From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Nov 1 00:47:26 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 31 Oct 2000 19:47:26 EST Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: In a message dated 10/31/00 2:08:11 PM Mountain Standard Time, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >If "the farming population of much of Europe switched language" to IE (by >conquest or otherwise) from something other than IE, then of course there may >be that "substratal influence" to find. -- or may not; or -- more probably -- there were many local languages before "Indo-Europeanization". After all, the process continued down into historic times, with the retreat of Basque, for example. In the directly analagous but rather later Indo-Europeanization of the old farming areas of Iran, Central Asia and India the pre-existing languages sometimes left substratum influence, and sometimes didn't. Eg., there are very old Dravidian loans in the Sanskrit of the Rig-Veda, but little (IIRC) Elamite influence in Old Persian. Although we know from the documentary sources that the whole of southwestern Iran, at the least, spoke Elamite well into early Iron Age times and Elamite remained as a chancery language into the first century of the Persian Empire; _vide_ the inscriptions of Darius I. Likewise, Germanic has a large vocabulary that isn't reduceable to PIE; the Baltic languages have very little. Conversely, the western Uralic languages have many early loans from IE languages. >It is perfectly possible that neolithic farmers brought early Indo-European >languages not only to Europe but also to southern Russia, together with >agriculture, and that their descendants, who developed nomadic pastoralism in >the Kurgan steppes carried their languages, which was still of Indo-European >origin but transformed from the original... -- here Occam's injunction to avoid unnecessary multiplication of hypotheses comes into play. A theory originally designed to avoid "migrationist" explanations is now piling migration upon re-migration! One is reminded of the cycles and epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy. The early-Neolithic migration of agriculturalists into Europe undoubtedly carried language(s) along with it. The simplest explanation is that they were irrecoverably lost with the subsequent spread of IE. From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Nov 1 23:07:55 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 1 Nov 2000 18:07:55 EST Subject: "nightmare" Message-ID: In a message dated 10/31/2000 1:47:08 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: << The only Basque word for 'nightmare' in the 'creature' sense I know of is . This is pretty clearly of Latino-Romance origin, though the direct source would appear to be an unrecorded Latin *, an altered form of the familiar . So far as I am aware, the Basque word is unmarked for sex, and it translates both 'incubus' and 'succubus'. >> Larry, what ending would you have expected from the Latin -us? By that I mean, the "-a" is not expected from the latin "-us? -- what would normally be there? Just some other observations: there is a Latin verb with pretty much the same meanings, , and an attested , that seems to be recorded only as an architectural term (the base that supports the weight of a pillar). There was also the odd noun "inguen" that is given as describing the "space between the hips in the front of the body", and also the loins and the privates and also some diseases. There are of course many different symptoms that we might now recognize in the "pressing down" reflected in "incubus" -- e.g., the sleep apnea mentioned by Stanley Friesen earlier. Even the throttling and trampling has been associated with strokes, convulsions, etc., and falls within that general area of a weight or a force applied "onto" one's body. The Latin term is in that way a pretty literal description. "Incubare" described the action of being pushed or forced or beat down quite literally, before it was ever applied to nightmares, post-Classically. The fact that the nightmare is associated with the female seems to be more of a matter of who sent it -- like the Finnish witch -- then of the necessary sex of the spirit itself. It doesn't seem to be female in Latin or Greek. In northern european folklore, you can discover the true identity of the mare itself by saying its name -- and in the stories it is sometimes a secretly malicious neighbor who is as likely male as female. The later succubus I suspect is an entirely different kind of dream -- a nightmare only in the sense of prompting unwanted sensations. The incubus, in its earliest appearances, doesn't appear to be in its essence sexual or pleasurable. Especially when it stomped on your head. Regards, Steve Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Nov 2 04:31:47 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Wed, 1 Nov 2000 22:31:47 -0600 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: Dear Rick and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Rick Mc Callister" Sent: Tuesday, October 31, 2000 5:27 PM [RM] > Larry Trask often mentions Basque being used as the rubbish bin of > unexplained Ibero-Romance etyma > Etruscan sometimes serves the same purpose for Latin, even though some of the > vocabulary is claerly of IE origin; e.g. I saw a reference to Tuscan dialect > brenti "heather" that declared it to be from Etruscan, yet there are cognate > forms in Ibero-Romance and I'd guess that Irish fraoch is also cognate [PR] What would really be interesting is for Larry Trask to show statistically how likely his immense group of unattested proto-Romance etyma are as a source for Basque, which, evidently never met a foreign word it did not like --- while tenaciously preserving a most usual morphological system. 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/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ec at ec hecc, vindga meipi a netr allar nmo, geiri vnda~r . . . a ~eim mei~i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rstom renn." (Havamal 138) From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Thu Nov 2 08:26:56 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 10:26:56 +0200 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? In-Reply-To: <32.c08e79c.272fc5b7@aol.com> Message-ID: [Steve Long wrote] > Putting aside for the moment the question of how much Kurgan actually ever > came to most of Europe, the quote above suggests that if there is a substrate > to look for in early European IE languages -- as described above -- it might > consist of "pre-proto" IE languages. > My question is: what would such a substrate be like? What would one look > for? Thinking of other examples of where IE has folded over on itself, so to > speak -- where one IE language exhibits a substrate of an earlier IE language > -- where would one look for such a "pre-proto" substrate in PIE? How would > one separate "pre-proto" features from "proto" features, since both would > ultimately be of the same origin? [Joat Simeon wrote (not as a reply to the particular quote above)] > ...Germanic has a large vocabulary that isn't reducible to PIE; the > Baltic languages have very little. Coversely, the western Uralic > languages have many early loans from IE languages. And in addition to this, the western Uralic languages have a huge amount of words of unknown origin. It seems that one is dealing here with an extensive lexical substrate not unlike that in Germanic. Because the putative substrate words look nothing like Indo-European (having e.g. affricates and palatalized consonants), there must have been non-Uralic and non-IE substrate languages in the Baltic Sea area. The Uralic data does not seem to support the idea that there would have been some kind of "para-IE" languages in this area before the arrival of the predecessors of northwest IE langauges in the region. Regards, Ante Aikio From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Nov 2 15:00:21 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 09:00:21 -0600 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I saw somewhere, maybe on the web? (and possibly unreliable) that Elamite was spoken in SW Iran until the 10th c. AD or so Is this so? Are there any traces in the local languages? >Eg., there are very old Dravidian loans in the Sanskrit of the Rig-Veda, but >little (IIRC) Elamite influence in Old Persian. >Although we know from the documentary sources that the whole of southwestern >Iran, at the least, spoke Elamite well into early Iron Age times and Elamite >remained as a chancery language into the first century of the Persian Empire; >_vide_ the inscriptions of Darius I. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From dlwhite at texas.net Thu Nov 2 15:19:10 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 09:19:10 -0600 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Well, I stand semi-corrected. Anyway, my point was one that I think should be obvious upon reflection: that speakers do know the phonemes of their native language, just as they know the words, or they wouldn't be able to speak it. It is fairly simple after all: what people are 1) able to control productively, and 2) able to hear perceptively is phonemic. For English /th/ vs/ /dh/, the question to ask is something like "In a story where two brothers were named "Lith" and "Lidh", would an audience be able to keep them apart?" The answer is clearly yes, regardless of the various other consideration that some have noted, therefore the distinction is (not surprisingly) phonemic. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Nov 2 15:31:56 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 09:31:56 -0600 Subject: *sr- roots in PIE (2) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I finally tracked down my notes and Yes, it is xarrupar "sorber (to sip)" [Corominas 1976: 128] In the same section, Corominas also ascribes to "Basque-Aquitanian" or "Basque-Iberian" Catalan, Occitan estalviar "ahorrar, salvar [la vida, la dignidad] (to save up, to save [a life, dignity])" /st-/ doesn't look at all Basque to me On page 126 He ascribes Spanish barruntar "to have a premonition" socarrar "to half-dress or half-roast meat" [Vela/zquez]; "to engage in knavery" mellar "to notch, hack" zurrar "to dress leather; chastize; whip" and a dozen or so other meanings to "Basque-Iberian" I would have thought that by that time Iberian would have been shown to be not to be demonstrably related to Basque In any case socarrar looks as if it includes Latin sub- was Corominas thinking in ekarri, ekharri? and mellar has an initial /m-/ Larry, do any of these look as if they're from Basque? Or are they cognates of Basque words that may have come from Latin or whatnot? I'm curious about the occasional initial /s-/ > /s^, c^, x/ in various Ibero-Romance words e.g. Spanish jabo/n < sapo:n- Spanish chorizo, Port. chouric,o /s^owrisu/ < sauriculum The easy way out would be to lay all of this at the feet of Basque but what else can be said about this? >That is: "XARRUPAR, word in common with Basque , mod. occ. > (or , or ), and nav.-arag. >, of uncertain origin; it's certain that all, more or >less, are in part due to onomatopoeia and other expressive factors, >but it's probable that for a large part they originate utimately from >a deformation suffered by Lat. SORBE:RE in the mouths of the >aboriginal population of the Pyrinees when they turned bilingual >(latin-protohispanic), maybe spread by half-Basque shepherds from the >mountains." >======================= >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal >mcv at wxs.nl Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Nov 2 17:24:04 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 17:24:04 +0000 Subject: "nightmare" Message-ID: Steve Long writes: [LT] > << The only Basque word for 'nightmare' in the 'creature' sense I know of > is . This is pretty clearly of Latino-Romance origin, though > the direct source would appear to be an unrecorded Latin *, > an altered form of the familiar . So far as I am aware, the > Basque word is unmarked for sex, and it translates both 'incubus' and > 'succubus'. >> > Larry, what ending would you have expected from the Latin -us? By that I > mean, the "-a" is not expected from the latin "-us? -- what would normally be > there? A Latin noun is normally borrowed into Basque in its accusative singular form. Assuming that the accusative of would have been , the expected Basque treatment of this would be *, without nasalization, or *, with nasalization. But I don't know what inflectional class belonged to. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Nov 3 00:21:28 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 19:21:28 EST Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: In a message dated 11/2/00 5:00:13 PM Mountain Standard Time, anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi writes: > The Uralic data does not seem to support the idea that there would have been > some kind of "para-IE" languages in this area before the arrival of the > predecessors of northwest IE langauges in the region. -- good point. Late paleolithic and early neolithic Europe probably had a situation much like eastern pre-Columbian North America, an area of comparable size. That is, there were probably hundreds of languages and scores of language families. Conversely, in the early stages of Indo-Europeanization, say in the 3rd millenium BCE, you could probably have walked from Holland to Sinkiang and found only dialect differences. From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Nov 3 00:31:10 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 18:31:10 -0600 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: Dear Ante and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ante Aikio" Sent: Thursday, November 02, 2000 2:26 AM > And in addition to this, the western Uralic languages have a huge amount > of words of unknown origin. It seems that one is dealing here with an > extensive lexical substrate not unlike that in Germanic. Because the > putative substrate words look nothing like Indo-European (having e.g. > affricates and palatalized consonants), there must have been non-Uralic > and non-IE substrate languages in the Baltic Sea area. The Uralic data > does not seem to support the idea that there would have been some kind of > "para-IE" languages in this area before the arrival of the predecessors of > northwest IE langauges in the region. [PR] Is there an available listing of these substrate roots? 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/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ec at ec hecc, vindga meipi a netr allar nmo, geiri vnda~r . . . a ~eim mei~i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rstom renn." (Havamal 138) From stevegus at aye.net Fri Nov 3 01:50:30 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 20:50:30 -0500 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: Steve Long wrote: > My question is: what would such a substrate be like? What would one look > for? Thinking of other examples of where IE has folded over on itself, so to > speak -- where one IE language exhibits a substrate of an earlier IE language > -- where would one look for such a "pre-proto" substrate in PIE? How would > one separate "pre-proto" features from "proto" features, since both would > ultimately be of the same origin? Perhaps what you'd need to look for is a vocabulary --- especially a vocabulary referring to local features, arts, or cultural practises --- that is still recognisably IE, but which has been subjected to a radically different set of sound changes. English as she is spoke in Western movies displays an obvious substrate influence. You have some words that conform to expectations for ordinary English words, like "ranch." You have others that stick out, more or less, like "canyon," "bronco," and "hoosegow." These words [AFAIK] are all of IE origin, but they took a different path into English. In pre-literate times the connection between "hoosegow" and an earlier import "judge" might be hard to figure, much less the connection between "ranch" and "ring." There is an obvious and similar substrate in Germanic, apparently the language of the Ship and Sword Guys; not sure if they have a technical academic name. Like the Western movie words, the borrowed vocabulary seems to have focused on cultural territory that was retained by the proto-Germans. Boating is the area that sticks out most prominently; most Germanic languages share a group of unique words like ship, keel, oar, and sail. There is another group that features swords, knives, and helmets. The proto-Germans apparently respected these folks, and their arts and culture, enough to borrow both the cultural practices and the vocabulary that went with. Various attempts have been made to give IE derivations to several of these distinctive Germanic words; most require some violence to expected sound changes. They seem recognisable as a substrate because they are culturally connected, and either non-IE or, if IE, they went together through strange changes in Germanic that aren't found elsewhere. -- Christ(of His mercy infinite) i pray to see;and Olaf,too --- e. e. cummings i sing of Olaf glad and big From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Nov 3 03:29:34 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 22:29:34 EST Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: In a message dated 11/2/00 5:23:22 PM Mountain Standard Time, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: << I saw somewhere, maybe on the web? (and possibly unreliable) that Elamite was spoken in SW Iran until the 10th c. AD or so -- I think that may have been 10th century BCE? From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Nov 3 09:19:24 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 09:19:24 +0000 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: Patrick Ryan writes: > What would really be interesting is for Larry Trask to show statistically > how likely his immense group of unattested proto-Romance etyma are as a > source for Basque, which, evidently never met a foreign word it did not > like --- while tenaciously preserving a most usual morphological system. Well, a most engaging challenge, but, I'm afraid, an incomprehensible one. I confess I have not the faintest idea what "[my] immense group of unattested proto-Romance etyma" might be, or how such a thing, whatever it is, might be "a source for Basque". The source of Basque is not in doubt. That source is a language spoken in Gaul before the IE languages -- first Celtic, then Latin -- arrived there. As for the curious remark about borrowing words, it is true that Basque has borrowed heavily from Latino-Romance. But this observation is anything but surprising. Compare English after the Norman Conquest. The Normans were always a tiny minority in England, and most people in England never learned Norman French. Moreover, Norman French survived as a spoken language in England only for a couple of centuries, after which it died out. Nevertheless, the Norman French impact on the English vocabulary was colossal. Virtually the *entire* abstract, elevated and technical vocabulary of English was obliterated, and replaced by French words. The proportion of the attested Old English vocabulary which was lost is variously estimated at anything from 60% to 85%. Even such everyday words as the native equivalents of 'river', 'mountain', 'face', 'picture', 'army' and 'language' were lost in favor of French words. In great contrast, Basque has been surrounded by a sea of IE speech for around 2500 years, and it still is today. At least after the Roman conquest of the area, that surrounding speech was always immensely more prestigious than was Basque. In the circumstances, the enormous impact of Latin and Romance on the Basque vocabulary is not even slightly surprising. What is surprising is that the language has survived at all. All of the other pre-Latin languages of Italy, Gaul, Spain and Portugal -- including even Celtic -- were blatted long ago. Nevertheless, it is not true that we Vasconists routinely assign every vaguely troublesome word we come across to a Latino-Romance source. We do this only when we have good evidence for such a source. And nobody in the field takes seriously such vaporings as the ignorant old proposal to derive Basque 'son' from Latin 'seed'. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Nov 3 17:43:39 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 11:43:39 -0600 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? In-Reply-To: <001f01c04485$e7a58f20$149f113f@patrickr> Message-ID: [ moderator edited ] >[PR] >What would really be interesting is for Larry Trask to show statistically >how likely his immense group of unattested proto-Romance etyma are as a >source for Basque, which, evidently never met a foreign word it did not >like --- while tenaciously preserving a most usual morphological system. If you've read most histories of the Spanish language, you come across a couple of pages on pre-Roman Iberia and a list of words and an ascription that amounts to "I don't know where it comes from so it must be from Basque." Most of the histories focus on the development of Latin to Spanish. And if the authors know any non-Romance languages, those will be generally limited to Greek, German and Arabic. When Basque or Celtic are mentioned, it tends to be via a dictionary of modern Basque or a modern Celtic language, often without any input vis-a-vis what Basque or Hispano-Celtic must have looked like when the loan word in question entered Ibero-Romance. A lot of what is writen about pre-Romance substrate in Spanish [in general histories of the language] also tends to be received information with little or no attempt to verify, update or revise it. Keep in mind that non-specialists tend to read only these general histories and not the specialized research publications, which [from what I perceive] began to flourish after the death of Franco. To give an example of what I'm talking about. Spanish "cinnabar" < Hispano-Latin [and also the Min~o/Minho River] is often ascribed to Basque based on Basque "shiny, lit up, sparkling" Larry Trask has explained on the list [many times] that Basque had no /m/ at that period so the logical assumption would be to look elsewhere and so I looked at the on-line MacBain's Gaelic Etymological Dictionary and found mèin, mèinn "ore, mine" Irish méin, mianach, Early Irish míanach, Welsh mwyn: < *meini-, meinni-, < root mei, smei, smi; see Old Slavonic mêdi, aes; OHG smîda, metal, English smith (Schräder) Now, I would be hypocritical if I stopped there and said it must be from Celtic, since I don't know exactly what the word would like like in Hispano-Celtic and I don't know the phonetic differences among Celtiberian, SW & NW Hispano-Celtic and Gaulish. Also, keep in mind that MacBain's is about 100 years old. And, mnore importantly, Celtic was not the only pre-Roman IE language spoken in Iberia. There was also Lusitanian/Sorotaptic. I'd also want to check a Basque etymological dictionary to see about a possible *bin, etc. But, I think there's enough information there to hypothesize that likely came from IE If you want to see a language that is even more skewed than Basque in terms of Spanish vocabulary, look at some on-line pages for Chamorro The lexicon seems to be about 90-95% Spanish yet the language by and large maintains its original morphology. Other than a knowledge of topics, it is not comprehensible to Spanish speakers. I imagine that part of the answer for Basque goes beyond just being surrounded by IE languages for the last 2-3,000 years. As hill people, the Basque acquired new technology, fashions, ideologies, etc. from IE-speakers. I suppose they also needed a rudimentary knowledge of IE languages for doing business at IE-speaking market towns and dealing with IE-speaking political and religious functionaries. The language has many dialects and I imagine that speakers just used the IE word they heard for new-fangled things and concepts This process may predate the Romans. Roz Frank once mentioned an idea that the Celts may have had the same relationship with the Basques. I've also seen some articles that talk about a similar but reversed relationship between Celts and Tartessians. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Nov 3 17:48:23 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 11:48:23 -0600 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Does any of this substrate overlap with the so-called "Baltic" substrate in Germanic; i.e. words of non-IE, non-Uralic origin such as ship, sea, seal (animal), etc.? [snip] >And in addition to this, the western Uralic languages have a huge amount >of words of unknown origin. It seems that one is dealing here with an >extensive lexical substrate not unlike that in Germanic. Because the >putative substrate words look nothing like Indo-European (having e.g. >affricates and palatalized consonants), there must have been non-Uralic >and non-IE substrate languages in the Baltic Sea area. The Uralic data >does not seem to support the idea that there would have been some kind of >"para-IE" languages in this area before the arrival of the predecessors of >northwest IE langauges in the region. >Regards, >Ante Aikio Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Nov 3 05:58:34 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 00:58:34 EST Subject: The PIE substrate in Uralic Message-ID: In a message dated 11/2/2000 7:00:13 PM, anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi writes: << The Uralic data does not seem to support the idea that there would have been some kind of "para-IE" languages in this area before the arrival of the predecessors of northwest IE languages in the region. >> Actually, a strong case for dating PIE to before 5000BC and Danubian culture came from your presentation of the *PIE substrate in proto-Uralic on this list awhile back. (If you recall, back then (january of this year) I gave you Hajdu's (1975) 5000BC terminus dating from Dolukhanov (1996). This is based if I remember on the expansion of Niemen, Sperrings, Upper Volga, etc. communities across northeastern Europe in early neolithic times. The maps indicate that pit comb culture common to them moved south and overlapped the northeastern range of Tripolye-Cucuteni in the northern Ukraine before or around 5000BC. The main and more southern Ukraine candidate for IE hometown, Sredni Stog, did not appear until about 500 years later.) I should point out something here. If you look at my initial post, I wasn't REALLY asking why we shouldn't look for a pre-PIE substrate. I was actually asking what it would look like if we were to look for one. That is, if we didn't decide ahead of time there couldn't be one. Actually, looking back in the archives, you did address this issue. You wrote: << 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 changed beyond our recognition. >> (Mon, 31 Jan 2000 15:26:18, Re: PIE and Uralic) Of course, if the Danubian culture that was in contact with Proto-Uralic before 5000BC was *PIE, the question about identifying pre-PIE might well be irrelevant. You also wrote: <> Well, that doesn't really appear to negate my question (based on the Cavalli-Sforza quote). If Pre-IE arose around the Danube and gave a substrate to the later "daughter" PIE language of the Ukraine cultures (Cavalli-Sforza's idea, not mine) -- then other substrates are STILL totally acceptable. You see the archaeological evidence supports some very well developed mesolithic cultures across north central and eastern Europe that PREDATE the neolithic Danubian culture. In fact, the spread of full domestication of plants and animals to the more northern regions would only occur with the coming of Corded Ware around 3000BC. So the existence of those supposed non-IE substrates in Germanic or Uralic does not really negate the question: if PIE superimposed itself on Pre-IE, what would it look like? What would one look for? Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Nov 3 06:07:33 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 01:07:33 EST Subject: Basque and Germanic Message-ID: In a message dated 11/2/2000 6:26:18 PM, proto-language at email.msn.com writes: <<...how likely his immense group of unattested proto-Romance etyma are as a source for Basque, which, evidently never met a foreign word it did not like --- while tenaciously preserving a most usual morphological system. >> Ironically, this is kind of what Ringe describes in Germanic. Earlier morphology shared with Slavic, but later lexical commonality with Celtic and Italic. Regards, S. Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Nov 3 07:44:21 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 02:44:21 EST Subject: Elamite Message-ID: In a message dated 11/2/2000 7:23:22 PM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: << I saw somewhere, maybe on the web? (and possibly unreliable) that Elamite was spoken in SW Iran until the 10th c. AD or so>> Apparently a characteristic of "Elamite" is that the texts that are readable (e.g., the Behistun inscription) are "like Ottoman Turkish, made up of many borrowed words, particularly Persian and Semitic." Early "Elamite" texts have not been deciphered. Two problems are reflected here. One is that it is difficult for a language that has done a lot of borrowing to create an identifiable substrate (or adstrate) in the language it has heavily borrowed from. The other is that Elamite seems to be a language of uncertain identity, so that one might not recognize it in a substrate if one saw one. Regards, S. Long From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sat Nov 4 17:08:56 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2000 19:08:56 +0200 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <001b01c044e0$413f3b80$162a63d1@texas.net> Message-ID: On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, David L. White wrote: > For English /th/ vs/ /dh/, the question to ask is something like "In a > story where two brothers were named "Lith" and "Lidh", would an > audience be able to keep them apart?" The answer is clearly yes, > regardless of the various other consideration that some have noted, > therefore the distinction is (not surprisingly) phonemic. No, the answer is: if there were two brothers named Lith and Lidh then the distinction would be phonemic. As long as there aren't, there is no phonemic distinction. It doesn't matter that the two sounds are capable of being distinct phonemes. Until they are used as phonemes by the speakers of the language, they aren't phonemes for all that they are recognizably different sounds. When speakers start coining unrelated words where [th] contrasts with [dh] then they will be phonemes. The fact that you could coin words where they contrast is not sufficient. And as you unintentionally point out, when they become phonemes, [dh] will have to be written , otherwise you couldn't distinguish between and . Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Nov 5 18:51:56 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2000 20:51:56 +0200 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 21 Oct 2000 "Ross Clark (FOA LING)" wrote: >RW> On Fri, 28 Apr 2000 Ross Clark wrote: >RC>> I trust that we share the assumptions that (i) we are >RC>> talking about the synchronic phonology of modern English, and >RC>> (ii) the reality that we are trying to get at is what is in >RC>> speakers' heads. >RW> First, let me assure you that we are indeed talking about >RW> the synchronic phonology of modern English. About the second >RW> point, I am much less sanguine. I think it is possible to >RW> describe how language works linguistically (some areas are easier >RW> than others), but I don't think that we are in a position to say >RW> what goes on in a speaker's head to produce language. While it >RW> would certainly be nice to know, I think that the cognitive >RW> processes that produce language are beyond our reach at the >RW> moment. Speakers themselves don't know how they produce >RW> language, so you can't find out by just asking them. So the only >RW> reality that we can get at is the language that speakers produce. >RW> Historical grammar, when we have a written record, is based >RW> on empirically verifiable facts. Synchronic grammar is based on >RW> a hypothesis about how native speakers produce their language. A >RW> hypothesis is not a fact. It is an explanation put forward to >RW> account for observable facts. People tend to forget this and >RW> consider synchronic grammar a fact. But whatever reality may >RW> exist in the speaker's head just can't be gotten at at the >RW> present time with our present knowledge. In general, I agree >RW> that what we are trying to get at is the reality in speakers' >RW> heads, but it is a roundabout road that we have to take and we >RW> have to have a realistic picture of language before we are likely >RW> to get there. >I'm not sure what you mean by "historical grammar" here. By "historical grammar" I mean the changes in grammar through time, studied systematically. By grammar I mean those features of language that one will usually find in a standard grammar book: phonology, morphology, and syntax, but generally not including pragmatics and lexicon. >If it is an account of changes in the language, then it is >surely an account of transitions from one synchronic grammar to >another, and hence subject to the same epistemological >vulnerability you attribute to the latter. Hardly. At any given period the speakers of a language will produce a corpus of language. For this to be useful for historical purposes it must be recorded somehow -- either as texts or by being recorded as a spoken corpus by a competent field linguist. The recorded corpus of language becomes a body of data. This data can be minutely compared with similar data from other periods and the differences noted in detail. Consider the following diagram: speakers + rules --> Old English | speakers + rules --> Middle English | speakers + rules --> Modern English Synchronic (generative) grammar is concerned with the horizontal rows. Historical grammar is concerned only with the final column. Since we don't know what goes on in speaker's minds, everything to the left of the arrows is an assumption. We assume that speakers start from a certain point and apply a certain set of rules to arrive at the corpus on the right of the arrows. But everything to the right of the arrows is data. When we move from one set of data to another we also formulate rules to account for the changes. The difference is that that the historical rules are not based on assumptions about how speakers produce language, but on observed differences in the language that speakers have produced. Synchronic grammar is simply cut out of the loop in historical grammar. I am not trying to say by this that historical grammar is all cut and dried and that synchronic grammar is all guesswork. Far from it. Historical rules still have to be deduced, but the difference is that the forms on either side of the rules are known and thus there is a qualitative difference in the derivation of historical rules and synchronic rules. Now when we are talking about phonetics (pronunciation) based solely on written records (as opposed to a phonetic transcription in IPA made by a linguist) there will always be uncertainties because writing systems vary in their fit to the phonological system of the language they express. Still, there are enough strong clues in the writing (spelling variants; puns; and, in poetry, alliteration, rhyme, and meter) to narrow down pronunciations with reasonable precision. >So, in your view, we have, on the one hand, "the language that >speakers produce" -- texts, I guess. Presumably the "empirically >verifiable facts" on which you see historical grammar as being >based are of the same sort. Precisely. This is what I have said. The language that speakers produce synchronically is exactly the same language that we arrive at by tracing its historical development. The outcomes of both methods are the same. But the historical rules and the synchronic rules that produce it will not necessarily be the same. >On the other hand we have "the cognitive processes that produce >language", "whatever reality may exist in a speaker's head", >which is at present unknowable. Yet apparently we are able to >describe "how language works linguistically", "a realistic >picture of language". And what criteria do we have as to what is >"realistic" in this description? Is this what was once called the >Hocus Pocus view -- that a linguistic description is simply an >efficient and elegant description of a body of data, without >reference to any possible mental reality? Realistic means based on realia -- things that actually exist as opposed to mental constructs. When you start talking about "mental reality" you are getting into a murky area of philosophy. Is there such a thing as "mental reality"? This is something that can be discussed endlessly and inevitably inconclusively. Language is essentially a mental construct, one that is shared among its speakers. Because of the transitory nature of sounds, unless language is recorded somehow it exists only in the minds of its speakers (and hearers). When the last speaker of a language dies, unless that language has been recorded somehow, it is gone forever. There is no hope of reconstructing it. There are currently some 6000 to 10,000 or more languages in the world (depending on who is doing the counting and what criteria they are using for identifying different languages), many, if not most, of which have not been recorded. And who knows how many thousands of other languages have existed since the use of human language began and have disappeared without a trace. So one of the urgent tasks of linguists is recording languages that have no written records in the hope that the more languages that are available for study, the greater the possibility of obtaining a "realistic picture of language" and thus determining "how language works linguistically." So long as everything to the left of the arrows in the diagram above is uncertain, the only clue to it is in what is to the right of the arrows. Thus the constant (and usually frustrating) search for linguistic universals in the hope that such universals will provide clues to universals of human cognition and thus help explain what goes on on the left side of the arrows. >RC>> The rest of your post is entirely dependent on the further >RC>> assumption that native speakers of modern English (in general, >RC>> not just linguists) distinguish "foreign" from "native" words, >RC>> and that the words I listed with /th/ in voiced environments are >RC>> marked as "foreign". Since I don't share this assumption, I would >RC>> like to know what evidence leads you to it. Do you have any such >RC>> evidence, other than the fact that by excluding these hundreds of >RC>> words you can arrive at a nice phonological generalization? >RW> Let me answer this from back to front. >RW> You ask what evidence I have that native speakers >RW> distinguish by rule the [th] of loan words from the [dh] of >RW> native words other than hundreds of examples and the fact that it >RW> produces a nice phonological generalization. >This is not quite what I said. I said that in order to arrive at >your nice generalization you need to *exclude* hundreds of >English words, and I asked what independent evidence you had that >these words are somehow marginal to the structure of English? I don't remember saying that these words were marginal to the structure of English and I don't remember your saying it previously. I didn't say these words were marginal to the structure of English. I said that these words follow a different rule from native English words and that foreign words don't necessarily follow the same rules as native words. So these words aren't marginal to English -- there are too many of them -- they just follow different rules. But I can see that I shouldn't expect connections to be made when these connections have not been expressly stated. So let's start again. Grimm's Law says that certain PIE consonants shift in a certain way in Germanic. But there are a large number of exceptions. One exception is that unvoiced stops don't shift when the stop is the second part of a voiceless cluster (thus /sp/, /st/, and /sk/ remain unshifted). However, even with this, there are still a large number of exceptions to Grimm's Law. Verner's Law says that when the PIE stress fell after the consonant then the consonant shifted in a different way. So Verner's Law in effect *excludes* hundreds of Germanic words from the effects of Grimm's Law thereby producing a nice phonological generalization. What independent evidence is there that Verner's Law correctly excludes these words? Only the fact that when it can be checked, the PIE stress does fall after the consonant in those cases where the consonant does not shift according to Grimm's Law. Of course this might just be coincidence, and some people might not accept Verner's Law and ask what independent evidence there is for it other than that when you exclude these words using this rule you get the nice phonological generalization known as Grimm's Law. >RW> This seems rather like asking what evidence I have for >RW> Grimm's Law or Verner's Law other than hundreds of examples and >RW> the fact that they provide a nice phonological generalization. >No, because you are not presenting this as a historical law. As >a historical explanation of why /th/ occurs in certain places and >/dh/ in others, it is not in dispute. Historical law - historical explanation -- What's the difference in your mind? What happened happened. If the explanation can be stated as a rule and is not in dispute, what is the problem? The outcome of the historical processes that produced the modern language and the synchronic (generative) processes that produce the modern language are the same: the modern language. The generative rule that produces [th] in these words may be (probably is) different from the historical rule (explanation), but there must be a rule or else there wouldn't be a pattern. It is a basic premise of generative grammar that alternations must be explained by rules. >The general possibility is not in question; the question is >about particular examples. Hock offers evidence in the Old Irish >case, namely the failure of p-initial words "for some time" to >participate in the lenition process. This would certainly mark >them as exceptional in that respect. But note that he does not >argue that the mere fact of having initial p- is evidence of >their "foreign" status. And as I have said, it doesn't matter whether it is considered "foreign" or not. It is sufficient that it is recognized as following a different rule. >RW> If not, how can one account for the un-Anglicized >RW> pronunciation of 'chanson' in English at least 400 years after >RW> it entered the language (first attested in 1601 according to my >RW> dictionary). >Actually, my American Heritage dictionary gives a fully >anglicized pronunciation /S'æns at n/ (initial sh-, rhymes with >"Manson"), but I admit I've never heard it. The word has probably >been re-introduced once or twice since 1601, but the persistence >of the nasal-vowel pronunciation is no mystery: the word refers >to specifically French things (medieval epic poems or 19th-20th >century popular songs), and it is used almost entirely by people >who have some familiarity with French and could tell you (if you >would allow this as data) that it's a French word. I believe that I said exactly the same thing concerning 'chanson' in another posting. What I said there was: But 'chanson' has been in the language for about 400 years and it still has its French pronunciation. It simply resists Anglicization because it is not known to most naive native speakers. People who know this word are likely to know that it has a French pronunciation and to know why. I would have to make an exception among naive native speakers to include the AHD, but otherwise I think we agree that people who know this word are likely to know French as well. So long as English and French are in contact (i.e., have bilingual speakers) it is even possible that this word is reborrowed by every generation. And, of course, I would accept a speaker's explanation that the pronunciation of this word as French is because it is a French word as data. But I would be skeptical if a speaker told me that its pronunciation was because it was a medieval term or because it referred to music or poetry. >RW> But ultimately, it is unimportant whether speakers can still >RW> recognize foreign words after several centuries or not. The >RW> pronunciation rules are marked in the lexicon. The native >RW> speaker learns these rules and follows them. It is these rules >RW> that produce the pattern, not the speaker's perception of the >RW> words as native or non-native. >RW> For other evidence that native speakers distinguish by rule >RW> the [th] of loan words from the [dh] of native words I offer the >RW> pattern created by the presence of intervocalic [th] and [dh] in >RW> English words. >This is not "other evidence". This *is* your evidence. Then my position is unassailable. As with Verner's Law, the fact that the rule by which the exclusions are made is valid and leads to a valid generalization is sufficient. >RW> One thing that can be noticed is that there are only 15 >RW> lemmata with intervocalic [th] that can be marked as non-native >RW> (and 5 of these are clearly derivative). You say that there are >RW> hundreds of these words in the language (and so there are, if not >RW> thousands). This makes one point quite clear. While there may >RW> be quite a large number of loan words in English, the core >RW> vocabulary -- the most commonly used words -- remains primarily >RW> native. Thus a search of 6318 lemmata with over 800 occurrences >RW> in a corpus of over 6 million words turns up only 15 (10 if you >RW> eliminate derivatives) of these lemmata. >I'm not sure this elaborate demonstration was necessary. Nobody >disputes that the pattern exists in words of OE origin. Nor is it >any secret that non-OE words are less frequent in basic >vocabulary than in the lexicon at large. Perhaps, but it is nice to have data to back up one's opinions. >RW> This further suggests that the knowledge of many of the >RW> lemmata with intervocalic [th] is a function of vocabulary size. >RW> The larger one's vocabulary the more such lemmata (not simply as >RW> an absolute, but as a percentage of the total) one is likely to >RW> know. Vocabulary size is also correlated with educational level. >RW> Hence by the time that one has acquired a large number of such >RW> lemmata, one is likely to be sufficiently educated to realize >RW> that such words are loans. Poorly educated native speakers are >RW> not likely to realize that these words are loans. They may even >RW> mispronounce them; but then, dictionaries are not written (nor >RW> often consulted) by native speakers of this educational level. >RW> Thus my test of the pronunciation of these words may not be >RW> entirely accurate, since I am relying on my own pronunciation and >RW> on the pronunciation given by the dictionary. As a turnabout, if >RW> you have evidence that native speakers regularly mispronounce >RW> these words because they don't know that they are loans, that >RW> would be germane. >I'm puzzled by you asking me for this evidence. And I'm puzzled by your being puzzled. >As I understand your position, you are claiming that there is a >single phoneme, say /th/, with a realization rule that says >(among other things) that /th/ is realized as [dh] >intervocalically, except in certain exceptional words. Close. I claim that there was once a single phoneme /th/ in English. Then that this phoneme became voiced to [dh] intervocalically without creating any new contrasts (/th/ now has allophones [th, dh]). Then that any words that came into the language with intervocalic [th] after this sound change operated retain [th] intervocalically (this is not necessarily restricted to loanwords; it could also include new coinings -- there just don't seem to be any with intervocalic [th]). There is nothing particularly exceptional about words with intervocalic [th] except that the vast majority of them came into the language after the sound change. There are a few native words with intervocalic [th] (for reasons that can be accounted for), but there are no loanwords that originally had intervocalic [th] that now have [dh]. This is exceptional, at least to the extent that there are no exceptions. >Only the more educated and literate speakers may realize that >these exceptional words are loans. (Surely, however, this is not >a function of the number of such words in one's vocabulary, but >of things one reads or is taught.) What I said was "Vocabulary size is also correlated with educational level." What, then, is the difference between "educational level" and "things one reads or is taught"? The more things one reads or is taught, the higher one's educational level, and the more likely one is to have a larger vocabulary and hence the more likely one's vocabulary is to contain a larger percentage of loan words or neologisms. By educational level I do not refer to passing thorough required fixed stages of education without having learned anything. As Henry Fielding has Tom Jones say: "it is as possible for a man to know something without having been at school, as it is to have been at school and to know nothing." It has been my experience that many graduates of high school and some colleges and universities do not have a particularly high educational level. >Meanwhile, how do we know that children and the less educated >actually formulate the rule this way? If they did, one would >expect that errors consisting of pronouncing [dh] >intervocalically in words which should have [th] would be common. >I don't recall any such tendency from my experience as a native >speaker of English, but surely it's you that should be looking >for such evidence. My point is that we don't know how any speaker actually formulates the rule. What goes on on the left side of the arrows is a mystery. All we know is that there is a pattern, the historical reason for the pattern, and that, synchronically, patterns must be accounted for by rules. My further point is that it doesn't matter that we can't formulate the synchronic rule. There must be one, or the pattern wouldn't be there. And I must confess that I did not consider the effect of mispronunciation in the same way that you do. You said that native speakers don't recognize these words with intervocalic [th] as loans. My assumption was that if they don't recognize them as loans, then they would mispronounce them by treating them as native words and pronouncing intervocalic as [dh]. This would support your contention. But your assumption seems to be that if they do recognize them as loans then they would see them as words in need of nativization and would mispronounce them in an attempt to nativize them. This would support what you see as my contention. But it is not my contention that native speakers recognize these words as loans. That is, as you so readily agree, merely the historical explanation for why these words have intervocalic [th], and what you have assumed is my contention. I will quite as readily agree that I don't really know how native speakers recognize the words as exceptional. The more educated may recognize them as loans, the less educated may simply memorize the correct pronunciation as exceptions (as they memorize the exceptions in plural forms such as 'foot' / 'feet'. Since neither of us have noticed any tendency to mispronounce these words the point about what such mispronunciation would prove is moot. But I do maintain that there is some synchronic rule that maintains this pronunciation or else *all* loans with intervocalic [th] wouldn't still have this pronunciation. >By the way, 6318 words is a pretty basic vocabulary. And your >list doesn't include some words (arithmetic, ether, various >personal names) that were part of my vocabulary and that of all >my contemporaries by the age of 10. I apologize for the inadequacies of the list, but it is not really "my" list. All I did was extract words with intervocalic from somebody else's list. As such 'arithmetic' would not appear in "my" list because it does not have intervocalic (but I must report that the original list did not have 'arithmetic' either and therefore it had fewer than 800 occurrences in the six-million-plus words of the corpus). To my knowledge, personal names do not occur in the list because they are not lemmata. >RW> The best evidence that the pattern is created by rule by the >RW> speakers of the language is the fact that the pattern exists. >RW> For if there is a pattern in a language, synchronically it must >RW> be created by its speakers because that is the only place that >RW> language comes from. If the pattern is not created by rule, then >RW> it is simple coincidence. >No, this is where you go wrong. I presume that "this is where you go wrong" is your way of saying that your opinion is different from mine. :) >The pattern has been created by historical changes in the >language. That is what creates the distribution of [dh] and [th] >that is the input to each speaker's language-learning task. There >is no general principle that speakers must recognize (consciously >or unconsciously) any such pattern, or make use of it in their >rule-governed language behaviour. No, the modern language is not created by the historical events that brought it about. The modern language is created by what goes on on the left side of the arrows in the diagram above. This is the assumption of generative grammar. And it is a basic premise of generative grammar that patterns must be accounted for by rules. If you have evidence, rather than just an intuition, that linguistic patterns are not created by rules, then please share it. It will revolutionize synchronic grammar. Children learning a language as a native speaker do not learn the history of the language. Children learning a language do not memorize rules that lead to grammatically correct utterances (this comes later, in school, after the child has essentially already learned to speak the language; but if the child never goes to school, it will still speak the language). Children learn the language by imitation of what they hear and by internal analysis of what they hear through deduction, induction and abduction to arrive at their own rules of grammar. In doing this, they make a lot of mistakes. Sometimes these mistakes are corrected, either externally, or internally, by better imitation or analysis. Sometimes they are not. In essence the synchronic grammar is recreated by each generation of native speakers (with a little help from their ancestors and their peers). This is one reason why living languages constantly change and dead languages (those with no native speakers) don't. But to say than native speakers learn their language by memorizing historically created patterns flies in the face of all theories of generative grammar and L1 acquisition. L2 (and higher) acquisition may work this way, but, unless accompanied by total immersion in the language, it seldom leads to native fluency (and often not even then). RW> You said above that RC>> The rest of your post is entirely dependent on the further RC>> assumption that native speakers of modern English (in general, RC>> not just linguists) distinguish "foreign" from "native" words, RC>> and that the words I listed with /th/ in voiced environments RC>> are marked as "foreign". Since I don't share this assumption, RC>> ... >RW> You are saying that this pattern can't be based on the fact >RW> that words in English with intervocalic [th] are overwhelmingly >RW> loan words because the speakers of the language are unaware that >RW> these are loans. As I mentioned above, this is not just a weak >RW> argument, it is a spurious one. It may be true that most >RW> speakers do not know that these are loans, but that is irrelevant >RW> to the phonemic analysis of the language. Were it not, then most >RW> linguistic analyses would have no validity because speakers of a >RW> language are in general woefully ignorant of the linguistic >RW> mechanisms of their language. >Actually, I am arguing that English speakers do not consider >words like "author", "Ethel", or "method" to be unusual in any >way. First, let us dispense with the idea that there is nothing in any way unusual about 'Ethel'. You can't say that 'Ethel' is not unusual in any way because it is unusual from the moment it stops being a word in the language and becomes a personal name. It is no longer a lemma of the language, it becomes part of a special corpus, the corpus of personal names. Generally, you won't find personal names listed in the lexicon (dictionary), although they may be collected in a separate section. If personal names are listed in the lexicon, they do not have a meaning, only a functional label: "masc. PN", "fem. PN", or the like. In addition to being lexically exceptional, personal names, are also phonologically exceptional. Personal names are, well, personal. People identify with their names in more ways than one. When someone has been called something all his life (his name), he will resist changing it; even if the sounds in his name change in the language he will resist introducing these changes into his name. If others mispronounce his name, he will correct them. Personal names, then, have the potential to withstand phonetic changes that take place elsewhere in the language with the result that such changes often bypass personal names. So linguistically, practically everything is unusual about 'Ethel'. Historical linguists know that personal names are a fruitful hunting ground for archaisms -- forms that have long disappeared from the rest of the language. Even small children know that names are different. When my daughter was about 3, she got a new doll. She soon began saying "sisibamakin". When I asked her what "sisibamakin" was she said it was her doll. "But what does it mean?", I asked. "It doesn't mean anything, it's her name," was her reply. So speakers don't really treat personal names as a normal part of language. They are simply labels without linguistic connotations. They stand outside both the normal lexicon and normal phonological rules. So if someone tells you that his or her name is Abraham or Avram or Ethel or Stanley or Ahmed or Rumpelstiltskin, you don't question how it fits into the phonology of your language. You just accept it because that's his or her name. >Your only basis for disagreement seems to be that your >single-phoneme analysis requires them to be marked as exceptions. >Other evidence one might imagine, such as deviant morphophonemic >behaviour, acquisition difficulties, or the existence of more >"nativized" variants, appears to be entirely lacking. Yes, they are only marked by having intervocalic [th] where the vast majority of native words have intervocalic [dh]. But the very fact that all loanwords that came into the language with intervocalic [th] still have this pronunciation is sufficient to show that speakers must know some rule that preserves this pronunciation. Otherwise, words with intervocalic [th] and intervocalic [dh] wouldn't fall into such neat piles. There is no need to nativize words with intervocalic [th] because there are native words with intervocalic [th] (which are again exceptions that can be accounted for). Speaker can either memorize the pronunciation of each of these words or they can find some way of generalizing a rule so that they don't have to. Uneducated speakers probably do the former, and those with more education or experience probably do the latter. But either way, they don't get any help from the orthography. >Excuse me. I'm tired, and I see there are at least a dozen >paragraphs left. I'll snip them for now, and perhaps we can >return to them another time, if this has not drifted too far >off-topic for IE. Well, at least we're talking about an IE language. And I for one find it interesting. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From bonewits at warwick.net Sun Nov 5 17:46:18 2000 From: bonewits at warwick.net (Isaac Bonewits) Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2000 12:46:18 -0500 Subject: "witch" and "warlock" Message-ID: I'll leave lurk-mode for a moment to ask if anyone can direct me to *current* resources discussing the history and evolution of these two terms (a summary would be nice, too, if someone would be kind enough to take the time). An article or book discussing IE religious terminology would be of great value to my current research! thanks, Isaac B. -- ******************************************************************* * Isaac Bonewits * * Snailmail: Black Dirt PG, ADF, Box 372, Warwick, NY 10990-0372 * ******************************************************************* From bronto at pobox.com Sat Nov 4 19:23:12 2000 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2000 11:23:12 -0800 Subject: "nightmare" Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: > A Latin noun is normally borrowed into Basque in its accusative > singular form. Assuming that the accusative of would > have been , the expected Basque treatment of this would > be *, without nasalization, or *, with nasalization. > But I don't know what inflectional class belonged to. Regular 2m (thus ) according to Lewis & Short. -- Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/ From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Nov 5 22:33:10 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2000 23:33:10 +0100 Subject: *sr- roots in PIE (2) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick wrote: >In the same section, Corominas also ascribes to "Basque-Aquitanian" or >"Basque-Iberian" Catalan, Occitan estalviar "ahorrar, salvar [la vida, la >dignidad] (to save up, to save [a life, dignity])" >/st-/ doesn't look at all Basque to me Basque , means "to hide, cover". is cover or protection. There are a number of native Basque words beginning with esC- (or ezC-), so there is no reason to assume the word is not Basque (even though the similarity with Indo-European words for "stable" is noteworthy. >On page 126 >He ascribes Spanish >barruntar "to have a premonition" >socarrar "to half-dress or half-roast meat" [Vela/zquez]; "to engage in >knavery" >mellar "to notch, hack" >zurrar "to dress leather; chastize; whip" and a dozen or so other meanings >to "Basque-Iberian" I don't have the Castilian Corominas, and all of these words are absent from Gomez de Silva's etymological dictionary (he seems unwilling to include words with doubtful etymologies). >[...] >I'm curious about the occasional initial /s-/ > /s^, c^, x/ in various >Ibero-Romance words >e.g. >Spanish jabo/n < sapo:n- >Spanish chorizo, Port. chouric,o /s^owrisu/ < sauriculum >The easy way out would be to lay all of this at the feet of Basque >but what else can be said about this? It is often said that this is due to (Moz)Arabic influence. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From dlwhite at texas.net Mon Nov 6 05:20:49 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2000 23:20:49 -0600 Subject: Germanic and Balto-Slavic Morphology Message-ID: When people say that Germanic and Balto-Slavic have a common morphology (which if interpreted literally is absurd), are they talking about anything other than the dative plurals in /m/ rather than /b/? That is not much to hand one's hat on, in part because it could conceivably have arisen (as I pointed out long ago before my swan-dive into dissertation slogging) by suffixing /bhis/ (or whatever) to the accusative rather than the stem. Since in neuter singulars the accusative IS the stem, ambiguity and re-analysis are plausible. In other words there is no reason to posit a mysterious dative plural suffix in /m/ just for Germanic and Balto-Slavic, as is traditionally done. A point of contact between the two that should also be noted, though as far as I know it never has been, is that both have developed what might be called "short form" and "long form" adjectives, with the distribution of these being controlled by syntactic factors related to definiteness. However, the suffixes used are entirely different. Common tendency? Common substrate? It is clear (to me anyway) that there is Uralic substratal influence in Balto-Slavic, but as far as I know Uralic could not be a source for this. Does some one out there know if it could be, or if not what else could be? Dr. David L. White From douglas at nb.net Mon Nov 6 07:28:33 2000 From: douglas at nb.net (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 02:28:33 -0500 Subject: Incuba (Nightmare) Message-ID: From "Lexicon Latinitatis Nederlandicae Medii Aevi" (Johanne W. Fuchs et al., eds.) (Brill [Leiden], 1990), p. I 307: incuba, ae, m. f. -- ... 2. daemon quidam (cf. incubus): CONFL. VOC. incuba, een mare vel een meerminne vel elfinne, talis mulier; GEMMA een nachtmerrinne; et vid. neptina. ---------- This is apparently satisfactory semantically and morphologically (1st declension, acc. sg. "incubam"); chronologically, I don't know. -- Doug Wilson From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Mon Nov 6 10:58:06 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 12:58:06 +0200 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? In-Reply-To: <00b001c0452d$5e04ed80$879f113f@patrickr> Message-ID: On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, proto-language wrote: > Is there an available listing of these substrate roots? Not a complete one, I'm afraid. But you could use e.g. Juhani Lehtiranta's "Yhteissaamelainen sanasto" ('common Samic vocabulary') (Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne 200 [1989]). It contains 1479 Proto-Samic roots and references to their etymologies (in the cases where there is one; Lehtiranta has 637 items with no etymology at all). The glosses are in Finnish, so you need a dictionary if you don't know Finnish. And if you are interested in trying to etymologize the roots, you'll at the very least need a pile of other dictionaries (e.g., of the various Samic languages) and knowledge of the Samic sound changes in addition to this (an excellent introduction to Samic linguistics is Pekka Sammallahti's "The Saami languages: an Introduction"). regards, Ante Aikio From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com Mon Nov 6 16:14:00 2000 From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader) Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 11:14:00 -0500 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Maybe peripheral to the topic, but I think Larry's concept of the length of time Anglo-French influenced English is rather outdated. The literate classes of medieval England had at least a good working knowledge of Anglo-French well after 1250, judging by its use in commerical transactions and Parliamentary and court records. Far more prose writing in Anglo-French survives from the period after 1250 than from before. Later Anglo-French tends to be devalued because of its increasing semantic, morphological, and phonological departure from francien, i.e., Parisian French, but this is just traditional linguistic purism--Anglo-French was a valid dialect of medieval French well into the 15th century, and for lawyers its use in reports and professional notes continued into the 17th century. For a corrective view, see some of the articles by William Rothwell, e.g., "The Legacy of Anglo-French: in French and English," _Zeitschrift f|r Romanische Philologie_, Bd. 109 (1993) and "The Missing Link in English Etymology: Anglo- French," _Medium Aevum_, v. 60 (1991). Jim Rader > Compare English after the Norman Conquest. The Normans were always > a tiny minority in England, and most people in England never learned > Norman French. Moreover, Norman French survived as a spoken language > in England only for a couple of centuries, after which it died out. > Nevertheless, the Norman French impact on the English vocabulary was > colossal. Virtually the *entire* abstract, elevated and technical > vocabulary of English was obliterated, and replaced by French words. > The proportion of the attested Old English vocabulary which was lost > is variously estimated at anything from 60% to 85%. Even such everyday > words as the native equivalents of 'river', 'mountain', 'face', 'picture', > 'army' and 'language' were lost in favor of French words. > Larry Trask Jim Rader Etymology Editor Merriam-Webster, Inc. 47 Federal St., P.O. Box 281 Springfield MA 01102 http://www.merriamwebster.com From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Mon Nov 6 16:44:37 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 18:44:37 +0200 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 3 Nov 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Does any of this substrate overlap with the so-called "Baltic" > substrate in Germanic; i.e. words of non-IE, non-Uralic origin such as > ship, sea, seal (animal), etc.? I don't think anyone has tried to do any serious research on this. It would be quite interesting to compare the assumed substrate vocabularies. But there's the problem that even in a postive case, the results would probably be doubtful at best, as the standard methods of etymology are inapplicable when we are dealing with borrowings but have no knowledge of the asssumed donating language. However, there are lexical correspondences between western Uralic and Germanic which have no further etymologies in either language family, e.g. Germ. *saiwa- ~ Samic *saajvê 'fresh water', Finnic *kauka- 'long' ~ Germ. *hauha- 'high', Germ. *ailda- 'fire' ~ Samic *aaltê-nkê-ssê 'lightning'. But all of these can be explained as borrowings in one direction or the other, so there is no special reason to asssume separate borrowing from some substrate language in these cases. Regards, Ante Aikio From sonno3 at hotmail.com Mon Nov 6 19:03:06 2000 From: sonno3 at hotmail.com (Christopher Gwinn) Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 14:03:06 -0500 Subject: "witch" and "warlock" Message-ID: > I'll leave lurk-mode for a moment to ask if anyone can direct me to > *current* resources discussing the history and evolution of these two > terms (a summary would be nice, too, if someone would be kind enough > to take the time). > Calvert Watkins in "The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo European Roots" has Witch derive from the root *weg- (2) "to be strong/to be lively" (which also is the root of English "to wake"). Witch, from Old English masculine Wicca (Feminine Wicce), ultimately comes from a suffixed PIE form, *weg-yo and likely may represent a Proto Germanic *wikkjaz meaning "necromancer" or (more literally) "one who wakes the dead." Warlock (Old English Waeloga), on the other hand, comes from a compound of two PIE roots, *werH-o "true/trustworthy" and *leugh- "to tell a lie." Warlock literally means "pledge/oath breaker" (the Old English word waeloga meant "oath breaker/damned soul/wicked person" and was often assigned as an epithet of Satan). -Christopher Gwinn From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Nov 6 16:18:55 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 10:18:55 -0600 Subject: *sr- roots in PIE (2) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I remember hearing that in grad school but the problem I perceive is that [I would guess that] this is based on Mozarabic's perceived adaptation of Arabic phonology; Arabic has /s, _S_, z, _Z_, s^/ and one suppose that Castillian apical /S/ would be perceived as Arabic emphatic /_S_/, rather than /s^/ Off the top of my head, and please correct me if I'm wrong, most of these examples sibilants before /a, o, u/ [snip] >>I'm curious about the occasional initial /s-/ > /s^, c^, x/ in various >>Ibero-Romance words >>e.g. >>Spanish jabo/n < sapo:n- >>Spanish chorizo, Port. chouric,o /s^owrisu/ < sauriculum >>The easy way out would be to lay all of this at the feet of Basque >>but what else can be said about this? >It is often said that this is due to (Moz)Arabic influence. >======================= >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal >mcv at wxs.nl Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From dlwhite at texas.net Mon Nov 6 04:56:35 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2000 22:56:35 -0600 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: > No, the answer is: if there were two brothers named Lith and Lidh then > the distinction would be phonemic. As long as there aren't, there is > no phonemic distinction. It doesn't matter that the two sounds are > capable of being distinct phonemes. Until they are used as phonemes > by the speakers of the language, they aren't phonemes for all that they > are recognizably different sounds We will just have to agree to differ. DLW From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Mon Nov 6 05:09:45 2000 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2000 23:09:45 -0600 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: >On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, David L. White wrote: > > > >> For English /th/ vs/ /dh/, the question to ask is something like "In a >> story where two brothers were named "Lith" and "Lidh", would an >> audience be able to keep them apart?" The answer is clearly yes, >> regardless of the various other consideration that some have noted, >> therefore the distinction is (not surprisingly) phonemic. Bob Whiting replied: >No, the answer is: if there were two brothers named Lith and Lidh then >the distinction would be phonemic. As long as there aren't, there is >no phonemic distinction. It doesn't matter that the two sounds are >capable of being distinct phonemes. Until they are used as phonemes >by the speakers of the language, they aren't phonemes for all that they >are recognizably different sounds. When speakers start coining unrelated >words where [th] contrasts with [dh] then they will be phonemes. The >fact that you could coin words where they contrast is not sufficient. This is simply wrong. We could, theoretically, coin words where aspirated [ph] contrasted with plain [p] -- but if we did, people would have to learn to control, and pay attention to, a hitherto redundant feature. But people already hear, and pay attention to, the voicing distinction in the interdental fricatives, just as they do in the other English fricatives and affricates. And there are those minimal pairs, such as ether:either and thigh:thy, which cannot be dismissed by *synchronically* attributing them to some morphological conditioning or to a native:foreign dichotomy. Let me drag in a notorious German example. [x] and palatal [c,] are very nearly in complementary distribution, with [x] found only immediately after back vowels a(:) o(:) u(:) au. [c,] is found after front vowels and diphthongs, all consonants, and (for some speakers) initially. But the diminutive suffix -chen has only [c,] even after back vowels -- a rare occurrence, since -chen normally fronts ("umlauts") the preceding vowel. So one finds alleged minimal pairs such as Kuchen [khu.c, at n] 'cake' and baby-talk Kuhchen [khu:c, at n] 'little cow', which some claim demonstrate that [x] and [c,] must be assigned to different phonemes. And furthermore, many (most?) German speakers hear the difference quite clearly. But are they separate phonemes? No, as is shown by the fact that Kuchen : Kuhchen form a subminimal pair: the vowel of the latter is clearly (but non-distinctively) longer than the former, indicating that it was in root-final position, before suffix -chen. Then, on synchronic grounds along, we may write the alleged minimal pair as /ku:x at n/ 'cake' but /ku:+x at n/ 'little cow': the boundary /+/ conditions both the extra vowel length and the palatal realization of /x/. The fact that all such "minimal pairs" contain precisely the diminutive suffix -chen confirms this analysis. It is therefore unlikely, though possible, that German could coin new words in which [x] and [c,] would (appear to) contrast in some other environment, just as it is unlikely that English would coin new words contrasting precisely in aspired [ph] vs. plain [p]. But English does have a few minimal pairs for the interdentals, ones which cannot be explained on phonologucal grounds. True, in my pronunciation, the stressed vowel of _either_ is longer than that of _ether_ -- but this is in line with vowel length before other voices vs. voiceless consonants. And there's no difference in _thigh_ vs. _thy_. So the fact that new words contrasting only in having [T] vs. [D] could be formed without any new feature becoming distinctive confirms that the two are searate phonemes, and have ben so for some time. >And as you unintentionally point out, when they become phonemes, [dh] >will have to be written , otherwise you couldn't distinguish between > and . Well, it should be so written already, but we ignore all sorts of other distinctions, and it doesn't bother us. stands for /s z S Z/ (the latter two as in _pressure_ and _pleasure_ -- in fact, we don't evan have an official way to spell /Z/, though would seem obvious. And don't even ask about the vowels: treating as doublets of , we have effective five vowel symbols for a very large phonemic inventory. I'd be glad to see ,dh. in use, but it really has nothing to do with whether [T D] are separate phonemes. regards Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at memphis.edu University of Memphis From sarima at friesen.net Mon Nov 6 16:13:29 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 08:13:29 -0800 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 07:08 PM 11/4/00 +0200, Robert Whiting wrote: >On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, David L. White wrote: > >> For English /th/ vs/ /dh/, the question to ask is something like "In a >> story where two brothers were named "Lith" and "Lidh", would an >> audience be able to keep them apart?" The answer is clearly yes, >> regardless of the various other consideration that some have noted, >> therefore the distinction is (not surprisingly) phonemic. >No, the answer is: if there were two brothers named Lith and Lidh then >the distinction would be phonemic. As long as there aren't, there is >no phonemic distinction. It doesn't matter that the two sounds are >capable of being distinct phonemes. ... Actually David has a good point (at least if you make it a play rather than a story to be read). Try writing a Japanese play with characters named Shil and Shir. The result will be confusion and incomprehension. Or try an English play with characters named Lit and Lit' (where /'/ represents aspiration, since we are already using /th/ to mean voiceless interdental fricative). You will get the same result. And this is despite the fact that both the pair /r/ and /l/ and the pair /t/ and /t'/ *can* be distinguished, since some languages do exactly that. The the fact that an non-specialist native speaker can *hear* the difference is good reason to consider it to be phonemic. >And as you unintentionally point out, when they become phonemes, [dh] >will have to be written , Not at all. The natural spelling of /lidh/ in English would be Lihthe or something like that (If "lithe" did not already exist with a long 'i', that would be the spelling) -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Mon Nov 6 15:40:44 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 17:40:44 +0200 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there In-Reply-To: <20000426082023.29305.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 26 Apr 2000 Gábor Sándi wrote: >[ Moderator's note: > Robert Whiting's posting quoted below was in response to, and > quoted from, a previous message from John McLaughlin dated 13 > Apr 2000. I have added the proper attribution where needed. > --rma ] >On Saturday, 22 April, 2000 Robert Whiting > wrote: >Subject: RE: minimal pairs are not always there >[ JMcL wrote:] >>> [Robert Whiting] >>> I would say that even a minimal pair is not a sufficient >>> condition to establish two sounds as separate phonemes. >I am entering this debate somewhat late, but I do have strong >opinions on it. >In my view, the main purpose of phonemic analysis is to provide >for an unambiguous way to describe the pronunciation of every >utterance in a language. Yes, well, this is what we have the IPA for. But you may have noticed that IPA is the International PHONETIC Alphabet, not the *International PHONEMIC Alphabet. You are simply confusing phonemics with phonetics. Phonemic transcription (/.../) is neither phonetically unambiguous nor necessarily phonetically accurate. Phonetic transcription ([...]) is necessarily (or at least to the best of the transcriber's ability) an accurate mapping of the pronunciation of every utterance in a language. But phonetic transcription doesn't care what the phonemes are; it records the actual sounds (phones) of the utterance. As a simple example, English 'pin' is transcribed phonemically as /pin/ but phonetically as [p'in] or [p^hin] because the initial /p/ is aspirated (followed by a puff of air). The consensus is that aspirated and unaspirated /p/ in English are simply allophones of a single phoneme (although a case could be made that they aren't). Now consider 'spin', which has the unaspirated allophone of /p/ (or /P/ if you are into archiphonemes). Phonemically it is /spin/ but phonetically you could most accurately represent it as [sbin] (the puff of air of the aspirated consonant delays the onset of voicing; without the puff of air, voicing of the vowel sound begins before the consonant is finished, making the consonant seem voiced). So while the phonetic transcription may be accurate, it is at odds with the phonemic transcription. Whenever you have allophones of a single phoneme, phonemic transcription is not necessarily an accurate phonetic mapping of an utterance since each phoneme can have several members. Phonemic and phonetic transcriptions do not have to look very much alike. This is why we have a provision for both phonetic and phonemic transcriptions. A phonetic transcription is an accurate mapping of the pronunciation of an utterance. A phonemic transcription is an abstraction. This is because phonemes themselves are abstractions. Phones are realia. They exist in the real world. They can be measured and identified with a voice spectograph. Phonemes exist in the minds of the speakers of a language (and for the most part, they don't even exist there consciously). Two (or more) phones may be allophones of the same phoneme in one language but separate phonemes in another. You can't tell from looking at a voice spectograph whether a phone is a phoneme or not. You can't even tell what the phonemes of a language are by asking its speakers, because they won't be able to give you a list of the phonemes of their language. Native speakers learn their phonemes through contrasts. The never sit down with a list of the phonemes and memorize them the way the memorize multiplication tables. You can only tell what the phonemes of a language are by analyzing the speech of its speakers and seeing which sounds contrast and under what circumstances. >Therefore if there is a single pair of words distinguished by >the presence of sound A in one and sound B in the other (this is >the definition of "minimal pairs"), this should be sufficient to >establish a phonemic difference. In any dialect of English where >"either" may be pronounced /i:dh at r/ (@ stands for the schwa), the >existence of the minimal pair either/ether is then sufficient to >establish the existence of separate phonemes /dh/ and /th/. This is like saying that [x] and [ç] (the ich-laut) must be separate phonemes in German because you can find "minimal pairs" with these two sounds ('Kuhchen' [ku:çen] "little cow" and 'Kuchen' [ku:xen] "cake" or 'Tauchen' [tauçen] "little rope" and 'tauchen' [tauxen] "to dive, submerge"). This is just not so. The presence of these sounds can be explained by rule (even if it isn't a phonological rule). I expect that most native speakers of German would not accept these as "minimal pairs" even if they are by your definition. And a single "minimal pair" doesn't establish separate phonemes; it establishes a contrast between two segments. If one accepts 'ether' and 'either' as a minimal pair, this proves only that [th] and [dh] contrast. It doesn't prove that [th] and/or [dh] are not allophones of /t/ and/or /d/. See below. Perhaps we can eliminate some of the discord about whether minimal pairs define phonemes by refining the definition of minimal pair, rather than refining the definition of phoneme. The problem, in my view, stems from defining phoneme in terms of meaning. Unfortunately, because of the way language works (as a system that expresses meaning through sound), it is very difficult to avoid tying meaning to sound definitionally at some point. But phonemes are not about differences in meaning; phonemes are about being able to make arbitrary contrasts that result in differences in meaning. Differences in meaning may be a result of phonemes. Phonemes are not a result of differences in meaning. The key word here is "arbitrary". The relationship between sound and meaning is arbitrary. If two words differ by only one segment, the differing segments are different phonemes only if their presence in the words is arbitrary. If the sounds are required to be in those words by some rule, the distinction can't be phonemic. To say that words with different meanings must have different phonemes is to require that homonyms have invisible (inaudible?) phonemes that provide the difference in meaning. So let us keep the meaning of phoneme as "the smallest unit of sound that can make a difference in meaning" (although I still don't like this, because in practice any difference in sound can make a difference in meaning, but any difference in sound is not necessarily a different phoneme) with the proviso that phonemes do not make any *specific* difference in meaning. A phoneme should be semantically empty. If it is not, then it is no longer (just) a phoneme. Phonemic contrasts must be arbitrary. If we have the words 'big' and 'pig' and 'fig', these are arbitrary contrasts. Nothing requires the phonemes /b/ or /p/ or /f/ to be in any of these words. We can check this by comparing other words like 'bad', 'pad', and 'fad' or 'ban', 'pan', and 'fan' and so on, and seeing that there is nothing about any of the phonemes in these words that tells you anything about their meanings or anything about their meanings that tells you what particular phonemes have to be present. To put this another way, ask yourself a question: If the phoneme /b/ occurs in an English word, what does that tell you about the meaning of that word? The answer should be: "absolutely nothing." In the pair ether/either, 'ether' belongs to a class of words where the pronunciation of as [th] is required (by rule based on a clearly established pattern [Greek loans originally containing theta]); 'either' belongs to a class of words where the pronunciation of as [dh] is required (by rule based on a clearly established pattern [native words with an intervocalic spirant where the original voiceless spirant was voiced by rule]). Since the respective pronunciations of these words are required by rule, this cannot be a phonemic distinction because the choice of these sounds is not arbitrary. If 'ether' had [dh] and 'either' had [th], this would be a phonemic distinction because the opposition would not be predictable. Saying that native speakers don't know that 'ether' is originally from a Greek word with theta doesn't make any difference. There must be some synchronic rule that forces this [th] pronunciation or else the pattern wouldn't be there in the language synchronically. Now it might be argued that [th] and [dh] don't make any *specific* difference in meaning in these two words and therefore the contrast should be considered phonemic. And it is true that 'ether' could mean anything and 'either' could mean anything else. But so long as 'ether' comes from a Greek word that had theta in it and 'either' is a native word that had an intervocalic /th/ when the voicing rule operated, then 'ether' would *have* to be pronounced with [th] and 'either' would *have* to be pronounced with [dh]. There is nothing arbitrary about the choice of [th] and [dh]; these pronunciations are required by rule, therefore the contrast is not phonemic. >Of course, other pairs like thy/thigh, this'll/thistle etc. will >reinforce this analysis. Indeed they will. Whenever the distribution of the sounds can be explained by rule, the distinction is not phonemic. The point about phonemes is that a speaker can use them to make a distinction in meaning. When a speaker is required to use a certain sound in a certain place (for reasons other than simply to effect the desired meaning) then that usage is not phonemic (for all that it may create a different meaning). >You may of course not accept my approach, but I do not see the >utility of a phonemic system that cannot uniquely map the >pronunciation of every word in a language. But this is not the purpose of a phonemic system. Phonemic systems do not uniquely map the pronunciation of every word in a language. Again, you are confusing phonemics with phonetics. Phonemic analysis accounts for the different phones used in a language by assigning them to phonemes. And this is done by determining which phones contrast and which do not. But a phonemic inventory is coextensive with a phonetic inventory of a language only if there are no allophones. >Imagine writing a description of the English sound system, say >of the "General American" dialect. If you don't accept the >phonemicity of /dh/, you will presumably provide a list of eight >fricatives: >/f/ /v/ /th/ /s/ /z/ /sh/ /zh/ /h/ >Next you will say that some of these come in voiceless/voiced >pairs: /f/ - /v/, /s/ - /z/ and /sh/ - /zh/. One (/h/) is always >voiceless. Finally, there is a curious phoneme /th/, which is >voiceless initially (except in function words) and in word-final >position in nouns (bath) and adjectives (uncouth), but voiced >between vowels (except when not), after consonants (further), and >in word-final position in verbs (bathe). Words of foreign origin >(as if native speakers cared) would have their own rules (Athens, >anthem). No doubt other sub-rules could be added, ad infinitum. >Now why would this analysis be superior to one that said that >English had nine fricatives (/f/ /v/ /th/ /dh/ /s/ /z/ /sh/ >/zh/ /h/ )? Because it is more accurate and accounts for all of the evidence? Besides, I don't deny that English has nine fricatives. You can prove it with a spectograph. What I deny (or at least can't find evidence to prove) is that all these nine fricatives (or spirants as I prefer to call them) are phonemically distinct. The fact that certain sounds occur in a language doesn't ipso facto prove that they are all phonemes in that language. English (and most other languages as well) has lots of sounds that aren't phonemes (or, rather, that are different from, but not distinct from, other members of the same phoneme). I'm surprised that you haven't included /x/ as an English fricative. Although once present and then lost, is has surely been borrowed back in words like 'ach', 'loch' and names like 'Bach'. >Here you need no distributional rules, just a specification of the >articulation of each phoneme: voiceless labiodental fricative etc. >[snip] I fail to see the point of this. You can describe the articulation of each sound regardless of whether it is a phoneme in any particular language or not. [th] is still a voiceless alveolar (dental) fricative and [dh] is still a voiced alveolar (dental) fricative regardless of whether they are separate phonemes or not. They will be pronounced the same way whether they are separate phonemes or allophones of the same phoneme. Phonemicity doesn't have anything to do with how a sound is pronounced. Two sounds can be pronounced differently (have different features) and still not be phonemically distinct. Two sounds can be phonemically distinct in one language and not phonemically distinct in another, but they will still be two sounds. Consider bright /l/ and dark /l/: allophones of /l/ in English, but separate phonemes in Russian. Now a distinctive feature analysis may make it easier to check sounds cross-linguistically, but for a single language, it makes little difference whether you identify its sounds through features or as phonemes and their allophones. Many sounds have both distinctive features and redundant features. Redundant features belong to allophones of sounds whose distinctive features contrast (in at least one feature) with all the other phonemes in the language. For example English /k/ has at least 6 allophones: a palatal, a labial, a neutral, with aspirated and unaspirated variants of each. But for purposes of phonemic analysis, English /k/ is simply a voiceless velar stop. The redundant features that distinguish its allophones are just not considered in phonemic analysis. >> No problem. I have no vested interest in any theory that >> either requires or doesn't require [th] and [dh] to be separate >> phonemes. I'm just looking to find out what the evidence is and >> how the evidence proves it one way or the other. >[ JMcL wrote:] >>> The evidence for establishing /th/ and /dh/ as separate >>> phonemes is no worse than that for establishing /zh/, /ng/, and >>> /oj/ as phonemes (depending on whether or not one considers >>> diphthongs to be on the same footing as other phonemes in the >>> language). >> I think it is quite a bit worse. How many of /zh/, /ng/, or >> /oj/ occur only in certain classes of words or only as >> morphophonemic alternants? Show me that in all the words where >> /zh/ occurs that /zh/ limits or restricts the meanings that it >> can have and I will grant you the point. It is said that /ng/ >> only occurs in word final position, but even this is not true >> (compare 'finger' - 'singer'). These may be difficult to >> establish as phonemes, but there is solid evidence: places where >> these sounds provide the only contrast and cannot be predicted by >> rule. Show me the same for [dh] and I will grant you the point. >[GS] >Once you accept nonphonetic conditioning factors, there is no >end to the elimination of phonemes from a system. Of course there is an end. This is just hyperbole. There is no way to eliminate /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/, /f/, /v/, /s/, /z/, /th/, /sh/, /m/, /n/, and /h/ as phonemes in English. It is rather the other way around: if you eliminate all nonphonetic conditioning factors and say that all sounds that are potentially distinctive are phonemes, there is no end to the number of phonemes in a language. Phonological purists always insist that morphology can't affect phonology (i.e., no nonphonetic conditioning factors) and the next thing you know they are talking about the phonological effects of morpheme boundaries and word boundaries. In fact, it is almost impossible to discuss phonology without these concepts. But morpheme boundary and word boundary are not phonological conditions, but morphological ones. Somehow they seem to get smuggled into phonology. So it is not a matter of "no nonphonetic conditioning factors," it is a matter of how much morphological conditioning you are willing to allow into phonology. My own answer to this tends to be "as much as you can." Language is a fully integrated system. It expresses meaning (morphemes) through phonological form (phonemes). So in my view it is very difficult to completely separate morphology from phonology. Systems engineers know that when you start mucking around with one part of a system, you are likely to cause unexpected havoc in some other (apparently unrelated) part of the system. Software developers are intensely aware of this; they just can't explain it to judges, apparently. :) >Take two of your examples above: >/ng/ - not a phoneme. We can analyze it as the allophone of /n/ >before /k/ and /g/. /g/ is then dropped ("zero allophone" - why >not?) in final position after /n/, and before the derivative >suffix -er (as in "singer"), although not before the comparative >-er (as in "longer"). There remain some exceptions, like the name >of my favourite Canadian city (Vancouver is pronounced >/vaenku:v at r/ by locals), but this is clearly a loanword, or >(maybe) two morphemes: Van Couver. Well, yes, we could analyze it this way (with some modifications), but then we would have to have a silent phoneme in the language, because you can't just elide final /g/. Phonemically, its place has to be held by a marker of the zero allophone of /g/. Otherwise, in pairs like 'run', 'rung'; 'sin', 'sing'; and especially 'sinner', 'singer' you would have [n] and [ng] contrasting (and we all know that allophones can't contrast in different words). Therefore 'sinner' would have to be analyzed as /sin at r/ and 'singer' would have to be analyzed as /sing0(g)@r/ (where 0(g) represents the zero allophone of /g/) or else you would just have /sin at r/ contrasting with /sing at r/ suggesting that [n] and [ng] are not allophones. Of course, you will also have a different syllable structure (si'-n at r vs. sing'- at r) because [ng] can't occur in syllable initial position. This doesn't affect [n] / [ng] contrasts in final position, however, so we have /r at n/ and /r at ng0(g)/. One of the modifications that it seems to me would have to be made is that g --> 0 / ng ___# has to be the next rule applied after n --> ng / ___ [velar]. This gets rid of the complication of saying that /g/ goes to zero after [ng] in final position and before the agentive suffix '-er'. Stem-final /g/ goes to zero immediately and (nearly) all derivative suffixes (agentive '-er', '-ing', '-ish', '-ly', '-y', etc.) are added to this base. All that is needed then is a rule that triggers the restoration of /g/ before the comparative '-er' (and for completeness, the superlative '-est'): 0(g) --> g /ng ___ [COMPARATIVE, SUPERLATIVE]. So it is not too difficult to account for the distribution of [n] and [ng] in English with synchronic (generative) rules and treating [ng] as an allophone of [n]. The only real problem is that it requires a silent phoneme (a stem-final zero allophone of /g/). There is nothing particularly wrong with this (as someone pointed out, French does a lot of this, and John McLaughlin has pointed out that Numicists do it for Comanche). Furthermore, it is not a particularly difficult phoneme for speakers to keep track of: wherever you have a bare [ng] (i.e., without a following velar), it is followed by a zero allophone of /g/. There is another problem for phonological purists, because the initial assimilation rule obviously doesn't operate across morpheme boundaries (compare 'unclear', 'unclean', but 'uncle') and sometimes even across perceived morpheme boundaries (e.g., 'mangrove', 'mongoose', your 'Vancouver', 'vanguard', and sometimes even 'vanquish' [analogy?]). This simply means that the original assimilation rule has to be marked [+root] as part of the environment. And the zero allophone of /g/ rule probably doesn't work in New York City because too many people live on "Long Gisland." :) All things considered then, it is probably simpler to operate with /n/ and /ng/ as different phonemes because this does not require the zero allophone of /g/ to maintain their allophonic status *and* there is no indication of a morphophonemic alternation between [n] and [ng] (there is no connection between pairs like 'bun' / 'bung', 'pin' / 'ping', 'thin' / 'thing', 'clan' / 'clang', etc., etc.). /ng/ is frequently used in expressive and imitative words (e.g., 'ding', 'ping', 'zing', 'ring' 'clang', 'twang', 'bong', etc. -- even cross-linguistically: 'gong' is a loan from Malay, and the Sumerian word for "harp" was 'balang'), but not exclusively so (e.g., 'thing', 'lung' 'rung' [noun], 'strong', 'among', 'gang', and, most commonly, the derivative suffix '-ing'). But the analysis does show that it is possible to analyze two sounds both as separate phonemes and as allophones of a single phoneme, accounting for all the observed data in each case. In such instances we usually resort to Occam's Razor for a resolution. In this case we accept the separate phoneme theory because the allophone theory requires an additional entity (a zero allophone of /g/). But this does not necessarily mean that this is the correct solution. Occam's Razor is just a heuristic. It tells us that the simpler solution (that accounts for all the evidence) is to be preferred, but it doesn't tell us that it has to be correct. The simple solution is more likely to be correct, but unlikely things do happen. >/zh/ - who needs it? Using the logic of reductionism, we shall >elaborate a set of rules to account for this sound: This is an oxymoron. Reductionism doesn't elaborate rules; it simplifies them. >(1) It is an allophone of the phoneme /j/, occurring in >loanwords from French (genre, garage, mirage). First, let's get our terminology straight. What we will call the phoneme /j/ is j with hachek [dzh] and not to be confused with IPA j which is English y. As such, /j/ is the voiced counterpart of /ch/ (c with hachek [tsh]). Now to facts. The sound [zh] occurs predominantly in French loans borrowed after about 15-1600, but it also appears in some loans from Slavic; I remember at least 'muzhik' "peasant" from Russian, but there are probably others. But the thrust of the statement is correct: [zh] in this environment is found only as a received pronunciation in words of foreign origin. >The phoneme /j/ in native words like 'edge' /ej/ remains [j], >whereas this pronunciation does not occur in loanwords. Sure it does. It is found in words from Japanese ('jinricksha', 'judo', 'jujitsu' [not to mention 'Japan']); Arabic ('jihad', 'jinni' ['genie']); and many others. But most of the loanwords with this pronunciation come from French. In speaking of loans from French, the pronunciation of this segment depends on when the word was borrowed. Words borrowed before about 15-1600 will have [j (dzh)]; words borrowed later will have [zh]. This parallels exactly the treatment of the voiceless counterparts of these sounds. Words borrowed before the sound change in French will have [ch (tsh)] ('chief', 'chandler'). Words borrowed later will have [sh] ('chef', 'chandelier'). This last change does not cause any controversy in English because /s/ and /sh/ had already been established as separate phonemes. However, the pronunciation of as [sh] makes it easy to pick out French loans of the last 4-500 years. But 'chief' never had a pronunciation with [sh] in English. >Where it does, one may always set up a new word category: >loanwords that have been fully assimilated to the sound structure >of English. This will take care of troublesome words like jet, >gene and magenta. No, the vast majority of loans from French with [j] never had a pronunciation of [zh] in English. This is a matter of a sound change in French, not of nativization of the sound in English. So your statement is a distortion of the evidence, especially of the evidence you have offered. Of the three examples given, 'jet' is in a different category. I'm not entirely sure about this, but I seem to remember that _j_ from Latin _j_ went to [zh] later than _ge_ from Latin _ge_. Perhaps someone can help out on this. I would need a philologist of French to verify this, but I expect that 'jet' never had a pronunciation with [zh] in English despite the fact that it wasn't borrowed until the 17th century. Contrast with 'jeté' [zh at te:] (a technical term in ballet, where unnativized French terms abound), a 19th century borrowing. Words like 'joy' 'joust' 'judge', 'jury', and so on, never had a pronunciation with [zh] in English. Again, contrast 'juggler' (14th cent.; with [j]) with 'jongleur' (18th cent.; with [zh]). The second example is a modern coining based on the suffix '-gen', as in 'pathogen', 'halogen', 'oxygen', 'hydrogen'. 'Gene' never had a pronunciation with [zh] in English. The final example is Italian, not French. The in 'magenta' is exactly parallel to its voiceless counterpart in Italian loans such as 'cello' or 'vermicelli', regularly pronounced with [ch]. 'Magenta' never had a pronunciation with [zh] in English (except for those who give it a French pronunciation as an affectation). So there are two strata of French loans in English: the earlier will have or and [j] ('jet', 'jelly', 'jaunty', 'juggler'; 'gender', 'gelatin', 'genteel'); the later will have or and [zh] ('genre', 'gelée', 'gendarme'; 'jeté', 'jongleur', 'jeunesse'). The earlier borrowings never had a pronunciation with [zh] in English. Now despite your poor choice of examples, there is a process of nativization going on with recent French loans. To my knowledge, 'ménage' has only [zh] but 'menagerie' can have either [j] or [zh]. Similarly 'mélange', 'garage', 'genre', 'gendarme', etc., can have either. The pronunciation of 'garbage' with [zh] is an affectation; apparently French garbage is considered to have more class than English garbage. :) But it does illustrate the point that the pronunciation with [zh] is considered by speakers to be connected with French and that a native (or nativized) word can be "Frenchified" by using this pronunciation.. >(2) In words like azure, seisure and invasion, /zh/ is derived >from the sequence of phonemes z + y. (/azyu:r/, /si:zy at r/ and >/inveyzy at n/). Come to think of it, didn't Chomsky and Halle >analyze English along these lines, to get back at those dreadful >structuralists of the 50's? I think that Chomsky and Halle were trying to show that English pronunciation and English orthography were not so disparate as generally assumed (as an antidote to Shaw, etc.) and that English spelling provides a great deal of information to the reader that the pronunciation has lost. But the analysis of this instance of [zh] is quite correct. It is a palatalized allophone of [z] before a palatal ('confuse' [z], 'confusion' [zh]) parallel with the palatalized allophone [sh] of [s] in the same environment ('confess' [s], 'confession' [sh]). This is quite regular and very common cross-linguistically: consonant + palatal --> palatalized consonant. In short, the palatal, originally associated with a (usually front) vowel, is transferred to become associated with the preceding consonant. Again, [sh] in this environment is a palatalized allophone of [s], but since /s/ and /sh/ are already considered phonemes ('sore' / 'shore', 'seat' / 'sheet'), the rule (concept) "once a phoneme, always a phoneme" causes it to be considered as a phoneme even in this environment where it is clearly an allophone. Many people then consider that since /sh/ is a phoneme in this environment then [zh] must also be a phoneme. They then collect numerous examples of minimal pairs and near minimal pairs to show that /sh/ contrasts with [zh] in the same environment ('Confucian' / 'confusion', 'kosher' / 'closure', 'vicious' / 'vision', 'pollution' / 'collusion') and then claim that this proves that [zh] is a phoneme because it contrasts with /sh/. But as Ante Aikio has quite correctly reminded us on Wed, 26 Apr 2000: 1. One minimal pair, such as above, does not establish phonemes - it establishes an opposition in a non-contrastive environment. A phoneme is the sum of its oppositions: what makes something a phoneme is that it is in opposition to -all- the other phonemes. You can establish phonemes only in the context of the whole phonological system. To which I would add that a hundred minimal pairs, or a thousand, that all express the same contrast (e.g., [sh] and [zh]) does not establish phonemes, only a contrast between the two particular segments involved. This is where the definition of "phoneme" that I use comes into play. The definition that I use is that a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound recognized as distinct from all other such units by the speakers of a language. This definition has a number of disadvantages. Namely, it does not account for suprasegmental phonemes and it also defines the concept in terms of itself. Its main advantages are that it keeps "meaning" out of the definition and it stresses the psychological nature of the phoneme. And it tells you how you go about identifying phonemes. To be a phoneme, a sound must contrast with *all* other phonemes in the language. If it contrasts with all other phonemes except one, it is not a phoneme, but an allophone of that one (unless the two sounds are so distant phonetically that they simply cannot be considered allophones [like English /h/ and /ng/]). I consider this a conceptual definition; it tells you what phonemes are, as opposed to the functional definition ("a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that can make a difference in meaning") which tells you what phonemes do. Phonemes can make differences in meaning. But you can have differences in meaning without having different phonemes (homonyms). Therefore, a difference in meaning is not a sufficient condition for insisting on the presence of different phonemes. And a minimal pair is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for establishing different phonemes. What is necessary is to show that a sound is a phoneme is to show that it contrasts with every other phoneme in the language. And this is where Ante Aikio seems to have forgotten what he made so clear in his first point when he wrote in his second point: 2. It must be once again stressed that for many languages it is impossible to establish all the contrasts using minimal pairs - this is precisely the case with English /sh/ vs. /zh/, which was discussed earlier. The phonemes contrast with each other even though there are no minimal pairs, because their distribution cannot be accounted for with a rule. I.e., they show contrast in non-contrastive environments (vicious vs. vision etc.). The contrast of /sh/ and [zh] does not prove that [zh] is a phoneme. As Ante Aikio made clear in his first point, it only proves a contrast with /sh/. It cannot be proved that [zh] is a phoneme unless it can be shown that [zh] contrasts with *all* other phonemes (or is so phonetically distant from some phoneme for which a contrast cannot be shown that it cannot be considered an allophone of that phoneme). Particularly, it is crucial to show that [zh] contrasts with /z/. Because if [zh] is an allophone of /z/ then [zh] will contrast with all other phonemes except /z/ because /z/, as a phoneme, will contrast with all other phonemes and so, therefore, will all of its allophones. And /z/ and [zh] are so close phonetically that the second criterion does not apply. Now it has been correctly pointed out that [zh] in English has two origins: 1) It is a received pronunciation in loanwords. Such loanwords are predominantly from French where the pronunciation is primarily a result of first palatalization of /g/ to /j/ ([dzh]) before [e] and then unpacking of the complex sound ([dzh] > [d]+[zh]) and elision of the initial [d]. This development took place in French, not in English where the phoneme /j/ is still found in both native words ('hedge') and borrowed words ('judge'). 2) It is a palatalization of /z/ before palatal vowels (z --> zh / ___ [palatal]). As such, it is clearly an allophone of /z/. Since zh(2) is an allophone of /z/ it cannot contrast with /z/. It can, however, contrast with /j/ (and, presumably therefore, with its allophones) Since we have 'legion' ([j]) and 'lesion' ([zh(2)]) this contrast is validated. There is also one pronunciation of 'azure' (I don't know the pronunciation that you give: /azyu:r/; I know [æzh at r] and [@zhUr], the first with accent on the first syllable, the second with accent on the second syllable) that shows this contrast: 'adjure' [@jUr] (this also contrasts with [sh]: 'assure' [@shUr]). On the other hand, zh(1) can contrast with /z/. Thus we have 'ruse' [ruz] and 'rouge' [ruzh] (although 'rouge' is also realized as [ruj] in some dialects or by some speakers) and 'lose' [luz] and 'luge' [luzh] (also 'loser' [luz at r] and 'luger' [luzh at r]). So we are faced with the fact that zh(1) (as an allophone of /j/) can contrast with /z/ and zh(2) (as an allophone of /z/) can contrast with /j/. But to my knowledge, zh(1) does not contrast with /j/ and zh(2) does not contrast with /z/. Thus the question becomes: are we justified in considering identical allophones of different phonemes as phonemes in their own right? If the answer is yes, then [zh] is a phoneme in English; if not, not. In Akkadian, there are three phonemic short vowels (a, i, u) and three corresponding long vowels. There is also a short and long e, but this is not considered phonemic because it is always an allophone of either a or i. Now it is possible to find "minimal pairs" in which e (as an allophone of a) contrasts with i and in which e (as an allophone of i) contrasts with a. Thus it is possible to show four different contrasts, but not that there are four different vowel phonemes. I would say that the case of English [zh] is entirely similar. On the other hand, Akkadian being a dead language, the grammar was explicated by philologists rather than by linguists. A linguistic approach might reach different conclusions. >With sufficient ingenuity, I am sure we can come up with rules >to eliminate other phonemes from English: /v/ and /@r/ (bird, >fern, word) come immediately to mind. With sufficient ingenuity, we can come up with anything we want. The question is, will anyone believe it. >My main point, I hope readers realize, is that this kind of >analysis is not very helpful. A simple description of the >phonemic structure of a language should account for all >differences that are potentially distinctive, irrespective of the >morphology, semantics or etymological provenance of the words in >question. And it is not very helpful to say that every different sound in a language is a phoneme. For any different sounds in a language are potentially distinctive. Whether they are actually distinctive depends on how the speakers of the language use them. If they aren't used to make arbitrary contrasts, then they aren't phonemes (in that particular language). >It is a noteworthy fact that there tend to be correlations >between certain phonemes and certain grammatical and semantic >criteria. In English, /dh/ starts many function words and /th/ >never does - so what? The phoneme /h/ (or the cluster /hw/, >depending on the dialect) starts many interrogatives (where, >which, what, when) while /k/ never does - is this a reason to >bunch them together under one phoneme? This is mere sophistry. The one situation has no relevance to the other. To say that it does may make it look like a valid argument to anyone who doesn't know anything about historical linguistics, but it is easy to refute by anyone who does. The split between initial [th] and [dh] is quite recent in English. There can be no question that [th] and [dh] were originally the same phoneme. Initial /th/ is the normal Germanic reflex of PIE *t as captured in Gothic. English has preserved /th/ while German has generally shifted to /d/. Thus: PIE Gothic English German *ter- thaurnus thorn Dorn *trei- thrija (neut.) three drei *tr.s- thaurstei thirst Durst *tar- thar there dar, da *tu:- thu thou du etc etc etc etc By comparison, /hw/ is the normal Germanic reflex of PIE *k^w (just as /h/ is the normal Germanic reflex of PIE *k' [palatal k]). All the interrogatives in /hw/ (English or ) are derived from the Teutonic pronoun base *hwo- / *hwe- (presumably phonetically [x^w]) which is derived from PIE *k^wo- / *k^we-. So the reason that there are no interrogatives beginning with /k/ in English is that there is no initial PIE *k^w left in English. Any English initial /k/ has come from some other source (normally shifted from PIE *g or *g^w; otherwise borrowed from a language that has preserved PIE *k^w like 'quart(er)', or from an unrelated language ['Quetzalcoatl', 'Kwakiutl'). That is why no one claims that modern English /hw/ and modern English /k/ are the same phoneme. They aren't and they never have been. English /hw/ and PIE *k^w are the same (i.e., one has developed into the other), but there is no initial /k/ in English that has been inherited from PIE *k^w or *k'. Therefore saying that [th] and [dh] can't belong to the same phoneme in English because /hw/ and /k/ aren't the same phoneme in English is a completely spurious argument and I can't imagine why anyone who has ever heard of Grimm's Law would put it forward. >[ JMcL wrote:] >>> [Me] >>> The distribution of /th/ and /dh/ cannot be determined by the >>> assignment of a PHONOLOGICAL rule. >> Let me see if I have your take on this straight. Are you >> saying that allophones automatically become separate phonemes >> when the phonological conditioning environment that maintains >> their allophonic identity is lost? And that they are phonemes >> even if they never contrast in an environment that can't be >> predicted, so long as the basis for predicting the environment is >> not phonological? >[GS] >Yes, that's how it should be. Once the conditioning factor is >lost, we have separate phonemes. German (+Swedish, Danish and >Norwegian) umlauts, Southern British /e@/ (bare, care) and French >nasal vowels come to mind as examples. You can probably invent a >series of complex rules to eliminate these from the inventories >of phonemes, explain the exceptions as loanwords, analogies or >whatever, but what would be the purpose of this? The purpose is accuracy and thoroughness. Insisting on simplicity at the expense of accuracy is a particularly pernicious type of reductionism. Another name for it is "oversimplification." There are various kinds of reductionism. A productive kind is found in breaking apart a system that is too complex to be studied as a whole into its subsystems and studying the subsystems independently. This type of reductionism is frequently applied to language because it is an extremely complex system with many interacting levels. Thus we have specialists in various linguistic subsystems: Phoneticians and phonologists, grammarians dealing with morphology and syntax, lexicographers dealing with the lexicon, pragmatists dealing with matters of style and discourse, and so on. The danger with this kind of reductionism is that the specialists in the various subsystems sometimes forget that their specialty is not the entire system and that it has to be integrated with all the other subsystems in order for the system to work. On the whole, however, this kind of reductionism yields good results. Another kind of reductionism is simply refusing to allow complexity to be considered as a possible explanation. The simple solution is always correct. This kind of reductionism elevates Occam's Razor from a heuristic to a religion. Complicating factors are simply ignored. As an example consider the short term observations of the apparent motion of the sun, moon, and fixed stars from the earth. The simplistic explanation of these observations is that the earth is stationary and the heavenly bodies revolve around it. This works fine, except for the irregular motion of the planets. But what would be the purpose of working out complex explanations for the motion of the planets that might upset the simplistic explanation of the observations? Let us just call the planets "wanderers" and ignore their wayward motion, maintaining the earth as the center of the universe. Saying that evidence of complexity should be ignored so that we can have simple explanations may be fine in the everyday world where principle often gives way to expediency. But in a scientific context it is generally considered bad form. >>I just invented a phonological explanation for 'ether' - 'either' >>so it is no longer a minimal pair (just like Comanche [papi] and >>[pavi] aren't a minimal pair, although presumably these two words >>are both native in Comanche). >To use someone else's analysis of Comanche as supporting >evidence for your analysis of English is not very convincing. Very perceptive. It wasn't meant to be convincing. On the contrary, it was meant to show that creating silent phonemes to block distinctions between other phonemes is not very good methodology because it is too easy to do (see above, on the discussion of /n/ and /ng/). If whenever we don't want two contrasting sounds to be phonemes we just invent a silent phoneme so that the sounds are no longer contrasting, we no longer have a sound basis (pun intended) for our phonological analysis. My point was that if the Numicists can do it for Comanche, then I can do it for English with exactly the same result. But I wouldn't do it for English because, as you say, it is unconvincing, and by implication, if it is unconvincing for English, it is unconvincing for Comanche as well. >If I analyzed Comanche, I would probably accept the p/v contrast >as phonemic, even if the contrast existed only intervocally. Since you have already said that you consider all different sounds that occur in a language to be phonemes, this is hardly surprising. But it is obvious that the Numicists feel that there is good reason why [p] and [v] should not be considered phonemically distinct in Comanche. If one is not a specialist in these languages one has to respect their view. I only disagree with their method of establishing this by using a silent phoneme that is an obvious concession to the requirement that there can be no non-phonological conditioning environments. >It is quite common in language change for certain new phonemes >to exist at first only in specific environments. Subsequently, >the new phoneme is introduced into other environments by >borrowing (from other languages or from other dialects of the >same language) or by processes other than the one that gave rise >to the new phoneme in the first place. Yes, and that is how you can tell that they are being used as phonemes. Until that happens, though, the only reason for saying that they are phonemes is symmetry, slot filling, or analogy. Actual usage as a phoneme would seem to be a more viable criterion. >Examples: >1. /v/, /z/, and /j/ in English. These phonemes arose from >internal /f/, /s/ and /g > y/ in Old English under certain >conditions (live, cheese, hedge), and they were introduced >initially later on in loanwords (very, zero, jet) and from >dialects (vat, vixen). While this explanation is essentially correct for /v/ and /z/, you seem to be somewhat confused about the development of /j/ in native English words. Native /g/ does shift to /y/ in English, but it either remains in initial position (compare native 'yard' with borrowed 'garden') or is elided intervocalically (compare borrowed 'wagon' or 'waggon' with native 'wain', or native 'weigh' ("move"; OE 'weyan') with German '(be)wegen' ("move") and finally (although it may be preserved graphically, it is not preserved phonetically except as part of a diphthong; compare 'way' [wei] with German 'Weg' "way"). English /j/ developed from a geminated g (usually in ME and in OE). As such it will normally correspond to in German: Old English Middle English Modern English German ecg egge edge Eck, Ecke (un)flecge flegge fledge flucki (OHG) hecg hegge hedge Hecke wecg wegge wedge Weck brycg brigge bridge brucka (OHG) hrycg rigge ridge rucki (OHG) etc etc etc etc Since there is no initial /gg/ in English, initial /j/ in English is usually found in loan words. This does not cause a problem because there is a native /j/ phoneme and the maxim "once a phoneme, always a phoneme" allows the acceptance of such words on a native basis and even allows new coinings with initial /j/ like 'jingle', 'jive', and 'jitterbug'. That's how you can tell it's a phoneme. >2. /b/, /d/ and /g/ in my native Hungarian. These phonemes are >the natural development of the Proto-Finno-Ugric (PFU) internal >clusters /-mp-/, /-nt-/ and /-nk-/, respectively. On the other >hand, they should not exist initially, as there is no regular >phonetic change that could produce them from PFU etyma. Yet >Hungarian is full of words beginning with voiced stops: they are >loanwords from Turkic, Slavic etc., and there are even a few >words of FU origin where initial *p- and *t- changed into *b- and >*d- ("sporadic sound change"). The dictum "once a phoneme, always a phoneme" will account for this. >There exist as well curious cases where an allophone acquires >phonemic status ONLY because of the introduction of loanwords >into a language. I am thinking of Japanese, where the phoneme /h/ >is pronounced as the voiceless bilabial fricative (normally >denoted as the Greek letter phi, but let's write it [ph] here) >before the vowel /u/ (the Hepburn transliteration is used for >the gloss, followed by a phonemic and phonetic transcription): >Fujimori /huzimori/ is pronounced [phujimori], fune /hune/ 'boat' >is [phune]. Nowadays, loanwords from English are introducing [ph] >into environments other than pre-/u/, e.g. ftku [pho:ku] 'fork', >fairu [phairu] 'file'. According to my thinking, a new phoneme is >being born in Japanese: the next generation of speakers will not >necessarily know that these are "loanwords", so any phonetic rule >based on their being loanwords will be purely ad-hoc: the only >reason for labelling some words as loanwords will be in order to >account for the presence of "unusual" occurrences of sounds like >[ph] not before /u/, [sh] before /e/ etc. It is better, IMHO, to >allow for the addition of new phonemes into the structure. To me, the importance of this paragraph is not what it says about the phonemicization of allophones (although the points made are valid), but lies in the fact that it shows that you (or at least a part of you) really do know the difference between phonemics and phonetics. Therefore, you should not be having this discussion with me, but with yourself. Specifically, the part of you that knows the difference between phonemic /huzimori/ and phonetic [phujimori] should try to convince the part of you that says things like: "the main purpose of phonemic analysis is to provide for an unambiguous way to describe the pronunciation of every utterance in a language" that it is wrong. Please do this, and I hope one of you will let me know who wins. I certainly hope that it is the one who knows that "/huzimori/ is pronounced [phujimori]." Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From stevegus at aye.net Tue Nov 7 03:20:11 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 22:20:11 -0500 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: Jim Rader wrote: > Maybe peripheral to the topic, but I think Larry's concept of the > length of time Anglo-French influenced English is rather outdated. > The literate classes of medieval England had at least a good > working knowledge of Anglo-French well after 1250, judging by its > use in commerical transactions and Parliamentary and court > records. Far more prose writing in Anglo-French survives from the > period after 1250 than from before. Later Anglo-French tends to be > devalued because of its increasing semantic, morphological, and > phonological departure from francien, i.e., Parisian French, but this > is just traditional linguistic purism--Anglo-French was a valid dialect > of medieval French well into the 15th century, and for lawyers its > use in reports and professional notes continued into the 17th > century. For a corrective view, see some of the articles by William > Rothwell, e.g., "The Legacy of Anglo-French: in > French and English," _Zeitschrift f|r Romanische Philologie_, Bd. > 109 (1993) and "The Missing Link in English Etymology: Anglo- > French," _Medium Aevum_, v. 60 (1991). The French used by lawyers was increasingly a jargon applied by rote, and I suspect without real understanding of French. It lost grammatical gender early on. The formulaic parts of pleadings are set forth in what is standard for the language, since most of them are copied from earlier books; but when new ideas are required, their vocabulary fails them, so you get phrases like "li ject un brickbat a le dit justice." [an actual example] Peculiarly, the scriveners were better etymologists than spellers. They routinely wrote the first person plural verb forms with the curlicue that is the standard Latin abbreviation for -mus. We don't really know how the lawyers said these verbs; and latterday editions of the Year Books and similar texts routinely print "parlomus" and so forth. English was not routinely used in statutes until the early Tudors; statutes were drafted in this French, or in Latin. Pleading in this sort of French was permitted in court until it was abolished by Charles II at the Restoration. -- Quae vestimenta induet misella in conviviis crastinis? From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Nov 7 09:04:51 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2000 09:04:51 +0000 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: Jim Rader writes: > Maybe peripheral to the topic, but I think Larry's concept of the > length of time Anglo-French influenced English is rather outdated. > The literate classes of medieval England had at least a good > working knowledge of Anglo-French well after 1250, judging by its > use in commerical transactions and Parliamentary and court > records. Far more prose writing in Anglo-French survives from the > period after 1250 than from before. Later Anglo-French tends to be > devalued because of its increasing semantic, morphological, and > phonological departure from francien, i.e., Parisian French, but this > is just traditional linguistic purism--Anglo-French was a valid dialect > of medieval French well into the 15th century, and for lawyers its > use in reports and professional notes continued into the 17th > century. For a corrective view, see some of the articles by William > Rothwell, e.g., "The Legacy of Anglo-French: in > French and English," _Zeitschrift f|r Romanische Philologie_, Bd. > 109 (1993) and "The Missing Link in English Etymology: Anglo- > French," _Medium Aevum_, v. 60 (1991). Yes, of course. But, in my posting, I was careful to say that Norman French died out as a *spoken language* -- that is, as a mother tongue -- after a couple of centuries. The later administrative Anglo-French was nobody's mother tongue. This is in great contrast to the position in the Basque Country, in which Latin and Romance continued to be not only living languages but also the languages of the vast majority of the people in the whole area surrounding the Basque Country, as well as the languages of the states within which the Basques were incorporated from the 10th century on. My point was this. The English were ruled by a handful of French-speakers for a couple of centuries. The Basques have been an island in a sea of Latino-Romance speech for around 2000 years, they were part of the western Roman Empire as long as that empire lasted, and they have been incorporated into Romance-speaking states for around 1000 years. In the circumstances, then, the enormous number of Latino-Romance loans in the language is in no way surprising. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Nov 7 04:54:05 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 23:54:05 EST Subject: Iranian and Indo-Aryan Message-ID: I've been looking over some documents in Avestan and Rigvedic Sanskrit, but I'm not really conversant with either. Would they have been mutually comprehensible? From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Nov 7 09:11:30 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2000 09:11:30 +0000 Subject: Incuba (Nightmare) Message-ID: Douglas Wilson writes: > From "Lexicon Latinitatis Nederlandicae Medii Aevi" (Johanne W. Fuchs et > al., eds.) (Brill [Leiden], 1990), p. I 307: > incuba, ae, m. f. -- ... > 2. daemon quidam (cf. incubus): CONFL. VOC. incuba, een mare vel een > meerminne vel elfinne, talis mulier; GEMMA een nachtmerrinne; et vid. > neptina. > This is apparently satisfactory semantically and morphologically (1st > declension, acc. sg. "incubam"); chronologically, I don't know. Splendid, and many thanks. I couldn' find this form in even the biggest Latin dictionaries in our library, but I don't think they cover medieval Latin. As for the chronology, I would like the word to have entered Basque by about the 11th century, in order to allow that /k/ to undergo the regular voicing after /n/. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From r.clark at auckland.ac.nz Tue Nov 7 05:14:44 2000 From: r.clark at auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark (FOA LING)) Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2000 18:14:44 +1300 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: I've tried to keep this short by eliminating some inessential paragraphs. RC -----Original Message----- From: Robert Whiting [mailto:whiting at cc.helsinki.fi] Sent: Monday, 6 November 2000 7:52 a.m. To: 'Indo-European at xkl.com' Subject: RE: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) On Sat, 21 Oct 2000 "Ross Clark (FOA LING)" wrote: [snip] >RW> Historical grammar, when we have a written record, is based >RW> on empirically verifiable facts. Synchronic grammar is based on >RW> a hypothesis about how native speakers produce their language. A >RW> hypothesis is not a fact. It is an explanation put forward to >RW> account for observable facts. People tend to forget this and >RW> consider synchronic grammar a fact. But whatever reality may >RW> exist in the speaker's head just can't be gotten at at the >RW> present time with our present knowledge. In general, I agree >RW> that what we are trying to get at is the reality in speakers' >RW> heads, but it is a roundabout road that we have to take and we >RW> have to have a realistic picture of language before we are likely >RW> to get there. RC>I'm not sure what you mean by "historical grammar" here. RW>By "historical grammar" I mean the changes in grammar through RW>time, studied systematically. By grammar I mean those features RW>of language that one will usually find in a standard grammar RW>book: phonology, morphology, and syntax, but generally not RW>including pragmatics and lexicon. RC>If it is an account of changes in the language, then it is RC>surely an account of transitions from one synchronic grammar to RC>another, and hence subject to the same epistemological RC>vulnerability you attribute to the latter. RW>Hardly. At any given period the speakers of a language will RW>produce a corpus of language. For this to be useful for RW>historical purposes it must be recorded somehow -- either as RW>texts or by being recorded as a spoken corpus by a competent RW>field linguist. The recorded corpus of language becomes a body RW>of data. This data can be minutely compared with similar data RW>from other periods and the differences noted in detail. Consider RW>the following diagram: speakers + rules --> Old English | speakers + rules --> Middle English | speakers + rules --> Modern English RW>Synchronic (generative) grammar is concerned with the horizontal RW>rows. Historical grammar is concerned only with the final RW>column. Since we don't know what goes on in speaker's minds, RW>everything to the left of the arrows is an assumption. We assume RW>that speakers start from a certain point and apply a certain set RW>of rules to arrive at the corpus on the right of the arrows. But RW>everything to the right of the arrows is data. When we move from RW>one set of data to another we also formulate rules to account for RW>the changes. The difference is that that the historical rules RW>are not based on assumptions about how speakers produce language, RW>but on observed differences in the language that speakers have RW>produced. Synchronic grammar is simply cut out of the loop in RW>historical grammar. I doubt that this description fits anything that we are familiar with under the name of historical grammar. A corpus is not a language, and I find it hard to imagine, say, historical syntax couched in terms of differences between a sentence found in an OE corpus and another one found in a ME corpus. (I don't mean examples, I mean the statements of historical grammar.) As soon as you even begin to talk about, say, cases, constituents or constructions, you are already moving left of the arrows. [snip] RC>So, in your view, we have, on the one hand, "the language that RC>speakers produce" -- texts, I guess. Presumably the "empirically RC>verifiable facts" on which you see historical grammar as being RC>based are of the same sort. RW>Precisely. This is what I have said. The language that speakers RW>produce synchronically is exactly the same language that we RW>arrive at by tracing its historical development. The outcomes of RW>both methods are the same. But the historical rules and the RW>synchronic rules that produce it will not necessarily be the same. RC>On the other hand we have "the cognitive processes that produce RC>language", "whatever reality may exist in a speaker's head", RC>which is at present unknowable. Yet apparently we are able to RC>describe "how language works linguistically", "a realistic RC>picture of language". And what criteria do we have as to what is RC>"realistic" in this description? Is this what was once called the RC>Hocus Pocus view -- that a linguistic description is simply an RC>efficient and elegant description of a body of data, without RC>reference to any possible mental reality? RW>Realistic means based on realia -- things that actually exist as RW>opposed to mental constructs. This is not sufficient to make any discrimination among linguistic descriptions. Any linguist of any theoretical persuasion will claim that their description is "based on" "things that actually exist". However, I guess it might distinguish you from a radical Hocuspocusian. RW>When you start talking about RW>"mental reality" you are getting into a murky area of philosophy. RW>Is there such a thing as "mental reality"? This is something RW>that can be discussed endlessly and inevitably inconclusively. Well, that's what philosophers are paid to do. As linguists, I think we should simply admit that insofar as our synchronic descriptions are any more than mere transcription, they are attempts to capture some aspect of mental reality. [snip] >RC>> The rest of your post is entirely dependent on the further >RC>> assumption that native speakers of modern English (in general, >RC>> not just linguists) distinguish "foreign" from "native" words, >RC>> and that the words I listed with /th/ in voiced environments are >RC>> marked as "foreign". Since I don't share this assumption, I would >RC>> like to know what evidence leads you to it. Do you have any such >RC>> evidence, other than the fact that by excluding these hundreds of >RC>> words you can arrive at a nice phonological generalization? >RW> Let me answer this from back to front. >RW> You ask what evidence I have that native speakers >RW> distinguish by rule the [th] of loan words from the [dh] of >RW> native words other than hundreds of examples and the fact that it >RW> produces a nice phonological generalization. RC>This is not quite what I said. I said that in order to arrive at RC>your nice generalization you need to *exclude* hundreds of RC>English words, and I asked what independent evidence you had that RC>these words are somehow marginal to the structure of English? RW>I don't remember saying that these words were marginal to the RW>structure of English and I don't remember your saying it RW>previously. I didn't say these words were marginal to the RW>structure of English. I said that these words follow a different RW>rule from native English words and that foreign words don't RW>necessarily follow the same rules as native words. So these RW>words aren't marginal to English -- there are too many of them -- RW>they just follow different rules. RW>But I can see that I shouldn't expect connections to be made when RW>these connections have not been expressly stated. So let's start RW>again. Grimm's Law says that certain PIE consonants shift in a RW>certain way in Germanic. But there are a large number of RW>exceptions. One exception is that unvoiced stops don't shift RW>when the stop is the second part of a voiceless cluster (thus RW>/sp/, /st/, and /sk/ remain unshifted). However, even with this, RW>there are still a large number of exceptions to Grimm's Law. RW>Verner's Law says that when the PIE stress fell after the RW>consonant then the consonant shifted in a different way. So RW>Verner's Law in effect *excludes* hundreds of Germanic words from RW>the effects of Grimm's Law thereby producing a nice phonological RW>generalization. This is the most peculiar interpretation of Verner's Law I have ever seen. The fact is that Verner made it possible to *include* many words which had previously simply been sidelined as "exceptions". RW>What independent evidence is there that Verner's RW>Law correctly excludes these words? Only the fact that when it RW>can be checked, the PIE stress does fall after the consonant in RW>those cases where the consonant does not shift according to RW>Grimm's Law. Of course this might just be coincidence, and some RW>people might not accept Verner's Law and ask what independent RW>evidence there is for it other than that when you exclude these RW>words using this rule you get the nice phonological generalization RW>known as Grimm's Law. If someone asked this I would have to conclude that they had not understood either. >RW> This seems rather like asking what evidence I have for >RW> Grimm's Law or Verner's Law other than hundreds of examples and >RW> the fact that they provide a nice phonological generalization. RC>No, because you are not presenting this as a historical law. As RC>a historical explanation of why /th/ occurs in certain places and RC>/dh/ in others, it is not in dispute. RW>Historical law - historical explanation -- What's the difference RW>in your mind? You misunderstood me. I was not proposing an antithesis. RW>What happened happened. If the explanation can be RW>stated as a rule and is not in dispute, what is the problem? What I said was that the *historical* explanation of the distribution of [th] and [dh] in native English words was not in dispute. What we are arguing about is a *synchronic* account of [th] and [dh] in Modern English. This is why the comparison with Grimm/Verner was not appropriate. [snip] >RW> But ultimately, it is unimportant whether speakers can still >RW> recognize foreign words after several centuries or not. The >RW> pronunciation rules are marked in the lexicon. The native >RW> speaker learns these rules and follows them. It is these rules >RW> that produce the pattern, not the speaker's perception of the >RW> words as native or non-native. >RW> For other evidence that native speakers distinguish by rule >RW> the [th] of loan words from the [dh] of native words I offer the >RW> pattern created by the presence of intervocalic [th] and [dh] in >RW> English words. RC>This is not "other evidence". This *is* your evidence. RW>Then my position is unassailable. I think you should be worried about this. "Self-validating" might be another way of putting it. RW>As with Verner's Law, the fact RW>that the rule by which the exclusions are made is valid and leads RW>to a valid generalization is sufficient. Not in the slightest like Verner's Law, as I've pointed out. Consider: For any pair of English phonemes (say /p/ and /b/) it is possible to extract a subset of the words in which they occur where the two are in "complementary distribution". (Say [p] initially and [b] medially, so we include pig, nibble and rubber, but exclude big, nipple and supper.) We then state that there is only one phoneme, but that the excluded words "follow a different rule". What principle would exclude such a ridiculous analysis? [snip] RC>As I understand your position, you are claiming that there is a RC>single phoneme, say /th/, with a realization rule that says RC>(among other things) that /th/ is realized as [dh] RC>intervocalically, except in certain exceptional words. RW>Close. I claim that there was once a single phoneme /th/ in RW>English. Then that this phoneme became voiced to [dh] RW>intervocalically without creating any new contrasts (/th/ now RW>has allophones [th, dh]). Then that any words that came into the RW>language with intervocalic [th] after this sound change operated RW>retain [th] intervocalically (this is not necessarily restricted RW>to loanwords; it could also include new coinings -- there just RW>don't seem to be any with intervocalic [th]). There is nothing RW>particularly exceptional about words with intervocalic [th] RW>except that the vast majority of them came into the language RW>after the sound change. There are a few native words with RW>intervocalic [th] (for reasons that can be accounted for), but RW>there are no loanwords that originally had intervocalic [th] that RW>now have [dh]. This is exceptional, at least to the extent that RW>there are no exceptions. [snip] RC>Meanwhile, how do we know that children and the less educated RC>actually formulate the rule this way? If they did, one would RC>expect that errors consisting of pronouncing [dh] RC>intervocalically in words which should have [th] would be common. RC>I don't recall any such tendency from my experience as a native RC>speaker of English, but surely it's you that should be looking RC>for such evidence. RW>My point is that we don't know how any speaker actually RW>formulates the rule. What goes on on the left side of the arrows RW>is a mystery. All we know is that there is a pattern, the RW>historical reason for the pattern, and that, synchronically, RW>patterns must be accounted for by rules. My further point is RW>that it doesn't matter that we can't formulate the synchronic RW>rule. There must be one, or the pattern wouldn't be there. Since you are sure there is a rule, and are even willing to state it, I don't see why you claim it is such a mystery. RW>And I must confess that I did not consider the effect of RW>mispronunciation in the same way that you do. You said that RW>native speakers don't recognize these words with intervocalic RW>[th] as loans. My assumption was that if they don't recognize RW>them as loans, then they would mispronounce them by treating them RW>as native words and pronouncing intervocalic as [dh]. This RW>would support your contention. But your assumption seems to be RW>that if they do recognize them as loans then they would see them RW>as words in need of nativization and would mispronounce them in RW>an attempt to nativize them. This would support what you see as RW>my contention. RW>But it is not my contention that native speakers recognize these RW>words as loans. That is, as you so readily agree, merely the RW>historical explanation for why these words have intervocalic RW>[th], and what you have assumed is my contention. I will quite RW>as readily agree that I don't really know how native speakers RW>recognize the words as exceptional. The more educated may RW>recognize them as loans, the less educated may simply memorize RW>the correct pronunciation as exceptions (as they memorize the RW>exceptions in plural forms such as 'foot' / 'feet'. Since RW>neither of us have noticed any tendency to mispronounce these RW>words the point about what such mispronunciation would prove is RW>moot. But I do maintain that there is some synchronic rule that RW>maintains this pronunciation or else *all* loans with RW>intervocalic [th] wouldn't still have this pronunciation. We may be working from fundamentally different conceptions of how languages are organized here. I repeat your schema from the discussion of historical grammar: speakers + rules --> Old English >From this it would appear that, for you, "rules" includes all the information commonly thought of as being part of the lexicon. Just above, you stated that "The pronunciation rules are marked in the lexicon", which makes me wonder whether you share an assumption that I had been taking as given, namely that there are two different types of information/knowledge relevant here: (i) information about the phonological shape of particular lexical items -- for example, the fact that the English word for "fish" has an /f/ in initial position. (ii) general information about the realization of particular segments and configurations (such as allophonic and morphophonemic rules). In my experience, most people would use the term "rules" of the latter type of information, but not the former. [snip] >RW> The best evidence that the pattern is created by rule by the >RW> speakers of the language is the fact that the pattern exists. >RW> For if there is a pattern in a language, synchronically it must >RW> be created by its speakers because that is the only place that >RW> language comes from. If the pattern is not created by rule, then >RW> it is simple coincidence. RC>No, this is where you go wrong. RW>I presume that "this is where you go wrong" is your way of saying RW>that your opinion is different from mine. :) Isn't that what "wrong" usually means? :) RC>The pattern has been created by historical changes in the RC>language. That is what creates the distribution of [dh] and [th] RC>that is the input to each speaker's language-learning task. There RC>is no general principle that speakers must recognize (consciously RC>or unconsciously) any such pattern, or make use of it in their RC>rule-governed language behaviour. RW>No, the modern language is not created by the historical events RW>that brought it about. ?There is obviously a distinction in your mind between "create" and "bring about" which I am not picking up. Otherwise you have contradicted yourself. Or is it the tense distinction between "is created" (by speakers,now) and "brought it about" (in the past). In either case, I am happy to re-state my claim above as: The historical changes *brought about* the present distribution of [dh] and [th]. RW>The modern language is created by what RW>goes on on the left side of the arrows in the diagram above. RW>This is the assumption of generative grammar. And it is a basic RW>premise of generative grammar that patterns must be accounted for RW>by rules. If you have evidence, rather than just an intuition, RW>that linguistic patterns are not created by rules, then please RW>share it. It will revolutionize synchronic grammar. No, I don't think it will. My view is one you have probably heard before: That there are two distinct phonemes /th/ and /dh/, which occur in various words in various positions. A subset of the English vocabulary shows a pattern of complementary distribution between these phonemes. The pattern is there in the vocabularies of English speakers because it is there in the corpus of presently spoken English on which they have based their internalized knowledge of English. And it is in the corpus as a consequence of changes which took place long ago in the history of the language. Your analysis (again, correct me if I'm wrong) postulates a single phoneme /th/ with two different "pronunciation rules". Some words follow a rule that says intervocalic /th/ is pronounced [th], and others a rule that says it is pronounced [dh]. Which words follow which rule presumably has to be marked on individual lexical items. In the broad sense implicit in your schema, both analyses produce the [th]/[dh] pattern by "rules". (In the narrower sense, however, your analysis has "rules" that mine doesn't.) Now that we have two analyses to compare, perhaps you can explain why you think yours is superior. Ross Clark [snip] The following is something of an excursus, but too interesting to snip: RC>Actually, I am arguing that English speakers do not consider RC>words like "author", "Ethel", or "method" to be unusual in any RC>way. RW>First, let us dispense with the idea that there is nothing in any RW>way unusual about 'Ethel'. You can't say that 'Ethel' is not RW>unusual in any way because it is unusual from the moment it stops RW>being a word in the language and becomes a personal name. It is RW>no longer a lemma of the language, it becomes part of a special RW>corpus, the corpus of personal names. Generally, you won't find RW>personal names listed in the lexicon (dictionary), although they RW>may be collected in a separate section. If personal names are RW>listed in the lexicon, they do not have a meaning, only a RW>functional label: "masc. PN", "fem. PN", or the like. Personal names are semantically distinctive, it is true. I don't agree that they don't have a meaning. (Their meaning is roughly "person named X", where X is the phonological shape. Thus defining them in dictionaries would be a rather tedious waste of space.) Still less do I agree that they are not words of the language. RW>In addition to being lexically exceptional, personal names, are RW>also phonologically exceptional. Personal names are, well, RW>personal. People identify with their names in more ways than RW>one. When someone has been called something all his life (his RW>name), he will resist changing it; even if the sounds in his name RW>change in the language he will resist introducing these changes RW>into his name. If others mispronounce his name, he will correct RW>them. Personal names, then, have the potential to withstand RW>phonetic changes that take place elsewhere in the language with RW>the result that such changes often bypass personal names. How we feel about our names has nothing to do with their phonological exceptionality or otherwise. If you have actual evidence of the resistance-to-sound-change phenomenon, let's hear it. My ancestors appear to have offered no resistance to the relatively recent sound change by which "Clerk" became "Clark". RW>So linguistically, practically everything is unusual about RW>'Ethel'. Historical linguists know that personal names are a RW>fruitful hunting ground for archaisms -- forms that have long RW>disappeared from the rest of the language. A personal name is a distinct lexical item from any word that may have gone into its formation. As such, it may survive when the original word is lost. Just as OE guma "man" survives only in "bridegroom". This is not indicative of a special status for personal names. RW>Even small children RW>know that names are different. When my daughter was about 3, she RW>got a new doll. She soon began saying "sisibamakin". When I RW>asked her what "sisibamakin" was she said it was her doll. "But RW>what does it mean?", I asked. "It doesn't mean anything, it's RW>her name," was her reply. So speakers don't really treat RW>personal names as a normal part of language. Names are distinctive in that they are attached to people (and dolls) in a particular way. This does not mean that they are phonologically extra-systemic. RW>They are simply RW>labels without linguistic connotations. Surely you can't mean this. RW> They stand outside both RW>the normal lexicon and normal phonological rules. So far I've seen no evidence for this. RC>So if someone tells you that his or her name is Abraham or Avram RC>or Ethel or Stanley or Ahmed or Rumpelstiltskin, you don't RC>question how it fits into the phonology of your language. You RC>just accept it because that's his or her name. Do you really mean that English speakers never drop the /h/ from "Ahmed" to make it fit English phonotactics? I'm astonished. [end of excursus] [snip some rather repetitive material] From sarima at friesen.net Tue Nov 7 16:21:43 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2000 08:21:43 -0800 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 05:40 PM 11/6/00 +0200, Robert Whiting wrote: >On Wed, 26 Apr 2000 Gábor Sándi wrote: >yourself a question: If the phoneme /b/ occurs in an English >word, what does that tell you about the meaning of that word? >The answer should be: "absolutely nothing." Seems reasonable, though perhaps a bit overstated. There are plenty of words with some sort of sound-symbolism involving perfectly good phonemes to make this too strong a statement. (And I do not just mean onomatopoeia). >In the pair ether/either, 'ether' belongs to a class of words >where the pronunciation of as [th] is required (by rule >based on a clearly established pattern [Greek loans originally >containing theta]); I disagree. I do not respond to any such rule in my own listening. No such rule governs any pattern in my speech production. As far as I am aware, I just memorized the word 'ether' as such. > 'either' belongs to a class of words where >the pronunciation of as [dh] is required (by rule based on a >clearly established pattern [native words with an intervocalic >spirant where the original voiceless spirant was voiced by >rule]). Ditto. > Since the respective pronunciations of these words are >required by rule, this cannot be a phonemic distinction because >the choice of these sounds is not arbitrary. It is in MY speech. And I doubt many other English speakers could be shown to have even a subliminal awareness of any such rules. >Greek word with theta doesn't make any difference. There must be >some synchronic rule that forces this [th] pronunciation or else >the pattern wouldn't be there in the language synchronically. Not at all - there is such a thing as a *relictual* pattern. one that is left over from prior history, but which has no *current* linguistic significance. The only evidence I would accept for a synchronic rule is evidence from the speech behavior of native speakers. The mere existence of a pattern is not, by itself, sufficient to establish a rule. The very fact that having characters names Lith and Lihthe(/lidh/) is *comprehensible* in English shows that English speakers *perceive* the two sounds as being semantically arbitrary. If they did not, then someone hearing such a pair of names would necessarily attempt to interpret them according to the supposed rules, and thus have a difficult time hearing them as a pair of names. Instead they would hear two words in different categories, as required by the rules. >to be pronounced with [dh]. There is nothing arbitrary about the >choice of [th] and [dh]; these pronunciations are required by >rule, therefore the contrast is not phonemic. The pronunciations are "required" by *historical* rules that are no longer active. In my speech I have merely learned the two words by rote. I apply no rules to determine their pronunciation. >smuggled into phonology. So it is not a matter of "no >nonphonetic conditioning factors," it is a matter of how much >morphological conditioning you are willing to allow into >phonology. As little as possible to still produce a coherent theory of a given language. I.e., apply Occam's Razor here. Do not postulate an entity - in this case a particular type of morphological conditioning - unless it is *necessary* to explain the facts. You might also call this the KISS principle. >My own answer to this tends to be "as much as you can." Then here is the fundamental disagreement. I prefer to minimize special handling, not maximize it. >> Take two of your examples above: >> /ng/ - not a phoneme. We can analyze it as the allophone of /n/ >> before /k/ and /g/. /g/ is then dropped ("zero allophone" - why >> not?) Because it is *simpler* to treat it as a phoneme? [Though in this case there is actually a reasonable argument for allophonic status, given its *very* limited distribution - and the fact that trying to use /ng/ to coin arbitrary new words results in words that do not sound like English]. >before the agentive suffix '-er'. Stem-final /g/ goes to zero >immediately and (nearly) all derivative suffixes (agentive '-er', >'-ing', '-ish', '-ly', '-y', etc.) are added to this base. All >that is needed then is a rule that triggers the restoration of >/g/ before the comparative '-er' (and for completeness, ... I would prefer to reorder the rules so that the comparative suffix is added prior to the application of the rule that deletes the /g/. I do not like rules that restore. >All things considered then, it is probably simpler to operate >with /n/ and /ng/ as different phonemes because this does not >require the zero allophone of /g/ to maintain their allophonic >status *and* there is no indication of a morphophonemic >alternation between [n] and [ng] The main problem with that is that this supposed phoneme cannot be used arbitrarily. A made-up 'ngib' is NOT a possible English word contrasting with 'nib'. [Interestingly, when playing with this "word" I tended to "hear" it as 'gib' (hard 'g') - which supports a 'silent g' interpretation]. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Nov 7 18:22:13 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2000 18:22:13 +0000 Subject: More on dental fricatives Message-ID: Given our recent discussion of dental fricatives in English, I'm hoping it will be interesting to mention a curious fact about dental fricatives in Basque. But first a word about Castilian Spanish. As is well known, Castilian in the north of Spain -- the only variety relevant here -- has a phonemic contrast between a voiceless apico-alveolar fricative, noted , and a voiceless dental fricative, noted in general but before a front vowel. There are minimal pairs like 'house' and '(a) hunt'. Basque has no dental fricatives, but it does have an unusual contrast between two voiceless alveolar fricatives: an apical, noted , and a laminal, noted . There are minimal pairs, like 'fire' and 'you', or like 'see' and 'wash'. Traditionally, and still today, in borrowings from Castilian, Basque takes over Castilian as its apical , and Castilian as its laminal . Examples: Cast. 'tailor' > Bq. ; Cast. 'class' > Bq. ; Cast. 'cinema' > Bq. ; Cast. 'rice' > Bq. ; Cast. 'socialist' > Bq. . Castilian is never borrowed into Basque as a dental fricative, even by speakers who are fully fluent in Castilian. Now, northern Castilian has another well-known feature: word-final /d/ is pronounced as a voiceless dental fricative, theta. Words like 'Madrid' and 'net' are thus pronounced in the north with final theta. Few of these words were borrowed into Basque in the past. When they were borrowed, Basque, which tolerates no word-final voiced plosives, did interesting things to them. For example, 'Madrid' is in Basque , with a legal final /l/. But today Castilian has a number of acronyms, and some of these acronyms end in the letter D. An example is , which is the Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia. Naturally, northerners pronounce these too with final theta. But now comes the interesting bit. When these acronyms are used in Basque, they are frequently pronounced with final theta! So, even though Castilian theta is never taken into Basque as a dental fricative, which Basque does not have, Castilian word-final /d/, which is locally a phonetic theta, is taken into Basque as a dental fricative. This is a pretty little phonological problem, don't you think? The observation was made by J. I. Hualde, who reports it in an article in Folia Linguistica 27 (1993). Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Nov 8 04:47:52 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2000 23:47:52 EST Subject: Anglo-French Message-ID: >Jim Rader writes: >The literate classes of medieval England had at least a good > working knowledge of Anglo-French well after 1250, judging by its > use in commerical transactions and Parliamentary and court > records. Far more prose writing in Anglo-French survives from the > period after 1250 than from before. In a message dated 11/7/2000 9:59:51 PM, stevegus at aye.net writes: << The French used by lawyers was increasingly a jargon applied by rote, and I suspect without real understanding of French. >> In a message dated 11/7/2000 10:36:38 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: << Yes, of course. But, in my posting, I was careful to say that Norman French died out as a *spoken language* -- that is, as a mother tongue -- after a couple of centuries. The later administrative Anglo-French was nobody's mother tongue.>> Steve Gustafson's comments about the "Anglo-Norman" used in English law being a jargon may have been the case very early. Awhile ago I had to work with A-N texts and from what I understood about the translations that were given to me, very little "Anglo" was involved, especially in the areas of trade regulation. Looking in Black's Law Dictionary, they quote Wharton in "properly" describing it as "Norman French". It also says that Norman French was "the language of English legal procedure till 36 Edw. III (A.D. 1362)." But wasn't this Norman version an odd dialect of French and not the one that penetrated into English about the time of Chaucer? I seem to recall in notes in Canterbury Tales that Chaucer was picking up a lot Parisian that may have been fashionable at Court at the time, but that he also felt comfortable putting into the mouths of his common folk characters. So I'm just wondering if "Anglo-Norman," as opposed to a different later influx of more conventional French, was anything but an "occupation" language that was never really spoken in the streets. Regards, Steve Long From BMScott at stratos.net Wed Nov 8 05:40:12 2000 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 00:40:12 -0500 Subject: Incuba (Nightmare) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: LT> Splendid, and many thanks. I couldn' find this form in even the biggest LT> Latin dictionaries in our library, but I don't think they cover LT> medieval Latin. As for the chronology, I would like the word to have LT> entered Basque by about the 11th century, in order to allow that /k/ LT> to undergo the regular voicing after /n/. Latham's Revised Medieval Latin Word-List (OUP 1980) has 'nightmare, demon' in British and Irish sources between 1250 and ca.1362; however, the form is listed as being of regular occurrence between ca.1160 and 1528. Brian M. Scott From jer at cphling.dk Wed Nov 8 14:46:55 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 15:46:55 +0100 Subject: Iranian and Indo-Aryan In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 6 Nov 2000 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > I've been looking over some documents in Avestan and Rigvedic Sanskrit > [...] > Would they have been mutually comprehensible? Most certainly! It should be remembered that the handbook impression of Avestan is anachronistic, since the recital form of the old text has simply participated in over a millennium of further Old and Middle Iranian phonetic development. If pushed back to its time, even if only to a point where the metre of the Gathas gets consistent, it takes on an appearance which looks like Sanskrit just as much as British and American English resemble each other. Jens From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Nov 8 08:26:09 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 03:26:09 EST Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: In a message dated 11/5/2000 7:44:49 PM, stevegus at aye.net writes: <> I think that in Cavalli-Sforza's scenario (PIE in the Ukraine replaces Pre-IE in the Danube, etc.) you have a situation where the sound changes might become opaque. The time span would be about 1500-1000 years between the first Danubian expansion into the middle Ukraine (yielding Sredni Stog) and the earliest appearance of Corded Ware. If that is in fact the location of *PIE (rather than among the early PitGrave culture over by the Caucasus and the Caspian sea), than there was pretty much constant contact during that time. In its mildest form, it might be analogous to the difference between British and American cultures, multiplied by about four times as many years. A Spanish substrate in American English would seem to reflect two long of a time difference - as between a Romance language and English. On the other hand, if they had as little information as we have about the Neolithic language, wouldn't it look like American English had a Latin substrate? Or adstrate? Or even Norman-style Latin conquerors? << The proto-Germans apparently respected these folks, and their arts and culture, enough to borrow both the cultural practices and the vocabulary that went with. >> Unless of course it was "the proto-Germans" who borrowed the language and some practices, but pretty much stayed where they were. There is basic cultural continuity from the neolithic and really right from the mesolithic. Even the Cavalli-Sforza genetic evidence, which I do not put an awful lot of stock by, suggests that post-neolithic incursions from the south and east barely affected southern Scandinavia and Denmark. And only a bit more the southern rim of the Baltic. Regards, Steve Long From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com Wed Nov 8 17:07:44 2000 From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader) Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 12:07:44 -0500 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I'm not disputing your point about Basque--obviously, the sociolinguistic pressures of Romance on Basque are not comparable to the French/English relationship. But one might draw the conclusion from your post that the period during which Anglo-French served as a source for English loans lasted two centuries, when in reality it was at least twice as long, and many loans and calques took place in the two centuries that Anglo- French was "dying out." Its gradual extinction as a first language of the elite did not end its role as a vital auxiliary language, on a par with Latin, in English society. Jim Rader > Jim Rader writes: >> Maybe peripheral to the topic, but I think Larry's concept of the >> length of time Anglo-French influenced English is rather outdated. >> The literate classes of medieval England had at least a good >> working knowledge of Anglo-French well after 1250, judging by its >> use in commerical transactions and Parliamentary and court >> records. Far more prose writing in Anglo-French survives from the >> period after 1250 than from before. Later Anglo-French tends to be >> devalued because of its increasing semantic, morphological, and >> phonological departure from francien, i.e., Parisian French, but this >> is just traditional linguistic purism--Anglo-French was a valid dialect >> of medieval French well into the 15th century, and for lawyers its >> use in reports and professional notes continued into the 17th >> century. For a corrective view, see some of the articles by William >> Rothwell, e.g., "The Legacy of Anglo-French: in >> French and English," _Zeitschrift f|r Romanische Philologie_, Bd. >> 109 (1993) and "The Missing Link in English Etymology: Anglo- >> French," _Medium Aevum_, v. 60 (1991). > > Yes, of course. But, in my posting, I was careful to say that Norman > French died out as a *spoken language* -- that is, as a mother tongue -- > after a couple of centuries. The later administrative Anglo-French was > nobody's mother tongue. This is in great contrast to the position > in the Basque Country, in which Latin and Romance continued to be not > only living languages but also the languages of the vast majority > of the people in the whole area surrounding the Basque Country, as > well as the languages of the states within which the Basques were > incorporated from the 10th century on. > > My point was this. The English were ruled by a handful of French-speakers > for a couple of centuries. The Basques have been an island in a sea > of Latino-Romance speech for around 2000 years, they were part of the > western Roman Empire as long as that empire lasted, and they have been > incorporated into Romance-speaking states for around 1000 years. > In the circumstances, then, the enormous number of Latino-Romance loans > in the language is in no way surprising. > > Larry Trask From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Nov 8 08:32:48 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 03:32:48 EST Subject: The Germanic substrate - knives? Message-ID: In a message dated 11/5/2000 7:44:49 PM, stevegus at aye.net writes: << There is an obvious and similar substrate in Germanic, apparently the language of the Ship and Sword Guys; not sure if they have a technical academic name. Like the Western movie words, the borrowed vocabulary seems to have focused on cultural territory that was retained by the proto-Germans. Boating is the area that sticks out most prominently; most Germanic languages share a group of unique words like ship, keel, oar, and sail. There is another group that features swords, knives, and helmets.>> But there's something that just doesn't seem to ring true about some of the words often mentioned as evidencing the substrate - at least as far as it being non-IE. Rick Mc Callister, on his very informative web site on the Germanic substrate (http://www.muw.edu/~rmccalli/subsGerIntro.html), mentions the reasons that words are included in this category: "....most evidence suggesting that a given word is non-Indo-European is essentially negative : * the word does not exist in other branches of Indo-European * its phonology does not conform to the norms of Indo-European * the evolution of the word does not correspond to known phonological laws of the branch in question" Looking at some of the most commonly cited words however, one might wonder if these criteria may not be producing the substrate. And without questioning the value of the comparative method in the least, it just seems like narrowing the meanings of these words can sometimes be the big problem in tracing them, rather than the phonology. Starting with a word like "knife." I'm not positive how it got on the list, but I suspect that it might be from an anachronistic idea of what knives are. What we might call "knives" in English appear very early in the archaeological record in Germany and across Europe. Knives made in shapes almost identical to modern ones were made in great number from stone and perhaps in even greater number from bone, antler and wood, which are perishable. Knives don't only predate metal, but "knives" made of bone and antler also continue to be made into the iron age. So, that in the bronze age, the word might well have referred to tools made of a variety of materials. This is important because the most common uses of knife-like objects was not as weapons or even kitchen implements, but as tools. There's evidence of knives regularly being used as scrapers for the dressing of skins, for the gathering and processing of wool (before shears), for pruning, cutting holes in hides and cloth and a variety of other tasks. On that basis, there is a whole flock of words in Greek alone that show something close to the variations of "knife" found in Germanic. (Along with the forms OED also reports "kneupe, gneip, gnippe" in Germanic). In Greek, we see: knao: (L&S adds "but in correct Att., knêi,...") - to scrape, grate or scratch knaph-os - the "card" used to clean or dress wool, cloth and presumably hides knapto: - "carding" of wool, but also tearing or mangling anything knaps - to cut short (dalos) knapsis, later gnapsis - the dressing of "cloth" or presumably hides kne:phe: - itch (ie, something to scratch) knupoô - fencing with thorn bushes knizo: - (Dor, eknixa; pass, knizon) scratch, gash, cut up, grate, also associated with sacrificial cutting-up. kata-knizo: - chop up, mince,cut grooves in, score, and let blood from, again sacrificially kne:s-ma - scrapings, sting, bite kne:s-trion - scraper, kne:s-tos - scraped, rasped knide: - nettle nusso: - touch with a sharp point, prick, stab, pierce nuxis - pricking, stabbing chnauo: - nibble, bite chnauma - slice In Lithuanian, "gnybti" is to pinch or prune. (Cf., kni:pen (MGer) pinch, prune) In Polish, "no:z:" is knife, but "gnyp" is a leather dresser or shoemaker's knife. (The notion that "gnyp" and "gnybti" are borrowed from Germanic runs somewhat in the face of the distinct possibility that the proto-speakers of those other two languages had prunning or dressing knives as early or earlier than other northern Europeans.) None of the words above may qualify for strict phonological relationships with the Germanic "knife", but it seems rather implausible that so many close examples have no relationship to the word. If anything, it suggests that if "knife" is in fact part of a substrate, that substrate might well also be Indoeuropean. There are a fair number of other common examples of the Germanic substrate that suggest the same thing. Regards, Steve Long From dlwhite at texas.net Wed Nov 8 08:13:58 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 02:13:58 -0600 Subject: More on dental fricatives Message-ID: > Given our recent discussion of dental fricatives in English, > I'm hoping it will be interesting to mention a curious fact > about dental fricatives in Basque. This is not meant to be an objection to anything Dr. Trask has said, but it is fairly well-known in cases of what might be called routine full bilingualism for phonemic distinctions of one language to be imported into another. Good examples fail me at this late hour (still recovering as I am from the shock of seeing Florida called and then uncalled for Gore), but I think a few can be found in Thomason and Kaufman. So perhaps the difference in treatment (if I have understood the facts correctly) has to do with the extent to which Basque speakers were fully fluent in Spanish at different times. Perhaps it could even be a good indirect indicator of this. (The bad example I can think of involves Japanese speakers, who as a group are apparently quite well trained in English from a young-enough age, importing English phonemic distinctions into Japanese, and is accordingly a bit unnatural. But the phenomenon is real enough.) Dr. David L. White From dlwhite at texas.net Fri Nov 10 01:03:11 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2000 19:03:11 -0600 Subject: Mutual Comprehensibility, Reconvergence Message-ID: It used to be that, as far as I knew, the situation in the Danelaw areas of England, where two dialects but recently separated began (in my opinion) to reconverge, was unique. However it has recently come to my attention that a similar situation developed between Spanish and Portugese in northern Uruguay, which is to say on the border with Brazil. Is there anyone out there who can tell me what the results of this were, without demanding that I read Spanish? (I suppose I could, but being lazy would rather not.) Dr. David L. White From ibonewits at neopagan.net Fri Nov 10 04:53:21 2000 From: ibonewits at neopagan.net (Isaac Bonewits) Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2000 23:53:21 -0500 Subject: "witch" and "warlock" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Christopher Gwinn said... >Calvert Watkins in "The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo European Roots" >has Witch derive from the root *weg- (2) "to be strong/to be lively" (which >also is the root of English "to wake"). >Witch, from Old English masculine Wicca (Feminine Wicce), ultimately comes >from a suffixed PIE form, *weg-yo and likely may represent a Proto Germanic >*wikkjaz meaning "necromancer" or (more literally) "one who wakes the dead." >Warlock (Old English Waeloga), on the other hand, comes from a compound of >two PIE roots, *werH-o "true/trustworthy" and *leugh- "to tell a lie." >Warlock literally means "pledge/oath breaker" (the Old English word waeloga >meant "oath breaker/damned soul/wicked person" and was often assigned as an >epithet of Satan). My books (most of which are old) have OE wicca < OE wic- < PIE *weik-, with four meanings, mostly having to do with "magic or sorcery" or "bending, twisting", and also related to "wych" and "willow." Is that tracing obsolete? Have any articles on "witch" and "warlock" been published in JIES or elsewhere in the last twenty years? cheers, Isaac B. -- ******************************************************************* * Isaac Bonewits * * Snailmail: Black Dirt PG, ADF, Box 372, Warwick, NY 10990-0372 * ******************************************************************* From colkitto at sprint.ca Sat Nov 11 05:54:19 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 00:54:19 -0500 Subject: "witch" and "warlock" Message-ID: >I'll leave lurk-mode for a moment to ask if anyone can direct me to >*current* resources discussing the history and evolution of these two >terms (a summary would be nice, too, if someone would be kind enough >to take the time). >An article or book discussing IE religious terminology would be of >great value to my current research! [ moderator snip ] for "warlock" see a fascinating article by Joanna Nichols in an issue of Stanford Slavic Studies, the Whitfield festschrift (I'm afarid I can't remember the exatc details) Robert Orr From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Nov 10 17:42:46 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2000 12:42:46 -0500 Subject: The Germanic substrate - knives? In-Reply-To: <64.8276a69.273a69b0@aol.com> Message-ID: You make a very interesting point regarding I think of knife in the sense of "cut, tear, strike, kill" but I can see how "flesher, scraper" can work Watkins (1985: 19) lists knife under *gen- "hypothetical Indo-European base of a range of Germanic words referring to compact, knobby bodies and projections, sharp blows". 11 derivative forms are offered. He cites Pokorny *gen. Unfortunately, I don't have access to Pokorny and don't know if he also included knife. I found Watkins's wording as an expression of doubt. I also realize that Watkins only includes IE roots found in English BTW: does anyone know roughly what percentage of all IE roots these include? Looking through *KVn- in Watkins, the closest other root to knife is *ghwen- "to strike, kill [1985: 25] Do your sources offer any IE roots for the words you cite? Initial /*gwh-/ would have yielded Germanic /b, g/ --IF followed by a vowel. Someone more knowledgeable will have to fill us in on what /*ghwn-V-/ would have produced. Regarding initial (non-clustered) consonants, following Watkins, Greek initial (non-clustered) /kh-/ (also /th-/) corresponds to Lithuanian /g/ < IE *ghw-. Lithuanian initial (non-clustered) /g-/ can also come from IE *gw-; which gives Greek /b, d, g/ Greek initial (non-clustered) /k-/ can come from IE *k (Lithuanian /s-/) & *kw (Lithuanian /k, c, c^/) Again, I don't know what *Kn- would yield in Greek & Lithuanian The closest roots for "scraping" in Watkins are *gerbh-, *gher-, *ghrei-, *ghreu-, *grat-. I've seen instances of /kn-/ > /kr-/ but never the other way. BUT I'm not a linguist, so maybe someone with more experience can fill me in. Keep in mind that the list is essentially a compilation of claims (and possibilities) rather than my own work. I agree that a fair percentage of the items in the list are probably from IE and I'm convinced that a small percentage definitely are. >Rick Mc Callister, on his very informative web site on the Germanic substrate >(http://www.muw.edu/~rmccalli/subsGerIntro.html), mentions the reasons that >words are included in this category: >"....most evidence suggesting that a given word is non-Indo-European is >essentially negative : >* the word does not exist in other branches of Indo-European >* its phonology does not conform to the norms of Indo-European >* the evolution of the word does not correspond to known phonological laws >of the branch in question" [ moderator snip ] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From sonno3 at hotmail.com Fri Nov 10 18:50:36 2000 From: sonno3 at hotmail.com (Christopher Gwinn) Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2000 13:50:36 -0500 Subject: Continental Celtic mailing list Message-ID: I am sending this message to invite all those interested in the languages and cultures of the Continental Celts to join a new mailing list that I have created via www.egroups.com - "Continental Celtic" (Main Page: http://www.egroups.com/group/continentalceltic ). It is my hope that both academics and laypeople alike will consider joining this group, which will be unmoderated for now, but will focus on issues like Gaulish linguistics, Galatian social structure, and remnants of Celtiberian religious beliefs, to name only a few topics. British and Irish issues should be discussed only when relevant to Continental Celtic issues. Cheers, Christopher Gwinn Moderator/List Owner For those wishing to subscribe, please go to: http://www.egroups.com/subscribe/continentalceltic OR, send a BLANK email to: Subscribe: continentalceltic-subscribe at egroups.com Then reply to the confirmation letter that you receive Other Important Addresses for the site: Post message: continentalceltic at egroups.com Unsubscribe: continentalceltic-unsubscribe at egroups.com List owner: continentalceltic-owner at egroups.com From colkitto at sprint.ca Sat Nov 11 06:44:26 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 01:44:26 -0500 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: One small point : Rick McCallister wrote: > "To give an example of what I'm talking about. > Spanish "cinnabar" < Hispano-Latin > [and also the Min~o/Minho River] > is often ascribed to Basque based on Basque "shiny, lit up, sparkling" > Larry Trask has explained on the list [many times] > that Basque had no /m/ at that period > so the logical assumption would be to look elsewhere > and so I looked at the on-line MacBain's Gaelic Etymological Dictionary > and found > mhin, mhinn "ore, mine" > Irish miin, mianach, Early Irish mmanach, Welsh mwyn: > < *meini-, meinni-, < root mei, smei, smi; > see Old Slavonic mjdi, aes; OHG smnda, metal, English smith (Schrdder)" "MacBain's Gaelic Etymological Dictionary" is not the best source for early Celtic in any case. Apparently it is best for providing a corpus of Inverness-shire Gaelic for the last century. Robert Orr From colkitto at sprint.ca Sat Nov 11 16:16:32 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 11:16:32 -0500 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: Perhaps Georgiev's Pelasgian (in his 1981. An Introduction to the History of the Indo-European Languages. Sofia: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.) or Holzer's Temematisch (in his 1989. Entlehnungen aus einer bisher unbekannten indogermanischen Sprache im Urslavischen und Urbaltischen. Vienna: Verlag der Vsterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.) might provide some pointers to the question posed below. Robert Orr >Putting aside for the moment the question of how much Kurgan actually ever >came to most of Europe, the quote above suggests that if there is a substrate >to look for in early European IE languages -- as described above -- it might >consist of "pre-proto" IE languages. >My question is: what would such a substrate be like? What would one look for? >Thinking of other examples of where IE has folded over on itself, so to speak >-- where one IE language exhibits a substrate of an earlier IE language -- >where would one look for such a "pre-proto" substrate in PIE? How would one >separate "pre-proto" features from "proto" features, since both would >ultimately be of the same origin? >Regards, Steve Long From dlwhite at texas.net Sat Nov 11 17:39:43 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 11:39:43 -0600 Subject: Motivating the Root Restrictions of PIE Message-ID: [ Moderator edited. Please do not send HTML mail to the list. ] Sorry if you folks have heard this before, but I never got a response... According to Lehmann, PIE shows three kinds of root restrictions. Accepting for now the traditional interpretation and using "D" to represent any voiced plosive, "T" to represent any voiceless plosive, and "DH" to represent any voiced aspirate plosve, these are: 1) no /DeD/ 2) no /TeDH/ 3) no /DHeT/ Note that 2 and 3 are the inverse of each other, and are assimilatory, whereas 1 is dissimilatory. The problem is that if the traditional interpretation is correct, these restrictions (not to mention the /b/-gap) do not make sense. So here is one way (the only way I can see) that they could make sense. 1) The voiced plosives were orginally not voiced but pharyngealized. Pharyngealization is a crude gesture, and if occuring on both sides of a vowel would distort this in the direction of /o/. If PIE was attempting to maintain a distinction between /e/ and /o/, this would not be good. Alternatively, the restriction could be related to avoiding having pharyngealization noise mess up a distinction of laryngealixed versus murmured vowels, see below. Pharyngealization would also explain the /b/-gap, as pharyngealized labials are, for good acoustic reasons, disfavored generally. It could also explain part of what JER has noted, that vowels in the vicinity of voiced sounds in PIE tend to come out as /o/. (The other part would have to be related to the vague back-round resonance of sonorants generally, as seen in modern English "prison, prism, bottle", where it is not entirely clear whether a [U] sound, as in "foot", is to be regarded as present or not.) 2) The voiceless plosives were orginally laryngealized (which is not the same as glottalized). 3) The voiced aspirates were as traditionally posited, technically murmured. More specifically, what I have in mind here is that the voiceless and voiced aspirated series were originally associated with what Ladefoged and Maddieson call "stiff voice" and "slack voice" respectively, which are in effect weak laryngealization and weak murmur. (Where what we would consider normal phonation ("modal voice") does not occur, there is no point in going to the trouble of producing the strong forms of laryngealization and murmur.) Laryngealization and murmur are phonetic opposites. This would explain why they could not co-occur, especially if the original distinction of phonation type was on the vowels, and was only later reanalyzed as belonging to the consonants. Such a system would be typologically (or rather statistically) odd, even unattested, but no more normal system motivates the root restrictions seen. It is not true, contrary to what is sometimes alledged, that languages never contain unique features. For example, the stress system of Estonian is (so I have it on good authority) absolutely unique. House-husbandry calls, more (on place) anon. Congratiulations in advance to anyone who spots what (I see) is wrong (though not uncorrectably) with all this. Dr. David L. White From dlwhite at texas.net Sat Nov 11 21:34:05 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 15:34:05 -0600 Subject: Rhotacism in Norse Message-ID: I cannot find among my home sources here when it was that rhotacism of final /z/ occurred in Norse, leading to the characteristically Norse profusion of /-r/. More precisely, when is it that the original two runes begin to be confused? Does anyone out there know? Dr. David L. White From Tristan at MAIL.SCM-RPG.COM.AU Sat Nov 11 22:26:10 2000 From: Tristan at MAIL.SCM-RPG.COM.AU (Tristan Jones) Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 17:26:10 -0500 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: This message was originally submitted by Tristan at MAIL.SCM-RPG.COM.AU to the INDO-EUROPEAN list at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG. [ moderator snip ] ----------------- Message ------------------ I do not think elite dominance is enough for a conquered people to adopt the invaders language, sure they will adopt some words from the invading language and change the conquered peoples language, depends if the invaders or the invaded are more advanced than another. In those cases where a small elite domaites over a conquerored nation (i.e. the Franks in Gaul, Germanic Tribes in Italy and Spain, Mongols and Tartars in Russia) these invading cultures where just absorbed into the local culture. People only adopt the language of invader as a primary tongue because lots of peoples of the invaders actually come to their homeland and make a statement like this "adopt out language, we are here to stay!, if you do not like it go somewhere else". In the moments where invader languages replaced the languages of the conquered, Slavic over the various languages of Eastern Europe, Indo-European over the pre Indo european languages of Europe in the 4th to 3rd Millennium BC, Anglo-Saxons over the Welsh, Turks over the Greeks in Anatolia and the Indo-Aryans over the Dravidian speaking people's of Northern India. We have seen huge migrations of the invaders come to the lands they conquered, not just replacing the elite of the society, however huge sections of it. The main question is how much of invaded population would the Invaders have to make up to impose their language onto the invaded people's From stevegus at aye.net Sun Nov 12 01:37:29 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 20:37:29 -0500 Subject: Mutual Comprehensibility, Reconvergence Message-ID: David L. White wrote: > It used to be that, as far as I knew, the situation in the Danelaw > areas of England, where two dialects but recently separated began (in my > opinion) to reconverge, was unique. I suspect that the current situation in Scandinavia is similar. All three (or four) of the continental Scandinavian languages are to some degree mutually comprehensible. At the close of the Viking era, the dialects of Norway (and Iceland) [West Scandinavian] were distinct from those of Sweden and Denmark [East Scandinavian]; these latter two shared a number of common features. A number of important social and political developments followed. All three languages were strongly influenced by Low German, the mercantile language of the Hanse. There were a number of political unions among the several nations; the longest lasting of these was the union of Denmark and Norway, which lasted until the early 1900's. During the early modern period, Danish evolved away from the northern standard with some fairly comprehensive vowel and consonant shifts. These changes were not shared by Norwegian or (most) Swedish. Danish continued to be the government and prestige language of Norway, but the Danish imported there was spoken in accordance with the more conservative Norwegian phonology. The net result was that Norwegian and Swedish generally share a common phonology, while Danish and Norwegian share a common vocabulary that Swedish occasionally dissents from. The most common form of Norwegian has lost its West Scandinavian distinctiveness and has been assimilated to Swedish in its pronunciation, and Danish in its vocabulary. The complicating factor in all of this is a nineteenth century attempt to revive the surviving features that once made Norwegian different, by proposing a new standard language based on rural and western dialects that had preserved some of the West Scandinavian distinctiveness. While the numbers of schools teaching the new standard suggest that it has not been particularly successful, both seem to be relatively stable, and both Norwegian dialects freely borrow from one another. -- Quae vestimenta induet misella in conviviis crastinis? From nee1 at midway.uchicago.edu Sun Nov 12 03:38:07 2000 From: nee1 at midway.uchicago.edu (Barbara Need) Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 21:38:07 -0600 Subject: Mutual Comprehensibility, Reconvergence In-Reply-To: <000b01c04ab1$ffcbff80$3f2363d1@texas.net> Message-ID: Something called Portunol (tilde over the n). I don't have any references and don't remember very many details, but a friend of mine is from Uruguay and did a paper on Portunol for our class on diglossia. Barbara Need University of Chicago--Linguistics > It used to be that, as far as I knew, the situation in the Danelaw >areas of England, where two dialects but recently separated began (in my >opinion) to reconverge, was unique. However it has recently come to my >attention that a similar situation developed between Spanish and Portugese >in northern Uruguay, which is to say on the border with Brazil. Is there >anyone out there who can tell me what the results of this were, without >demanding that I read Spanish? (I suppose I could, but being lazy would >rather not.) > Dr. David L. White From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Nov 12 17:39:11 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000 12:39:11 -0500 Subject: Mutual Comprehensibility, Reconvergence In-Reply-To: <000b01c04ab1$ffcbff80$3f2363d1@texas.net> Message-ID: In themselves, Spanish and Portuguese are pretty much mutually comprehensible --say like American English and Scots, or American and Caribbean English. Educated speakers usually don't have any problems understanding one another but some class and regional dialects can be impenetrable. Some Portuguese dialects, or so I've been told, are more difficult for standard Portuguese speakers than Spanish is. It takes a few minutes to sort out the handful of common false cognates but even children of one language understand speakers of the other --as mine did at the University of Texas when they played with Brazilian kids. Brazilian movies are usually pretty easy to understand without subtitles. Although both languages, of course, have different standardized forms, forms in one language are often common non-standard forms in the other; e.g. Spanish & Portuguese non-standard entonces, ninguie/n--ninguem, mismo vs. Portuguese enta~o, nadie, mesmo; Portuguese & Spanish non-standard onde, agora, mesmo vs Spanish donde, ahora, mismo. Some forms are non standard in both languages, e.g. asina/assina. The Gau/cho dialect from southern Brazil, however, is close to Uruguayan & Argentine Spanish. Standardized spelling masks some shared pronunciations; e.g. hallar vs. achar /as^ar/ "to find, to have an opinion" People that I've met from Rio Grande du Sul sound almost as if they were Argentines or Uruguayans pronouncing Spanish as if it were Portuguese. It shares a local culture and regional vocabulary with Uruguayan & Argentine Spanish. It does have an overlay of modern Brazilian slang but much of this is known to Spanish speakers across the border. Uruguayan & Argentine Spanish also share a Tupi-Guarani adstrate with Brazilian Portuguese, so much of the local flora, fauna and agricultural produce share the same names. Early settlers speaking both languages settled on both sides of the offical linguistic frontier and there has been massive immigration from Spanish-speaking countries to southern Brazil. Native speakers of one language who are familiar with the sound shifts and the handful of grammatical differences of the other language often pass as native speakers of the other language with no formal study. Interestingly enough, I was told in grad school that Portuguese and Spanish were much father apart in the Middle Ages but that the tremendous load of latinisms from the Renaissance, the use of Galician as a prestige language for poetry in Spain during the latter Middle Ages and Renaissance, the use of Salmantine (from Salamanca in western Spain, with some Portuguese-like features) in Spanish Renaissance drama and Spain's cultural dominance of the Iberian peninsula after 1500 brought the two languages closer. My intuitive reaction is that Spanish and Portuguese are much closer than say northern & southern Italian "dialects" or French & Occitan > It used to be that, as far as I knew, the situation in the Danelaw >areas of England, where two dialects but recently separated began (in my >opinion) to reconverge, was unique. However it has recently come to my >attention that a similar situation developed between Spanish and Portugese >in northern Uruguay, which is to say on the border with Brazil. Is there >anyone out there who can tell me what the results of this were, without >demanding that I read Spanish? (I suppose I could, but being lazy would >rather not.) > Dr. David L. White Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From stevegus at aye.net Sun Nov 12 04:49:39 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 23:49:39 -0500 Subject: Rhotacism in Norse Message-ID: David L. White wrote: << I cannot find among my home sources here when it was that rhotacism of final /z/ occurred in Norse, leading to the characteristically Norse profusion of /-r/. More precisely, when is it that the original two runes begin to be confused? Does anyone out there know? >> I was out of town when it happened. But it was after 800 C.E. that the elder futhark, which contained the symbol for z/R, yielded to the reduced younger futhark. This alphabet appeared first in Denmark, and spread throughout the rest of Scandinavia by the year 900. We know that Gothic, written by Ulfilas in around 375, was wholly innocent of the s > r change. The change seems to have taken hold in two steps; the intermediate one, preseved in the runes, is a sound written by the 'yr' rune, and usually transliterated as 'R.' The earlier runic inscriptions always carefully distinguished between 'r' and 'R;' inscriptions after 800 are less careful, and occasionally use 'r' in word-final positions where 'R' would be expected. The Ro"k stone from around 900 sometimes uses 'R' in mid-word, which suggests that its carver heard it as a phoneme. R remained part of the alphabet at least until after 1000, when the semi-Christianised Rune Song was written. Generally 'r' is used much more often than 'R' by around 1150, at least in Denmark and Sweden. It may be that too much can be read in the runic evidence, if only because the switch to the shortened alphabet was probably not motivated by purely phonetic considerations. The shorter alphabet is in fact noticeably inferior to the one it replaced. It flattened out distinctions between voiced and unvoiced consonants, that were surely still meaningful in the spoken language, and consistently observed when the Latin script was used to write the language. Later rune writers found it helpful to add dots to distinguish voiced characters from the unvoiced ones. If they made so unhelpful a change to their alphabet, though, their writing may be conventional rather than phonemic. For more info, look at E.V. Gordon's -Introduction to Old Norse-, (2nd edition, revised by A. R. Taylor, 1954); and E. Haugen's -The Scandinavian Languages- (don't have it handy, sorry) -- Quae vestimenta induet misella in conviviis crastinis? From BMScott at stratos.net Sun Nov 12 06:36:47 2000 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000 01:36:47 -0500 Subject: Rhotacism in Norse In-Reply-To: <000c01c04c27$1ea46660$e26263d1@texas.net> Message-ID: DLW> I cannot find among my home sources here when it was that rhotacism of DLW> final /z/ occurred in Norse, leading to the characteristically Norse DLW> profusion of /-r/. More precisely, when is it that the original two DLW> runes begin to be confused? Does anyone out there know? Einar Haugen (Scandinavian Language Structures: A Comparative Historical Survey) says that /R/ (from /z/) had merged with /r/ by 900-1100, as shown by runic evidence. Brian M. Scott From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Nov 12 04:55:46 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 23:55:46 EST Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: In a message dated 11/11/00 9:24:02 PM Mountain Standard Time, Tristan at MAIL.SCM-RPG.COM.AU writes: << The main question is how much of invaded population would the Invaders have to make up to impose their language onto the invaded people's >> -- it's a little more complext than mere gross numbers of newcomers vs. established population, although that is important. There are subtle social factors involved as well. To dominate and replace a previous language, the new language has to be in a majority _in the households and immediate communities_ of the intruders. If they're a very thin layer of overlords, this is of course unlikely. Eg., the Gothic and Frankish barbarian overlords of various post-Roman provinces. Furthermore, the social structure of the population bearing the intrusive language has to have a social mechanism for assimilating outsiders _as individuals_. Mallory points out (in IN SEARCH OF THE INDO-EUROPEANS) that Brahui-speakers assimilate Pathan-speakers in Afghanistan, rather than vice-versa, despite the numerical and even military superiority of the Pathans. This is because the Brahui chieftainship structure allows Pathans to enter as junior members and work their way up -- at the price of cultural assimilation. The more egalitarian and clan-centered Pathan social milieu finds accepting and assimilating outsiders much less easy. The proto-IE speakers wouldn't have to be in large numbers vs. a vs. the populations they linguistically "converted"; what they would have to be is dominant _locally_. Thus their numbers would continue to grow _at the expense of the speakers of the indigenous language_ by a sort of "one-way assimilation". Even if it was quite slow, over centuries it would be also quite certain. The locals might be assimilated into IE-speaker households and communities in a number of ways: as war-captives, as young people seeking patrons, as women moving to the patrilocal IE-speakers' homes, etc. I'd say that in a preliterate milieu, the minimal requirement for language replacement is that the intrusive community come in complete family groups (children learn language from their mothers, after all), that they come in -some- numbers, so they're not a drop of ink in a bucket of milk, and that they have social mechanisms for assimilating the local population _as individuals_. From dlwhite at texas.net Sun Nov 12 05:28:39 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 23:28:39 -0600 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: > I do not think elite dominance is enough for a conquered people to adopt > the invaders language, It depends. There are many examples where "huge numbers" of invaders (proportionally) did not come in, yet were able to linguistically dominate. One may note for example 1) Latin in the Roman empire, 2) Spanish and Portugese in Latin America, 3) English in Ireland (outside of Ulster) and "the Celtic Fringe" generally, 4) Arabic outside Arabia (esp. Egypt, where Arabs cannot possibly have numerically dominated the original population), and 5) (a bit more murkily) Greek in Anatolia (quite probably also Turkish). I have probably missed more than a few other very good examples. It should be noted as well that one study (whose author I all too typically forget; I can get it if anyone wants it) concludes that the number of Saxons that come over to Britain was in the range of 10-40 thousand, hardly overwhelming masses, and that in general recent scholarship (see especially various works by Higham) suggests quite strongly that the extent of "Celtic survival" in Roman Britain was quite shockingly high, from the standpoint of older conceptions. Dr. David L. White From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Nov 12 18:07:20 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000 13:07:20 -0500 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory In-Reply-To: <200011120415.WAA06444@sunmuw1.MUW.Edu> Message-ID: Ideology and cultural dominance may be a key. Most Germanic tribes tended to merely replace the local elite while respecting a variation of the existing system. The Goths and Franks were Christians (albeit Arianist) and attempted to maintain the same structures through an aparteid-like social hierarchy. The Turks were also a small minority elite but they welcomed anyone into their fold who converted to Islam. This probably made the difference >I do not think elite dominance is enough for a conquered people to adopt the >invaders language, sure they will adopt some words from the invading language >and change the conquered peoples language, depends if the invaders or the >invaded are more advanced than another. In those cases where a small elite >domaites over a conquerored nation (i.e. the Franks in Gaul, Germanic >Tribes in >Italy and Spain, Mongols and Tartars in Russia) these invading cultures where >just absorbed into the local culture. People only adopt the language of >invader as a primary tongue because lots of peoples of the invaders actually >come to their homeland and make a statement like this "adopt out language, >we are here to stay!, if you do not like it go somewhere else". In the >moments where invader languages replaced the languages of the conquered, >Slavic >over the various languages of Eastern Europe, Indo-European over the pre Indo >european languages of Europe in the 4th to 3rd Millennium BC, Anglo-Saxons >over >the Welsh, Turks over the Greeks in Anatolia and the Indo-Aryans over the >Dravidian speaking people's of Northern India. We have seen huge migrations of >the invaders come to the lands they conquered, not just replacing the elite of >the society, however huge sections of it. The main question is how much of >invaded population would the Invaders have to make up to impose their language >onto the invaded people's Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From edsel at glo.be Sun Nov 12 10:49:06 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000 11:49:06 +0100 Subject: "nightmare" Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Sunday, October 29, 2000 5:03 PM > Steve Long writes: >> So once again, based on this much at least, it seems the "mare" (in >> nightmare) is a Germanic-Slavic thing. And though the word may be >> reconstructible as IE, its meanings and usage appear to be too local and >> complex to justify seeing it as IE. (Of course, I don't know how this whole >> idea ran in Basque.) > The only Basque word for 'nightmare' in the 'creature' sense I know of > is . This is pretty clearly of Latino-Romance origin, though > the direct source would appear to be an unrecorded Latin *, > an altered form of the familiar . So far as I am aware, the > Basque word is unmarked for sex, and it translates both 'incubus' and > 'succubus'. > Other Basque words, like and , are used much more > generally, to denote just about any kind of hobgoblin or imp. [Ed Selleslagh] I don't remember if it was already mention, but in Dutch, e.g. 'mare' is an archaic word for (usually bad) news. On the other hand, a nightmare is 'nachtmerrie', with literally the same meaning. I once read that 'nachtmerrie' was actually a popular misinterpretation of what was originally 'nachtmare', i.e. bad news in a dream. From edsel at glo.be Sun Nov 12 11:52:45 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000 12:52:45 +0100 Subject: More on dental fricatives Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Tuesday, November 07, 2000 7:22 PM > Given our recent discussion of dental fricatives in English, > I'm hoping it will be interesting to mention a curious fact > about dental fricatives in Basque. [snip] > Now, northern Castilian has another well-known feature: word-final /d/ > is pronounced as a voiceless dental fricative, theta. Words like > 'Madrid' and 'net' are thus pronounced in the north > with final theta. Few of these words were borrowed into Basque in > the past. When they were borrowed, Basque, which tolerates no > word-final voiced plosives, did interesting things to them. For > example, 'Madrid' is in Basque , with a legal final /l/. [Ed Selleslagh] But the Castilian adjective is 'madrileño'. Interesting isn't it? On the other hand, I often hear an edh in 'Madrid', 'laúd' etc. Or is there something wrong with my hearing ? > But today Castilian has a number of acronyms, and some of these > acronyms end in the letter D. An example is , which is the > Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia. Naturally, northerners > pronounce these too with final theta. > But now comes the interesting bit. When these acronyms are used > in Basque, they are frequently pronounced with final theta! > So, even though Castilian theta is never taken into Basque as a > dental fricative, which Basque does not have, Castilian word-final > /d/, which is locally a phonetic theta, is taken into Basque as > a dental fricative. > This is a pretty little phonological problem, don't you think? [Ed] Probably they are just using the Spanish pronunciation. The same thing happens with English computer terms in Western languages. Note that there are virtually no monolingual Basques left, so the necessity to convert the phonemes (OR 'phones??´) when borrowing may not be so strong any more. What do the French Basques say, who don't speak Spanish? THAT will be interesting! > The observation was made by J. I. Hualde, who reports it in an > article in Folia Linguistica 27 (1993). > Larry Trask From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Nov 12 17:49:58 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000 12:49:58 -0500 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? In-Reply-To: <009001c04baa$d67529a0$d38f6395@roborr.uottawa.ca> Message-ID: I won't argue with you but for me, it's the only source. I'd appreciate any corrections. Partridge (1958) also has similar information on this entry --perhaps also from MacBain. [ moderator snip ] >"MacBain's Gaelic Etymological Dictionary" is not the best source for early >Celtic in any case. Apparently it is best for providing a corpus of >Inverness-shire Gaelic for the last century. >Robert Orr Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From dlwhite at texas.net Mon Nov 13 03:26:24 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000 21:26:24 -0600 Subject: Mutual Comprehensibility, Reconvergence Message-ID: > In themselves, Spanish and Portuguese are pretty much mutually > comprehensible --say like American English and Scots, or American and > Caribbean English So (as I sort of suspected) Spanish and Portugese have not really diverged to the point where something like creolization (in practical effect) might be expected in circumstances where they have been thrown together again. Thus the parallel is not close enough. Too bad. It might have provided some useful insights. On a vaguely related point, what is the earliest evidence for the development of the post-positive article in Norse? I do not recall that it is found in runic (before Roman-alphabet literacy). Dr. David L. White From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Nov 13 04:12:15 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000 23:12:15 EST Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: In a message dated 11/12/00 9:01:44 PM Mountain Standard Time, dlwhite at texas.net writes: >3) English in Ireland (outside of Ulster) >> -- Ireland (and not just Ulster) was a major destination of English and Scottish emigration, numbering in the hundreds of thousands in the 17th century and substantial numbers in the 18th. And that's not counting the medieval influx, which was substantial and which had already Anglicized the area around Dublin. Prior to about 1720, Ireland absorbed more immigrants from Britain than the whole of the Americas. The linguistic history of Ireland is incomprehensible unless these facts are taken into consideration. (See the Oxford History of the British Empire, vs. I & II). Likewise, southern Wales was extensively colonized by English peasants imported by the Marcher lords in the medieval period. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Nov 13 04:12:45 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000 23:12:45 EST Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: In a message dated 11/12/00 9:01:44 PM Mountain Standard Time, dlwhite at texas.net writes: << concludes that the number of Saxons that come over to Britain was in the range of 10-40 thousand, >> -- this is generally regarded as exceedingly dubious. From Tristan at mail.scm-rpg.com.au Mon Nov 13 06:05:00 2000 From: Tristan at mail.scm-rpg.com.au (Tristan Jones) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 17:05:00 +1100 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: > Ideology and cultural dominance may be a key. Most Germanic tribes > tended to merely replace the local elite while respecting a variation of > the existing system. The Goths and Franks were Christians (albeit Arianist) > and attempted to maintain the same structures through an aparteid-like > social hierarchy. The Turks were also a small minority elite but they > welcomed anyone into their fold who converted to Islam. This probably made > the difference I suddenly got this interesting thought. I think spread of languages has to do with Inclusive and Exclusive Elites thing, Inclusive Elites like the Roman Empire was allowed Conquered peoples to become part of elite as long as they adopted the conqueror's language and culture. Exclusive elites do not allow conquered people's to become apart of the elite such as White South Africa. Inclusive elite systems must have been more successfully in imposing the language of conqueror's onto the conquered. Maybe that's how Indo-Aryan Languages managed to spread to 75% of India, despite the migration of Indo-Aryan Speaks must have been pretty small. Maybe that inclusive elite thing might explain the success of spread of Arabic over vast areas of Middle East and Africa, Mandarin and Cantonese over huge areas of China, I think before the spread of Chinese Empire, Austronesian Languages would have been spoken over large areas of Southern China's Rice Growing Zones. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Nov 13 11:18:56 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 11:18:56 +0000 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: Tristan Jones writes: > I do not think elite dominance is enough for a conquered people to adopt the > invaders language, sure they will adopt some words from the invading language > and change the conquered peoples language, depends if the invaders or the > invaded are more advanced than another. In those cases where a small elite > domaites over a conquerored nation (i.e. the Franks in Gaul, Germanic Tribes > in Italy and Spain, Mongols and Tartars in Russia) these invading cultures > where just absorbed into the local culture. People only adopt the language > of invader as a primary tongue because lots of peoples of the invaders > actually come to their homeland and make a statement like this "adopt out > language, we are here to stay!, if you do not like it go somewhere else". > In the moments where invader languages replaced the languages of the > conquered, Slavic over the various languages of Eastern Europe, Indo-European > over the pre Indo european languages of Europe in the 4th to 3rd Millennium > BC, Anglo-Saxons over the Welsh, Turks over the Greeks in Anatolia and the > Indo-Aryans over the Dravidian speaking people's of Northern India. We have > seen huge migrations of the invaders come to the lands they conquered, not > just replacing the elite of the society, however huge sections of it. The > main question is how much of invaded population would the Invaders have to > make up to impose their language onto the invaded people's I don't think it's possible to generalize like this. Take the Turks. The Turkish conquest of Anatolia resulted in the almost total replacement of the earlier languages in favor of Turkish. But we cannot conclude that this came about because vast numbers of Turkic-speakers poured into the area and overwhelmed the indigines. The Turks of Turkey look very little like the Turkic-speakers of central Asia, but very much like their Greek, Armenian, Kurdish and Lebanese neighbors. Cavalli-Sforza, in his big genetic atlas, reports that there is "very little difference" between the Turks and their neighbors, with the Turks being genetically closest to the speakers of Persian, Kurdish, Lebanese Arabic and Aramaic ('Assyrian'). He concludes that the number of Turkish-speaking invaders was "probably rather small", and that these invaders were apparently absorbed into the indigenous population (The History and Geography of Human Genes, 1994, pp. 242-243). He further notes that the Turks seem to be more than averagely genetically heterogeneous, and that further study is called for to investigate this heterogeneity. The speakers of Arabic appear to be another case in point. C-S's organization by continents makes these a little awkward to investigate, but it appears that Arabic-speakers are genetically a very diverse group, with each local group related more strongly to speakers of neighboring languages -- Turkish, Persian, Kurdish, Aramaic, Berber, Cushitic, Ethiopian Semitic -- than to speakers of Arabic elsewhere. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From dlwhite at texas.net Mon Nov 13 19:53:51 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 13:53:51 -0600 Subject: Reference on Numbers of Saxons Message-ID: Since more than one of you has asked, here it is: Jones, Michael Eugene. 1985. "Provinces of Iron and Rust: the End of Roman Britain". Unpublished dissertation, UT Austin. It should, if all is in order, be available from UMI in the usual manner. Practically speaking, I doubt that there is anything in it that does not also occur in various works by Higham, notably "Rome, Britain, and the Anglo-Saxons" (I think). Interested readers may also wish to consult various contributions to Tristram 2000 "Celtic Englishes II", notably those by Gary German "Britons, Anglo-Saxons, and Scholars: 19th Century Attitudes Towards the Survival of Britons in Anglo-Saxon England", and by Wolfgang Viereck "Celtic and English -- An Intricate Relationship". The first of these shows quite clearly (as I too have always argued) that the traditional interpretation or "double X model" (my term), by which the original Celtic inhabitants were expelled or exterminated, is the result of arbitrary prejudices (which I would not shrink from calling "proto-Nazi") being projected into what was thought of as a black box. But there is considerable evidence after all, and it strongly suggests very substantial "Celtic survival". Dr. David L. White From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Nov 13 12:24:57 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 12:24:57 +0000 Subject: More on dental fricatives Message-ID: Ed Selleslagh writes: [on final /d/ in European Spanish] > On the other hand, I often hear an edh in 'Madrid', 'laúd' etc. Or is > there something wrong with my hearing ? No; this is the more widespread pronunciation in Spain. But it is not the pronunciation used in the north, in and around the Basque Country, where theta is usual. [on Spanish final /d/ as theta taken into Basque] > Probably they are just using the Spanish pronunciation. The same thing > happens with English computer terms in Western languages. Yes, but the curious thing is that they accept phonetic theta when it represents Spanish /d/, but not when it represents Spanish theta. > Note that there are virtually no monolingual Basques left, so the necessity > to convert the phonemes (OR 'phones??´) when borrowing may not be so strong > any more. Nevertheless, Spanish phonemic theta is *always* rendered in Basque as the laminal sibilant , and never as phonetic theta. > What do the French Basques say, who don't speak Spanish? THAT will be > interesting! I have no data, I'm afraid. Hualde didn't look at this, and I can't recall hearing a French Basque pronounce a suitable recent borrowing from French. Anyway, there really are no ordinary lexical items ending in /d/ in the kind of southern French spoken in and near the French Basque Country. A word that has final /d/ in standard Parisian French always has a following schwa in this southern French, and this schwa is always taken into French Basque as /a/. For example, French comes into French Basque as . I guess we really need a suitable French acronym, but I can't think of one. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Nov 13 15:19:59 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 10:19:59 -0500 Subject: More on dental fricatives In-Reply-To: <017001c04ca0$cb4eeec0$3603703e@edsel> Message-ID: /_DH_/ (edh) is the standard pronunciation for final besides /_TH_/ theta in northern Spain other regional pronunciations (that I have come across) are /0/ in lowland Spanish /maDHri, maDHri:/ /s/ as a hypercorrection in lowland Spanish; occasionally /S, _TH_/ in parts of Central America /maDHris, maDHriS/ and /t/ in Yucatan /madrit, matrit/ but only among speakers whose native language was yucateco note also the lastname Madriz [snip] >On the other hand, I often hear an edh in 'Madrid', 'laúd' etc. Or is >there something wrong with my hearing ? [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From sonno3 at hotmail.com Mon Nov 13 18:25:03 2000 From: sonno3 at hotmail.com (Christopher Gwinn) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 13:25:03 -0500 Subject: "witch" and "warlock" Message-ID: > My books (most of which are old) have OE wicca < OE wic- < PIE > *weik-, with four meanings, mostly having to do with "magic or > sorcery" or "bending, twisting", and also related to "wych" and > "willow." > Is that tracing obsolete? Have any articles on "witch" and "warlock" > been published in JIES or elsewhere in the last twenty years? Pokorny offers an alternative: Ueik- "aussondern" which would give a suffixed Proto-Germanic *wikkan (thus m.germ. wicken "zaubern" and wicker "zauberer, Wahrsager"). Calvert Watkins analysis is the most current, other than that I can't say which is preferred by most Indo European scholars. -Chris Gwinn From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Tue Nov 14 14:36:54 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 14:36:54 GMT Subject: Elamite Message-ID: How likely is the supposed connection between Elamite and Dravidian? [ Moderator's note: Mr. Appleyard's query is in response to Steve Long's post of 3 Nov 2000: > Apparently a characteristic of "Elamite" is that the texts that are > readable (e.g., the Behistun inscription) are "like Ottoman Turkish, made > up of many borrowed words, particularly Persian and Semitic." Early > "Elamite" texts have not been deciphered. The context was not included in his original due to technical difficulties. --rma ] From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Nov 14 01:59:16 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 20:59:16 EST Subject: The Last Influx Message-ID: TO THE LIST, FYI: The following, a news story and two abstracts, seem to state that the last major migration into Europe occurred in the Neolithic period, accounting for about 20% of the current population. Judging past events based on current genes has its problems, but note that Cavalli-Sforza, L.L is listed in the head of one of the two studies. This was originally posted on the Mother Tongue list. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- >From the Associated Press: DNA Study Traces Europeans Ancestry By PAUL RECER The Associated Press WASHINGTON (AP) - Four out of five of the men in Europe shared a common male ancestor that lived as a primitive hunter on a wild continent some 40,000 years ago, researchers say. In a study appearing Friday in the journal Science, researchers say that an analysis of a pattern found in the Y chromosome taken from 1,007 men from 25 places in Europe shows that about 80 percent of Europeans arose from the Paleolithic people who first migrated to Europe. Peter A. Underhill, a senior researcher at the Stanford Genome Technology Center in Palo Alto, Calif., and co-author of the study, said the research supports conclusions from archaeological, linguistic and other DNA evidence about the settlement of Europe by ancient peoples. ``When we can get different lines of evidence that tell the same story, then we feel we are telling the true history of the species,'' said Underhill. Underhill said the researchers used the Y chromosome in the study because its rare changes establish a pattern that can be traced back hundreds of generations, thus helping to plot the movement of ancient humans. The Y chromosome is inherited only by sons from their fathers. When sperm carrying the Y chromosome fertilizes an egg it directs the resulting baby to be a male. An X chromosome from the father allows a fertilized egg to be female. The Y chromosome has about 60 million DNA base pairs. Changes in those base pairs happen infrequently, said Underhill, but they occur often enough to establish patterns that can be used to trace the ancestry of people. He said researchers looking at the 1,007 chromosome samples from Europe identified 22 specific markers that formed a specific pattern. Underhill said the researchers found that about 80 percent of all European males shared a single pattern, suggesting they had a common ancestor thousands of generations ago. The basic pattern had some changes that apparently developed among people who once shared a common ancestor and then were isolated for many generations, Underhill said. This scenario, he said, supports other studies about the Paleolithic European groups. Those studies suggest that a primitive, stone-age human came to Europe, probably from Central Asia and the Middle East, in two waves of migration beginning about 40,000 years ago. Their numbers were small and they lived by hunting animals and gathering plant food. They used crudely sharpened stones and fire. About 24,000 years ago, the last ice age began, with mountain-sized glaciers moving across most of Europe. Underhill said the Paleolithic Europeans retreated before the ice, finding refuge for hundreds of generations in three areas: what is now Spain, the Balkans and the Ukraine. When the glaciers melted, about 16,000 years ago, the Paleolithic tribes resettled the rest of Europe. Y chromosome mutations occurred among people in each of the ice age refuges, said Underhill. He said the research shows a pattern that developed in Spain is now most common in northwest Europe, while the Ukraine pattern is mostly in Eastern Europe and the Balkan pattern is most common in Central Europe. About 8,000 years ago, said Underhill, a more advanced people, the Neolithic, migrated to Europe from the Middle East, bringing with them a new Y chromosome pattern and a new way of life: agriculture. About 20 percent of Europeans now have the Y chromosome pattern from this migration, he said. --------------------- Semino, O., Passarino, G., Oefner, P.J., Lin, A.A., Arbuzova, S., Beckman, L.E., De Benedictis, G., Francalacci, P., Kouvatsi, A., Limborska, S., Marcikia, M., Mika, A., Mika, B., Primorac, D., Santachiara-Benerecetti, A.S., Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. & Underhill, P.A. (2000) The genetic legacy of Paleolithic Homo sapiens sapiens in extant Europeans: A Y chromosome perspective. Science. 290 (5494). 1155 - 9 (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/290/5494/1155) Abstract: A genetic perspective of human history in Europe was derived from 22 binary markers of the nonrecombining Y chromosome (NRY). Ten lineages account for >95% of the 1007 European Y chromosomes studied. Geographic distribution and age estimates of alleles are compatible with two Paleolithic and one Neolithic migratory episode that have contributed to the modern European gene pool. A significant correlation between the NRY haplotype data and principal components based on 95 protein markers was observed, indicating the effectiveness of NRY binary polymorphisms in the characterization of human population composition and history. ------------------------------ Gibbons, A. (2000) Europeans Trace Ancestry to Paleolithic People. Science. 290 (5494). 1080 - 1. (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/290/5494/1080) Summary: Y chromosome data show that living Europeans have deep roots in the region--and researchers say genetic markers may be linked to cultures known from archaeological remains. In a report on page 1155, an international team reports that a wealth of data from the Y chromosome show that more than 80% of European men have inherited their Y chromosomes--which are transmitted only from father to son--from Paleolithic ancestors who lived 25,000 to 40,000 years ago. Thus, the genetic template for European men was set as early as 40,000 years ago, then modified--but not recast--by the Neolithic farmers who arrived in the region about 10,000 years ago. =============== From sarima at friesen.net Tue Nov 14 02:17:16 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 18:17:16 -0800 Subject: Motivating the Root Restrictions of PIE In-Reply-To: <001201c04c06$6f7dbd00$726063d1@texas.net> Message-ID: At 11:39 AM 11/11/00 -0600, David L. White wrote: >According to Lehmann, PIE shows three kinds of root restrictions. Accepting >for now the traditional interpretation and using "D" to represent any voiced >plosive, "T" to represent any voiceless plosive, and "DH" to represent any >voiced aspirate plosve, these are: > 1) no /DeD/ > 2) no /TeDH/ > 3) no /DHeT/ >correct, these restrictions (not to mention the /b/-gap) do not make sense. >So here is one way (the only way I can see) that they could make sense. > 1) The voiced plosives were orginally not voiced but pharyngealized. > 2) The voiceless plosives were orginally laryngealized (which is not > the same as glottalized). > 3) The voiced aspirates were as traditionally posited, technically > murmured. I suspect that a slightly different set of alternatives can cover most of the same problems. 1. The traditional voiced plosives were actually voiceless unaspirated plosives. 2. The traditional voiceless plosives were actually voiceless *aspirated* plosives. 3. The traditional voiced aspirates were either simple voiced plosive or voiced fricatives. At the very least this avoids the typological issues. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Tue Nov 14 02:27:28 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 18:27:28 -0800 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory In-Reply-To: <9e.c1a66f1.273f7cd2@aol.com> Message-ID: At 11:55 PM 11/11/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >I'd say that in a preliterate milieu, the minimal requirement for language >replacement is that the intrusive community come in complete family groups >(children learn language from their mothers, after all), that they come in >-some- numbers, so they're not a drop of ink in a bucket of milk, and that >they have social mechanisms for assimilating the local population _as >individuals_. I would also say that it would be a great "help" if membership in the intrusive community is seen locally as bringing prestige. This would encourage not only direct assimilation, but also *imitation*. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From dlwhite at texas.net Tue Nov 14 03:22:22 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 21:22:22 -0600 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: > In a message dated 11/12/00 9:01:44 PM Mountain Standard Time, > dlwhite at texas.net writes: > << concludes that the number of Saxons that come over to Britain was in the > range of 10-40 thousand, >> > -- this is generally regarded as exceedingly dubious. No it isn't, not in the general trend anyway, though perhaps the range given is at the low end of the scale. You might want to consult the recent scholarship noted. Dr. David L. White From dlwhite at texas.net Tue Nov 14 04:30:50 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 22:30:50 -0600 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: > The Goths and Franks were Christians (albeit Arianist) ... I don't know who said this, but the Frankish half, though of perhaps minor importance, is wrong: the Franks were critically (to their success in forging alliances with the Church) not Arians. Dr. David L. White From summers at metu.edu.tr Tue Nov 14 09:01:10 2000 From: summers at metu.edu.tr (Geoffrey SUMMERS) Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 11:01:10 +0200 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: > I don't think it's possible to generalize like this. Take the Turks. > The Turkish conquest of Anatolia resulted in the almost total > replacement of the earlier languages in favor of Turkish. Is this sweeping statement correct?. How many languages were spoken on the Central Plateau in, say, AD 1900? How long did the replacement take? To what extent did replacement spread through Turkish controlled lands beyond Anatolia, depending on what you mean by Anatolia? What was the Ottoman court language. To go one step further, the script was changed. To what extent did the change of script (rather than, say, cultural or political orientation) influence the incorporation of European words into modern Turkish? > But we > cannot conclude that this came about because vast numbers of > Turkic-speakers poured into the area and overwhelmed the indigines. Exactly! Geoff -- Geoffrey SUMMERS Dept. of Political Science & Public Administration, Middle East Technical University, Ankara TR-06531, TURKEY. Office Tel: (90) 312 210 2045 Home Tel/Fax: (90) 312 210 1485 The Kerkenes Project Tel: (90) 312 210 6216 http://www.metu.edu.tr/home/wwwkerk/ From edsel at glo.be Tue Nov 14 20:01:59 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 21:01:59 +0100 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tristan Jones" Sent: Monday, November 13, 2000 7:05 AM [snip] > I suddenly got this interesting thought. > I think spread of languages has to do with Inclusive and Exclusive Elites > thing, Inclusive Elites like the Roman Empire was allowed Conquered peoples > to become part of elite as long as they adopted the conqueror's language and > culture. Exclusive elites do not allow conquered people's to become apart of > the elite such as White South Africa. [Ed Selleslagh] White South Africa is quite interesting: it was in a sense a Selectively Inclusive Elite: it excluded blacks but in a certain way kind of co-opted the so-called 'colored' people, many if not most of whom speak Afrikaans. It shows that there is a lot of grey between black and white, figuratively speaking. Ed. From sarima at friesen.net Wed Nov 15 03:01:30 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 19:01:30 -0800 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory In-Reply-To: <002801c04d37$aa0ea380$bc00a8c0@vic.bigpond.net.au> Message-ID: At 05:05 PM 11/13/00 +1100, Tristan Jones wrote: >small. Maybe that inclusive elite thing might explain the success of spread >of Arabic over vast areas of Middle East and Africa, Mandarin and Cantonese >over huge areas of China, I think before the spread of Chinese Empire, >Austronesian Languages would have been spoken over large areas of Southern >China's Rice Growing Zones. I think this is fairly well established. Certainly there are still relict Austronesian languages in Southern China even today. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From stevegus at aye.net Tue Nov 14 02:59:21 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 21:59:21 -0500 Subject: Mutual Comprehensibility, Reconvergence Message-ID: David L. White wrote: > On a vaguely related point, what is the earliest evidence for the > development of the post-positive article in Norse? I do not recall that it > is found in runic (before Roman-alphabet literacy). My recollection is that it generally does not appear in Norse runic inscriptions until around 1250 or so. It does not appear often, either, in verse. It may have been spoken well before then, but the ritual and formulaic nature of the runic monuments, or the density of expression and hard metres of the poetry poetry, may have kept it at bay. -- Quae vestimenta induet misella in conviviis crastinis? From joao at britanic-ih.com.br Tue Nov 14 19:25:08 2000 From: joao at britanic-ih.com.br (Joao) Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 17:25:08 -0200 Subject: Mutual Comprehensibility, Reconvergence Message-ID: The Portuguese of Portugal and of the former Portuguese Empire is markedly different from the Portuguese of Brazil. The Portuguese of Portugal is a stress-timed language. Weakening of stress yields vowel-centering, as in the English of the USA, the UK etc. Varieties of the language are predominantly regional, as of Italian. The Portuguese of Brazil is a syllable-timed language, as in Spanish generally, the English of the Caribbean, etc. Varieties are predominantly class-distinguished, as in UK English. There is great homogeneity within Brazil, where the Globo TV network has been a strong unifier. When Ramalho Eanes, the first President of post-revolution Portugal, visited Brazil, the Globo network supplied subtitles. President Eanes's accent is, admittedly, one of the more marked in Portugal, from the Beira Alta region. Brazil and her Spanish-speaking neighbours can, indeed, get along without detailed tranlation, given the will to do so. The gray area is called Portinhol by Brazilians. There is currently no creolizing. The societies of the Brazilian State of Rio Grande do Sul and of Uruguay and Northern Argentina, on the River Plate, share a lot of features, and generally get on well together. The new factor is the Mercosur/Mercosul common market, which has led to much interest within Brazil in speaking Spanish well. Quite beside Dr White's interest, the Eastern half of the Pacific island of Timor (the name itself means East), an ex-colony of Portugal, has opted for the Brazilian variety of Portuguese, rather than the ex-imperial variety. Cheers! Chester Graham From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Nov 14 04:15:47 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 23:15:47 EST Subject: Reference on Numbers of Saxons Message-ID: In a message dated 11/13/00 9:01:40 PM Mountain Standard Time, dlwhite at texas.net writes: << The first of these shows quite clearly (as I too have always argued) that the traditional interpretation or "double X model" (my term), by which the original Celtic inhabitants were expelled or exterminated, is the result of arbitrary prejudices (which I would not shrink from calling "proto-Nazi") >> -- I'm afraid I'd have to answer that anti-migrationist arguments like this are driven not by any archaeological or linguistic evidence, or any reasoning based on this evidence, but by political ideology and moral-aesthetic preferences. [ Moderator's note: I'm going to invoke Godwin's Rule (familiar to old Usenet readers): Once a poster to the thread uses the word "Nazi", all further discussion is moot, and the thread is officially ended. -- rma ] From dlwhite at texas.net Tue Nov 14 04:53:07 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 22:53:07 -0600 Subject: More on dental fricatives Message-ID: > but the curious thing is that they accept phonetic theta when > it represents Spanish /d/, but not when it represents Spanish theta. Perhaps I am merely displaying my ignorance (or lack of full comprehension of previous missives), but aren't positional considerations relevant here? Does Spanish theta (when not from /d/) occur finally? Perhaps in acronyms, and that is what I missed, due to the trauma of election night. But from what little I know, it seems that perhaps the where is as important as the what, so to speak. Dr. David L. White From edsel at glo.be Tue Nov 14 20:29:35 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 21:29:35 +0100 Subject: More on dental fricatives Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Rick Mc Callister" Sent: Monday, November 13, 2000 4:19 PM > /_DH_/ (edh) is the standard pronunciation for final > besides /_TH_/ theta in northern Spain > other regional pronunciations (that I have come across) are > /0/ in lowland Spanish /maDHri, maDHri:/ > /s/ as a hypercorrection in lowland Spanish; occasionally /S, _TH_/ in > parts of Central America /maDHris, maDHriS/ > and /t/ in Yucatan /madrit, matrit/ but only among speakers whose native > language was yucateco [ moderator snip ] [Ed Selleslagh] This pronunciation of d as edh is quite frequent, not only in final positions, but it is by no means arbitrary and I haven't been able yet to figure out the rules. A very similar phenomenon is that of b being pronounced as fricative v in certain positions (e.g. Avraham Lincoln in Spanglish), even by native speakers who "can't" pronounce fricative v knowingly. Two cases of non-phonemic alternate pronunciation?? From edsel at glo.be Tue Nov 14 20:19:58 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 21:19:58 +0100 Subject: More on dental fricatives Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Monday, November 13, 2000 1:24 PM > Ed Selleslagh writes: > [on final /d/ in European Spanish] >> On the other hand, I often hear an edh in 'Madrid', 'laúd' etc. Or is >> there something wrong with my hearing ? > No; this is the more widespread pronunciation in Spain. But it is > not the pronunciation used in the north, in and around the Basque > Country, where theta is usual. [Ed] OK, I had overlooked that in your comment. > [on Spanish final /d/ as theta taken into Basque] >> Probably they are just using the Spanish pronunciation. The same thing >> happens with English computer terms in Western languages. > Yes, but the curious thing is that they accept phonetic theta when > it represents Spanish /d/, but not when it represents Spanish theta. [Ed] I would guess that this is because in Castilian theta (written as c or z) is considered a sibilant of sorts. In the Americas it is pronounced /s/ anyway. >> Note that there are virtually no monolingual Basques left, so the necessity >> to convert the phonemes (OR 'phones??') when borrowing may not be so strong >> any more. > Nevertheless, Spanish phonemic theta is *always* rendered in Basque as > the laminal sibilant , and never as phonetic theta. [Ed] This brings us back to the old discussion about the origins of the two sibilants s/theta in Castilian (the often heard idea is that it comes from an affricated s) and its possible relationship to the two (apical/laminal) sibilants written as s/z in Basque. After all, Castilian originated in the fringe of the Basque speaking area. Remember also my remark about the Castilian adjective Madrileño, with an l like in Basque 'Madril'. >> What do the French Basques say, who don't speak Spanish? THAT will be >> interesting! > I have no data, I'm afraid. Hualde didn't look at this, and I can't > recall hearing a French Basque pronounce a suitable recent borrowing > from French. Anyway, there really are no ordinary lexical items > ending in /d/ in the kind of southern French spoken in and near the > French Basque Country. A word that has final /d/ in standard Parisian > French always has a following schwa in this southern French, and this > schwa is always taken into French Basque as /a/. For example, French > comes into French Basque as . I guess we really need > a suitable French acronym, but I can't think of one. [Ed] That (ancronym) is what I meant. From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Nov 14 05:53:10 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 00:53:10 EST Subject: The Germanic substrate - knives? Message-ID: In a message dated 11/11/2000 9:19:50 PM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: << You make a very interesting point regarding I think of knife in the sense of "cut, tear, strike, kill" but I can see how "flesher, scraper" can work>> That really is the problem with so many of these early words. They probably originated in a very specific, narrow, down-to-earth usage. But the reconstructed meaning creates the impression that they started with broad general abstract meanings like "cut, tear, strike, kill." Which immediately obscures the real practical meanings and processes. There is loads of evidence that the "knife" was fundamentally a tool or a group of tools among hunter-gathers and early farmers and trades folk. It undoubtedly had multiple uses. But any farmer, butcher, woolcutter, wood carver, fur trapper or a hunter who has actually dressed an animal will tell you that "killing" is a rare use for a knife. The OED for example lists "knifer" not as a killer but as an old term for someone who cut the heels for shoes. But I see in the old Britannica that is not quite right. The knifer actually "trimmed or smoothed" down the heel to match the already made shoe. He didn't even accurately "cut" them, much less tear or kill them. <> I suspect that this sort of amalgamation of meanings is almost useless. Just an example. On the web, you can buy "antler knives" and "bone knives," some of them brand new where the handle is made of bone, the others Native American antiques where the whole knife is made from bone. You see exquisitely carved knives made from bone in New Guinea at http://www.art-pacific.com/artifacts/nuguinea/weapons/bneknife.htm. At the non-pointed end of each is the natural "knob" of the bone joint or "knuckle" of the handle (cf. Pol., knuckle, , bone). Perhaps knives are named after the bones they were once made from? Perhaps not. But a pruning knife does not make "a sharp blow," yet if you look back at my original list you'll see pruning is one of the closest verbs in earlier German. Perhaps "knife" come from analogy to wild animal teeth. See the Greek, , , venemous beast, especially snake, wild beast, pin, pivot, , two projecting teeth on the blade of a hunting spear, , bear, bear teeth. Cf., Pol, , boar, tusk, blade, trowel. Perhaps and perhaps more likely it was the other way around, these things getting their names by analogy with knife. All these etymologies have to be conjectural. More importantly, if "knife" and all the similar words I found in Greek are in fact all connected in some way, how do we think about them? How is it that by looking closer at the real meanings of words in context we see strong similarities where alledgedly there were none before? You write: < /kr-/ but never the other way.>> Well, something is wrong there, that's pretty clear. Watkins is missing something, big time. But then again, if this is strictly between German/Slavic and Greek, then couldn't /kn-/ > /kn-/? <> And what does Watkins have <<*ghwen- "to strike, kill>> turn into? I bet this is rebuilt from some form of knife. <> I used Lidell-Scott and they occasionally offer comments on roots but not often. I don't recall any. <> Well, the factuality of these supposed non-IE words is often repeated and without question. In fact many have dead ringers with clear etymologies in other IE languages. It seems the connections between them however have been discounted either because of bad definitions or because of the sound laws -- which of course should not make us blind to obvious similarities that are impossible to assign to coincidence. There are more of these words I'd like to address. Regards, Steve Long From kastytis.beitas at gf.vu.lt Wed Nov 15 00:17:20 2000 From: kastytis.beitas at gf.vu.lt (Kastytis Beitas) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 01:17:20 +0100 Subject: The Germanic substrate - knives? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:42 10.11.2000 -0500, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Initial /*gwh-/ would have yielded Germanic /b, g/ --IF followed by >a vowel. Someone more knowledgeable will have to fill us in on what >/*ghwn-V-/ would have produced. > <...> > Again, I don't know what *Kn- would yield in Greek & Lithuanian Lithuanian: knaibyti, knebenti, knyburiuoti 'to peck, pick' knapteleti 'to nod suddenly (usually about sleepy person)' knez:inti 'to break/smash to pieces' kniede 'rivet' knieteti 'to itch, tickle' kniubti 'to kneel/fall with one's face downwards' knotis 'to come off (tear off ) (spontaneously) [about bark]' But there are no words with meaning 'knife'. But I have one fresh crazy idea, based on this *kn- thing. :-) There is Russian word okno 'window; opening, orifice, hole'. Usually it is explained as derivative from Slavonic oko 'eye'. But there is other possibility. There are some Russian words with initial o-, where this o is a prefix. For example: Russian okorok 'ham' is explained as derivative from Old Slavonic *kork-, where krak in many Slavonic languages means 'leg, thigh, hip'. Russian ovrag 'ravine' is derived from Old Russian form vrag. /These examples are from Chernykh's 'Historical etymological dictionary of modern Russian language' (1999)/ It is possible to find other similar examples too. Idea is that Russian okno 'window' is actually o-kno, where kn- means something (hole, opening etc) that is cut by knife or punched by some sharp or similar implement... And this kn- in okno is maybe the lonely last relic in Russian... His nearest relative may be is Russian verb kinut' 'to cast, throw'. Other group of related words are words with gn- (Russian gniot etc) and gin- ... Kastytis Beitas ********************************** Kastytis Beitas ---------------------------------- Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics Faculty of Natural Sciences Vilnius University Ciurlionio 21 Vilnius 2009, Lithuania ---------------------------------- Fax: (370 2)235409 E-Mail: kastytis.beitas at gf.vu.lt ********************************** From kastytis.beitas at gf.vu.lt Tue Nov 14 23:50:36 2000 From: kastytis.beitas at gf.vu.lt (Kastytis Beitas) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 00:50:36 +0100 Subject: The Germanic substrate - knives? In-Reply-To: <64.8276a69.273a69b0@aol.com> Message-ID: At 03:32 08.11.2000 -0500, Steve Long wrote: >Starting with a word like "knife." I'm not positive how it got on the list, >but I suspect that it might be from an anachronistic idea of what knives are. <....> >This is important because the most common uses of knife-like objects was not >as weapons or even kitchen implements, but as tools. >There's evidence of knives regularly being used as scrapers for the dressing >of skins, for the gathering and processing of wool (before shears), for >pruning, cutting holes in hides and cloth and a variety of other tasks. I think that the words with meanings 'to cut, to carve' may semantically change to closely related meanings, as: 1. 'hack, chop' 2. 'edge, brim, rim' 3. 'divide to parts' 4. 'kill' 5. 'geld, castrate' 6. 'short' 7. 'strike (blunt)' 8. 'press, squeeze' 9. 'thrust, stab' 10. ... The meanings 'to bite' and 'to gnaw' are close too. So examples presented by Steve Long look rather convincing. >In Greek, we see: >knao: <...> - to scrape, grate or scratch ><...> >knaps - to cut short (dalos) >knizo: - (Dor, eknixa; pass, knizon) scratch, gash, cut up, grate, also >associated with sacrificial cutting-up. It is similar to Lithuanian "nizho" '(it) itched shortly' and "niezhai" 'itch, scabies (disease)'. I am sorry, I am not linguist and I don't know how to present sounds phonetically correct. May be these words must be presented as "niz:o" and "niez:ai". >nusso: - touch with a sharp point, prick, stab, pierce >nuxis - pricking, stabbing Lith. niuksas 'punch. cuff' >In Lithuanian, "gnybti" is to pinch or prune. (Cf., kni:pen (MGer) pinch, >prune) >In Polish, "no:z:" is knife, but "gnyp" is a leather dresser or shoemaker's >knife. >(The notion that "gnyp" and "gnybti" are borrowed from Germanic runs somewhat >in the face of the distinct possibility that the proto-speakers of those >other two languages had prunning or dressing knives as early or earlier than >other northern Europeans.) In Lithuanian there is "z:nybti" too . It is another form of "gnybti" with the same meanings. "gnybti" ir "z:nybti" have an aspects of single act. And there is a group of related words: z:naibyti -- 'to pinch, nib, tweak (repeated action)', z:nyples -- 'tongs, pliers, nippers' or 'claws of crayfish' and other. Lithuanian "shnioti" (or must be s:nioti?) means 'strike, lach, whip; to cut, mow, reap' A similar group of words exist in Russian too: (po)z:i:nat' -- 'to reap' z:nec -- 'reaper (of corn)' These Lithuanian and Russian words are related to words with meanings 'press, squeeze': Lithuanian: gniauz:ti -- 'to squeeze, to clutch, to press' gniuz:ti -- 'to give up to pressing' gniu:z:te -- 'snowball (and similar objects, produced by sqeezing)' knisti -- 'to nuzzle, root up (about swine)' and knaiso (the past time of verb "knaisyti" that means more prolongated nuzzling) Russian gniot -- 'press, squeezing' gnesti -- 'to press, to squeeze' Very similar forms are in other Slavonic languages (Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Czech na-gnetat' -- 'to press, to pump' >None of the words above may qualify for strict phonological relationships >with the Germanic "knife", but it seems rather implausible that so many close >examples have no relationship to the word. It seems to me too that to abundant connections of "knife" to another Indo-European words rejects the possibility that "knife" is non-Indo-European word. The similar case is with Lithuanian "peilis" 'knife'. It is similar to Russian "pila" 'saw', Lat. "pilum" 'heavy javelin, pestle', OHG "pfil" 'arrow, stake'. In this context OE "pil" 'stake, shaft, spike' and Eng "pile" 'arrow, dart' may be not borrowings as it is stated in Chambers Dict. of Etym. ( p.794)] but words of common Indo-European origin. And there are copious words roots of what begins as pi- (pin-, pik- etc; and spin-, spik- too) that mean various sharp implements for stabbing or sharp things: German Pike, English pike, Spanish picca 'spear' English pick, Lat. spiculum English spike 'large nail' and all its Germanic relatives, Lithuanian spyglys 'needle, spine, thorn' and speigas 'bitting (hard) frost' English pin and peak (Russian pinat' means 'to strike with foot, to kick'), English spine, Old Saxon pin 'peg'... You can find many other examples. These words are related to meanings 'to press, squeeze' and 'strike' too: Lith. spausti 'to press, squeeze', may be English pound ' etc. Kastytis Beitas ********************************** Kastytis Beitas ---------------------------------- Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics Faculty of Natural Sciences Vilnius University Ciurlionio 21 Vilnius 2009, Lithuania ---------------------------------- Fax: (370 2)235409 E-Mail: kastytis.beitas at gf.vu.lt ********************************** From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Tue Nov 14 16:36:18 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 18:36:18 +0200 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <01JW73M7JRC4AM3R9Y@LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU> Message-ID: On Sun, 05 Nov 2000 CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU wrote: >>On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, David L. White wrote: >> >>> For English /th/ vs/ /dh/, the question to ask is something >>> like "In a story where two brothers were named "Lith" and "Lidh", >>> would an audience be able to keep them apart?" The answer is >>> clearly yes, regardless of the various other consideration that >>> some have noted, therefore the distinction is (not surprisingly) >>> phonemic. >Bob Whiting replied: >>No, the answer is: if there were two brothers named Lith and >>Lidh then the distinction would be phonemic. As long as there >>aren't, there is no phonemic distinction. It doesn't matter that >>the two sounds are capable of being distinct phonemes. Until >>they are used as phonemes by the speakers of the language, they >>aren't phonemes for all that they are recognizably different >>sounds. When speakers start coining unrelated words where [th] >>contrasts with [dh] then they will be phonemes. The fact that >>you could coin words where they contrast is not sufficient. >This is simply wrong. Which means that opinions differ. :) >We could, theoretically, coin words where aspirated [ph] >contrasted with plain [p] -- but if we did, people would have to >learn to control, and pay attention to, a hitherto redundant >feature. This is simply wrong. :) If we started using aspirated p [p'] and unaspirated p [p] contrastively, the real problem would be distinguishing unaspirated [p] from [b]. People can easily distinguish [p'] from [p] as in Chinese (a billion Chinese can't be wrong :>). When pinyin transcription was introduced in 1979, most people seemed to get the impression that the pronunciation of Chinese had changed: Peking was now called Beijing. Linguists know (or should know) that Chinese pronunciation didn't change a bit. The new system was just considered closer to the actual pronunciation (particularly for English speakers) than the Wade-Giles system that it replaced. The

in Peking and the in Beijing both represent the same Chinese sound, unaspirated [p] (Chinese does not have a voiced/voiceless distinction). English [b] is simply closer to the sound than English [p'] is in this position (where it is always aspirated). A speaker of Finnish would have no difficulty getting the correct pronunciation from Peking (except for the final nasal velar which does not appear in this position in Finnish) because Finnish has only unaspirated [p] and no /b/ phoneme. Indeed, as a native speaker of English, my English-trained ear almost always hears Finnish initial [p] (both word and syllable) as [b] because it is not used to hearing unaspirated [p] in this position and the nearest equivalent to it is [b] (the puff of air that constitutes the aspiration of [p'] delays the onset of voicing for the following vowel; without this puff of air, voicing begins earlier with the result that the consonant sounds voiced. Not enough to make it sound like a full-bodied [b], but enough to make it sound more like [b] than [p], especially in an unexpected environment. So you can't just start shifting contrasts around one at a time. You have to consider the effect on rest of the phonological system. If we wanted to use [p] and [p'] contrastively, we would probably have to give up /b/ as a phoneme. And the same is true of other stops. English only gets away with using unaspirated stops after [s] ('pin' vs. 'spin', 'top' vs. 'stop', 'cot' vs 'Scot') because English phonotactics does not permit [sb], [sg], or [sd] (except at morpheme boundaries: 'disburse', 'disguise', 'disgrace', 'disdain', 'jurisdiction'). Using [p], [p'], and [b], etc. all contrastively is cutting distinctions very fine. Consider the minimal (if any) difference in pronunciation between 'discussed' and 'disgust' in contrast to the clear(er) distinction between 'cussed' and 'gust'. I suspect that there are very few languages that actually do this. I suspect that most languages will either have a contrast between voiceless [p] and voiced [b] or between unaspirated [p] and aspirated [p'], but not a three-way contrast between [p], [p'], and [b]. Perhaps some typologist could confirm or refute this. Stefan? >But people already hear, and pay attention to, the voicing >distinction in the interdental fricatives, just as they do in the >other English fricatives and affricates. And I still say that the fact that a person can hear and recognize the difference between two sounds does not ipso facto make those sounds phonemes of his language. I can hear the difference between bright l and dark l. You might say that I can only do this because I have studied Russian and Arabic. But I imagine that most English speakers could hear the difference between bright l and dark l. Does this mean that bright l and dark l are phonemes in English? No, because they are not used contrastively. Does this mean that they aren't phonemes in Russian? No, because there they are used contrastively. So whether two sounds are phonemes or not does not depend on whether they can be be recognized as different sounds or not, it depends on whether they are used contrastively by the speakers of the language or not. A native speaker of English who hears a Chinese pronounce the initial unaspirated [p] of will probably hear it as [b]. If he then hears the same Chinese pronounce an initial aspirated [p'], he will probably be able to hear the difference. But he will probably think that the contrast is between voiced [b] and unvoiced [p(')] because that is the contrast in his own language. The fact that he can hear the difference between [p] and [p'] does not mean that these two sounds are phonemes in his language (although they are in Chinese). He will just assume that the contrast is the same as in his own language (nearest equivalent). >And there are those minimal pairs, such as ether:either and >thigh:thy, which cannot be dismissed by *synchronically* >attributing them to some morphological conditioning or to a >native:foreign dichotomy. Part of the problem is that these words were there in the language before there was any question of [th] and [dh] being separate phonemes. For a long time 'thigh' and 'thy' were pronounced the same. Then, with the lenition of the initial [th] of unstressed function words, 'thigh' and 'thy' suddenly have different initial sounds and constitute that holy grail of the phonologists, a "minimal pair." Golly, says everyone, this must mean that [th] and [dh] are different phonemes because they make it possible to distinguish 'thigh' and 'thy' as different words. The problem is that 'thigh' and 'thy' were always different words. So the question is, for those who insist that differences in meaning must mean the presence of different phonemes, what phonemes differentiated 'thigh' and 'thy' just before this event? Answer: none. The lenition of initial [th] in function words is simply a change that affected a class of words (function words) and didn't affect the complementary class (content words). Whatever the reason for this change may have been, I am fairly confident that it didn't happen so that it would be possible to distinguish 'thigh' from 'thy'. The two words just happen to be in different classes and so end up with different initial sounds. Since these sounds are determined by the class that the word belongs to, and not by the fact that they are different words, I find it difficult to accept that this is a phonemic distinction. >Let me drag in a notorious German example. Please do, because I think that this example clearly illustrates exactly what I have been talking about. >[x] and palatal [c,] are very nearly in complementary >distribution, with [x] found only immediately after back vowels >a(:) o(:) u(:) au. [c,] is found after front vowels and >diphthongs, all consonants, and (for some speakers) initially. >But the diminutive suffix -chen has only [c,] even after back >vowels -- a rare occurrence, since -chen normally fronts >("umlauts") the preceding vowel. So one finds alleged minimal >pairs such as Kuchen [khu.c, at n] 'cake' and baby-talk Kuhchen >[khu:c, at n] 'little cow', which some claim demonstrate that [x] >and [c,] must be assigned to different phonemes. And >furthermore, many (most?) German speakers hear the difference >quite clearly. But are they separate phonemes? No, as is shown >by the fact that Kuchen : Kuhchen form a subminimal pair: the >vowel of the latter is clearly (but non-distinctively) longer >than the former, indicating that it was in root-final position, >before suffix -chen. Then, on synchronic grounds along, we may >write the alleged minimal pair as /ku:x at n/ 'cake' but /ku:+x at n/ >'little cow': the boundary /+/ conditions both the extra vowel >length and the palatal realization of /x/. But this is precisely my point. Juncture (or morpheme boundary) is not a phonological condition but a morphological one. Creating a silent phoneme /+/ and calling it juncture doesn't change this fact. It just eases the phonologist's conscience. The justification for considering juncture (morpheme boundary) a phonological condition seems to be axiomatic. Phonologists start with the axiom that only phonological conditions can affect phonology. Since morphological conditions (morpheme boundary, word boundary) often affect phonology, these must be phonological conditions because, axiomatically, only phonological conditions can affect phonology. Doesn't anyone see this argument as even a little bit circular? Apparently the phonologists don't because they then import these morphological conditions into phonology as symbols (+ and #) and then proceed to bandy them about as if they were really phonological conditions. If, whenever you have good reason to believe that two apparently contrasting sounds aren't really phonemes, you invent a silent phoneme that has some morphological (or morphophonemic or morpho-lexical or lexico-historic) basis, call it a segmental phoneme, and insert it into the phonemic analysis so that the two sounds no longer contrast, then you are just pandering to those who say that only phonological conditions can affect phonology. I'm not trying to say that juncture doesn't exist, or even that it doesn't affect pronunciation (it often effects things like pitch, duration, and pause), or that it doesn't affect meaning (consider the difference between 'I see you've got an ice cream' and 'I see you've got a nice scream'). All I'm saying is that juncture is not a phonological condition, it is a morphological one, and making a segmental phoneme out of it and throwing it in among the segmental phonemes and saying "see, the sounds don't contrast any more" may not be the best methodology. Admittedly, doing this makes it easier to understand some things (for example, analyzing 'unclean' as /@n+kli:n/ in contrast to 'uncle' /@ngk at l/ makes it clear why the n of 'unclean' doesn't assimilate to the velar), but if there is a "phoneme" that is only trotted out when it is needed and ignored otherwise, one begins to wonder about its reality quotient (as a phoneme, not as an event). >The fact that all such "minimal pairs" contain precisely the >diminutive suffix -chen confirms this analysis. Actually, it makes it seem more like a self-fulfilling prophecy, since '-chen', as a bound morpheme, specifically a suffix, will always be preceded by juncture, whereas in words where the is part of the root, can't be preceded by juncture. I'm not saying that the analysis is wrong. Quite the contrary, I agree with the conclusion completely: [c,] and [x] are not different phonemes in German despite the apparent contrast in words like 'Kuchen' and 'Kuhchen'. I'm just saying that I would have gotten there by a method other than making a phoneme out of a morphological feature. I would have said that contrasts that can be accounted for by rules are not phonemic contrasts. The allophonic distribution rules say that [x] appears after back vowels and [c,] after front vowels. Therefore the pronunciation of [x] in 'Kuchen' is required by rule. There is another rule, obviously of higher precedence, that says that the diminutive suffix '-chen' is always pronounced with [c,] regardless of its environment. Therefore the pronunciation of [c,] in 'Kuhchen' is required by rule. Since both pronunciations are required by rule, the contrast is not phonemic. QED. Now some people will say that the rule that says that '-chen' is always pronounced with [c,] is not a phonological rule, but a morpho-lexical one and that one can only evaluate phonemic contrasts through phonological rules. These people will then take a morphological feature, make it into a segmental phoneme and then show that it blocks the contrast. Occam's Razor gives my method the edge, because it does not need the additional entity of a silent phoneme. >It is therefore unlikely, though possible, that German could >coin new words in which [x] and [c,] would (appear to) contrast >in some other environment, just as it is unlikely that English >would coin new words contrasting precisely in aspired [ph] vs. >plain [p]. This is an interesting spin that you have put on this. It makes it seem like your analysis supports what David L. White said while in fact it demolishes it. I would have said that it is possible, but unlikely, rather than the other way around. But either way, clearly the Germans recognize [c,] and [x] as two different sounds (otherwise they wouldn't appear to contrast in 'Kuhchen' and 'Kuchen'), but they don't use them contrastively (as phonemes). We agree on this. So let's modify what Dr. David said just a little bit. "In a German story where two brothers were named 'Luchen' [lu:x at n] and 'Luhchen' [lu:c, at n], would an audience be able to keep them apart?" The answer is clearly yes ('Kuchen' and 'Kuhchen' prove this). Would [c,] and [x] then be phonemes? Well, yes (as long as you can convince the audience that 'Luhchen' doesn't mean "little Luh") because the sounds are used contrastively in a way that can't be predicted by rule. Does this mean that [c,] and [x] are already phonemes in German? Most emphatically not. You have proved that they are not your way and I have proved it mine. The fact that two sounds are potentially contrastive does not prove that they are phonemes in any particular language. The mere fact that the same two sounds can be phonemes in one language but allophones of the same phoneme in another language should be adequate proof of this. >But English does have a few minimal pairs for the interdentals, >ones which cannot be explained on phonologucal grounds. But you haven't explained German [c,] and [x] on phonological grounds. You have explained them using morpho-lexical information. The fact that you have made a morphological condition into a phonological one (or rather used one that the phonologists already had waiting to be used for purposes like this) doesn't make this a phonological explanation for anyone who knows the difference. >True, in my pronunciation, the stressed vowel of _either_ is >longer than that of _ether_ -- but this is in line with vowel >length before other voices vs. voiceless consonants. And there's >no difference in _thigh_ vs. _thy_. I have explained my reasons for not considering 'thigh' and 'thy' a minimal pair above. My reasons for not considering 'ether' / 'either' a minimal pair are similar (ultimately relying on the fact that the pronunciations are required by rules), but if you prefer, I could invent a silent phoneme that blocks the voicing of intervocalic [th] in loanwords (there is no need for this since it wouldn't voice anyway [there is no indication of one having voiced], but it does provide a "phonological" basis for the lack of contrast). Everyone seems to object to my using these rules to determine whether the sounds involved are phonemes or not, saying "you can't use these rules because they aren't phonological rules." To which I could say (if I really wanted to) "Of course they are phonological rules because they are rules about how these words are pronounced. And what is phonology about except how things are pronounced." But I don't want to say this (yet) because there are other aspects of phonology that I don't want to get involved in. Everyone also seems to be under the impression that I am trying to prove that [th] and [dh] are not separate phonemes. This is not the case. It would not bother (nor surprise) me if [th] and [dh] could be shown to be separate phonemes. All I am saying is that the evidence that [th] and [dh] are phonemes is inadequate. As I have said before, there is no reason why [th] and [dh] shouldn't or couldn't be phonemes. Indeed, when one looks at the evidence, they should be phonemes based on the parallel development of /z/ and /v/. All I say is "where is the evidence?" Where are all the contrasts that would show unequivocally that that [th] and [dh] are phonemes as there are contrasts that show that /z/ and /v/ are phonemes. And I don't consider 'thigh' and 'thy' or 'ether' and 'either' any more indicative of the phonemicity of [th] and [dh] than 'Kuhchen' and 'Kuchen' are indicative of the phonemicity of German [c,] and [x]. >So the fact that new words contrasting only in having [T] vs. >[D] could be formed without any new feature becoming distinctive >confirms that the two are searate phonemes, and have ben so for >some time. And I still say that when new words with this contrast are formed, then they will be phonemes. They might be phonemes now, as you claim, but if so, they are unused phonemes -- just sitting in the closet with their wrapping and ribbons still on. But the argumentation used here seems considerably less than convincing. For instance, one might say that [x] could be used as a phoneme in English by forming new words where it contrasts with /k/ or /g/. Since these words could be formed without any new feature becoming distinctive (as a voiceless velar fricative the contrast between /x/ and /k/ or /g/ would be the same as the contrast between /f/ and /p/ or /b/), this confirms that [x] is already a phoneme in English and has been for some time. I don't think so. >>And as you unintentionally point out, when they become phonemes, >>[dh] will have to be written , otherwise you couldn't >>distinguish between and . >Well, it should be so written already, but we ignore all sorts of >other distinctions, and it doesn't bother us. It's not so much that we ignore other distinctions as it is that the graphic system's ways of distinguishing them are not always consistent or intuitively transparent. But once you get the hang of it, the writing system is actually quite well adapted to the language, and the lack of transparency is generally because the writing has preserved etymological information that has disappeared from the spoken language. Perhaps you should read Chomsky and Halle. Except for some word final distinctions between - and -, no attempt is made to distinguish between [th] and [dh]. It's a good thing the pronunciation is predictable. One thing you can say for sure though is that never represents [dh] (except in the name of the character 'edh'). Otherwise it is regularly realized as [d] ('dhow', 'dharma', 'jodhpurs') and generally indicates a foreign word (except, of course, in native compounds where it represents two sounds [e.g., 'madhouse', 'deadhead', etc.]). Incidentally, I'm still looking for an explanation of why words from languages with phonemic /dh/ don't come into English with [dh]. It seems curious, what with [dh] being a phoneme in English and all, that phonemic /dh/ comes into English as [d]. Many people have hastened to assure me that [th] and [dh] are indeed phonemes in English, but everyone seems reluctant to address this point. > stands for /s z S Z/ (the latter two as in _pressure_ and >_pleasure_ -- in fact, we don't evan have an official way to >spell /Z/, though would seem obvious. And don't even ask >about the vowels: treating as doublets of , we have >effective five vowel symbols for a very large phonemic inventory. >I'd be glad to see ,dh. in use, but it really has nothing to do >with whether [T D] are separate phonemes. Maybe not, but you don't get any help from the orthography on how to pronounce them. And although there are only five vowel symbols in English, there are actually quite a few more, because the five are combined in various (but not always consistent) ways to provide much more than five representations for various vowel sounds. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Wed Nov 15 08:36:49 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 10:36:49 +0200 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <4.3.1.2.20001106080244.00aff400@getmail.friesen.net> Message-ID: On Mon, 06 Nov 2000 Stanley Friesen wrote: >At 07:08 PM 11/4/00 +0200, Robert Whiting wrote: >>On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, David L. White wrote: >> >>> For English /th/ vs/ /dh/, the question to ask is something >>> like "In a story where two brothers were named "Lith" and "Lidh", >>> would an audience be able to keep them apart?" The answer is >>> clearly yes, regardless of the various other consideration that >>> some have noted, therefore the distinction is (not surprisingly) >>> phonemic. >>No, the answer is: if there were two brothers named Lith and >>Lidh then the distinction would be phonemic. As long as there >>aren't, there is no phonemic distinction. It doesn't matter that >>the two sounds are capable of being distinct phonemes. ... >Actually David has a good point Yes, but the good point is simply a truism. When he says that if these two sounds were used contrastively then they would be phonemes, that is a good point. It is like my saying that if I had a million dollars I would be a millionaire. You can't argue with the logic of that. But when he says that since they could be used contrastively, then they are already phonemes, that is not a good point. It is like saying that since I could easily make a million dollars (after all, I get several emails every day telling me how easy it is and offering to sell me the secret for a paltry sum :>), then I am already a millionaire. We are all lucky that the IRS doesn't think this way or else they would be after us to pay taxes on all the money that we could have earned but didn't. >(at least if you make it a play rather than a story to be read). >Try writing a Japanese play with characters named Shil and Shir. >The result will be confusion and incomprehension. This is certainly true. Japanese (and Chinese) just don't distinguish these sounds. As a somewhat chilling example of the extent of the confusion and incomprehension that is possible, the Singapore Airlines plane that crashed and burned at Taipei recently was taking off on the wrong runway. In so doing, it struck some parked equipment and burst into flames. The pilot was supposed to be using runway 50L but was actually using runway 50R. The presumption is that the controler's instructions were not understood by the pilot. It would be funny if it weren't such a tragedy. But there is nothing funny about nearly 100 people killed by allophones. >Or try an English play with characters named Lit and Lit' (where >/'/ represents aspiration, since we are already using /th/ to >mean voiceless interdental fricative). You will get the same >result. It is almost impossible to articulate a final unaspirated stop in normal speech. To do so, you either have to stop breathing until you make the next sound or else keep your mouth closed and breathe through your nose. Otherwise, as soon as you release the stop you also release a puff of air. So it is not surprising that it is very difficult to contrast final aspirated and unaspirated stops. On the other hand, if the brothers were named Till and T'ill, the audience would have no trouble telling them apart. It would be easier if the audience were Chinese, because this distinction is phonemic in Chinese. But an English speaking audience would still be able to tell them apart. They would probably hear the initial unaspirated [t] as [d] (the puff of air that constitutes the aspiration delays the onset of voicing for the following vowel; without this puff of air, voicing begins earlier and partly overlaps the preceding consonant). Not perhaps a full-bodied [d], but a sound with enough voicing to make it sound more like [d] than [t]. The English speaking audience would just assume that one brother was named Till and the other Dill. Does this prove that [t] and [t'] are already phonemes in English? Hardly. >And this is despite the fact that both the pair /r/ and /l/ and >the pair /t/ and /t'/ *can* be distinguished, since some >languages do exactly that. Oriental speakers are notorious for not being able to distinguish [r] from [l]. And nobody can really articulate final unaspirated stops without contortions. >The the fact that an non-specialist native speaker can *hear* the >difference is good reason to consider it to be phonemic. This is just not true. Native speakers of German can hear the difference between [ç] and [x]. Does this mean that they are different phonemes in German? Not a bit. No one that I know of would say that [ç] and [x] are anything but allophones in German. Let's look at it another way. I can hear the difference between bright l and dark l. Although I have training that helps me, I suspect that most English speakers could hear the difference; they are, after all, pretty distinctive. So suppose the brothers were named Tilt and Til-t (l for bright l and l- for dark l). Would the audience be able to hear the difference? Probably -- although it might take a few repetitions before they were comfortable with it. Would that make bright l and dark l phonemes? Yes, because they are arbitrary contrasts used to differentiate meaning. Does that mean that they are phonemes now? Not in English (but if the play were written in Russian they would have been phonemes before the play, because Russian uses them contrastively). What makes different sounds phonemes is their use as arbitrary contrasts that make a difference in meaning. The fact that speakers can hear the difference between two sounds does not make them phonemes if they are not used as phonemes. Phonemes have to have a certain amount of distinctiveness to be used as phonemes or else you get confusion and ambiguity. But above this level, identifying phonemes doesn't depend on how distinctive they are, but on how they are used. If they aren't used to make arbitrary contrasts then they aren't phonemes no matter how distinctive they are. >>And as you unintentionally point out, when they become phonemes, >>[dh] will have to be written , >>Not at all. The natural spelling of /lidh/ in English would be >Lihthe or something like that (If "lithe" did not already exist >with a long 'i', that would be the spelling) Actually you'd probably do better with Lithth or Liththe. But the point was that whatever way you come up with for expressing [dh] it will have to be something that is not used now. Once [th] and [dh] can contrast without any conditioning whatsoever, there will have to be some way to distinguish them graphically or else you will have a completely opaque writing similar to . You will probably say that the writing is already opaque because you don't have any rules that tell you how to pronounce and you have memorized the pronunciation of every occurrence of in the lexicon. But I have generalized rules for the pronunciation of because I have better things to do than to memorize the dictionary. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Nov 15 23:02:24 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 18:02:24 EST Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: In a message dated 11/15/2000 5:42:33 PM, dlwhite at texas.net writes: << I don't know who said this, but the Frankish half, though of perhaps minor importance, is wrong: the Franks were critically (to their success in forging alliances with the Church) not Arians. >> Actually it may not be of minor importance. Arianism was a fundamentally Greek form of Christianity and as such was the source of the first strong foreign influx of Christian meaning and terminology into a Germanic language. S. Long From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Nov 15 22:24:44 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 17:24:44 -0500 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory In-Reply-To: <001f01c04df3$abbdaca0$032863d1@texas.net> Message-ID: The Franks were evidently Arians until Clovis converted to Catholicism after the pope's representative promised him victory >> The Goths and Franks were Christians (albeit Arianist) ... > I don't know who said this, but the Frankish half, though of perhaps >minor importance, is wrong: the Franks were critically (to their success in >forging alliances with the Church) not Arians. > Dr. David L. White Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Nov 16 04:02:15 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 23:02:15 EST Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: In a message dated 11/15/00 3:42:33 PM Mountain Standard Time, dlwhite at texas.net writes: << the Franks were critically (to their success in forging alliances with the Church) not Arians. >> -- correct. They were, in fact, still pagan at the time they set up shop in Gaul. When they converted, it was to Catholicism. The Goths and Vandals, of course, were Arian 'heretics'. That's why we have the Gothic bible, a priceless source of information on East Germanic. From r.clark at auckland.ac.nz Thu Nov 16 05:12:53 2000 From: r.clark at auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark (FOA LING)) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 18:12:53 +1300 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Stanley Friesen [mailto:sarima at friesen.net] Sent: Wednesday, 15 November 2000 4:02 p.m. At 05:05 PM 11/13/00 +1100, Tristan Jones wrote: >>small. Maybe that inclusive elite thing might explain the success of spread >>of Arabic over vast areas of Middle East and Africa, Mandarin and Cantonese >>over huge areas of China, I think before the spread of Chinese Empire, >>Austronesian Languages would have been spoken over large areas of Southern >>China's Rice Growing Zones. >I think this is fairly well established. Certainly there are still relict >Austronesian languages in Southern China even today. No. The only AN language in China today (apart from Taiwan of course) is Tsat, spoken by a few thousand people on Hainan island, and it is a relatively late intrusion from further south. That Chinese replaced Austronesian languages as it expanded is quite possible, but none of them survived on the mainland. Ross Clark From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Nov 16 10:09:52 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 10:09:52 +0000 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: Geoffrey Summers writes: [LT] >> The Turkish conquest of Anatolia resulted in the almost total >> replacement of the earlier languages in favor of Turkish. > Is this sweeping statement correct?. Yes; I think so. Turkish is today the mother tongue of about 90% of the population of Turkey. Most of the rest are speakers of Kurdish, in a large eastern area. A number of other languages are spoken by smaller groups, mostly along the borders: Laz and other Caucasian languages next to the Caucasus, Azerbaijani and Arabic along the eastern and southern borders, and so on. There are a few other odds and ends. When I was living in Turkey, I was told that there was a single Polish-speaking village somewhere in the middle of the country. I never got to see it, but anyway I doubt that Polish was already spoken in Anatolia before the Ottoman conquest. > How many languages were spoken on the Central Plateau in, say, AD 1900? The chief differences from today would have been a sizeable number of Armenian-speakers, most of them massacred a few years later, and a large number of Greek-speakers along the Aegean coast, almost all of them expelled after the Greco-Turkish war. So far as I know, the central plateau would not have been very different linguistically. > How long did the replacement take? I simply don't know, and I don't know if anybody knows. Greek was the prestige language before the Turkish conquest, but I've never seen even a guess as to how many mother tongues were spoken in Byzantine Anatolia, or as to how long any of these languages lasted after the conquest. I would certainly be interested in finding out, if anybody knows of any work on this topic. > To what extent did replacement spread through Turkish controlled lands > beyond Anatolia, depending on what you mean by Anatolia? Not very greatly, as far as I know, but then I was only talking about Anatolia. > What was the Ottoman court language. As far as I know, it was Ottoman Turkish. > To go one step further, the script was changed. To what extent did the > change of script (rather than, say, cultural or political orientation) > influence the incorporation of European words into modern Turkish? An interesting question, but probably not very much. Ottoman Turkish was already full of loanwords from European languages at the time of the Turkish revolution. Indeed, alongside his switch to the roman alphabet, Atatürk charged the Turkish Linguistic Society with finding "pure" Turkish replacements for words of foreign origin. Most of these words were from Arabic or Persian, of course, but hundreds of them were from European languages, especially from French, but also from German, Italian, English and perhaps Greek. The new script doubtless made it easier to write these words in an orderly way, but they were already in use in everyday speech. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Nov 15 23:50:21 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 18:50:21 EST Subject: Elite dominance theory vs. Practicality Message-ID: Just a quick note. What Asia Minor and Pannonia had in common before moving towards a single language was the presence of an unusually large number of different languages. I heard someone roll off 22 languages that reportedly were spoken in the general area of modern day Hungary during the first millennium AD. And of course the area of modern day Turkey may well have had similar diversity before Ottoman Turkish became the "universal" language. In both cases, both languages may have solved a very practical problem. A third language is a good compromise, especially when it represents the new administrative powers that would affect one's official if not private life. In essence, this would have provided a neutral bridge over previous language barriers between a large number of different language elements - permitting a new and better channel of communications. Overcoming such barriers would probably have been commercially if not socially advantageous to those speakers who adopted the new second languages and to the next generations that made them their first languages. Regards, Steve Long From dlwhite at texas.net Thu Nov 16 03:00:06 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 21:00:06 -0600 Subject: English in Ireland Message-ID: One hundred thousand English arriving in Ireland over a hundred years is one thousand per year, which is not proportionally significant. It is roughly equivalent, on a proportional basis, to the number of Mexicans arriving per year in America. In any event, it is not controversial, to my knowledge, that the triumph (so to speak) of English over Irish in Ireland is largely a result of "elite dominance", not numerical preponderance. Dr. David L. White From dlwhite at texas.net Wed Nov 15 23:59:52 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 17:59:52 -0600 Subject: Motivating the Root Restrictions of PIE Message-ID: > I suspect that a slightly different set of alternatives can cover most of > the same problems. > 1. The traditional voiced plosives were actually voiceless unaspirated > plosives. > 2. The traditional voiceless plosives were actually voiceless *aspirated* > plosives. > 3. The traditional voiced aspirates were either simple voiced plosive or > voiced fricatives. > At the very least this avoids the typological issues. But under this proposal no reason is given that roots with voiceless unaspirated plosives (TET corresponding to traditional DED) should be avoided. Nor is the dissimilation seen in the other two types motivated, as there is no reason that voiceless aspirated plosives and either voiced plosives or fricatives should not co-occur. We find nothing "hard to say" about "tub" (or "but"), or "peeve" (or "veep"), for example, nor should we. The typological issues, I think, are minor, as the idea that there are no unique languages implies that it is somehow mystically illegal, if only two languages have a certain feature, for one of them to go extinct. I do not think reality works that way. The sort of "stiff voice" vs. "slack voice" contrast that is two thirds of what I posit is, by the way, not unattestasted. It occurs in some SE Asian languages, in particular (if memory serves) Mpi. How it sounds can be heard by those having access to the UCLA program called "Sounds of the World's Languages" (or something like it). Both stiff voice and slack voice occur, non-phonemically, in English, and there is nothing particularly exotic about either. Stiff voice is what is sometimes called "vocal fry" or "creak", and is often used by men (esp. in RP, I have heard) trying to sound more manly, and slack voice is the breathy voice (for some reason considered "sexy" by a good part of humanity) heard from such luminaries as Marilyn Monroe and George Michael. Nor is it unheard of for pharyngealization, which is technically a secondary articulation, to be used as if it is a phonation type, which is essentially what Semitic does. What is unattested is for both these ways of doing things to be used in the same language, but this could well be just a coincidence, as neither of them is terribly common to begin with. Dr. David L. White From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Nov 16 00:07:16 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 18:07:16 -0600 Subject: Motivating the Root Restrictions of PIE Message-ID: Dear Stanley and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stanley Friesen" Sent: Monday, November 13, 2000 8:17 PM > At 11:39 AM 11/11/00 -0600, David L. White wrote: >> According to Lehmann, PIE shows three kinds of root restrictions. Accepting >> for now the traditional interpretation and using "D" to represent any voiced >> plosive, "T" to represent any voiceless plosive, and "DH" to represent any >> voiced aspirate plosve, these are: >> 1) no /DeD/ >> 2) no /TeDH/ >> 3) no /DHeT/ >> correct, these restrictions (not to mention the /b/-gap) do not make sense. >> So here is one way (the only way I can see) that they could make sense. >> 1) The voiced plosives were orginally not voiced but >> pharyngealized. >> 2) The voiceless plosives were orginally laryngealized (which is >> not the same as glottalized). >> 3) The voiced aspirates were as traditionally posited, >> technically murmured. > I suspect that a slightly different set of alternatives can cover most of > the same problems. > 1. The traditional voiced plosives were actually voiceless unaspirated > plosives. > 2. The traditional voiceless plosives were actually voiceless *aspirated* > plosives. > 3. The traditional voiced aspirates were either simple voiced plosive or > voiced fricatives. [PR] This conforms very closely to my own views with the exception that I would add: 4. The traditional voiceless aspirates were voiceless fricatives. Pat From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Thu Nov 16 04:05:43 2000 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 22:05:43 -0600 Subject: Motivating the Root Restrictions of PIE Message-ID: To explain the well know restrictions of PIE roots, >> 1) no /DeD/ >> 2) no /TeDH/ >> 3) no /DHeT/ , David L White proposed: >>So here is one way (the only way I can see) that they could make sense. >> 1) The voiced plosives were orginally not voiced but pharyngealized. >> 2) The voiceless plosives were orginally laryngealized (which is not >> the same as glottalized). >> 3) The voiced aspirates were as traditionally posited, technically >> murmured. Surely he can't mean that *all* of these applied: what sort of typological system would that be, with pharyngealized, laryngealized, and murmured stops, but no other kind? Stanley Friesen rejected this proposal, saying: >I suspect that a slightly different set of alternatives can cover most of >the same problems. >1. The traditional voiced plosives were actually voiceless unaspirated >plosives. >2. The traditional voiceless plosives were actually voiceless *aspirated* >plosives. >3. The traditional voiced aspirates were either simple voiced plosive or >voiced fricatives. This set of alternatives hardly seems "slightly different" to me. SF continued: >At the very least this avoids the typological issues. That depends on which alternative is chosen in the third series: while a system with voiced stops (possibly with fricative allophones) is typologically impeccable, voiced fricative phonemes would be at least very unusual for a system lacking corresponding voiceless fricative phonemes. Pax Domini semper vobiscum. Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at memphis.edu University of Memphis From dlwhite at texas.net Thu Nov 16 03:20:40 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 21:20:40 -0600 Subject: Problems with DLW's "Motivating the Root Restrictions of PIE" Message-ID: The problem (that I see) with reinterpreting voicing (in obstruents) as pharyngealization is that in addition to predicting a /b/-gap it would also predict a /gw/-gap, which does not occur. This problem can, I think, be solved by positing that the labio-velars where "originally" (at the time the root restrictions evolved) uvulars, and were only later reanalyzed as labio-velars, due to some phonetic similarity involving lowered F2 in both cases, though uvulars are primarily characterized by raised F1, and only secondarily by lowered F2. Dr. David L. White From dlwhite at texas.net Thu Nov 16 03:34:04 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 21:34:04 -0600 Subject: Observation on the Laryngeals Message-ID: It is interesting that these affect only /e/, leaving original /o/ alone. What this suggests, very strongly as far as I can see, is that the laryngeals affected tongue-position, not general acoustics. Otherwise a back/rounding (from H3) of /e/ and a fronting (from H1) of /o/ should have produced more or less the same result. This in turn suggests that the laryngeals were not really laryngeals in the sense that that term is traditionally intended (sounds produced behind the velum) but rather were, as various German linguists these days suggest, dorsal sounds of the normal kind, produced in front of the velum. Thus the original effects would have been motivated by articulation, not perception, and the resistiance of /o/ (reminiscent of Greek vowel contraction, where /o/ dominates /e/) can be explained. This would, however, be a pretty much fatal blow to attempts to connect IE laryngeals with what might be called true laryngeals in Semitic, and therefore to Nostratic. (Please, let's not get into that.) Dr. David L. White From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Thu Nov 16 04:21:59 2000 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 22:21:59 -0600 Subject: More on dental fricatives Message-ID: David L. White wrote: > Perhaps I am merely displaying my ignorance (or lack of full >comprehension of previous missives), but aren't positional considerations >relevant here? Does Spanish theta (when not from /d/) occur finally? Yes, in words such as _luz_ 'light', _vez_ 'occasion' < Lat. _lu:cem_, _vicem_. Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at memphis.edu University of Memphis From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Nov 16 10:21:53 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 10:21:53 +0000 Subject: More on dental fricatives Message-ID: David White writes: [LT, on Basque] >> but the curious thing is that they accept phonetic theta when >> it represents Spanish /d/, but not when it represents Spanish theta. > Perhaps I am merely displaying my ignorance (or lack of full > comprehension of previous missives), but aren't positional considerations > relevant here? Does Spanish theta (when not from /d/) occur finally? Yes, though the frequency is not high, except in names: 'sheaf', 'time, occasion', 'voice', 'chess', 'light', 'cross', and all those Spanish surnames like , , , , , and . There are also some Basque place names which get final theta in Spanish, an example being Spanish for Basque . Spanish 'voice' is borrowed into Basque as , with a laminal sibilant, and not with theta, or sometimes as , with the more normal (in final position) laminal affricate. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Nov 16 14:18:29 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 09:18:29 -0500 Subject: More on dental fricatives In-Reply-To: <000501c04df6$c8af5040$3f2863d1@texas.net> Message-ID: You're right, (in areas where it occurs) /-_DH_/ > /-_TH_/ only occurs finally --at the end of words or syllable final before nasals (I can't think of any other consonants that might follow ) >> but the curious thing is that they accept phonetic theta when >> it represents Spanish /d/, but not when it represents Spanish theta. > Perhaps I am merely displaying my ignorance (or lack of full >comprehension of previous missives), but aren't positional considerations >relevant here? Does Spanish theta (when not from /d/) occur finally? >Perhaps in acronyms, and that is what I missed, due to the trauma of >election night. But from what little I know, it seems that perhaps the >where is as important as the what, so to speak. > Dr. David L. White Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Nov 16 14:24:24 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 09:24:24 -0500 Subject: More on dental fricatives In-Reply-To: <004201c04e7e$f2631740$9c03703e@edsel> Message-ID: I think you're missing the point. In standard Spanish is ALWAYS fricative /_DH_/ except when sentence initial (or after a pause in a sentence), after /l/ & after /n/ The variant forms occur in syllable final [snip ] >[Ed Selleslagh] >This pronunciation of d as edh is quite frequent, not only in final positions, >but it is by no means arbitrary and I haven't been able yet to figure out the >rules. A very similar phenomenon is that of b being pronounced as fricative v >in certain positions (e.g. Avraham Lincoln in Spanglish), You mean /aBHraNG liNGkoNG/? :> > even by native >speakers who "can't" pronounce fricative v knowingly. Two cases of >non-phonemic >alternate pronunciation?? Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Nov 16 14:31:18 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 09:31:18 -0500 Subject: More on dental fricatives In-Reply-To: <004101c04e7e$f1f53a40$9c03703e@edsel> Message-ID: >[Ed] more like a thibilant :> >I would guess that this is because in Castilian theta (written as c or z) is >considered a sibilant of sorts. In the Americas it is pronounced /s/ anyway. [snip] Spanish are from Old Spanish /c, DZ/. Some try to assign a clean dichotomy of < /c/ & < /DZ/ but a check of the various spellings doesn't seem to allow that Someone more knowledgeable than I am can elaborate on voiced vs. unvoiced affricates in Old Spanish or whether dialect had anything to do with it >[Ed] >This brings us back to the old discussion about the origins of the two >sibilants s/theta in Castilian (the often heard idea is that it comes from an >affricated s) and its possible relationship to the two (apical/laminal) >sibilants written as s/z in Basque. After all, Castilian originated in the >fringe of the Basque speaking area. Remember also my remark about the >Castilian adjective Madrileño, with an l like in Basque 'Madril'. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From lmfosse at elender.hu Wed Nov 15 21:05:34 2000 From: lmfosse at elender.hu (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 22:05:34 +0100 Subject: SV: Elamite Message-ID: Anthony Appleyard [SMTP:mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk] skrev 14. november 2000 15:37: > How likely is the supposed connection between Elamite and Dravidian? Apparently not very likely. The American scholar McAlpin suggested such a connection and tried to establish arguments for it, but his work has been rejected by leading Dravidianists. Best regards, Lars Martin Fosse Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114, 0674 Oslo Norway Phone: +47 22 32 12 19 Mobile phone: +47 90 91 91 45 Fax 1: +47 22 32 12 19 Fax 2: +47 85 02 12 50 (InFax) Email: lmfosse at online.no From Georg at home.ivm.de Thu Nov 16 18:49:48 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 19:49:48 +0100 Subject: Elamite In-Reply-To: <6079D1033C3@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: >How likely is the supposed connection between Elamite and Dravidian? As an (obvious) non-specialist, I may throw in a few remarks: So far, the only *substantial* work to demonstrate this relationship is McAlpins's TPhilSoc work of 1981, which I have recently had between my hands. I don't know much Dravidian, and I don't know Elamite. *But*: McAlpin does *not* compare a haphazard list of words which somehow resemble each other. He is at pains to find regularity, and - although some comparisons do look a bit, say, not-first-class, when it comes to semantics - it looks like he found a great deal of it. On Dravidian: he is an expert, holding (or having hold 20 years ago) a chair in Dravidian studies. On Elamite, I cannot comment on his expertise, but, in the work, he seems to be able to do a lot of necessary homework, i.e.: he cites Elamite texts at length, arguing for specific functions of some affixes from context. He is aware of chronological layers of Elamite texts. On the whole, he seems to have familiarized himself quite thoroghly with the language (including to learn how to read it and interpret actual primary sources). What struck me as best in his work is that he is eager to find cognate morphology (fulfilling the requirement of finding polydimensional paradigmaticity) and seems to succeed in that. Moreover, some of his sound-laws work in affoxes as well, i.e. once they are found, a lot of morphology seems to fall into place. Given all that, McAlpin's attempt looks very good and inspiring. I'*m not aware, whether there have been any reactions from the Dravidianist and/or Elamicist communities, and what their criticisms, if any, were. His conclusion is, quite surprisingly, that Elamite is just another Dravidian language, or, if I remember correctly, that it is even closer to (most of) Dravidian, than Brahui is. What could be done now, would be to check his Elamite data with the fine and comprehensive dictionary of Hinz', which was published after McAlpin's work, and anything which has been published on E. grammar since (those cuneiform-languages are really moving targets ...). That's everything I, as a non-connoisseur of both language (families) should say. In method and spirit of approach it looks *miles above* what Greenberg, Ruhlen and the whole lot are able to produce. But it could be wrong, nevertheless, let's hear the experts. StG -- Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstraße 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Nov 17 05:04:15 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 00:04:15 EST Subject: Elamite Message-ID: In a message dated 11/15/2000 2:33:21 PM, mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk writes: << How likely is the supposed connection between Elamite and Dravidian? [ Moderator's note: Mr. Appleyard's query is in response to Steve Long's post of 3 Nov 2000: > Apparently a characteristic of "Elamite" is that the texts that are > readable (e.g., the Behistun inscription) are "like Ottoman Turkish, made > up of many borrowed words, particularly Persian and Semitic." Early > "Elamite" texts have not been deciphered. >> The foremost mentioned work in terms of making the Elamite-Dravidian connection is David McAlpin's "Proto-Elamian-Dravidian: the evidence and its implications" (1981). (See also "Elamite and Dravidian: Further evidence of relationship" (With discussion by M.B. Emeneau, W.H. Jacobsen, F.B.J. Kuiper, H.H. Paper, E. Reiner, R. Stopa, F. Vallat, R.W. Wescott, and a reply by McAlpin) 16 Current Anthropology (1975); also, N. Lahovary, Dravidian Origins and the West (Madras,1957) -- notes structural similarities in the Dravidian, Sumerian and Elamite languages.) One problem is, once again, that the supposed "proto-Elamite" language of the pre-cuneiform inscriptions is still undeciphered. This leaves open the opinion that the similarities between later cuneiform Elamite and Dravidian are the result of borrowings -- this Elamite showing a great deal of foreign influence otherwise. This is why Kamil Zvelebil, Possehl and other Dravidian-Tamil scholars refer to the relationship with Elamite as being "poorly understood." Bernard Sergent -- a proponent of the idea that Harappan-Indus was Dravidian -- in "Genesis of India" (1997) apparently also takes the position that the isoglosses cited by McAlpin can be explained "through contact rather than common origin." It seems the main commonality between Elamite and Dravidian is that they are both agglutinating. Proto-Dravidian however has been reconstructed as exclusively suffixal while Elamite apparently is not strict about the location of the lexical root. McAlfin also found a number of common agricultural terms that suggested that Proto-Elam-Dravidian separated after "neolithization." Much of the cuneiform texts are however heavily influenced by Semitic, Persian and possibly even Turkic -- suggesting that Dravidian-like elements may have been transfered in a number of ways. The pictographic "proto-Elamite" script itself apparently shows some affinities with Harappan scripts, but also shares some common elements with Anatolian and Sumerian scripts. The Harappan scripts have not been deciphered according to any consensus. >From what I can see there is no clear consensus that Elamite and Dravidian were the same or related languages. BTW - in the category of credibility of ancient historians - Herodotus scored big points by matching almost perfectly the report regarding Darius the Great given on the Behistun (or Bisutun) Stone located in modern Iran. His list of Darius' local conspiratorial enemies was the first key to deciphering the official royal inscriptions written in three undeciphered languages -- Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. Regards, Steve Long From milan.rezac at utoronto.ca Thu Nov 16 09:45:34 2000 From: milan.rezac at utoronto.ca (milan.rezac at utoronto.ca) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 04:45:34 -0500 Subject: The Germanic substrate - knives? In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.1.20001115001915.00b1dc50@voruta.vu.lt> Message-ID: The vowels are a problem. I think OCS shows the hard yer for _okuno_; the Finnish borrowing is _akkuna_ < *_okuno_ (dial., for std. _ikkuna_). So PSlv. *okuno. That makes a lot of sense as a derivative of IE. *okw-, *okw-no- > *okuno-: cp. Greek op-, omma < *okw-mnt- 'eye', Lat. oculus, etc. A connection with Russ. _kinut'_ is improbable because of the vowels: _kinut'_ < kynOti (O=syllabic nasal), best connected with kyv- (something like 'move in a swinging fashion'), sc. *kyv-nO- > kynO-. Interestingly, the Gothic word for window is auga-dauro 'eye-door', English window < Old Norse vind-auga 'wind-eye'. On Wed, 15 Nov 2000, Kastytis Beitas wrote: > But I have one fresh crazy idea, based on this *kn- thing. :-) > There is Russian word okno 'window; opening, orifice, hole'. Usually it is > explained as derivative from Slavonic oko 'eye'. But there is other > possibility. > There are some Russian words with initial o-, where this o is a prefix. For > example: .... > Idea is that Russian okno 'window' is actually o-kno, where kn- means > something (hole, opening etc) that is cut by knife or punched by some sharp > or similar implement... And this kn- in okno is maybe the lonely last relic > in Russian... His nearest relative may be is Russian verb kinut' 'to cast, > throw'. Other group of related words are words with gn- (Russian gniot etc) > and gin- ... > Kastytis Beitas From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com Thu Nov 16 19:26:04 2000 From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 14:26:04 -0500 Subject: The Germanic substrate - knives? In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.1.20001115001915.00b1dc50@voruta.vu.lt> Message-ID: Imaginative etymology, but this word is spelled in a late 10th cent. East Slavic text with a back jer, i.e., oku^no, which is most likely continued by the modern Russian genitive pl. . A derivative of "eye" as a word for "window" suggests Old Norse , literally, "wind-eye," whence English , Irish , etc. Jim Rader > But I have one fresh crazy idea, based on this *kn- thing. :-) > There is Russian word okno 'window; opening, orifice, hole'. Usually it is > explained as derivative from Slavonic oko 'eye'. But there is other > possibility. > Idea is that Russian okno 'window' is actually o-kno, where kn- means > something (hole, opening etc) that is cut by knife or punched by some sharp > or similar implement... And this kn- in okno is maybe the lonely last relic > in Russian... His nearest relative may be is Russian verb kinut' 'to cast, > throw'. Other group of related words are words with gn- (Russian gniot etc) > and gin- ... > Kastytis Beitas From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Nov 17 15:43:59 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 09:43:59 -0600 Subject: The Germanic substrate - knives? Message-ID: Dear Steve and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Monday, November 13, 2000 11:53 PM > In a message dated 11/11/2000 9:19:50 PM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: > << You make a very interesting point regarding I think of knife in > the sense of "cut, tear, strike, kill" but I can see how "flesher, scraper" > can work>> > Well, the factuality of these supposed non-IE words is often repeated and > without question. In fact many have dead ringers with clear etymologies in > other IE languages. It seems the connections between them however have been > discounted either because of bad definitions or because of the sound laws -- > which of course should not make us blind to obvious similarities that are > impossible to assign to coincidence. There are more of these words I'd > like to address. [PR] It was the ambiguity of headings like *gen- in Pokorny that first started me looking at proposals for Nostratic; however, I now believe I may have come close to disambiguating: pre-Ablaut-IE *gAn, 'press together'; pre-Ablaut-IE *g(^)En-, 'puncture' -> 'penetrate sexually' pre-Ablaut-IE *gOn-, 'twist' This really does not cover all the meanings because IE *g also is the residue of an earlier velar nasal, [ng], which may have passed through a stage of [G] before merging with [g]: pre-Ablaut-IE *ngAn, 'tube'; pre-Ablaut-IE *ng(^)En-, 'lump' pre-Ablaut-IE *ngOn-, 'ball' My best guess would be that the 'knife' words started out as pre-Ablaut-IE *g(^)En-, and originally signified 'daggers'. 'Cut' seems to be universally attached to pre-Ablaut-IE *k(h)Ol-. 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/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ec at ec hecc, vindga meipi a netr allar nmo, geiri vnda~r . . . a ~eim mei~i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rstom renn." (Havamal 138) From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Thu Nov 16 20:48:43 2000 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 14:48:43 -0600 Subject: thy thigh etc. Message-ID: On Tuesday Robert Whiting responded at great length to my post on the English interdental fricatives, in which I attempted to draw some lessons from the German non-distinction between [x] and [c,] in _Kuchen_ 'cake' vs. _Kuhchen_ 'little cow', which I analyzed as /ku:x at n/ vs. /ku:+x at n/. The gist of his argument seems to be that if it is fair to use phonological boundaries (which he identifies as always ultimately morphological boundaries), then it is also fair to use morphological and lexical information to account for the distribution of the intedental fricatives [T] and [D] in English. He overlooks a significant difference between morphological -> phonological boundaries and other types of morphological information: boundaries can be located precisely between morphemes. It is therefore to show them in phonological representations, for their position (and type) seems to matter for the phonetic realization. But information such as "native/foreign" or "content/function word" cannot be so located and cannot be described in any real sense as "morphological", but rather as lexical and (for the latter, at least) "syntactic". There is no inconsistency in saying that boundaries are phonologically relevant while other information is not. (I do not mean to imply that boundaries are *always* relevant while other information *never* is, only that there is no inconsistency in treating them differently.) A few other points: How did _thy_ and _thigh_ differ before the former developed a voiced fricative? Easy: the Old English forms were _thi:n_ and _the:oh_, where the final -h represented a velar fricative. The loss of the final consonants in these words seems to be much later than the initial voicing. As the possibility of a three-way /ph : p : b/ contrast: While I agree that English speakers tend to hear unaspirated [p] as /b/ (at least, if the stop has a lenis pronunciation; the fortis stops of the Romance languages are normally perceived as /p/), systems with this contrast are by no means rare. It was found in ancient Greek and a variety of modern languages. It could not *on typological grounds* be ruled out for some future version of English. And finally, I have read Chomsky & Halle. Seems to me they thought that had proved we didn't need phonemes to do phonology. and that various problems (of the type to which the thy thigh controversy belongs) could be resolved if we accepted "minor rules". Well, that's very nice, but that's not the framework in which we have been arguing, so I don't see why you invoked them. Regards and peace Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at memphis.edu University of Memphis From dlwhite at texas.net Thu Nov 16 13:19:31 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 07:19:31 -0600 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Look, either we admit that English speakers could coin /lith/ vs /lidh/, whereas Japanese speakers could not coin /biri/ versus /bili/ or we (somewhat obstructionistically) do not. If we admit it, there must be an explanation. The view of "the phonemic principle" that I and several others have been pushing provides this, while the view that Mr. Whiting has been pushing does not. I personally prefer to construe the concept of "phoneme" in such a way that meaningful and accurate predictions, which yield an increase in understanding of linguistic behavior (even hypothetical), can be made. The sort of distributional standards that are commonly used to determine phonemes can fail to predict what speakers are sensitive to and able to control. For example there is in one African language (I forget which, but I think it is in the Nuer Dinka area) which has predictable long-range nasalization that speakers are sensitive to. The long-range is the key, because the nasalization, though abstractly predictable, is not predictable from phonetic implementation. (Speakers do not really feel compelled to open their velums the whole way, as opposed to the way that English speakers feel compelled to aspirate under certain circumstances.) In a case like this, the question of whether nasalization is or is not phonemic depends on what we want the word to capture. I prefer it to capture speakers abilities, enabling us to predict (among other things) what coinages are possible and what are not. Mr. Whiting evidently prefers it to capture distributional truths, among other things. As I said before, perhaps over-charitably, we will have to agree to differ. It should be noted that the matter of boundaries, how many types there are and how (other than elegance of description) they are to be detected, is not so clear as some would have us think. For example, it is fairly common in Old English for what we think of as the first element of a compound to be written as a separate word. Nor is it clear that the sort of boundaries we have been talking about are properly described as "morphological", as any account of phonetics and phonology described in their own terms would at the very least have to include a recognition of word boundaries. But if we admit that at least there are stronger "word-like" boundaries on the one hand and things quite a lot weaker than that on the other, then the matter of "kuchen" can be handled by treating the diminutive as "ku-chen" or even, more radically, "ku chen", with "chen" as a somewhat exceptional word (given a looser definition of the word "word", which does not after all have a revealed meaning). The pronunciation referred to does indicate the presence of a strong boundary of a fundamentally different type, general rather than merely morphological, compared to the boundary in something like Latin "paribus" (however we divide that). Dr. David L. White From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Nov 16 13:58:17 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 07:58:17 -0600 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Dear Robert and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Whiting" Sent: Tuesday, November 14, 2000 10:36 AM > On Sun, 05 Nov 2000 CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU wrote: >>>On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, David L. White wrote: >>>> For English /th/ vs/ /dh/, the question to ask is something >>>> like "In a story where two brothers were named "Lith" and "Lidh", >>>> would an audience be able to keep them apart?" The answer is >>>> clearly yes, regardless of the various other consideration that >>>> some have noted, therefore the distinction is (not surprisingly) >>>> phonemic. > >Bob Whiting replied: > I would have said that contrasts that can be accounted for by > rules are not phonemic contrasts. Back in the Early Logocene, when this thread started, the question was posed as to whether Ablaut variation in IE roots established *e and *o as phonemes in IE. Am I correct in assuming that, for you, at least, an IE *Ce/oC- does not establish *e and *o as IE phonemes? 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/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ec at ec hecc, vindga meipi a netr allar nmo, geiri vnda~r . . . a ~eim mei~i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rstom renn." (Havamal 138) From sarima at friesen.net Thu Nov 16 16:16:32 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 08:16:32 -0800 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 06:36 PM 11/14/00 +0200, Robert Whiting wrote: >So you can't just start shifting contrasts around one at a time. >You have to consider the effect on rest of the phonological >system. If we wanted to use [p] and [p'] contrastively, we would >probably have to give up /b/ as a phoneme. And the same is true This is not necessarily true. Classical Greek had all three sounds as distinct phonemes: pi, phi, and beta. (And similarly for the other stops: the consonants that are *now* pronounced as voiceless fricatives were originally voiceless aspirates). >And I still say that the fact that a person can hear and >recognize the difference between two sounds does not ipso facto >make those sounds phonemes of his language. I can hear the >difference between bright l and dark l. You might say that I can >only do this because I have studied Russian and Arabic. But I I think this very likely - as I certainly cannot normally distinguish them (except when I am listening *very* carefully, and the speaker is speaking slowly and clearly). Nor can most people I know. >The problem is that 'thigh' and 'thy' were always different >words. So the question is, for those who insist that differences >in meaning must mean the presence of different phonemes, what This does not sound like any rule I have ever heard suggested before. (Though in the case in point the distinction seems to have originally been phonemic accent). >I have explained my reasons for not considering 'thigh' and 'thy' >a minimal pair above. And I find it unconvincing. The categorical difference may once have been significant, but I doubt it is currently "real" in the minds of most speakers, which is a minimal requirement for some linguistic pattern to be available for use in phonemic rules. > My reasons for not considering 'ether' / >'either' a minimal pair are similar (ultimately relying on the >fact that the pronunciations are required by rules), but if you >prefer, I could invent a silent phoneme that blocks the voicing >of intervocalic [th] in loanwords (there is no need for this Such a rule can *only* exist if normal, non-specialist speakers "know" that the words belong to different categories (even if they do not know what the categories originally represented). Speakers cannot apply a rule based on some category they are unaware of. Since I see no *synchronic* evidence that any non-linguist feels these words to belong to different relevant categories, there is no way such a rule could exist in the minds of such speakers. Yes, the pattern *exists*, but *most* living speakers are *not* *aware* *of* *it*, so they cannot have any rule involving it. >Everyone seems to object to my using these rules to determine >whether the sounds involved are phonemes or not, saying "you >can't use these rules because they aren't phonological rules." Not me. I object on the grounds that the average English speaker is unaware of the antecedents in the suggested rules, and so is incompetent to apply them. In order to enable these supposed rules you must *first* show by some set of behavioral differences that the average speaker is *aware* of the distinctions the rule makes use of. If the difference in pronunciation is the *only* difference in behavior, it requires fewer theoretical constructs (per Occam's Razor) to simply posit the sounds involved are phonemes. >development of /z/ and /v/. All I say is "where is the evidence?" >Where are all the contrasts that would show unequivocally that >that [th] and [dh] are phonemes as there are contrasts that show >that /z/ and /v/ are phonemes. And I don't consider 'thigh' and >'thy' or 'ether' and 'either' any more indicative of the >phonemicity of [th] and [dh] than 'Kuhchen' and 'Kuchen' are >indicative of the phonemicity of German [c,] and [x]. The difference here is that the basis for this rule is patently and obviously known by all speakers of German, since the -chen suffix is still *productive* in German. Thus it is clear on *independent* *grounds* that the speakers are aware of the difference in structure (or category) of the two words. Thus we know *a* *priori* that this difference is available for use in various rules. None of the suggested rules you have proposed meet this requirement. They almost all involve *dia*chronic patterns that few living speakers are even *aware* of, unless they are unusually educated in linguistic matters (such as all of us here). >convincing. For instance, one might say that [x] could be used >as a phoneme in English by forming new words where it contrasts >with /k/ or /g/. Since these words could be formed without any The difference here is that: A. All speakers would consider the word to be "odd" and think it sounds foreign. B. A great many speakers would hear it as having a /k/. (Check out how most people perceive German words with [x]: 'ik leebe dik' is how most English speakers pronounce "ich liebe dich"). >between [th] and [dh]. It's a good thing the pronunciation is >predictable. Only if you are a linguist and know what categories the words *used* to belong to. >One thing you can say for sure though is that never >represents [dh] (except in the name of the character 'edh'). So? The natural spelling for [dh] in English is not . >Otherwise it is regularly realized as [d] ('dhow', 'dharma', >'jodhpurs') and generally indicates a foreign word (except, of >course, in native compounds where it represents two sounds [e.g., >'madhouse', 'deadhead', etc.]). Incidentally, I'm still looking >for an explanation of why words from languages with phonemic /dh/ >don't come into English with [dh]. It seems curious, what with Well, the examples you give above do not establish this point. Those are Indic words, and the there represents a "voiced aspirate" (or murmured voiced stop) not a voiced fricative. You need to find *recent* borrowing from language with phonemic [dh] to establish this "fact". (Recent is necessary because any borrowing prior to the establishment of [dh] as a phoneme would *naturally* be treated that way). >Maybe not, but you don't get any help from the orthography on how >to pronounce them. And although there are only five vowel So? Pronunciation is prior, orthography secondary. Writing is just a set of "hints" as to how to say something. Some writing systems are more explicit about these hints than others. English falls in the middle, it is less explicit than Russian or German or Latin, but more so than Hebrew or Heiroglyphic Egyptian. Indeed unpointed Hebrew shows just *how* "incomplete" a writing system can be and still remain adequate for representing a language. People normally learn words not from *reading* but from *listening* - certainly during the first five years of life, and largely even afterwards. How a particular word is written is largely arbitrary. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Thu Nov 16 16:28:17 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 08:28:17 -0800 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 10:36 AM 11/15/00 +0200, Robert Whiting wrote: >stop you also release a puff of air. So it is not surprising >that it is very difficult to contrast final aspirated and >unaspirated stops. Difficult, but I am not sure it is impossible. Did Classical Greek lack final tau's? If it had them, then it constitutes an example of a language that had this contrast. >On the other hand, if the brothers were named Till and T'ill, the >audience would have no trouble telling them apart. It would be OK, so try Till (unaspirated) and Dill. This distinction, also, *can* be made, since some languages *do* make it. >easier if the audience were Chinese, because this distinction is >phonemic in Chinese. But an English speaking audience would >still be able to tell them apart. They would probably hear the >initial unaspirated [t] as [d] (the puff of air that constitutes >the aspiration delays the onset of voicing for the following >vowel; without this puff of air, voicing begins earlier and >partly overlaps the preceding consonant). Not perhaps a >full-bodied [d], but a sound with enough voicing to make it sound >more like [d] than [t]. The English speaking audience would just >assume that one brother was named Till and the other Dill. Does >this prove that [t] and [t'] are already phonemes in English? >Hardly. No, in proves that in English the unaspirated stops are normally allophones of the voiced stops, not the unvoiced. >> And this is despite the fact that both the pair /r/ and /l/ and >> the pair /t/ and /t'/ *can* be distinguished, since some >> languages do exactly that. >Oriental speakers are notorious for not being able to distinguish >[r] from [l]. And nobody can really articulate final unaspirated >stops without contortions. I am not sure of this. Can somebody give me the scoop on Classical Greek? Or how about Sanskrit? Did it have final unaspirated voiceless stops? >Actually you'd probably do better with Lithth or Liththe. But >the point was that whatever way you come up with for expressing >[dh] it will have to be something that is not used now. Once >[th] and [dh] can contrast without any conditioning whatsoever, >there will have to be some way to distinguish them graphically or >else you will have a completely opaque writing similar to . So? I see no reason that such a change would be *necessary*. As long as people recognize the words as written, does it matter if they accurately represent the pronunciation? Oh, sure, a distinction in spelling would make learning to read and write *easier* - but that is hardly a *requirement* for a writing system. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From bronto at pobox.com Sat Nov 18 07:09:44 2000 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 23:09:44 -0800 Subject: admin: duplicates? Message-ID: I got two copies of several postings today. Anyone else? -- Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/ [ Moderator's response: My apologies to all. Due to human error, a batch job which should have sent out only 8 (new) messages instead re-sent 20 which had already been sent. Because it was automated, I was not aware of the problem until much too late to do anything about it. --rma ] From dlwhite at texas.net Fri Nov 17 21:35:48 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 15:35:48 -0600 Subject: Franks as Arians Message-ID: About the Franks having been, at one point, Arians, is that in Gregory, as I imagine it must be? Most of my secondary sources are ambiguous, and one speaks of Clovis as "a barbarian king who contemplated conversion", which under ordinary circumstances would be taken to imply, if perhaps a bit weakly, that he was pagan. Not that I doubt it very much, that the Franks were at one point Arians, just a little bit ... 5%. Dr. David L. White From dlwhite at texas.net Fri Nov 17 22:28:02 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 16:28:02 -0600 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: > << the Franks were critically (to their success in forging alliances with > the Church) not Arians. >> > -- correct. They were, in fact, still pagan at the time they set up shop > in Gaul. When they converted, it was to Catholicism. Upon further examination, only two of my secondary sources say anything explicit about the matter, and they both say that the Franks were pagans before converting to Catholicism. 1) Hoyt and Chodorow, "Europe in the Middle Ages", p. 72: [Clovis] had an inestimable advantage of being, with the rest of the Franks, merely a heathen rather than a hated Arian heretic. 2) Cantor, "The Civilization of the Middle Ages", p. 110: Unlike the Visigoths, [the Franks] had not been converted by Arian missionaries ... So at this point until and unless I see otherwise in some primary source (is there any besides Gregory?), I am not going to believe it. But if I have perpetuated the errors of these scholars, I apologize. Dr. David L. White From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Nov 18 18:37:05 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 13:37:05 EST Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: In a message dated 11/17/00 10:46:51 PM Mountain Standard Time, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: > The Franks were evidently Arians until Clovis converted to Catholicism after > the pope's representative promised him victory -- no, they were _pagans_ until Clovis converted to Catholicism. They worshipped the standard Germanic pantheon: Wothan, Thunor, Nerthus and so forth. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Nov 18 18:43:35 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 13:43:35 EST Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: In a message dated 11/17/00 10:46:51 PM Mountain Standard Time, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: << The Franks were evidently Arians until Clovis converted to Catholicism after the pope's representative promised him victory >> -- incidentally, the 5th-century AD continental Germanics still had Tiw/Tiwaz as their primary god; a derivative of the PIE "sky" or "sky father" deity, by the usual *d ==>t. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Nov 18 03:04:57 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 22:04:57 EST Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: In a message dated 11/17/00 3:22:26 PM Mountain Standard Time, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: << > To what extent did replacement spread through Turkish controlled lands > beyond Anatolia, depending on what you mean by Anatolia? >> -- quite extensively. Eg., the population of Bulgaria was 40% Turkish at the time of the Bulgarian War of Independence in the mid 1870's. Crete had a 1/3 Turkish minority in 1898; there were other substantial Turkish minorities -- in Thessaly and Thrace, for instance -- and as far northwest as Serbia before the beginning of the various Balkan wars of independence starting in roughly the 1820's. Kemal Attaturk was born in Salonika, which is now a fairly homogenous Greek city. From a.rosta at newmail.net Sat Nov 18 04:54:07 2000 From: a.rosta at newmail.net (And Rosta) Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 04:54:07 -0000 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Ross Clark: > From: Stanley Friesen [mailto:sarima at friesen.net] > At 05:05 PM 11/13/00 +1100, Tristan Jones wrote: >>> small. Maybe that inclusive elite thing might explain the success of spread >>> of Arabic over vast areas of Middle East and Africa, Mandarin and Cantonese >>> over huge areas of China, I think before the spread of Chinese Empire, >>> Austronesian Languages would have been spoken over large areas of Southern >>> China's Rice Growing Zones. >> I think this is fairly well established. Certainly there are still relict >> Austronesian languages in Southern China even today. > No. The only AN language in China today (apart from Taiwan of course) is > Tsat, spoken by a few thousand people on Hainan island, and it is a > relatively late intrusion from further south. That Chinese replaced > Austronesian languages as it expanded is quite possible, but none of them > survived on the mainland. (Not really relevant to the elite dominance thread or to IE list, but...:) Laurent Sagart told me a few years back that he'd published a hypothesis that Chinese is AN (I don't know whether the Tibetan half of S-T is), and it expanded its territory at the expense of its close AN kin, the spread being due to a 'millet cult'. Unfortunately I no longer have the reference for this, the paper dealing with China as the AN homeland (because my university now and again likes to delete its employees' saved email for them). (If anyone would care to point me to literature discussing this issue (off-list, if appropriate), I'd be most grateful.) --And Rosta. From summers at metu.edu.tr Sat Nov 18 11:50:58 2000 From: summers at metu.edu.tr (Geoffrey SUMMERS) Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 13:50:58 +0200 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: Many thanks for your reply. I have commented on select parts. >> How many languages were spoken on the Central Plateau in, say, AD 1900? > The chief differences from today would have been a sizeable number of > Armenian-speakers, most of them massacred a few years later, and a > large number of Greek-speakers along the Aegean coast, almost all > of them expelled after the Greco-Turkish war. So far as I know, > the central plateau would not have been very different linguistically. I do not have figures to back up my impressions, surely someone does. Certainly sizeable number of Armenian speakers all over the central plateau, as evidenced by the writings of many European travellers, the presence of churches (mostly undocumented), and doubtless in the Ottoman defters. There was also a sizeable Greek (religion and language) population in central Cappadocia right down until the excahnge of populations in the early days of the Republic. I have understood that in the 19th century some of the "Greeks" were moving from villages into towns like Nevsehir. There were also Greek speakers in the Lake District. Much of the steppe was essentailly grazing land, transhumant Turkish even and some Kurdish speakers. I know nothing much about others, although I note that the written language of at least some of the Bektashi Order was Persian. In short, I doubt that Turkish was the dominant language on the Central Plateau in the early Middle Ages, and perhaps did not become so until the 18th or even the 19th century >> How long did the replacement take? > I simply don't know, and I don't know if anybody knows. Greek was > the prestige language before the Turkish conquest, but I've never > seen even a guess as to how many mother tongues were spoken in > Byzantine Anatolia, or as to how long any of these languages lasted > after the conquest. I would certainly be interested in finding out, > if anybody knows of any work on this topic. I am not able to help. >> To what extent did replacement spread through Turkish controlled lands >> beyond Anatolia, depending on what you mean by Anatolia? > Not very greatly, as far as I know, but then I was only talking > about Anatolia. But there were, and remain, many Turkish speakers in the Balkans. I have heard it claimed that there were more Turkish speakers in the Balkans in the 18th century than there were on the Anatolian plateau. Could anyone substantiate this? >> What was the Ottoman court language. > As far as I know, it was Ottoman Turkish. Someone jump on me if I am wrong here, but I had thought that the court language was Persian and that the court rather looked down on Turkish. Music, minature painting and other things also had a strong eastern flavour. If I am correct, when did the change occur? Geoff -- Geoffrey SUMMERS Dept. of Political Science & Public Administration, Middle East Technical University, Ankara TR-06531, TURKEY. Office Tel: (90) 312 210 2045 Home Tel/Fax: (90) 312 210 1485 The Kerkenes Project Tel: (90) 312 210 6216 http://www.metu.edu.tr/home/wwwkerk/ From Tristan at mail.scm-rpg.com.au Sat Nov 18 00:01:29 2000 From: Tristan at mail.scm-rpg.com.au (Tristan Jones) Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 11:01:29 +1100 Subject: Elite dominance theory vs. Practicality Message-ID: > I heard someone roll off 22 languages that reportedly were spoken > in the general area of modern day Hungary during the first millennium AD. > And of course the area of modern day Turkey may well have had similar > diversity before Ottoman Turkish became the "universal" language. 22 languages in Hungary, come on Hungary is only the size of Indiana state, 22 languages is a lot for a small region like that [ Moderator's comment: California was home to several dozen languages prior to European contact, as was the region of the United States called New England. This is not at all unusual. --rma ] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Nov 18 03:09:03 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 22:09:03 EST Subject: Elite dominance theory vs. Practicality Message-ID: Before the battle of Manzikert in the late 11th century, as far as I know Anatolia spoke mainly Greek, with Kurdish and Armenian in the east. The old Anatolian languages -- Phyrgian, Isaurian, etc. -- were pretty well extinct by late Byzantine times. Of course, Hellenic colonization of Anatolia was also very old by then; the western fringe was settled by Greek-speakers in the early Iron Age, after the fall of Mycenaean civilization; and after Alexander's time Greek cities were established far into the interior, by Greek colonists settled there by various Hellenistic monarchs. Even the Pontine kings, who were Persian by origin, encouraged Hellenization. By the early Roman period Greek had become the predominant language in all the cities and towns and among the upper classes generally. Over the following centuries it gradually penentrated the rural zones east of the old areas of Greek settlement. From dlwhite at texas.net Sat Nov 18 00:08:13 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 18:08:13 -0600 Subject: Turkish Message-ID: >> How many languages were spoken on the Central Plateau in, say, AD 1900? > The chief differences from today would have been a sizeable number of > Armenian-speakers, most of them massacred a few years later, and a > large number of Greek-speakers along the Aegean coast, almost all > of them expelled after the Greco-Turkish war. So far as I know, > the central plateau would not have been very different linguistically. Dawkins(1916) is a study (mainly) of Cappadocian Greek, which was presumably still spoken when he was studying it. (I have it only second-hand, though it is on my too-long list of things to read. But my impression has always been his study was first-hand.) Cappadocia is in central Anatolia, more or less. Cappadocian Greek brings up many interesting issues in language transfer that are perhaps too off-subject to be worth going into. >> To what extent did replacement spread through Turkish controlled lands >> beyond Anatolia, depending on what you mean by Anatolia? > Not very greatly, as far as I know, but then I was only talking > about Anatolia. It's dominant in European Turkey, not surprisingly, and occurs in various islands in Bulgaria, esp. in the northeast. The Bulgarian perfect has apparently been remodeled as an inferentional through Turkish influence. (Because in many cases something like "It has snowed" is easily reconstrued (by a Turk anyway) as "Evidently it has snowed", "I infer it has snowed", or something of the sort.) This is, I think, difficult to explain if Turkish was not at one time more common in Bulgaria than it has been more recently. Dr. David L. White Message-ID: <000c01c05173$1aab59a0$366263d1 at texas.net> References: Subject: Dawkins Reference Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 09:20:35 -0600 Sorry. I meant to inclue this but forgot. It is: Dawkins, R. M. 1916. "Modern Greek in Asia Minor ..." Cambridge: University Press. Dr. David L. White From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Nov 18 03:15:37 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 22:15:37 EST Subject: English in Ireland Message-ID: In a message dated 11/17/00 4:16:26 PM Mountain Standard Time, dlwhite at texas.net writes: >One hundred thousand English arriving in Ireland over a hundred years is one >thousand per year, which is not proportionally significant. -- several hundred thousand English over a period of about 100 years. Several thousand a year, in a population of very limited size. Contemporary surveys indicate that the population of Ireland as a whole in this period dipped well below 1,000,000, particularly in the mid to late 17th century. Half the people in the island may well have died between the 1640's and 1680's; certainly over a third died, due to war and war-related famine and plague. And this was precisely the period of maximum English and Scottish-lowland immigration. The immigrants and their descendants numbered over 1/5th of the population by the early 18th century; and they were concentrated in precisely the eastern and northeastern zones where Gaelic first went extinct. And they were thinnest on the ground -- a mere layer of landlords -- in precisely the far western areas where Gaelic persisted for the longest period, and remains down to our time. The drastic shrinkage of Gaelic from western Ireland was a 19th-century phenomenon, largley post-1846, quite distinct from the Anglicization of the eastern half, which began in medieval times. >the triumph (so to speak) of English over Irish in Ireland is largely a >result of "elite dominance", not numerical preponderance. -- both, in fact. Elite dominance backed up by continuing contact with the English-speaking homeland, and by a steady and substantial immigration of native English-speakers. (And Lallans-speakers, if you want to get technical.) From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Wed Nov 22 11:08:33 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2000 11:08:33 GMT Subject: Elamite In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Stefan Georg wrote:- > ... McAlpin's ... conclusion is, quite surprisingly, that Elamite is just > another Dravidian language, or, if I remember correctly, that it is even > closer to (most of) Dravidian, than Brahui is. ... Before we compare things with Brahui, what came of a thread that was on this list or Nostratic list a while ago?, where someone claimed that, of the modern outlying northern Dravidian languages:- > The Brahui-speakers were descended from soldiers raised in Dravidian South > India and dumped in Baluchistan when they got due for discharge. > The Kurukh and Malto migrated from South India in recent centuries. > Thus, their languages are irrelevant when discussing ancient linguistics. Is this genuine? Or are these ideas derived from old legends of exotic origin such as an old writer who equated "Scot" and "Scythian", or legends that particular north European peoples or their kings or gods were descended from Greeks or Trojans? There is a discussion on gothic-l at egroups.com about how quickly among illiterate uneducated tradition all sorts of unlikely matter can get into tribal legends. From xavier.delamarre at free.fr Sat Nov 18 11:57:04 2000 From: xavier.delamarre at free.fr (Xavier Delamarre) Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 12:57:04 +0100 Subject: New books on Ancient Celts Message-ID: I mentionned, a few days ago, on 'the Continental Celtic List' two forthcoming books for the study of Continental Celtic linguistics : Lambert's RIG II-2 and my Gaulish Dictionary. We now have an other important book just issued (last week) about Ancient Celts : Venceslas KRUTA : "Les Celtes. Histoire et Dictionnaire. Des origines à la romanisation et au christianisme." Robert Laffont (Paris), collection "Bouquins", Nov. 2000, 1005 pp. Price : 189 FRF (‰ 29 Euro). V. KRUTA is the leading editor, with PY LAMBERT of the journal "Etudes Celtiques" and professor of European prehistory in Sorbonne (EPHE). The book is divided in 3 parts : - pp 1-386 : "Les Celtes avant Rome et le Christianisme" (a linear description of the history of the Celts) - pp 387-876 : "Dictionnaire" (more than 2000 entries dealing with ethnonyms, anthroponyms, theonyms, toponyms, and main aspects of material civilisation) - pp 877-1003 : List of Classical Authors quoted, Bibliography, List of European Museums (with ph./fax/e-mail), Indices. KRUTA's book will be an indispensable tool for those interested in the history & archaeology of ancient Europe. The Dictionnaire will be a very pratical instrument to get quickly a reference & the main literature on a specific subject. An other important feature is the systematic inclusion of archaeological founds made in Central Europe, Bohaemia, Hungary, Slovenia etc. This is new and very welcome. However, Kruta being mainly an archaeologist, the weakest point of the book is clearly linguistics and mythology. His few linguistic statements are often outdated or even erroneous (e.g. Uolcae connected with Germ. Volk !, Eburo- translated 'boar' [rather 'yew'], no analysis of gutu-ater and druid- etc.). I hope that my "Dictionnaire" will provide a complement to this. The mythological entries, especially the Irish stuff, are clearly second-hand and cursory : for the Táin we are referred to Medb (9 short lines poorly informative) etc. The recent dictionary of Bernhard Maier "Dictionary of Celtic Religion & Culture" (Boydell Press 1997), transl. from the German, will give a useful complement. But we cannot blame Kruta for not being a linguist & mythologist. Each one has his one speciality. We often have the same problems in the discussions about Proto-Indo-European culture : the results of archaeologists (who usualy are not linguists) do not match those of the linguists (who are not archaeologists). I warmly recommend the book, published in the very handy & practical paperback collection "Bouquins". Xavier DELAMARRE Vaucresson > From v.ferreira at gmx.de Sat Nov 18 14:48:48 2000 From: v.ferreira at gmx.de (Vera Ferreira) Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 14:48:48 -0000 Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Mir=E2ndes?= Message-ID: Hi, I'm doing my doctorate at the University of Munich, in Germany, on the Portuguese language and its dialects. Now I'm looking for information about the second offial language in Portugal, namely Mirandjs (its origins, development, and actual state). Does any of you know where I can find such information? (Maybe you can send me some by email!! - I would be very pleased.) Vera Ferreira Institut f|r Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitdt M|nchen Email: v.ferreira at gmx.de From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Wed Nov 22 17:03:59 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2000 17:03:59 GMT Subject: Observation on the Laryngeals Message-ID: "David L. White" wrote:- > It is interesting that these affect only /e/, leaving original /o/ alone. > What this suggests, very strongly as far as I can see, is that the > laryngeals affected tongue-position, not general acoustics. Otherwise a > back/rounding (from H3) of /e/ and a fronting (from H1) of /o/ should have > produced more or less the same result. ... Hereinafter # is the voiceless version of ayin, as in the Arabic name "Mu#ammad", and is often written as h with a dot below, and in the Arabic alphabet as a thing like an inverted (= turned) "2" without dots. The effects of one sound on another seem to me to vary much according to each language's speakers' speech habits. E.g. single stop consonants between vowels stayed as stable as the Rock of Gibraltar in many languages for a very long time, but in one or another language (e.g. Hebrew and Gaelic) they started weakening to fricatives. In one language, vowels shift one way; in another language, the same vowels shift different ways. Likewise how # and ayin affect sounds around likely can vary between languages. I see no great objection to H1 H2 H3 being glottal-stop and # and ayin. If there were two H1's, as some say, the other H1 was likely the ordinary h sound as in English "hat". From dlwhite at texas.net Sat Nov 18 03:15:13 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 21:15:13 -0600 Subject: Final Theta in Spanish Message-ID: > You're right, (in areas where it occurs) /-_DH_/ > /-_TH_/ only > occurs finally --at the end of words or syllable final before nasals (I > can't think of any other consonants that might follow ) I meant theta from Latin /k/ before /i, e/, corresponding to various affricates and sibilants in other Romance. I was not aware (or had managed to forget) that in some cases (one might also note "paz") final vowels had been lost, pretty much destroying my developing argument, unless perhaps the present situation has been created by some sort of dialect mixture. Why are these words so rare, evidently? Should not all Latin 3rd declension nouns in /k/ show up with final theta in Spanish, if "lux" and "pax" do? I cannot at the moment think of any more, but there must have been more than 2 ... Dr. David L. White From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Nov 18 21:17:39 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 16:17:39 -0500 Subject: More on dental fricatives In-Reply-To: <01JWL2MQWAWSAM6LNQ@LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU> Message-ID: and "soft c" are /_TH_/ in only northern & Central Spain, of course in a few places in Spain and among some Central American speakers, > /_TH_/ >David L. White wrote: >> Perhaps I am merely displaying my ignorance (or lack of full >>comprehension of previous missives), but aren't positional considerations >>relevant here? Does Spanish theta (when not from /d/) occur finally? >Yes, in words such as _luz_ 'light', _vez_ 'occasion' < Lat. _lu:cem_, >_vicem_. >Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures >connolly at memphis.edu University of Memphis Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Nov 18 21:26:39 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 16:26:39 -0500 Subject: More on dental fricatives In-Reply-To: Message-ID: How are Spanish & (and "soft c") treated in loan words? Is always & always ? Do Spanish-speaking Basques use apical /S/ or laminal /s/? Is apical /S/ is dying out --or diminishing-- in Spain? Most Spaniards I've met (from northern and central Spain) in the US and Latin America use laminal /s/. Is this linked to social class or is it a generational thing? >David White writes: >[LT, on Basque] >>> but the curious thing is that they accept phonetic theta when >>> it represents Spanish /d/, but not when it represents Spanish theta. >> Perhaps I am merely displaying my ignorance (or lack of full >> comprehension of previous missives), but aren't positional considerations >> relevant here? Does Spanish theta (when not from /d/) occur finally? >Yes, though the frequency is not high, except in names: 'sheaf', > 'time, occasion', 'voice', 'chess', 'light', > 'cross', and all those Spanish surnames like , , >, , , and . There are also >some Basque place names which get final theta in Spanish, an example >being Spanish for Basque . >Spanish 'voice' is borrowed into Basque as , with a laminal >sibilant, and not with theta, or sometimes as , with the more >normal (in final position) laminal affricate. >Larry Trask Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From alderson+mail at panix.com Mon Nov 20 19:12:02 2000 From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2000 14:12:02 -0500 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <4.3.1.2.20001116081819.00b4b420@getmail.friesen.net> (message from Stanley Friesen on Thu, 16 Nov 2000 08:28:17 -0800) Message-ID: On 16 Nov 2000, Stanley Friesen (sarima at friesen.net) wrote: >> So it is not surprising that it is very difficult to contrast final >> aspirated and unaspirated stops. > Difficult, but I am not sure it is impossible. Did Classical Greek lack > final tau's? If it had them, then it constitutes an example of a language > that had this contrast. Classical Greek had a very limited set of permitted finals: All the vowels (5 short, 7 long), /Vn/, /Vs/, /Vps/ and /Vks/, where the two clusters involve neutralization of voicing and aspiration, as for example in /thriks/ "hair" where the genitive /trikhos/ undergoes Grassmann. In those cases where a dental would cluster with /s/, an old rule reduces the cluster simply to /s/. > Or how about Sanskrit? Did it have final unaspirated voiceless stops? Indeed. All absolutely final stops are voiceless and unaspirated, though the sandhi rules conspire not to allow many absolutely final stops. The citation forms of nouns, though, is a good example, being the nominative singular--lots of cluster simplification and the like going on. BTW, the usual notation for the theta and edh sounds in 7-bit environments like mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups is /T/ and /D/ respectively, leaving /th/ and /dh/ to represent aspirates, all according to the 1992 ASCII IPA standard, described by the author at http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Evan_Kirshenbaum/IPA/ Rich Alderson From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Nov 20 20:25:23 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2000 20:25:23 -0000 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: > Can somebody give me the scoop on Classical Greek? > Or how about Sanskrit? Did it have final unaspirated voiceless stops? Classical Greek had no final stops at all, except for the two words ek and ouk. The form oukh is found, as expected, only before a rough breathing. The word ek uses the form eks to avoid this combination. Despite this purely phonetic rule about ouk/oux, there are examples in the Greek New Testament of oukh before pure vowel, and ouk before rough breathing. Modern editions tend to "improve" the text and remove them, but one or two do survive, eg Acts 2:7 oukh idou hapantes, where a word has intervened. At Galatians 2:14 the text oukhi ioudaiko:s has been preferred in modern editions to oukh ioud.... In Sanskrit in absolute final position (ie in pause, or when the word is isolated) only voiceless unaspirated stops can occur - others are devoiced and/or de-aspirated. Peter From acnasvers at hotmail.com Tue Nov 21 19:14:17 2000 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2000 19:14:17 -0000 Subject: thy thigh etc. Message-ID: Leo A. Connolly (16 Nov 2000) writes: >On Tuesday Robert Whiting responded at great length to my post on the English >interdental fricatives, in which I attempted to draw some lessons from the >German non-distinction between [x] and [c,] in _Kuchen_ 'cake' vs. _Kuhchen_ >'little cow', which I analyzed as /ku:x at n/ vs. /ku:+x at n/. The gist of his >argument seems to be that if it is fair to use phonological boundaries (which >he identifies as always ultimately morphological boundaries), then it is also >fair to use morphological and lexical information to account for the >distribution of the intedental fricatives [T] and [D] in English. >He overlooks a significant difference between morphological -> phonological >boundaries and other types of morphological information: boundaries can be >located precisely between morphemes. It is therefore to show them in >phonological representations, for their position (and type) seems to matter >for the phonetic realization. But information such as "native/foreign" or >"content/function word" cannot be so located and cannot be described in any >real sense as "morphological", but rather as lexical and (for the latter, at >least) "syntactic". There is no inconsistency in saying that boundaries are >phonologically relevant while other information is not. (I do not mean to >imply that boundaries are *always* relevant while other information *never* >is, only that there is no inconsistency in treating them differently.) >A few other points: How did _thy_ and _thigh_ differ before the former >developed a voiced fricative? Easy: the Old English forms were _thi:n_ and >_the:oh_, where the final -h represented a velar fricative. The loss of the >final consonants in these words seems to be much later than the initial >voicing. The loss of final consonants probably is later than the establishment of initial [T:D] distinction, but one should not assume that this distinction arose by the selective voicing of initial [T] to [D] in what Whiting loosely labels "function words". (It escapes me how has any more "function" or less "content" than . What English words with initial [D] share is definiteness, not some murky "functionality".) Old English clearly did not consider [T:D], [f:v], and [s:z] to be phonemic oppositions. The characters "thorn" and "edh" are used indiscriminately in the manuscripts, and no special signs for "v" or "z" are found. In the usual treatment the OE fricatives are regarded as unvoiced when doubled, when adjacent to unvoiced stops, and when occurring initially or finally in words or compound-elements. The first two conditions are solidly established, but the third may be doubted: did morphemic boundaries in OE necessarily make adjacent fricatives unvoiced in connected speech? Some light is shed on the problem by the "Cuckoo Song" manuscript of circa 1240, which contains an Early Middle English folk-song in parallel with a Medieval Latin hymn. The English of the song shows no significant influence from Norman French or Latin. The scribe uses typical ML orthography with "u" and "v" indiscriminately representing both the vowel [u] and the voiced fricative [v], which creates no ambiguity in practice. For the English text, the scribe requires "w" and "thorn" to convey the non-ML sounds. More importantly, he carries the ML graphemic distinction "f:u/v" into his English transcription. We find "f" in , but "u" in , , and most significantly '(the) buck farts'. Here the scribe has preserved initial [v], conditioned by a final vowel in the previous word. This verb appears in later ME as ; it is unattested in OE but is a transparent cognate of Greek and Sanskrit . The manuscript does not distinguish [s:z] and [T:D] because these oppositions are unknown in Medieval Latin. In my opinion the Early ME dialect recorded here most likely made no phonemic distinction between voiced and unvoiced fricatives, but maintained an allophonic contrast on the basis of adjacent sounds regardless of morphemic boundaries, and this scheme was probably inherited from OE. For the composer of the "Cuckoo Song" the words and would have begun with [T] or [D] according to the unvoiced or voiced nature of the preceding sound. Turning now to Chaucer we find the "f:v" distinction consistently made, initially and medially, even in native words like 'to give' from OE . The character "z" is used only in foreign words, mostly from French and Arabic: , , , etc. Chaucer retains "s" for medial [z] in native words: , , , etc. Printed editions give no information about the dental fricatives, using "th" everywhere. Chaucer's language has a large component of recent loanwords in sometimes forming minimal pairs with older words in : 'to have value' ~ 'to fail', 'verse' ~ 'chess-queen'. It appears that this large influx of words beginning with [v] which does not alternate allophonically with [f] has forced the older words beginning with [f/v] to abandon the voiced allophone and become words beginning with invariant [f]. That is, this influx of loanwords has created a new phonemic distinction /f:v/ in initial position which the orthography of Chaucer's time (late 14th cent.) regards as fully established. For initial [s:z] Chaucer has only the sub-minimal pair 'zeals' ~ 'sealed', and since "z" is otherwise used to denote loanwords this provides no direct evidence for a phonemic opposition. The status of initial [T:D] in Chaucer is equivocal. Contractions like 'art thou' and 'sayest thou' suggest that already had invariant [D], since the old rule would require [T] here and [tT] usually contracts to [T], which would yield * etc. However, this argument is extremely weak. Statistical analysis of Chaucer's alliterations in "th" might resolve the issue, but I am not aware of such a study. At any rate it is clear that the English /f:v/ distinction resulted from loanwords and was well established by Chaucer's time. The /s:z/ distinction, if not already made by Chaucer, followed shortly. It can be attributed partly to loanwords, partly to the earlier establishment of /f:v/ as phonemic. The [T:D] opposition was left as an orphaned allophonic pair, very difficult for speakers to maintain, especially in initial position. They would have been obliged to enunciate some words with invariant initial [f], [v], [s], [z] and others with variable [T] or [D] according to the preceding sound. Under these circumstances any mechanism tending to fix [T] or [D] in particular words would have operated rather strongly. In my opinion this probably began with the statistics of utterances: demonstratives like and commonly follow prepositions, which in a majority of cases end in voiced sounds. Once the invariant [D] was fixed in the most common demonstratives, it would have spread by analogy to the other "th"-words of pronominal origin which carry definiteness. The situation would then have resembled the pre-Chaucerian stage of ME in which one class (recent loanwords) had invariant initial [v] and another class (older words) had variable initial [f/v]. In that case the older class was forced to fix its initial sound as [f], establishing /f:v/ as a phonemic distinction. In the case under discussion the non-pronominal, non-definite words beginning with [T/D] were forced to fix their initial sounds as [T], which yielded the fixed opposition in initial [T:D] that is found today. I would guess that the process was complete (in East Midland at least) by 1500, if indeed it was not by Chaucer's time. Hence one should not say that or its antecedent "developed" a voiced fricative. What happened, one way or another, is that the pronunciation with the unvoiced fricative, occurring after unvoiced sounds, was lost in this word. So is the initial [T:D] distinction phonemic in present-day English? Absolutely; it can and should be written /T:D/. It was phonemic as soon as the process of fixing invariant [T] and [D] on particular words was completed, even though minimal pairs for these phones probably did not exist at that time. Minimal pairs are luxury items. They are nice to have, but one can (and in many situations must) establish phonemic oppositions without them. When distinct phones occur in contrastive distribution in corresponding morphemic positions, they are either allophones of one phoneme or represent distinct phonemes. Allophones are regularly distributed according to phonologic environment. No conceivable phonologic rule could predict the distribution of [T] versus [D] in modern English words. They are indeed distinct phonemes. Doug Kilday From xiang at free.fr Sat Nov 18 11:17:11 2000 From: xiang at free.fr (Guillaume JACQUES) Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 12:17:11 +0100 Subject: Elamite Message-ID: [ moderator translated from base64 encoding ] | Bernard Sergent -- a proponent of the idea that | Harappan-Indus was Dravidian -- in "Genesis of India" (1997) apparently also | takes the position that the isoglosses cited by McAlpin can be explained | "through contact rather than common origin." You did not read his book. Sergent rejects the communis opinio that Harappa was dravidian, following Elfenbein 1987 who showed that all the aryan-looking loanwords in Brahui, the only dravidian language as far north as pakistan, are from baluchi, a language that we know came late in this region. This suggested brahui was not a remnant from earlier northern dravidians, but a wandering people that ended up far north. Sergent suggests Harappa might have been burushaski (he has good reasons for it), but on the whole we don't have enough proofs: if Harappan was indeed burushaski, we would expect a burushaski substrate in Vedic, which seems not to be the case (see Michael Witzel's online paper, 'substrates in old indo-aryan') Guillaume From lmfosse at elender.hu Thu Nov 23 09:25:53 2000 From: lmfosse at elender.hu (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 10:25:53 +0100 Subject: SV: Elamite Message-ID: Anthony Appleyard [SMTP:mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk] skrev 22. november 2000 12:09: > Before we compare things with Brahui, what came of a thread that was on this > list or Nostratic list a while ago?, where someone claimed that, of the > modern outlying northern Dravidian languages:- >> The Brahui-speakers were descended from soldiers raised in Dravidian South >> India and dumped in Baluchistan when they got due for discharge. >> The Kurukh and Malto migrated from South India in recent centuries. >> Thus, their languages are irrelevant when discussing ancient linguistics. > Is this genuine? This is more or less the received scholarly wisdom for the time being. I am away from my library, so I can't give you any precise references, but I believe that Bernard Sergeant discusses this in his book "Genese the l'Inde". Lars Martin Fosse Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114, 0674 Oslo Norway Phone: +47 22 32 12 19 Mobile phone: +47 90 91 91 45 Fax 1: +47 22 32 12 19 Fax 2: +47 85 02 12 50 (InFax) Email: lmfosse at online.no From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Mon Nov 27 14:27:30 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2000 14:27:30 GMT Subject: Elamite Message-ID: On 16 Nov 2000, Stanley Friesen (sarima at friesen.net) wrote: > Difficult, but I am not sure it is impossible. Did Classical Greek lack > final tau's? If it had them, then it constitutes an example of a language > that had this contrast. Classical Greek did not have final {t}. We can't tell with Mycenean (Linear B) Greek, as the spelling omits many consonants which are at the ends of syllables. But: Greek (1) {egraphe} = "he was writing" < IE *{eghrabhet}, but (2) {graphe} = "write!" (imperative) < IE *{grabhe} without a final {t}. In Classical Greek (1) adds a final n-ephelkoustikon if the next word starts with a vowel or h-vowel, but (2) does not, as if that -n was altered from an earlier -t derived from the old final consonant persisting in liaison. The Greeks were capable of pronouncing final stops, as is shown e.g. in Aristophanes: {op o:-op} as a spelling of a noise made while rowing a boat. Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2000 14:12:02 -0500 Reply-To: Indo-European at xkl.com Sender: The INDO-EUROPEAN mailing list From: Rich Alderson Subject: Re: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) Comments: To: Indo-European at xkl.com In-Reply-To: <4.3.1.2.20001116081819.00b4b420 at getmail.friesen.net> (message from Stanley Friesen on Thu, 16 Nov 2000 08:28:17 -0800) Classical Greek had a very limited set of permitted finals: All the vowels (5 short, 7 long), /Vn/, /Vs/, /Vps/ and /Vks/, where the two clusters involve neutralization of voicing and aspiration, as for example in /thriks/ "hair" where the genitive /trikhos/ undergoes Grassmann. In those cases where a dental would cluster with /s/, an old rule reduces the cluster simply to /s/. > Or how about Sanskrit? Did it have final unaspirated voiceless stops? Indeed. All absolutely final stops are voiceless and unaspirated, though the sandhi rules conspire not to allow many absolutely final stops. The citation forms of nouns, though, is a good example, being the nominative singular--lots of cluster simplification and the like going on. BTW, the usual notation for the theta and edh sounds in 7-bit environments like mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups is /T/ and /D/ respectively, leaving /th/ and /dh/ to represent aspirates, all according to the 1992 ASCII IPA standard, described by the author at http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Evan_Kirshenbaum/IPA/ Rich Alderson From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Nov 25 18:41:02 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 25 Nov 2000 13:41:02 -0500 Subject: Elamite 10th c. AD ?!? In-Reply-To: <6C42B3B1421@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: After rooting around I found the article "Elamite" in Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia by Samuel N. Kramer stating that Arabic sources in Khuzestan indicated that Elamite was still spoken in the 10th c. AD How reliable can this be? BTW: I also found a curious article on Avars in F & W stating that their descendents are "Lezghians [who speak] a language similar to Arabic"!!! Can anyone explain that? Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Nov 23 03:48:58 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2000 22:48:58 EST Subject: Franks as Arians Message-ID: In a message dated 11/22/00 8:46:16 PM Mountain Standard Time, dlwhite at texas.net writes: << About the Franks having been, at one point, Arians, is that in Gregory, as I imagine it must be? >> -- no, they weren't. Prior to Clovis' conversion, they mainly weren't Christians of any variety. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Nov 23 04:46:53 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2000 23:46:53 EST Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: "Traditionally the first Germanic king to convert directly from paganism to Catholicism was Clovis, and by extension, the first Germanic people to become Catholic were the Franks. In fact this statement needs some modification; the Suebi were certainly Catholics and were ruled by Catholic kings long before Clovis' conversion, and the Burgundians may also have been, although Gundobad [the Burgundian king], who ruled between ca. 476 and 516, was uquestionably Arian. Further, it is clear that Clovis spent some time considering the rival merits of the Catholic and Arian variants of Christianity." -- LATE ANTIQUITY: A GUIDE TO THE POSTCLASSICAL WORLD, p. 394. From Tristan at mail.scm-rpg.com.au Thu Nov 23 08:23:32 2000 From: Tristan at mail.scm-rpg.com.au (Tristan Jones) Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 19:23:32 +1100 Subject: Elite dominance theory vs. Practicality Message-ID: Well I will be dammed, I thought 22 languages for a area the size of Indiana was a bit shocking a first. > [ Moderator's comment: > California was home to several dozen languages prior to European contact, > as was the region of the United States called New England. This is not at > all unusual. > --rma ] From lmfosse at elender.hu Thu Nov 23 09:13:30 2000 From: lmfosse at elender.hu (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 10:13:30 +0100 Subject: SV: Elite dominance theory vs. Practicality Message-ID: Tristan Jones [SMTP:Tristan at mail.scm-rpg.com.au] skrev 18. november 2000 01:01: > 22 languages in Hungary, come on Hungary is only the size of Indiana state, > 22 languages is a lot for a small region like that Hungary covered a much bigger area before the First World War, but lost more than half of it at the Peace of Trianon (still much regretted by Hungarians). Before that period at least the following languages were spoken on traditional Hungarian territory: Magyar, German, Slovakian, Serbo-Kroat, Turkish and Rumanian. (The Turkish speakers of course eventually left). Until the 19th century, Latin was widely used, Magyar only recently became the dominant language of the country (after about 1850). The Jews that came to Hungary in the 19th century may have spoken several different languages, but were quickly Magyarized. Of course, after Trianon, there are not many minority language speakers left. Lars Martin Fosse Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114, 0674 Oslo Norway Phone: +47 22 32 12 19 Mobile phone: +47 90 91 91 45 Fax 1: +47 22 32 12 19 Fax 2: +47 85 02 12 50 (InFax) Email: lmfosse at online.no From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Thu Nov 23 11:32:16 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 11:32:16 GMT Subject: Turkish Message-ID: Someone wrote:- > How many languages were spoken on the Central Plateau in, say, AD 1900? "David L. White" wrote:- > The chief differences from today would have been a sizeable number of > Armenian-speakers ... and a large number of Greek-speakers along the > Aegean coast, almost all of them expelled after the Greco-Turkish war. And Kurdish. Re Greeks in Anatolia, in the 1960's or 1970's I read a UK scuba diving magazine article about Turkish sport scuba divers, and one of them was called Triyandafilidis, which is clearly modern Greek for "son of Trinity-lover". ? Dawkins(1916) is a study (mainly) of Cappadocian Greek ... I read that book or a similar book, about Pontus etc. Some of those Greek dialects had many loanwords from Turkish, e.g. a verb {du"su"ndo} from Turkish {du"su"nmek}. Turkish vowel harmony had also got in. > [Turkish is] dominant in European Turkey, not surprisingly ... Some history books seem to say that Turkish Thrace spoke largely Greek and Bulgarian right up to the suburbs or walls of Constantinople, until a big exchange of populations in the 1920's. On BBC TV (=UK TV) news from Kosovo during the recent Kosovo troubles I saw road signs in various languages including Turkish (e.g. {U"sku"b} for {Skopje}). Is there still an outlier of Turkish speech there, or what? > The Bulgarian perfect has apparently been remodeled as an inferentional > through Turkish influence. ... This is, I think, difficult to explain if > Turkish was not at one time more common in Bulgaria than it has been more > recently. Likely many Bulgarians knew enough Turkish for necessary dealings with the Ottoman Turkish authorities, until Turkish authority and Islamic rule were slung out of Bulgaria bag and baggage in the Russo-Turkish War in the 1880's. For more information about those events and their causes, see a history book. Likely afterwards very many bilingual Christian Bulgarians totally rejected all things Turkish including the language, and the Bulgarian government seems to have systematically renamed nearly every place with a Turkish-looking name, e.g. Hasi-ko"y -> Khaskovo, except for a few large towns such as Kazanl#k (# = the hard-sign), and Eski Dzhumaya, which (I think) was renamed to Dimitrovgrad in Communist times. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Nov 25 18:51:11 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 25 Nov 2000 13:51:11 -0500 Subject: Turkish In-Reply-To: <000d01c050f3$b4aa2b60$d86063d1@texas.net> Message-ID: Aren't the Gaugaz [sp?] an Anatolian Turkish-speaking Christian ethnic group in Ukraine, Rumania et al.? BTW: On maps I've seen references to Pomaks, Sanjaks & Nogays (among others) in the Balkans. Are these Turkish groups, former Turkish-speakers or local Muslims speaking Slavic languages? >>> To what extent did replacement spread through Turkish controlled lands >>> beyond Anatolia, depending on what you mean by Anatolia? >> Not very greatly, as far as I know, but then I was only talking >> about Anatolia. > It's dominant in European Turkey, not surprisingly, and occurs in >various islands in Bulgaria, esp. in the northeast. The Bulgarian perfect >has apparently been remodeled as an inferentional through Turkish influence. >(Because in many cases something like "It has snowed" is easily reconstrued >(by a Turk anyway) as "Evidently it has snowed", "I infer it has snowed", or >something of the sort.) This is, I think, difficult to explain if Turkish >was not at one time more common in Bulgaria than it has been more recently. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From vjpaniego at worldonline.es Thu Nov 23 22:50:49 2000 From: vjpaniego at worldonline.es (Victor y Rosario) Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 23:50:49 +0100 Subject: =?iso-8859-1?B?TWlyYW5k6nM=?= Message-ID: >I'm doing my doctorate at the University of Munich, in Germany, on the >Portuguese language and its dialects. >Vera Ferreira Regarding the research on Mirandjs, a couple of articles that might be useful: "O Mirandjs e as lmnguas do Noroeste peninsular", by Manuela Barros Ferreira Published by the Academia de la Llingua Asturiana in their journal Lletres Asturianes, 57 "Convengao Ortografica da Lmngua Mirandesa" Camara Municipal de Miranda do Douro. Both can be obtained from: Centro de Lingumstica da Universidade de Lisboa Avenida 5 de Outubro, 85, 5: e 6: 1000 Lisboa PORTUGAL Vmctor J. Paniego From dalazal at hotmail.com Tue Nov 28 05:14:36 2000 From: dalazal at hotmail.com (Diogo Almeida) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 00:14:36 -0500 Subject: Mirbndes Message-ID: "Vera Ferreira" Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 14:48:48 -0000 wrote: >Hi, >I'm doing my doctorate at the University of Munich, in Germany, on the >Portuguese language and its dialects. >Now I'm looking for information about the second offial language in >Portugal, namely Mirandjs (its origins, development, and actual state). >Does >any of you know where I can find such information? >(Maybe you can send me some by email!! - I would be very pleased.) Actually, Mirandjs is not a Portuguese or Galician dialect, but a different romance language, a survival of Asturo-Leonese (I hope that is the name in English :) ). I found a website about Mirandjs (in Portuguese). It's on http://www.eb2-miranda-douro.rcts.pt/mirandes/mirandes.html . There is a bibliography section. maybe it can help you. Best regards, Diogo Alvares de Azevedo e Almeida From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Nov 25 19:05:36 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 25 Nov 2000 14:05:36 -0500 Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Mir=E2ndes?= In-Reply-To: <009c01c0516e$e8c12b80$783d06d5@telepac.pt> Message-ID: There is a Mirandes webpage. I don't have the url but I believe it is linked to the local government or chamber of commerce page for the town of Miranda. I found it by typing in <> on Altavista. It doesn't have too much information but the authors may be able to put you in touch with local scholars. The authors of the page essentially see the language as closer to Leonese Spanish than Portuguese. >Hi, >I'm doing my doctorate at the University of Munich, in Germany, on the >Portuguese language and its dialects. >Now I'm looking for information about the second offial language in >Portugal, namely Mirandjs (its origins, development, and actual state). Does >any of you know where I can find such information? >(Maybe you can send me some by email!! - I would be very pleased.) >Vera Ferreira >Institut f|r Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft >Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitdt M|nchen >Email: v.ferreira at gmx.de Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Fri Nov 24 09:00:45 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Fri, 24 Nov 2000 09:00:45 GMT Subject: The Germanic substrate - knives? Message-ID: People have connected Germanic "knife" with various Greek and other words starting with "kn-", e.g. Greek {knao:} = "scrape". But surely PIE {kn-} would become Common Germanic {hn-}? Perhaps when metalworking and how to make copper or bronze came to the Germanic speakers, some time after the PIE -> Germanic consonant shifts happened, it brought with it an IE but not Germanic word which got into Germanic with the meaning "metal knife". From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Fri Nov 24 09:49:32 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Fri, 24 Nov 2000 09:49:32 GMT Subject: Reference on Numbers of Saxons Message-ID: INDO-EUROPEAN mailing list "David L. White" wrote:- > ... by which the original Celtic inhabitants were expelled or exterminated > ... It is likelier that any big loss of Celtic population in lowland Britain at this time was due to natural causes. I saw a TV program a year or two ago that showed that at that time something, perhaps a very massive volcanic eruption in Indonesia, darkened the sky so badly that across the world two successive harvests were wiped out, causing famine. It also said that in those conditions cattle survived better than horses, and that gave the Central Asian Turkic people an advantage over their Mongol etc neighbours and started the big expansion of the Turkic peoples in Asia and into Europe. Mike Baillie (m.baillie at qub.ac.uk) has theorized about a natural disaster at this time. I have seen speculations that there was a Tunguska-type comet fragment impact in the English Midlands at that time. As to where the eruption was, the TV program said Krakatoa, but I and Baillie suspect not. I read that the Javan `Book of Kings' records about this time a massive blow-out-and-subsidence eruption in the east end of the Sunda Strait, sinking land called Kapi which previously joined Java to Sumatra. From rayhendon at satx.rr.com Fri Nov 24 19:02:26 2000 From: rayhendon at satx.rr.com (Ray Hendon) Date: Fri, 24 Nov 2000 13:02:26 -0600 Subject: Celtic Germanic relationship Message-ID: I am confused about the linguistic relationship, if any, between Celt and German. I think I read somewhere that Celtic was an Italic language, and that German was a daughter language of Celtic, developing after Celtic became distinguished from other Italic languages. Also, if there is a relationship, has anything of a time-line been established for the periods of transition? [ Moderator's comment: The traditional Indo-European family tree (to use the model most familiar to non-specialists) has Germanic, Celtic, and Italic as three separate branches. Some, but by no means all, Indo-Europeanists believe that the Italic and Celtic branches should be considered to form a sub-unit of the tree, based on certain morphological developments; this branch is called Italo-Celtic. The Germanic branch shares some developments and vocabulary with Italic and Celtic, and others with Balto-Slavic. This has recently led a few people to posit an early separation of Germanic from the rest of the family (but from a branch that later led to Balto-Slavic), then massive influence from Celtic and Italic. No authoritative Indo-Europeanist to my knowledge has suggested the branch structure you outline. --rma ] From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Nov 23 12:08:44 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 12:08:44 +0000 Subject: More on dental fricatives Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister writes: > How are Spanish & (and "soft c") treated in loan words? Spanish is borrowed as Basque apical , and Spanish is borrowed as Basque laminal . But there is a complication in words containing both. Basque has sibilant harmony, and a single word cannot contain both kinds of sibilant. Assimilation is always in favor of the apical. So, for example, Castilian 'French' was borrowed as Basque (attested), but the usual form today is . > Is always & always ? Yes, except as just explained. > Do Spanish-speaking Basques use apical /S/ or laminal /s/? Apical, always. > Is apical /S/ is dying out --or diminishing-- in Spain? xx Don't know. But something is happening in Basque: the contrast between and is being lost, in favour of apical . The first evidence for the merger appears in the west in the 17th century. Today the merger is categorical in the west. In the center, the merger is variable, being often present in urban areas but still absent in rural areas. In the east, there is no trace of the merger, and the contrast is still robust. > Most Spaniards I've met (from northern and central Spain) in the US > and Latin America use laminal /s/. I'm astonished. In my experience, northern Spaniards invariably use apical /s/. The shushy quality of this thing is quite striking to my ears. A French Basque friend of mine who moved south and learned Spanish unhesitatingly identified the Spanish with his own apical . > Is this linked to social class or is it a generational thing? In the north, in my experience, there is no variation, and apical is universal. Don't know what happens elsewhere. I had thought the variation was strictly geographical. Not sure how far south the apical runs, but the Madrileños I've met always seem to have it. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Nov 23 11:33:44 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 11:33:44 +0000 Subject: Final Theta in Spanish Message-ID: David White writes: > Should not all Latin 3rd declension nouns > in /k/ show up with final theta in Spanish, if "lux" and "pax" do? I cannot > at the moment think of any more, but there must have been more than 2 ... There were, but I'm not sure they were all that numerous, and anyway not all of them survived into modern Castilian. For example, Latin 'leader' should have yielded Castilian *, but no such form is recorded, and modern 'duke' is clearly borrowed from Old French , which itself appears to be an analogical form. Anyway, the history of final /e/-loss in Castilian is a trifle complicated. For example, Latin yielded the expected , well attested in medieval Castilian, but the variant seemingly never disappeared, and modern exhibits not only the final /e/ but also an extra /l/ which it picked up somehow. As for '12', from , I confess I have little idea why that /e/ is still there. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Nov 23 12:49:44 2000 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max Wheeler) Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 12:49:44 +0000 Subject: Final Theta in Spanish In-Reply-To: <000701c0510d$c5417540$752863d1@texas.net> Message-ID: [ moderator edited ] --On Friday, November 17, 2000 21:15 -0600 "David L. White" wrote: >> You're right, (in areas where it occurs) /-_DH_/ > /-_TH_/ only >> occurs finally --at the end of words or syllable final before nasals (I >> can't think of any other consonants that might follow ) > > I meant theta from Latin /k/ before /i, e/, corresponding to > various affricates and sibilants in other Romance. I was not > aware (or had managed to forget) that in some cases (one might also note > "paz") final vowels had been lost, pretty much destroying my developing > argument, unless perhaps the present situation has been created by some > sort of dialect mixture. Why are these words so rare, evidently? Should > not all Latin 3rd declension nouns in /k/ show up with final theta in > Spanish, if "lux" and "pax" do? I cannot at the moment think of any > more, but there must have been more than 2 ... Indeed more than 2 (and adjectives, and other sources). here's a few, pending a look in a reverse dictionary: atroz audaz capaz cicatriz codorniz contumaz cruz diez eficaz emperatriz -ez abstract noun suffix '-ez surname suffix faz feliz feraz feroz fugaz haz hoz luz matriz mordaz nariz paz perdiz perspicaz pertinaz pez precoz procaz pugnaz salaz secuaz suspicaz tenaz veraz vivaz voraz voz ¿Basta? 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 dziewon at xs4all.nl Thu Nov 23 02:02:46 2000 From: dziewon at xs4all.nl (R.C. Bakhuizen van den Brink [Rein]) Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 02:02:46 +0000 Subject: Final Theta in Spanish Message-ID: On Fri, 17 Nov 2000, David L. White wrote: >these words so rare, evidently? Should not all Latin 3rd declension nouns >in /k/ show up with final theta in Spanish, if "lux" and "pax" do? I cannot >at the moment think of any more, but there must have been more than 2 ... > Not just nouns? Feliz navidad !! gtx, Rein -- Rein Bakhuizen van den Brink URL http://www.xs4all.nl/~dziewon +00-31-71-5212950 [voice] /-5234587 [fax] P.O.Box 749, NL-2300 AS Leiden ISO-8859-2 ĄĆĘŁŃÓŚŹŻ ąćęłńóśźż From bronto at pobox.com Fri Nov 24 01:00:54 2000 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 17:00:54 -0800 Subject: Final Theta in Spanish Message-ID: "David L. White" wrote, of Spanish words in -z: > Why are these words so rare, evidently? Should not all Latin > 3rd declension nouns in /k/ show up with final theta in Spanish, > if "lux" and "pax" do? I cannot at the moment think of any more, > but there must have been more than 2 ... (find Spanish wordlist, http://www.vada.nl/software/files/spanish.zip) (decompress) (grep "z$") ...478 words including: atroz barniz ( Message-ID: At 02:12 PM 11/20/00 -0500, Rich Alderson wrote: >On 16 Nov 2000, Stanley Friesen (sarima at friesen.net) wrote: >>> So it is not surprising that it is very difficult to contrast final >>> aspirated and unaspirated stops. >> Difficult, but I am not sure it is impossible. Did Classical Greek lack >> old rule reduces the cluster simply to /s/. >> Or how about Sanskrit? Did it have final unaspirated voiceless stops? >Indeed. All absolutely final stops are voiceless and unaspirated, though the >sandhi rules conspire not to allow many absolutely final stops. The citation >forms of nouns, though, is a good example, being the nominative singular--lots >of cluster simplification and the like going on. Hmm, interesting. From this I conclude that Sansktrit does not *contrast* /t/ and /th/ finally, nor does Greek. So apparently in many or most languages that otherwise have this contrast it is neutralized finally. Does anybody have any examples of a language that *retains* /t/ vs. /th/ finally? -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Nov 28 06:34:34 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 01:34:34 EST Subject: Elite dominance vs. Practicality/Turkey Message-ID: In a message dated 11/17/2000 5:52:28 PM, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: << I heard someone roll off 22 languages that reportedly were spoken in the general area of modern day Hungary during the first millennium AD. And of course the area of modern day Turkey may well have had similar diversity before Ottoman Turkish became the "universal" language. >> The idea was that perhaps Turkish became universal in part because it solved the problem of too much language diversity among the speakers already there. On the pre-Turkish language diversity in Asia Minor I have this: "The coastal areas, save for the mountainous part of Cilicia (Isauria), where the Taurus range advances to the very edge of the sea, had been hellenized for a good thousand years and more before Justinian's reign.... Quite different from the coastal areas of Asia Minor was the high inland plateau,... The ethnic composition of the plateau had not undergone any notable change for some seven hundred years before Justinian's reign. It was a bewildering mosaic of native peoples as well as immigrant enclaves of long standing, such as the Celts of Galatia, the Jews who had been planted in Phrygia and elsewhere during the Hellenistic period and Persian groups of even more ancient origin. It appears that many of the indigenous languages were still spoken in the Early Byzantine period: Phrygian was probably still extant, since it appears in inscriptions as late as the third century AD, Celtic in Galatia, Cappadocian farther east. The unruly Isaurians, who had to be pacified by force of arms in about 500 AD and many of whom drifted all over the Empire as professional soldiers and itinerant masons, were a distinct people speaking their own dialect, often to the exclusion of Greek.... Lying to the east of Cappadocia and straddling a series of high mountain chains were a number of Armenian provinces that had been annexed to the Empire as late as 387 AD when the Armenian kingdom was partitioned between Persia and Rome. These were strategically very important, but practically untouched by Graeco-Roman civilization... All [this was before] the ethnographic changes that the Empire witnessed after the sixth century... The Persians initiated a development that was to have important demographic consequences by striking at Constantinople through Asia Minor. In so doing they caused immense havoc. When the Arabs had succeeded to the Persians and made themselves masters of all the territories up to the Taurus mountains, they, too, struck into Asia Minor- not once or twice, but practically every year- and this went on for nearly two centuries.... ...it is also known that Greek survived in Asia Minor on a continuous basis only in Pontus and a small part of Cappadocia, whereas it had become practically extinct in the western part of the subcontinent until its reintroduction there by immigrants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Emperor Justinian Il... moved 'a great multitude' of Slavs to Bithynia.... In the 760s, however, we are told that 208,000 Slavs came to live in Bithynia of their own accord.... In addition to the Armenians and the Slavs, there were many other foreign elements, such as the Georgians and the Balkan Vlachs. A massive influx of Syrians and other Christian orientals followed the eastward expansion of the Empire at the end of the tenth century.... Early in the 11th century Turkic [but not necesaarily Turkish] tribes and families in ever-increasing numbers had begun to filter into Asia Minor.... - Cyril Mango, Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome (1980) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Nov 28 07:14:28 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 02:14:28 EST Subject: Reference on Numbers of Saxons Message-ID: Any theory dealing with the Saxon migrations to Britain has to deal with the differences in linguistic results. On the continent, Germanic migrants into the Roman provinces were generally linguistically assimilated within a few generations -- beyond some loanwords, little trace of Gothic remains in Iberian Romance, for instance. In fact, it was probably extinct or moribund by the time of the 8th-century Muslim invasions. It lasted much better in the Crimea! In Britain not only did the local Celtic and Romance speeches disappear, but the Anglo-Saxon that emerged after the conversion to Christianity was singularly lacking in both Romance and Celtic vocabulary. About 14 Celtic loan-words in all, and no more Latin loans than the continental Germanic of the period. In fact, when it emerges into the light of documentary day, Old English is a remarkably conservative West Germanic language still mutually comprehensible with the ancestors of Netherlandish, Frisian, and Low German, not to mention the nascent Scandinavian tongues. Which is why English missionaries were so important in the conversion of the continental Germans. And this despite the fact that we're talking about the Wessex dialect of Old English, which emerged on the western fringe of the English-speaking zone and which we know _was_ in contact with proto-Welsh speakers, since the laws of Wessex recognize a separate (and legally inferior) Welsh-speaking social group within the kingdom. The linguistic evidence alone strongly militates against any prolonged period of mass bilingualism in the areas of Anglo-Saxon speech. Since Anglo-Saxon in its early phase was the speech of an illiterate people divided into a multiplicity of small, unstable kingdoms with no standard court or chancery language, it should have been very open to influence from any substrate. In fact, in such situations linguistic influence occurrs without the speakers of either language being conscious of it. Yet there's less Celtic influence on Old English than there is Algonquian Indian influence on the English of New England! Indian place-names and loan-words are more common there, despite what we know was an extremely brusque dispossession of the previous population and very limited contact between the incomers and the indigenous people. The place-names tell the same story. They become common only in the western fringes of England, which we know from historical sources remained in British/Welsh hands until the 6th-7th centuries. And even there, they're often misunderstood -- rivers called "river" and hills called "hill". We also know that there was a very substantial drop in the population of post-Roman Britain. Estimates for Britannia in the late Roman period -- 4th century CE -- range as high as 3.5 million or more. By the time of the Norman conquest (a period for which we have unusually good historical-demographic documentation) England had about 1.5 million people; and that was after several centuries of what's generally agreed upon to be steady expansion. Other lines of evidence also testify to widespread depopulation in the transitional Romano-British and early Anglo-Saxon periods. For example, as late as the 11th century, London buildings were drawing on domestic sources of long, thick, straight oak timbers, the type that can only been drawn from closed-canopy forest at least 300 years old. These disappear from the domestic record not long after, and only the curved timber characteristic of coppice- and field-edge oaks is found -- at precisely the time when population, and forest clearance, again reach the Romano-British level. From edsel at glo.be Tue Nov 28 10:07:24 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 11:07:24 +0100 Subject: Turkish Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Anthony Appleyard" To: Sent: Thursday, November 23, 2000 12:32 PM Subject: Re: Turkish > Someone wrote:- [snip] > Re Greeks in Anatolia, in the 1960's or 1970's I read a UK scuba diving > magazine article about Turkish sport scuba divers, and one of them was called > Triyandafilidis, which is clearly modern Greek for "son of Trinity-lover". [Ed Selleslagh] On the other hand, lots of Greeks have hellenized Turkish names, e.g. Karamanli's, the former prime minister. (Or Italian/Venetian ones: Kapodistrias = Capo d'Istria). > ? Dawkins(1916) is a study (mainly) of Cappadocian Greek ... [snip] > On BBC TV (=UK TV) news from Kosovo during the recent Kosovo troubles I saw > road signs in various languages including Turkish (e.g. {U"sku"b} for > {Skopje}). Is there still an outlier of Turkish speech there, or what? [Ed] When I was there several decades ago (before the big earthquake) the city of Skop(l)je had a vast Turkish quarter from every point of view: language, bazar-like streets with artisans making Turkish coffee or hammering away at copper coffee sets, historical mosques etc. (There were more ethnic buroughs: a large Gipsy shanty town, the traditional Christian-Orthodox one, and the new part built under Tito). On the countryside there are many very Turkish-looking villages with minarets etc. In general, Macedonia is extremely multi-cultural, but often with physically separate communities (Albanian, Turkish, Gipsy/Roma, Slav-Macedonian (close to Bulgarian), Serb,...). The use of its name for a fruit cocktail has some very good reasons. As opposed to Bosnia-Hercegovina (Bosna-Hersek in Turkish; Hercegovina < Hersek Novi) where the Muslims are generally converted Serbians (one more reason to be hated by others), in Macedonia the Muslims are generally ethnic Turks, except in the area near Albania where virtually all are ethnic Albanians. [snip] > Likely many Bulgarians knew enough Turkish for necessary dealings with the > Ottoman Turkish authorities, until Turkish authority and Islamic rule were > slung out of Bulgaria bag and baggage in the Russo-Turkish War in the 1880's. > For more information about those events and their causes, see a history book. > Likely afterwards very many bilingual Christian Bulgarians totally rejected > all things Turkish including the language, and the Bulgarian government seems > to have systematically renamed nearly every place with a Turkish-looking > name, e.g. Hasi-ko"y -> Khaskovo, except for a few large towns such as > Kazanl#k (# = the hard-sign), and Eski Dzhumaya, which (I think) was > renamed to Dimitrovgrad in Communist times. [Ed] And in a more recent period there has been some quasi-officially sponsored action against ethnic Turks in Bulgaria, leading to almost collective emigration/fleeing to Turkish Thracia. Similar things happened (happen) in Greek Thracia, like forbidding Turkish-speaking schools and prosecuting its proponents for 'menacing the unity of the country' etc... In the Balkans, historical memory is very long, and cultural tolerance is still in its infancy. Bosnia and Serbia are only exceptional (in recent times) in the intensity of what happened. Ed. From ewb2 at cornell.edu Tue Nov 28 13:05:58 2000 From: ewb2 at cornell.edu (ewb2 at cornell.edu) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 08:05:58 -0500 Subject: Turkish (and Greek) In-Reply-To: <6DC91444E98@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: On Thu, 23 Nov 2000, Anthony Appleyard wrote: > ... Re Greeks in Anatolia, in the 1960's or 1970's I read a UK scuba diving > magazine article about Turkish sport scuba divers, and one of them was called > Triyandafilidis, which is clearly modern Greek for "son of Trinity-lover". ...which is more likely to be Modern Greek for "thirty leaves" (trianta + phylla), which now means "rose" (the flower). It's clear in the spelling of the surname in Greek letters: Triantaphyllide:s. "nt" is pronounced nd or just d. On the other hand, 'Trinity' is triada, where d is pronounced as the voiced interdental that so many contributors have been writing about. > On BBC TV (=UK TV) news from Kosovo during the recent Kosovo troubles I saw > road signs in various languages including Turkish (e.g. {U"sku"b} for > {Skopje}). Is there still an outlier of Turkish speech there, or what? There is. There are thousands of Turkish-speakers (enough to support publications and schooling) in Macedonia and (at least until the last couple of years) in Kosovo. Wayles Browne Department of Linguistics Morrill Hall 220, Cornell University Ithaca, New York 14853, U.S.A. tel. 607-255-0712 (o), 607-273-3009 (h) fax 607-255-2044 (write FOR W. BROWNE) e-mail ewb2 at cornell.edu From adahyl at cphling.dk Tue Nov 28 14:46:36 2000 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 15:46:36 +0100 Subject: Turkish In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 25 Nov 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Aren't the Gaugaz [sp?] an Anatolian Turkish-speaking Christian > ethnic group in Ukraine, Rumania et al.? > BTW: On maps I've seen references to Pomaks, Sanjaks & Nogays > (among others) in the Balkans. Are these Turkish groups, former > Turkish-speakers or local Muslims speaking Slavic languages? The Gagauz live mainly in southern Moldova around the city of Comrat, but there are also smaller groups in Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria. They are Orthodox by religion and speak a language closely related to Turkish, to some degree influenced by neighbouring Slavonic languages. They descend from Christian Turks given refuge by the Ottomans in the 19th century. The Pomaks are a Muslim, orginally nomadic, ethnic group living in Western Thrace (Greece). They speak a dialect of Bulgarian, or, if you like, a language closely related to Bulgarian. The Pomak research centre in Komotini publishes a newspaper (Zagalisa) in Pomak. Sandz^ak Novi Pazar is the name of a region in Southern Serbia and Northern Montenegro with a Muslim, Serbian-speaking population. The Sandz^aks define themselves as an ethnic group. The Nogays live in the Russian republic of Dagestan in North-Eastern Caucausus. They number about 75 000, and most of them speak Nogay, a Turkic language. ------------------ Adam Hyllested Editor of etymologies and language surveys Danish National Encyclopedia Student of Indo-European, Uralic and Balkan linguistics University of Copenhagen adahyl at cphling.dk From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com Tue Nov 28 19:57:26 2000 From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 14:57:26 -0500 Subject: Turkish In-Reply-To: <6DC91444E98@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: Kosovo had a Turkish-speaking minority into the 1980's. If I recall the _Encyclopaedia of Islam_ correctly, Prizren before the collapse of Yugoslavia was the only trilingual city in the Balkans, having some street signs in Serbian, Albanian, and Turkish and a Turkish population of about 30,000. What has become of these people since 1991 I have no idea. Turkish speakers in Serbia and Macedonia generally have declined in numbers since World War II through emigration to Turkey and Western Europe. I believe there are figures in _The Turkic Peoples of the World_, ed. Margaret Bainbridge, 1993. Jim Rader > Some history books seem to say that Turkish Thrace spoke largely Greek and > Bulgarian right up to the suburbs or walls of Constantinople, until a big > exchange of populations in the 1920's. > On BBC TV (=UK TV) news from Kosovo during the recent Kosovo troubles I saw > road signs in various languages including Turkish (e.g. {U"sku"b} for > {Skopje}). Is there still an outlier of Turkish speech there, or what? [Anthony Appleyard] From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com Tue Nov 28 20:37:21 2000 From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 15:37:21 -0500 Subject: Turkish In-Reply-To: Message-ID: The Gagauz are concentrated mainly in what is now Moldova, though there are small minorities in Romania and Bulgaria. Their language is quite close to Anatolian Turkish, but I believe it's lost vowel harmony at least partially and has some other peculiar features. The Pomaci (or Pomatsi, plural of Pomak) are Bulgarian-speaking Muslims living mainly in southern Bulgaria, if I recall correctly. By "Sanjaks" I assume you mean the 100,00-200,00 (?) Serbian- speaking Muslims who live in the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, a district of Serbia north of Kosovo and east of Montenegro. These people suffered persecution under the Milosevic regime; what their current status is I couldn't say. The Nogay are a Turkic-speaking people of the North Caucasus. If there are any in the Balkans, I don't know about it--Balkanologists on the list have anything to say? Jim Rader > Aren't the Gaugaz [sp?] an Anatolian Turkish-speaking Christian > ethnic group in Ukraine, Rumania et al.? > BTW: On maps I've seen references to Pomaks, Sanjaks & Nogays > (among others) in the Balkans. Are these Turkish groups, former > Turkish-speakers or local Muslims speaking Slavic languages? > Rick Mc Callister From r.piva at bluewin.ch Tue Nov 28 21:33:01 2000 From: r.piva at bluewin.ch (renato piva) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 23:33:01 +0200 Subject: Turkish Message-ID: Anthony Appleyard schrieb: > and one of them was called > Triyandafilidis, which is clearly modern Greek for "son of Trinity-lover". This is quite an odd interpretation, this name has nothing to do with the Trinity (Tri'as or Tri'ada in modern Greek). Trian'taphyllo means 'rose' (literally: '30 leaves/petals'), and the name as a whole, which you mention in Turkish orthography, means '(the one) of the rose', cf. e.g. the Italian names De Rosa or Della Rosa. (by the way: M.A. Triantaphyllidis was a very influent linguist in Pre-WWII-Greece who wrote a very detailed grammar of his language). I think that the most recent and most complete source of information in this regard (from the historical as well as from a linguistic point of view, and with large bibliographical data) is Georges Drettas, Aspects pontiques, Paris 1997. Renato Piva From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Wed Nov 29 12:12:48 2000 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 13:12:48 +0100 Subject: Turkish Message-ID: As for the Gagauz: They are generally considered as a Oghuz-Turkic speaking linguistic community, today spoken basically in the southern parts of the Moldavian Republic (in the so-called Gagauz Republic [Gagauz Yeri]) as well in the adjacent parts of Ukraine. They have immigrated into the Moldavian regions in 1806-12 - before, the Gagauz speakers settled mainly in the northeastern part of what is now Bulgaria (Deli Orman and so on), some Gagauz speakers remained on the Balkan (e.g. in the area of Novi Pazar and Varna, in Makedonia (FIY), and (perhaps) the Evros region of Northern Greece). Linguistically speaking, Gagauz clearly belongs to Western Oghuz - it participated in the Balkan Osmanic dialect continuum since at least the time of Sultan Bayasid I. However, it seems that Gagauz is based on a Kipchak Turkic substratum, perhaps spoken by Turkic Bulgarian groups in Byzantinian times (Danube-Bulgarian?) who had been christianized say between the 11th and 13th century. We may assume that the speakers switched from their Kipchak variety to the predominant Early Osmanic variety as it had shown up on the Balkan since say 1390. Nogays (Kipchak) can be spotted in the Dobrucha area esp. north of Constantia in Romania, they came to this place in the 19th century (after the Crimea war) from the eastern parts of the Crimea peninsula (due to Russian pressure). Pomaks are Bulgarian speaking muslims in Bulgaria (and now in the European parts of Turkey). Wolfgang Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Aren't the Gaugaz [sp?] an Anatolian Turkish-speaking Christian > ethnic group in Ukraine, Rumania et al.? > BTW: On maps I've seen references to Pomaks, Sanjaks & Nogays > (among others) in the Balkans. Are these Turkish groups, former > Turkish-speakers or local Muslims speaking Slavic languages? ******************** Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze Institut für Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft Universität München - Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 - D-80539 München Tel.: ++49-(0)89-2180 2486 (secretary) // ++49-(0)89-2180 5343 (office) Fax: ++49-(0)89-2180 5345 Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Web: http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ ******************** From dlwhite at texas.net Tue Nov 28 16:44:48 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 10:44:48 -0600 Subject: The Phonemic Principle, Middle Bulgarian Message-ID: I agree with what Dr. Connolly (sp?) and Mr. Friessen have said. In particular, there is no reason to believe that semantic or grammatical categorization affects phonetic implementation, which is essentially what seems to have been asserted. If we get (in a few cases) fewer phonemes by assuming that it does, we do so at the cost of complicating phonetic implementation by having it "reach back" to other levels, so that any supposed gains in simplicity ("Occam's Razor" and all that) are, as so often happens, illusory. Do inferential perfects occur in Middle Bulgarian, or are they modern? It occurred to me, as I was driving away on vacation, that perhaps the Turkic influence in question came from the Bulgarsway back, not from the Ottoman Turks. Indeed, I was half-expecting to find myself roundly berated for my ignorance-cum-arrogance when I got back. So far, so good. Maybe I (coincidentally) got it right the first time. Dr. David L. White From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Nov 28 07:30:34 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 02:30:34 EST Subject: Celtic Germanic relationship Message-ID: In a message dated 11/27/00 11:53:49 PM Mountain Standard Time, rayhendon at satx.rr.com writes: << I am confused about the linguistic relationship, if any, between Celt and German. -- they're independent branches of Indo-European, northwestern variety. Also, Celtic and Proto-Germanic were in contact (as were Proto-Germanic and Balto-Slavic) and lexical items moved across the boundaries. Eg., the PrtGrmc word for "iron" is a Celtic loan, as are several other terms (ruler and servant, for instance) and the form of these loans indicates that they were borrowed before the first Germanic sound-shift, since it underwent that change. (PIE *t, *d, and *dh ==> *th, *t, and *d, and PIE *p, *t and *k ==> *b, *d, and *g., etc.) This is the most notable feature immediately distinguishing Germanic from the other IE languages. Since we know from archaeological sources that iron technology spread to the early Germanic areas about 700-500 BCE, this dates that change quite precisely -- it came afterwards, towards the end of the 1st millenium BCE. Before that, pre-Proto-Germanic must have been strikingly conservative, much closer to PIE. (And the ancestral Balto-Slavic.) This in turn raises interesting questions as to the possible influence of a pre-IE substrate on proto-Germanic, since the Germanic urheimat in Scandinavia and northern Germany had presumably been indo-europeanized for a very long time at that point. From sarima at friesen.net Tue Nov 28 15:50:23 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 07:50:23 -0800 Subject: Celtic Germanic relationship In-Reply-To: <001001c05649$16839f60$8a8e1c18@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: >[ Moderator's comment: > The traditional Indo-European family tree (to use the model most familiar to > non-specialists) has Germanic, Celtic, and Italic as three separate > branches. > Some, but by no means all, Indo-Europeanists believe that the Italic and > Celtic branches should be considered to form a sub-unit of the tree, based > on certain morphological developments; this branch is called Italo-Celtic. > The Germanic branch shares some developments and vocabulary with Italic and > Celtic, and others with Balto-Slavic. This has recently led a few people to > posit an early separation of Germanic from the rest of the family (but from > a branch that later led to Balto-Slavic), then massive influence from Celtic > and Italic. I find this model to have some problems, not the least of which is that such massive borrowings should show up as words with different histories. English is a good case in point where we often have several different words derived from the same PIE word or root: e.g. 'head', 'chief', 'chef', 'capitol'. I would actually suggest a "reversal" of this model: an "early" branching from an Germano-Italo-Celtic base, followed by a significant Baltic influence, mostly in morphology (e.g. the case ending in '-m-' instead of '-bh-'). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From ibonewits at neopagan.net Tue Nov 28 07:04:17 2000 From: ibonewits at neopagan.net (Isaac Bonewits) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 02:04:17 -0500 Subject: Early Celtic/Sanscrit Mutual Comprehensibility In-Reply-To: <009001c04baa$d67529a0$d38f6395@roborr.uottawa.ca> Message-ID: I hope some of you will forgive an interested amateur for asking what may be simple questions with obvious answers "everyone" should know. On 11/11/00, Robert Orr wrote: >"MacBain's Gaelic Etymological Dictionary" is not the best source for early >Celtic in any case. Apparently it is best for providing a corpus of >Inverness-shire Gaelic for the last century. And the best source for early Celtic etymology now is? I ask because many years ago my Irish teacher (who had his Ph.D. in Linguistics) told me that "at one time" Old Irish and Sanscrit were similar enough that a speaker of one would have been able, with effort, to understand a speaker of the other. He also said that this was probably due to the "fossilization at the extremes" principle. I've gathered from the discussion of "Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate," that southern Russia/"Scythia" as *the* homeland of PIE from whence all IE languages completely originated is no longer the only academically respectable opinion. I know that some Indian linguists, archeologists, and historians insist that all the IE tongues (and related cultural paradigms) originated in India, which would make India no longer an extreme reach of linguistic migration from a center and make Ireland even more of an extreme one (from India). If there were "Pre-Proto-IE" languages whose speakers migrated into new territories and/or whose vocabulary traveled with specific technological innovations, can a correlation be made between PPIE/neolithic, PIE/bronze age, and IE/iron age cultures -- or with anything else observable? At what historical or archeological point (if any) can major nodes like Proto-Germanic or Proto-Celtic be distinguished from Proto-Indo-European? How would these alternatives to the traditional "origination from a center" theory of PIE-to-IE language travel explain the similarities in motifs and characters between the mythologies of the various IE Paleopaganisms, as (IMHO) amply demonstrated by Dumezil and his followers -- which also seem to show the "fossilization at the extremes" (Vedic/Irish/Baltic) principle in action? I would truly appreciate pointers to appropriate urls and/or reference texts, preferably in English (my Gaeilge isn't good enough yet for academic materials). Isaac Bonewits <===(returning to lurk mode) -- ******************************************************** * Isaac Bonewits, Adr.Em./ADF * * Box 372, Warwick, NY 10990 * ******************************************************** From dlwhite at texas.net Tue Nov 28 18:01:26 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 12:01:26 -0600 Subject: Motivating the Root Restrictions of PIE Message-ID: Yes, I am serious. And yes, what I posit is typologically weird, but what more normal system motivates the root restrictions? Are we to imagine that these were invented out of sheer phonological perversity? It is, obviously, a matter of the relative claims of typology versus motivation. Some reasons to think that the claims of typology are overrated have been given before. In any event, I prefer to value motivation, as long as there is no clearly understood mundane phonetic reason that the system I posit should be inherently unviable. By the way, I think my observations on the laryngeals are, upon further refection, almost completely worthless. I was trying to make something out of an assymetry that probably nothing can be made of. Dr. David L. White From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Nov 28 17:23:12 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 12:23:12 -0500 Subject: Elamite In-Reply-To: <005a01c05151$1b15fac0$1a241bd4@j5j6j5> Message-ID: >Sergent suggests Harappa might have been burushaski (he has good reasons for >it), but on the whole we don't have enough proofs: if Harappan was indeed >burushaski, we would expect a burushaski substrate in Vedic, which seems >not to >be the case (see Michael Witzel's online paper, 'substrates in old >indo-aryan') > >Guillaume Could you elaborate on these reasons? Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Nov 29 02:24:36 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 21:24:36 EST Subject: Elamite/Harappan/Sergent Message-ID: I wrote: << Bernard Sergent -- a proponent of the idea that Harappan-Indus was Dravidian -- in "Genesis of India" (1997) apparently also takes the position that the isoglosses cited by McAlpin can be explained "through contact rather than common origin.">> In a message dated 11/27/2000 6:30:19 PM, xiang at free.fr writes: <> Guillaume is quite right. My notes are from someone's review in 1998 when the book was first published in French. BUT I must point out that it appears my statement regarding Sergent's position on Elamite and Dravidian being unrelated languages is 100% CORRECT -- lest we forget the point being made. <> This is in fact correct. My apologies. Part of the reason for my confusion were in the notes from the review there is the quote that Sergent admits "...the Dravidians were certainly already in the Deccan when the mature Harappan civilization started.... Sergent asserts that the Dravidians formed a pre-Harappan population in Sindh and Gujarat, and that they were overwhelmed and assimilated, not by the invading Aryans, but by the mature-Harappan population." Note that Dravidian/Harappan connection is not denied, but rather subjected to "assimilation." xiang at free.fr also writes: <> Looking at this again, I do not see how anything that Sergent is saying eliminates the possibility the written language of Harappan was Dravidian. If Semitic speakers could write in Old Sumerian, then Harapan could have written in old Dravidian. Who's to say? Sergent certainly leaves that opening, doesn't he? And, since he can only tenously point to "Burushaski" -- one of the other major "mystery" languages of the region -- he has not really advanced the issue of Harappan script very far at all. Query how, with its IE affinities, the (unknown) early form of Burushaski would exactly have showed up as a substrate in Indo-Aryan? And why it would not already have showed up at least partially in the numerous attempts to decipher Harappan as an IE language? Cf. I. Casulje, Basic Burushaski Etymologies: The Indo-European and Paleobalkanic affinities of Burushaski (1997). Regards, Steve Long From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Wed Nov 29 12:22:13 2000 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 13:22:13 +0100 Subject: Lezgian and Arabic Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > BTW: I also found a curious article on Avars in F & W > stating that their descendents > are "Lezghians [who speak] a language similar to Arabic"!!! > Can anyone explain that? This is nonsense. Even the medivial Arabic sources did never claim that Lezgi(an) would be close or 'similar' to Arabic. The F&W entry is far from being understandable. Lezgian languages belong to the East Caucasian language group which as far as we can see (pace Starostin and friends) does not have any living relatives around the world... Wolfgang > Rick Mc Callister > W-1634 > Mississippi University for Women > Columbus MS 39701 -- ******************** Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze Institut für Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft Universität München - Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 - D-80539 München Tel.: ++49-(0)89-2180 2486 (secretary) // ++49-(0)89-2180 5343 (office) Fax: ++49-(0)89-2180 5345 Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Web: http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ ******************** From evenstar at mail.utexas.edu Tue Nov 28 23:15:48 2000 From: evenstar at mail.utexas.edu (Shilpi Misty Bhadra) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 17:15:48 -0600 Subject: Reconstructing Human Prehistory Message-ID: http://www.ihtmed.com/articles/1517.htm > Pushing the Limits of Prehistory > Nicholas Wade New York Times Service > Thursday, November 16, 2000 > An Archaeological Quest to the Dawn of the Human Species [ moderator snip of copyrighted material ] Shilpi Misty Bhadra University of Texas at Austin Ancient History, Classics, and Humanities (focus: Indo-European Studies) senior undergraduate evenstar at mail.utexas.edu 512-320-0229 (ph) 512-476-3367 (fax) From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Nov 28 09:41:02 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 09:41:02 +0000 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Stanley Friesen writes: > Does anybody have any examples of a language that *retains* /t/ vs. /th/ > finally? According to Ladefoged and Maddieson, The Sounds of the World's Languages, p. 67, Eastern Armenian has minimal pairs like these, where = t-esh and = aspirated: 'bond' 'club' 'difficult' 'high' 'phrase' 'no' 'under' 'hot' But L & M cite no examples with final /t/. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Nov 28 16:50:00 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 17:50:00 +0100 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <4.3.1.2.20001123072604.00b40190@getmail.friesen.net> Message-ID: On Thu, 23 Nov 2000 07:28:43 -0800, Stanley Friesen wrote: >Does anybody have any examples of a language that *retains* /t/ vs. /th/ >finally? (Cl.) Armenian -t ~ -t`. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From edsel at glo.be Tue Nov 28 10:22:44 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 11:22:44 +0100 Subject: More on dental fricatives Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Thursday, November 23, 2000 1:08 PM [snip] >> Most Spaniards I've met (from northern and central Spain) in the US >> and Latin America use laminal /s/. > I'm astonished. In my experience, northern Spaniards invariably use > apical /s/. The shushy quality of this thing is quite striking > to my ears. A French Basque friend of mine who moved south and > learned Spanish unhesitatingly identified the Spanish with his > own apical . [Ed] The systematic use of laminal s (for both s and z/soft-c) is quite characteristic for most of American Spanish, not Peninsular Spanish. Andalusian Spanish is an exception, but a more complicated one than just a matter of apical/laminal s. Catalan/Valencian provinces often show Catalan accent in pronunciation, especially in the north (of this region). >> Is this linked to social class or is it a generational thing? > In the north, in my experience, there is no variation, and apical > is universal. Don't know what happens elsewhere. I had thought the > variation was strictly geographical. Not sure how far south the > apical runs, but the Madrileños I've met always seem to have it. > Larry Trask [Ed] That is also my experience. And educated Castilian speaking people in more southern regions tend to imitate that - often not successfully Ed. From edsel at glo.be Tue Nov 28 11:14:22 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 12:14:22 +0100 Subject: Final Theta in Spanish Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Thursday, November 23, 2000 12:33 PM > David White writes: >> Should not all Latin 3rd declension nouns >> in /k/ show up with final theta in Spanish, if "lux" and "pax" do? I cannot >> at the moment think of any more, but there must have been more than 2 ... [Ed Selleslagh] e.g. falx > hoz ( -al- > o, cf. French Gaule < Gallia), radix > raíz, rapax > rapaz (and analogous formations: loquax > locuaz). Actually one should consider the accusatives:falcem, radicem, rapacem, loquacem... On the other hand: sex > seis, not *seiz, but here the (non-extant) accusative ending doesn't come into play, so it would be simply the loss of -k-, a regular phenomenon. Other words in -z have different origins: haz < fascem, faz < faciem (this one does have a -k root) > There were, but I'm not sure they were all that numerous, and anyway > not all of them survived into modern Castilian. For example, Latin > 'leader' should have yielded Castilian *, but no such > form is recorded, and modern 'duke' is clearly borrowed > from Old French , which itself appears to be an analogical form. > Anyway, the history of final /e/-loss in Castilian is a trifle > complicated. For example, Latin yielded the expected , > well attested in medieval Castilian, but the variant seemingly > never disappeared, and modern exhibits not only the final /e/ > but also an extra /l/ which it picked up somehow. As for '12', > from , I confess I have little idea why that /e/ is still > there. > Larry Trask [Ed] 'dulce' has all the characteristics of a 'learned' later formation, i.e. after the Renaissance (like próximo, fructuoso....). In other words: the -l-wasn't 'picked up', it was never lost as it should have, because it didn't undergo normal evolution: it skipped it. All Latin languages are full of that, e.g. French: Traditional: moustier/moûtier <> modern: monastère. It seems there is a 'need' for two syllables, maybe a lingering memory of the multisyllabic Latin origin, or just false analogy? (In S. American popular Spanish some say even 'seise' for 'seis'(cf. siete < septem)). There is a strong incentive for -e in 'doce/trece': avoid confusion with 'dos/tres', notwithstanding the s-z/c opposition, but that is absent in 'catorce, quince'... So it seems the -ce is rather the remnant of '-decim', the -d- having been lost like in 'raíz' and many other words (and in popular speech: -ado > ao, -ada > aa > á). No wonder, especially if z/c was originally affricated as is often thought. Ed. From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Nov 28 16:53:49 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 17:53:49 +0100 Subject: Final Theta in Spanish In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 23 Nov 2000 11:33:44 +0000, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote: >Anyway, the history of final /e/-loss in Castilian is a trifle >complicated. For example, Latin yielded the expected , >well attested in medieval Castilian, but the variant seemingly >never disappeared, and modern exhibits not only the final /e/ >but also an extra /l/ which it picked up somehow. As for '12', >from , I confess I have little idea why that /e/ is still >there. After a consonant cluster, the -e remained (once, catorce, quince), and thus by analogy doce, trece. I suppose. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Nov 28 15:57:56 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 10:57:56 -0500 Subject: Final Theta in Spanish In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Anyway, the history of final /e/-loss in Castilian is a trifle >complicated. For example, Latin yielded the expected , >well attested in medieval Castilian, but the variant seemingly >never disappeared, and modern exhibits not only the final /e/ >but also an extra /l/ which it picked up somehow. dulce is a Latinate form >As for '12', >from , I confess I have little idea why that /e/ is still >there. I imagine because *doz & *trez would have been too close to dos & tres There was possibly also an assimilation to the final /-e/ of once, catorce & quince which kept the final /-e/ to conform to Spanish phonology >Larry Trask Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Tue Nov 28 12:34:38 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 12:34:38 GMT Subject: Final Theta in Spanish Message-ID: "David L. White" wrote, of Spanish words in -z: > Why are these words so rare, evidently? Should not all Latin > 3rd declension nouns in /k/ show up with final theta in Spanish, > if "lux" and "pax" do? I cannot at the moment think of any more, > but there must have been more than 2 ... Why does Latin {rex} = "king" show in Spanish as {re} and not **{rez}? [ Moderator's note: The stem of Latin _rex_ is _reg-_, as seen in the accusative _regem_. --rma ] From vine at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Thu Nov 30 02:41:15 2000 From: vine at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (Brent Vine) Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 18:41:15 -0800 Subject: [vine@HUMnet.UCLA.EDU: Indo-Iranian position at UCLA] In-Reply-To: <200011300231.VAA01066@panix3.panix.com> Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: The position notice below was originally posted to the HISTLING mailing list. Some of you will have seen it there; the re-post is for those who did not. --rma ] >May I post a copy of this announcement on the Indo-European mailing list? > Rich Alderson > IE list owner > and moderator Yes, indeed! We'd be very grateful for that. (In case it's useful, I've pasted in a fresh copy below.) Thanks for your attention to this. - -- Brent Vine (Chair, Program in Indo-European Studies, UCLA) ****************************************************** University of California, Los Angeles The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and the Program in Indo-European Studies at UCLA announce an open-rank search to fill a position in Old Indo-Iranian language/linguistics and culture, starting July 1, 2001. The successful candidate will also be considered for an appointment to the newly endowed Musa Sabi Chair in Iranian Studies. Candidates should have substantial training in Indo-European linguistics. Teaching responsibilities will include courses in both Old and Middle Iranian (Avestan, Old Persian, Introduction to Middle Iranian) and in Classical and Vedic Sanskrit. In addition, the appointee should be able to teach undergraduate courses on topics of broad interest in Indic and Iranian religion, literature and culture, as well as graduate-level courses in Indo-European linguistics. Applicants should send a letter of introduction, curriculum vitae, samples of scholarly research, and at least three letters of recommendation to: Prof. Brent Vine Chair, Indo-Iranian Search Committee Department of Classics / Program in Indo-European Studies, UCLA 100 Dodd Hall Los Angeles, CA 90095-1417 Applications and supporting materials should be received by January 15, 2001. Applications will be reviewed until the position is filled. (Inquiries may be addressed to Brent Vine at vine at humnet.ucla.edu.) UCLA is an Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity Employer. Women and members of underrepresented minorities are encouraged to apply. From dlwhite at texas.net Thu Nov 30 04:17:09 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 22:17:09 -0600 Subject: Reference on Numbers of Saxons Message-ID: > Any theory dealing with the Saxon migrations to Britain has to deal with > the differences in linguistic results. Any theory of the development of English has to deal with the difference of result in English versus the other Germanic languages: in general, English has apparent Celticisms, which appear in the North and West, whereas the rest of Germanic in general does not. > On the continent, Germanic migrants into the Roman provinces were generally > linguistically assimilated within a few generations -- beyond some loanwords, > little trace of Gothic remains in Iberian Romance, for instance. In fact, it > was probably extinct or moribund by the time of the 8th-century Muslim > invasions. It lasted much better in the Crimea! The main difference is that Romance was high-prestige, whereas Brittonic was low-prestige. Prestige matters. > In Britain not only did the local Celtic and Romance speeches disappear, > but the Anglo-Saxon that emerged after the conversion to Christianity was > singularly lacking in both Romance and Celtic vocabulary. About 14 Celtic > loan-words in all, and no more Latin loans than the continental Germanic > of the period. The idea the grammatical influence must be accompanied by lexical influence is false, as is repeatedly noted by Thomason and Kaufman, esp p. 21. This has been pretty widely known since Jakobson or before, though apparently it has not filtered down to everybody. There is, all things being equal, simply no reason for words to be borrowed, in large numbers, from a low-prestige language into a high-prestige language. Furthermore, the number of "Celtic" loanwords in non-standard dialects of English in the northwest is about 200, which is not remarkably low. > In fact, when it emerges into the light of documentary day, Old English is a > remarkably conservative West Germanic language still mutually comprehensible > with the ancestors of Netherlandish, Frisian, and Low German, not to mention > the nascent Scandinavian tongues. Which is why English missionaries were so > important in the conversion of the continental Germans. Old English is not "remarkably conservative" for an Od Germanic language. It is fairly typical. Judging by the fact that Old Icelandic, which is contemporaneous with Middle English, is about as conservative as Old English, if anything North Germanic at the time of Old English would seem to be worthy of being termed "remarkably conservative". > And this despite the fact that we're talking about the Wessex dialect of > Old English, which emerged on the western fringe of the English-speaking zone > and which we know _was_ in contact with proto-Welsh speakers, since the laws > of Wessex recognize a separate (and legally inferior) Welsh-speaking social > group within the kingdom. The differences between OE dialects are fairly minor, as is to be expected if an elite had (in most of the country) spread itself fairly thinly over a subject population in fairly recent times, as time is measured in linguistics. > The linguistic evidence alone strongly militates against any prolonged period > of mass bilingualism in the areas of Anglo-Saxon speech. Since Anglo-Saxon > in its early phase was the speech of an illiterate people divided into a > multiplicity of small, unstable kingdoms with no standard court or chancery > language, it should have been very open to influence from any substrate. In > fact, in such situations linguistic influence occurrs without the speakers of > either language being conscious of it. It is classes that matter, not written chancery languages. That the Old Germanic languages had well-developed notions of linguistic propriety is evident from the very well-developed (or even artificial) poetic diction, complete with archaic "poetic" words. "Pre-literate" is not logically or practically equivalent to "unsophisticated" or "egalitarian". > Yet there's less Celtic influence on Old English than there is Algonquian > Indian influence on the English of New England! Indian place-names and > loan-words are more common there, despite what we know was an extremely > brusque dispossession of the previous population and very limited contact > between the incomers and the indigenous people. > The place-names tell the same story. They become common only in the western > fringes of England, which we know from historical sources remained in > British/Welsh hands until the 6th-7th centuries. And even there, they're > often misunderstood -- rivers called "river" and hills called "hill". Conquerors don't have to accept native place-names if they don't want to. The matter is quite open to fashion. > We also know that there was a very substantial drop in the population of > post-Roman Britain. Estimates for Britannia in the late Roman period -- > 4th century CE -- range as high as 3.5 million or more. > By the time of the Norman conquest (a period for which we have unusually > good historical-demographic documentation) England had about 1.5 million > people; and that was after several centuries of what's generally agreed upon > to be steady expansion. Since WWII, aerial surveys have indicated that the population of early AS Britain was quite a lot higher than it had been traditional to assert. I seriously doubt that there was any great change. Even a population of one million is high to have been composed primarily of the descendants of continental Saxons, since these can hardly have numbered more than fifty thousand. There is no evidence for any massive depoplation on the continent such as would have been required for the traditional view of the AS population's origins to be correct. It appears that only a thin costal strip was depopulated (this is confirmed by Bede), in part because it was sinking. > Other lines of evidence also testify to widespread depopulation in the > transitional Romano-British and early Anglo-Saxon periods. For example, as > late as the 11th century, London buildings were drawing on domestic sources > of long, thick, straight oak timbers, the type that can only been drawn from > closed-canopy forest at least 300 years old. > These disappear from the domestic record not long after, and only the > curved timber characteristic of coppice- and field-edge oaks is found -- at > precisely the time when population, and forest clearance, again reach the > Romano-British level. So there was still some climax forest around as of 1050. That hardly proves anything with regard to relations betweenn Anglo-Saxon and Brittonic. Here are some partial semi-formal references on people who seem to be, as we speak, scooping me on the matter of Celtic influence in English. (I did my own work in 1987, by the way.) Tristram, Hildegard C. 1999. "How Celtic is English" Tristram, Hildegard C., ed. 2000. "Celtic Englishes II" German, Gary. 2000. "Britons, Anglo-Saxons, and Scholars: 19th Century Attitudes Towards the Survival of Britons in AngloSaxon England", in "Celtic Englishes II." Venneman, Theo. 2000. "Atlantis Semitica: Structural Contact Features in Celtic and English." in "Historical Linguistics 1999: Selected Papers from th 14th International Conference on Historical Linguistics. Venneman, Theo. 2000. "English as a Celtic Language", in Celtic Englishes II. I would suggest that anyone attempting to make a serious contribution to this emerging issue submit matter for publication in the usual manner, after having read these and many other works, rather than discussing it on the IE list. That is what I am (somewhat sporadically) trying to do. And I could have sworn that this discussion was closed after I pointed out that the traditional interpretation rests fundamentally on a view of the early Germans and their supposed glory and superiority that could quite appropriately be called "Proto-Nazi". So why do I find myself typing in the same references again? Dr. David L. White [ Moderator's note: The discussion that was closed off was one in which reaction to the term "Proto-Nazi" was the point of the posting, rather than reasoned discussion of Dr. White's original claims. There is a corollary to Godwin's Rule, that when the words "Nazi" or "Hitler" are used in order to force the rule's invocation, the rule does not apply. Discussion of the linguistic and archaeological evidence for the various models of the spread of Anglo-Saxon at the expense of Celtic and Latin are on-topic for this list; further discussion of the putative reasons for 19th Century interpretations of the evidence then available belong on a list devoted to the History of Science, and will not be welcomed here. --rma ] From Tristan at mail.scm-rpg.com.au Thu Nov 30 06:33:31 2000 From: Tristan at mail.scm-rpg.com.au (Tristan Jones) Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 17:33:31 +1100 Subject: Reference on Numbers of Saxons Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Tuesday, November 28, 2000 6:14 PM > On the continent, Germanic migrants into the Roman provinces were generally > linguistically assimilated within a few generations -- beyond some loanwords, > little trace of Gothic remains in Iberian Romance, for instance. In fact, it > was probably extinct or moribund by the time of the 8th-century Muslim > invasions. It lasted much better in the Crimea! > In Britain not only did the local Celtic and Romance speeches disappear, > but the Anglo-Saxon that emerged after the conversion to Christianity was > singularly lacking in both Romance and Celtic vocabulary. About 14 Celtic > loan-words in all, and no more Latin loans than the continental Germanic > of the period. I have to agree with him, Genetic edviance tells us the English in the eastern part of England and Lowland Scotland are more related to Danes than they are to Welsh in Wales, West Country and other small bits of western England. I take caution since the genetic edviance might be showing an very anicent pattern where people in Western Fringe of Britain have migrated from Altanic coasts of France, Spain and Portgual and people in Eastern part of Britain have come across the North Sea from nearby Low Countries, Northern France, Germany and Denmark, which had been going in small and big waves for thousands of years. The Romano-British influence was pretty non-existant language wise, I do not a lot about how they affected Anglo-Saxon culture. There must have been a massive decrease in population of Romano-British from various causes in England and a large mirgation of Germanic people from across the North Sea. In the 6th century there was a massive Bubonic plague from mediterrean that just affected the Romano-British and spared the Anglo-Saxons, there is something to investgate. A good thing is to compaire how English replaced Latin and Welsh in England, againist Turkish replacing the languages Antaolia, Hungarian replacing the languages that were once in realm of what is now Hungry and Indo-Aryan languages replacing the Dravidan and Austro-Asiatic languages being spoken in Northern India around 1500BC. How much of pervious languages were preserved in new arriving language. I doubt those languages preserved as little of pervious languages than Old English did. ----------------------------------------------------- If you deny your roots, you deny yourself as a person From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Nov 30 16:36:54 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 11:36:54 -0500 Subject: Reference on Numbers of Saxons In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Are you only including words documented in written sources before the Norman conquest? Scanning Buck and Partridge, I get the impression that there were many more. Unfortunately, there's no information on attestation dates, etc. BTW: what percentage of Old English and Briton vocabulary consisted of close cognates? If there were a high percentage, would this have been a factor? [snip] >In Britain not only did the local Celtic and Romance speeches disappear, but >the Anglo-Saxon that emerged after the conversion to Christianity was >singularly lacking in both Romance and Celtic vocabulary. About 14 Celtic >loan-words in all, and no more Latin loans than the continental Germanic of >the period. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Nov 30 06:53:05 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 07:53:05 +0100 Subject: Turkish In-Reply-To: <004f01c0592d$079b6a00$4b02703e@edsel> Message-ID: On Tue, 28 Nov 2000 11:07:24 +0100, "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >As opposed to Bosnia-Hercegovina (Bosna-Hersek in Turkish; Hercegovina < >Hersek Novi) Isn't it rather Herceg-ov-ina (like Vojevod-ina), with < German ? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Nov 30 14:28:06 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 09:28:06 -0500 Subject: Turkish In-Reply-To: <20214262527333@m-w.com> Message-ID: On a Hammond map of European ethnic groups c. 1910 I saw Nogays in both Daghestan and also between the mouth of the Danube and Crimea [snip] >The Nogay are a Turkic-speaking people of >the North Caucasus. If there are any in the Balkans, I don't know >about it--Balkanologists on the list have anything to say? >Jim Rader [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From brent at bermls.oau.org Thu Nov 30 11:13:09 2000 From: brent at bermls.oau.org (Brent J. Ermlick) Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 06:13:09 -0500 Subject: Celtic Germanic relationship In-Reply-To: <30.d2676fc.2754b91a@aol.com>; from JoatSimeon@aol.com on Tue, Nov 28, 2000 at 02:30:34AM -0500 Message-ID: On Tue, Nov 28, 2000 at 02:30:34AM -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: . . . > Eg., the PrtGrmc word for "iron" is a Celtic loan, as are several other terms > (ruler and servant, for instance) and the form of these loans indicates that > they were borrowed before the first Germanic sound-shift, since it underwent > that change. (PIE *t, *d, and *dh ==> *th, *t, and *d, and PIE *p, *t and *k > ==> *b, *d, and *g., etc.) This is the most notable feature immediately > distinguishing Germanic from the other IE languages. Do these loans provide evidence for all three consonant grades? The only words that come to mind are *i:sarn- (iron) and *ri:k- (power), which only provide evidence for PIE *g -> PGmc *k. -- Brent J. Ermlick Veritas liberabit uos brent at bermls.oau.org From dlwhite at texas.net Thu Nov 30 15:50:08 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 09:50:08 -0600 Subject: Early Celtic/Sanscrit Mutual Comprehensibility Message-ID: > my Irish teacher (who had his Ph.D. in > Linguistics) told me that "at one time" Old Irish and Sanscrit were > similar enough that a speaker of one would have been able, with > effort, to understand a speaker of the other. He also said that this > was probably due to the "fossilization at the extremes" principle. Your teacher's statement is itself an example of extremes, unless "at one time" is meant to refer to something close to the time of PIE. The similarities between Celtic and Indic are more cultural than linguistic. Dr. David L. White From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Nov 30 17:15:01 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 18:15:01 +0100 Subject: Final Theta in Spanish In-Reply-To: <7559F662BFD@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: On Tue, 28 Nov 2000 12:34:38 GMT, "Anthony Appleyard" wrote: > Why does Latin {rex} = "king" show in Spanish as {re} and not **{rez}? >[ Moderator's note: > The stem of Latin _rex_ is _reg-_, as seen in the accusative _regem_. > --rma ] It shows up as rey < reye < rege(m). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From lmfosse at elender.hu Thu Nov 30 19:41:07 2000 From: lmfosse at elender.hu (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 20:41:07 +0100 Subject: Request Message-ID: I have a question to the members of the list: Are there any studies of the syntax of action nouns in Avestan? I would also be interested in bibliographic references to such studies for Sanskrit, particularly Vedic. Furthermore, I would be grateful for bibliographic references to such studies for Greek and Latin. I am particularly interested in such phenomena as the use of genitive objects and subjects. Best regards, Lars Martin Fosse Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114, 0674 Oslo Norway Phone: +47 22 32 12 19 Mobile phone: +47 90 91 91 45 Fax 1: +47 22 32 12 19 Fax 2: +47 85 02 12 50 (InFax) Email: lmfosse at online.no From cristim at smart.ro Thu Nov 30 12:37:09 2000 From: cristim at smart.ro (Cristian Mocanu) Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 14:37:09 +0200 Subject: Turkish, Hungary, Avars etc. Message-ID: I'll try to answer here - to the best of my knowledge-several questions by several distinguished contributors. 1. The language used at the Ottoman court was Ottoman Turkish (osmanli). It co-existed there, of course, with Persian, Arabic and even Greek. Incidentally, all the correspondence of the Sultans with the Moldavian and Wallachian princes, between the 15-th and the 19-th century, that is, all the documents preserved in both Turkish and Romanian archives is in Osmanli, and not Greek, as might have been expected, if one would think of the fact that the adresses were Orthodox Christians. 2. In the regions formerly under Turkish rule, Turkish is nowadays spoken as follows: -Bulgaria: there is a large Turkish speaking minority, apart from the Bulgarian-speaking Muslim population. I wouldn't hazard mentioning a percentage here, as I do not know the results of the latest Bulgarian census. But Turks do have a daily newspaper and a sizeable political party. -Yugoslavia: there is a large Turkish minority in Kosovo, especially in the urban areas. Before the conflict, they used to have schools, publications and a daily radio broadcast. There may be scattered Turkish speakers left in Southern Serbia. -(Former Yugoslav Republic of) Macedonia: there is a sizeable Turkish minority whose situation may be compared with that of the Kosovo Turks. -Dobrudja (i.e. South Eastern Romania, between the Danube and the Black Sea Coast): there is a Turkish minority of about 10 to 15 thousand. They have primary school educatiion, one secondary school, one weekly publication. -An interesting Turkish speaking enclave was the island of Ada Kale on the Danube in the far Southwest of Romania. The Ottomans established a garrison there, made up of (mainly) Anatolians. When the Austrians took hold of the town of Orsova, the Turks were asked to leave peacefully; uinstead, they surrendered their weapons and chose to stay. This 100% Turkish community stayed on until 1967 when the island was flooded at thed construction of a huge hydro power station. It was tried to re-settle them in Turkey, however, some came back and are now scattered in several places in Romania. 3. Related to the previous point, the Gagauz were indeed Seldjukid Turks who adopted Orthodox Christianity at some point during the 14-th century. Their mainstay region now is the south of the Republic of Moldova, where they even established an autonomous region, Gagauz Yeri. They are also to be found in the Odessa region in the Ukraine and in some parts of Russia. The speakers reported in Romania are originally also from what is now the Republic of Moldova (part of Romania until 1940). Fearing Soviet repression, some fleed westwards with the withdrawing Romanian administration. To the best of my knowledge, however, there are no active speakers left among their descendants. 4. About Hungary: Dr. Fosse is absolutely right in what he writes about pre-and post-Trianon Hungary. However, I think the original question referred to the 1-st millenium A.D. If this is the period we are discussing, the accuracy of the mentioned figure (22 languages), largely depends on whether or not we consider the Slavic languages as already separated at that time (actually, 1000 years is quite a lot, isn't it?). Again to the best of my knowledge, apart from the Slavs, the following language groups were represented in the Pannonian plains (roughly post-Trianon Hungary) at some stage during the period between 300 and 1000 A.D.: -Turkic and other Altaic languages:Avaric (see below), Bulgar,Cuman, Hunic, Pechenegue. -Germanic languages: Eastern Gothic, Gepidic, Baiuvaric (, questionable) -Uralic languages:Hungarian -Romance languages: Old (or Common) Romanian (Urrumaenisch, according to the terminology used by Puscariu,1916). The actual fact of the possible co-existence of some (or most) of these languages on a small territory should not , in my opinion, be judged by comparison with some or another American state. Rather, we should think that the period we are discussing is that of the great migration of peoples:some of the above cited populations were just "passing through", others stayed for smaller or longer periods of time, some others wandered back and forth in search of better grazing fields etc. Furthermore there was no question yet of a centralized state, standardized languages etc. Concerning the linguistic situation in post-Trianon Hungary, here are the linguistic minorities recognized as such by the present Hungarian government:Armenian, Bulgarian, Croatian, German, Greek, Romanian, Romany, Serbian, Slovak, Ukrainian and Yiddish. I would've had my doubts about Bulgarian and Greek before reading these data; however, somebody introducing himself as the spokesperson for the Bulgarian minority in Hungary gave an interview for the BBC in that capacity as recently as May 2000. 5. Finally a quick word about the Avars.The F&W reference quoted by Mr. Mc. Callister is a classical instance of the confusions the glossonymic similarities can sometimes induce: the Avars known to us from early Middle Age history, were-according to all-admittedly scarce- infomation we have, a Turkic population. The Avar language that is spoken now in the Authonomous Republic of Dagestan (Russia) is part of the Caucasian language family; as such it is undoubtedly related to Lesgin or Lesgian. But it is not a Turkic language. As for Arabic, the speakers of Avar are mainly Muslim, so their language may have quite a few Arabic loanwords,but that's hardly enough to postulate any genetic relationship. 6. I have already been too long, for which I apologize, but I cannot help myself to add another example of such a confusion, an example which is intended only to bring a smile on your face. In one of the Lord's Prayer collections published by the British Bible society back in the 19-th century, a confusion between "lingua Wallica" (Welsh) and "lingua Wallachica" (Romanian) resulted in two slightly different Romanian versions of the Lord's Prayer being published in the same collection, one of which was listed under "Welsh". The Hungarian historian and Protestant theologian Samuel Koleseri came across this collection and concluded that Welsh sounded so Romanian, that necessarily the Welsh must be descendants of the Roman legions in Britain! Best regards, Cristian From sandi at ilo.org Mon Nov 27 16:32:14 2000 From: sandi at ilo.org (Gabor Sandi) Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2000 17:32:14 +0100 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: My apologies to Mr. Sandi for the delay in posting this, which originally was sent to my personal mailbox rather than to the list. --rma ] >Subject: RE: minimal pairs are not always there Because of a house move, I haven't been able to respond before now to Robert Whiting's comments made on Nov. 6th, partially in response to me. His response, in any case, is very long (and in my view, repetitive and somewhat insulting). Therefore I shall restrict myself to a very concise answer. Robert Whiting wrote: ... Yes, well, this is what we have the IPA for. But you may have noticed that IPA is the International PHONETIC Alphabet, not the *International PHONEMIC Alphabet. You are simply confusing phonemics with phonetics. Phonemic transcription (/.../) is neither phonetically unambiguous nor necessarily phonetically accurate. Phonetic transcription ([...]) is necessarily (or at least to the best of the transcriber's ability) an accurate mapping of the pronunciation of every utterance in a language. I am aware of the difference between phonemics and phonetics. I don't like to be accused of confusion (any more than you would be), and I maintain that the following contrastive forms prove the presence of certain phonemic contrasts in English: pat - bat: /p/ vs. /b/ sinner - singer /n/ vs. /ng/ ether - either /T/ vs. /D/ On the other hand, the same phoneme occurs in each member of the following pairs of words, despite the obvious differences in pronunciation: lick - fall : both have the phoneme /l/, even though one is "clear", the other is "dark" (this is true for England - I believe that in the US, both /l/'s have a "dark" pronunciation) calm - kitten : both have /k/, even though one is velar, the other palatal pet - spin : both have /p/, even though one is aspirated, the other not So where exactly is my confusion as to the understanding of phonemic theory? [more of the same, so snip] >Therefore if there is a single pair of words distinguished by >the presence of sound A in one and sound B in the other (this is >the definition of "minimal pairs"), this should be sufficient to >establish a phonemic difference. In any dialect of English where >"either" may be pronounced /i:dh at r/ (@ stands for the schwa), the >existence of the minimal pair either/ether is then sufficient to >establish the existence of separate phonemes /dh/ and /th/. This is like saying that [x] and [ç] (the ich-laut) must be separate phonemes in German because you can find "minimal pairs" with these two sounds ('Kuhchen' [ku:çen] "little cow" and 'Kuchen' [ku:xen] "cake" or 'Tauchen' [tauçen] "little rope" and 'tauchen' [tauxen] "to dive, submerge"). This is just not so. The presence of these sounds can be explained by rule (even if it isn't a phonological rule). I expect that most native speakers of German would not accept these as "minimal pairs" even if they are by your definition. Others in the newsgroup, some of them Germans, have made very good counterarguments to this, and I won't repeat them. However, [x] and [ç] are beginning to go their separate ways in German, and to act like separate phonemes, just as bilabial [f] and laryngeal [h] do in Japanese (see my argument in the previous message). If you won't take my word for it, read the most recent edition of Duden's German Grammar, in which there is a very interesting discussion of exactly this issue. The main piece of evidence is from recent loanwords like Chalikose [çaliko:zE] and Chanukka [xanuka], showing that, at least before initial /a/, there is now a potential contrast, and we have a nascent phonemic contrast on our hands. And a single "minimal pair" doesn't establish separate phonemes; it establishes a contrast between two segments. If one accepts 'ether' and 'either' as a minimal pair, this proves only that [th] and [dh] contrast. It doesn't prove that [th] and/or [dh] are not allophones of /t/ and/or /d/. See below. So? The contrasts thin/tin and there/dare will take care of this argument. Or thin/sin and bathe/bays, if you want to carry the argument to the fricatives. [Snip on discussion of the interplay among phonetics, phonemics and meaning.] >You may of course not accept my approach, but I do not see the >utility of a phonemic system that cannot uniquely map the >pronunciation of every word in a language. But this is not the purpose of a phonemic system. Phonemic systems do not uniquely map the pronunciation of every word in a language. Again, you are confusing phonemics with phonetics. Phonemic analysis accounts for the different phones used in a language by assigning them to phonemes. And this is done by determining which phones contrast and which do not. But a phonemic inventory is coextensive with a phonetic inventory of a language only if there are no allophones. What on earth am I confusing? I never said that all phones must be assigned to separate phonemes. I said that, specifically, /T/ and /D/ must be assigned to separate phonemes, and I gave the evidence. They contrast. Let me give you another piece of evidence: Imagine the conversation between a nurse and an anaesthetist: Nurse: "Doctor, we are running out of gas. Shall I get ether or chloroform?" Doctor - version 1: "Ether will do" Doctor - version 2: "Either will do" (US pronunciation) The two potential answers by the doctor differ in one, and only one, phonetic feature: one has a voiceless sound (phone) in the middle of the first word, the other a voiced one. In my view, there can be no better proof of the existence of a phonemic contrast. Pronouncing the wrong allophone (say, pronouncing "aspirin" with an aspirated /p/) will not normally have the potentially deadly consequences of pronouncing the word with the wrong phoneme in the above conversation. [snip] I'm surprised that you haven't included /x/ as an English fricative. Although once present and then lost, is has surely been borrowed back in words like 'ach', 'loch' and names like 'Bach'. Actually, I'd rather include the phone [x] as the allophone of /h/ in word-final position. Of course, if you consider channukkah and chutzpah as part of English, /x/ will have to be included as a new phoneme. [snip and snip] Gabor Sandi g_sandi at hotmail.com From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Nov 1 00:47:26 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 31 Oct 2000 19:47:26 EST Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: In a message dated 10/31/00 2:08:11 PM Mountain Standard Time, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >If "the farming population of much of Europe switched language" to IE (by >conquest or otherwise) from something other than IE, then of course there may >be that "substratal influence" to find. -- or may not; or -- more probably -- there were many local languages before "Indo-Europeanization". After all, the process continued down into historic times, with the retreat of Basque, for example. In the directly analagous but rather later Indo-Europeanization of the old farming areas of Iran, Central Asia and India the pre-existing languages sometimes left substratum influence, and sometimes didn't. Eg., there are very old Dravidian loans in the Sanskrit of the Rig-Veda, but little (IIRC) Elamite influence in Old Persian. Although we know from the documentary sources that the whole of southwestern Iran, at the least, spoke Elamite well into early Iron Age times and Elamite remained as a chancery language into the first century of the Persian Empire; _vide_ the inscriptions of Darius I. Likewise, Germanic has a large vocabulary that isn't reduceable to PIE; the Baltic languages have very little. Conversely, the western Uralic languages have many early loans from IE languages. >It is perfectly possible that neolithic farmers brought early Indo-European >languages not only to Europe but also to southern Russia, together with >agriculture, and that their descendants, who developed nomadic pastoralism in >the Kurgan steppes carried their languages, which was still of Indo-European >origin but transformed from the original... -- here Occam's injunction to avoid unnecessary multiplication of hypotheses comes into play. A theory originally designed to avoid "migrationist" explanations is now piling migration upon re-migration! One is reminded of the cycles and epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy. The early-Neolithic migration of agriculturalists into Europe undoubtedly carried language(s) along with it. The simplest explanation is that they were irrecoverably lost with the subsequent spread of IE. From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Nov 1 23:07:55 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 1 Nov 2000 18:07:55 EST Subject: "nightmare" Message-ID: In a message dated 10/31/2000 1:47:08 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: << The only Basque word for 'nightmare' in the 'creature' sense I know of is . This is pretty clearly of Latino-Romance origin, though the direct source would appear to be an unrecorded Latin *, an altered form of the familiar . So far as I am aware, the Basque word is unmarked for sex, and it translates both 'incubus' and 'succubus'. >> Larry, what ending would you have expected from the Latin -us? By that I mean, the "-a" is not expected from the latin "-us? -- what would normally be there? Just some other observations: there is a Latin verb with pretty much the same meanings, , and an attested , that seems to be recorded only as an architectural term (the base that supports the weight of a pillar). There was also the odd noun "inguen" that is given as describing the "space between the hips in the front of the body", and also the loins and the privates and also some diseases. There are of course many different symptoms that we might now recognize in the "pressing down" reflected in "incubus" -- e.g., the sleep apnea mentioned by Stanley Friesen earlier. Even the throttling and trampling has been associated with strokes, convulsions, etc., and falls within that general area of a weight or a force applied "onto" one's body. The Latin term is in that way a pretty literal description. "Incubare" described the action of being pushed or forced or beat down quite literally, before it was ever applied to nightmares, post-Classically. The fact that the nightmare is associated with the female seems to be more of a matter of who sent it -- like the Finnish witch -- then of the necessary sex of the spirit itself. It doesn't seem to be female in Latin or Greek. In northern european folklore, you can discover the true identity of the mare itself by saying its name -- and in the stories it is sometimes a secretly malicious neighbor who is as likely male as female. The later succubus I suspect is an entirely different kind of dream -- a nightmare only in the sense of prompting unwanted sensations. The incubus, in its earliest appearances, doesn't appear to be in its essence sexual or pleasurable. Especially when it stomped on your head. Regards, Steve Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Nov 2 04:31:47 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Wed, 1 Nov 2000 22:31:47 -0600 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: Dear Rick and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Rick Mc Callister" Sent: Tuesday, October 31, 2000 5:27 PM [RM] > Larry Trask often mentions Basque being used as the rubbish bin of > unexplained Ibero-Romance etyma > Etruscan sometimes serves the same purpose for Latin, even though some of the > vocabulary is claerly of IE origin; e.g. I saw a reference to Tuscan dialect > brenti "heather" that declared it to be from Etruscan, yet there are cognate > forms in Ibero-Romance and I'd guess that Irish fraoch is also cognate [PR] What would really be interesting is for Larry Trask to show statistically how likely his immense group of unattested proto-Romance etyma are as a source for Basque, which, evidently never met a foreign word it did not like --- while tenaciously preserving a most usual morphological system. 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/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ec at ec hecc, vindga meipi a netr allar nmo, geiri vnda~r . . . a ~eim mei~i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rstom renn." (Havamal 138) From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Thu Nov 2 08:26:56 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 10:26:56 +0200 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? In-Reply-To: <32.c08e79c.272fc5b7@aol.com> Message-ID: [Steve Long wrote] > Putting aside for the moment the question of how much Kurgan actually ever > came to most of Europe, the quote above suggests that if there is a substrate > to look for in early European IE languages -- as described above -- it might > consist of "pre-proto" IE languages. > My question is: what would such a substrate be like? What would one look > for? Thinking of other examples of where IE has folded over on itself, so to > speak -- where one IE language exhibits a substrate of an earlier IE language > -- where would one look for such a "pre-proto" substrate in PIE? How would > one separate "pre-proto" features from "proto" features, since both would > ultimately be of the same origin? [Joat Simeon wrote (not as a reply to the particular quote above)] > ...Germanic has a large vocabulary that isn't reducible to PIE; the > Baltic languages have very little. Coversely, the western Uralic > languages have many early loans from IE languages. And in addition to this, the western Uralic languages have a huge amount of words of unknown origin. It seems that one is dealing here with an extensive lexical substrate not unlike that in Germanic. Because the putative substrate words look nothing like Indo-European (having e.g. affricates and palatalized consonants), there must have been non-Uralic and non-IE substrate languages in the Baltic Sea area. The Uralic data does not seem to support the idea that there would have been some kind of "para-IE" languages in this area before the arrival of the predecessors of northwest IE langauges in the region. Regards, Ante Aikio From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Nov 2 15:00:21 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 09:00:21 -0600 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I saw somewhere, maybe on the web? (and possibly unreliable) that Elamite was spoken in SW Iran until the 10th c. AD or so Is this so? Are there any traces in the local languages? >Eg., there are very old Dravidian loans in the Sanskrit of the Rig-Veda, but >little (IIRC) Elamite influence in Old Persian. >Although we know from the documentary sources that the whole of southwestern >Iran, at the least, spoke Elamite well into early Iron Age times and Elamite >remained as a chancery language into the first century of the Persian Empire; >_vide_ the inscriptions of Darius I. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From dlwhite at texas.net Thu Nov 2 15:19:10 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 09:19:10 -0600 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Well, I stand semi-corrected. Anyway, my point was one that I think should be obvious upon reflection: that speakers do know the phonemes of their native language, just as they know the words, or they wouldn't be able to speak it. It is fairly simple after all: what people are 1) able to control productively, and 2) able to hear perceptively is phonemic. For English /th/ vs/ /dh/, the question to ask is something like "In a story where two brothers were named "Lith" and "Lidh", would an audience be able to keep them apart?" The answer is clearly yes, regardless of the various other consideration that some have noted, therefore the distinction is (not surprisingly) phonemic. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Nov 2 15:31:56 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 09:31:56 -0600 Subject: *sr- roots in PIE (2) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I finally tracked down my notes and Yes, it is xarrupar "sorber (to sip)" [Corominas 1976: 128] In the same section, Corominas also ascribes to "Basque-Aquitanian" or "Basque-Iberian" Catalan, Occitan estalviar "ahorrar, salvar [la vida, la dignidad] (to save up, to save [a life, dignity])" /st-/ doesn't look at all Basque to me On page 126 He ascribes Spanish barruntar "to have a premonition" socarrar "to half-dress or half-roast meat" [Vela/zquez]; "to engage in knavery" mellar "to notch, hack" zurrar "to dress leather; chastize; whip" and a dozen or so other meanings to "Basque-Iberian" I would have thought that by that time Iberian would have been shown to be not to be demonstrably related to Basque In any case socarrar looks as if it includes Latin sub- was Corominas thinking in ekarri, ekharri? and mellar has an initial /m-/ Larry, do any of these look as if they're from Basque? Or are they cognates of Basque words that may have come from Latin or whatnot? I'm curious about the occasional initial /s-/ > /s^, c^, x/ in various Ibero-Romance words e.g. Spanish jabo/n < sapo:n- Spanish chorizo, Port. chouric,o /s^owrisu/ < sauriculum The easy way out would be to lay all of this at the feet of Basque but what else can be said about this? >That is: "XARRUPAR, word in common with Basque , mod. occ. > (or , or ), and nav.-arag. >, of uncertain origin; it's certain that all, more or >less, are in part due to onomatopoeia and other expressive factors, >but it's probable that for a large part they originate utimately from >a deformation suffered by Lat. SORBE:RE in the mouths of the >aboriginal population of the Pyrinees when they turned bilingual >(latin-protohispanic), maybe spread by half-Basque shepherds from the >mountains." >======================= >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal >mcv at wxs.nl Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Nov 2 17:24:04 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 17:24:04 +0000 Subject: "nightmare" Message-ID: Steve Long writes: [LT] > << The only Basque word for 'nightmare' in the 'creature' sense I know of > is . This is pretty clearly of Latino-Romance origin, though > the direct source would appear to be an unrecorded Latin *, > an altered form of the familiar . So far as I am aware, the > Basque word is unmarked for sex, and it translates both 'incubus' and > 'succubus'. >> > Larry, what ending would you have expected from the Latin -us? By that I > mean, the "-a" is not expected from the latin "-us? -- what would normally be > there? A Latin noun is normally borrowed into Basque in its accusative singular form. Assuming that the accusative of would have been , the expected Basque treatment of this would be *, without nasalization, or *, with nasalization. But I don't know what inflectional class belonged to. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Nov 3 00:21:28 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 19:21:28 EST Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: In a message dated 11/2/00 5:00:13 PM Mountain Standard Time, anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi writes: > The Uralic data does not seem to support the idea that there would have been > some kind of "para-IE" languages in this area before the arrival of the > predecessors of northwest IE langauges in the region. -- good point. Late paleolithic and early neolithic Europe probably had a situation much like eastern pre-Columbian North America, an area of comparable size. That is, there were probably hundreds of languages and scores of language families. Conversely, in the early stages of Indo-Europeanization, say in the 3rd millenium BCE, you could probably have walked from Holland to Sinkiang and found only dialect differences. From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Nov 3 00:31:10 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 18:31:10 -0600 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: Dear Ante and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ante Aikio" Sent: Thursday, November 02, 2000 2:26 AM > And in addition to this, the western Uralic languages have a huge amount > of words of unknown origin. It seems that one is dealing here with an > extensive lexical substrate not unlike that in Germanic. Because the > putative substrate words look nothing like Indo-European (having e.g. > affricates and palatalized consonants), there must have been non-Uralic > and non-IE substrate languages in the Baltic Sea area. The Uralic data > does not seem to support the idea that there would have been some kind of > "para-IE" languages in this area before the arrival of the predecessors of > northwest IE langauges in the region. [PR] Is there an available listing of these substrate roots? 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/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ec at ec hecc, vindga meipi a netr allar nmo, geiri vnda~r . . . a ~eim mei~i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rstom renn." (Havamal 138) From stevegus at aye.net Fri Nov 3 01:50:30 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 20:50:30 -0500 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: Steve Long wrote: > My question is: what would such a substrate be like? What would one look > for? Thinking of other examples of where IE has folded over on itself, so to > speak -- where one IE language exhibits a substrate of an earlier IE language > -- where would one look for such a "pre-proto" substrate in PIE? How would > one separate "pre-proto" features from "proto" features, since both would > ultimately be of the same origin? Perhaps what you'd need to look for is a vocabulary --- especially a vocabulary referring to local features, arts, or cultural practises --- that is still recognisably IE, but which has been subjected to a radically different set of sound changes. English as she is spoke in Western movies displays an obvious substrate influence. You have some words that conform to expectations for ordinary English words, like "ranch." You have others that stick out, more or less, like "canyon," "bronco," and "hoosegow." These words [AFAIK] are all of IE origin, but they took a different path into English. In pre-literate times the connection between "hoosegow" and an earlier import "judge" might be hard to figure, much less the connection between "ranch" and "ring." There is an obvious and similar substrate in Germanic, apparently the language of the Ship and Sword Guys; not sure if they have a technical academic name. Like the Western movie words, the borrowed vocabulary seems to have focused on cultural territory that was retained by the proto-Germans. Boating is the area that sticks out most prominently; most Germanic languages share a group of unique words like ship, keel, oar, and sail. There is another group that features swords, knives, and helmets. The proto-Germans apparently respected these folks, and their arts and culture, enough to borrow both the cultural practices and the vocabulary that went with. Various attempts have been made to give IE derivations to several of these distinctive Germanic words; most require some violence to expected sound changes. They seem recognisable as a substrate because they are culturally connected, and either non-IE or, if IE, they went together through strange changes in Germanic that aren't found elsewhere. -- Christ(of His mercy infinite) i pray to see;and Olaf,too --- e. e. cummings i sing of Olaf glad and big From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Nov 3 03:29:34 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 22:29:34 EST Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: In a message dated 11/2/00 5:23:22 PM Mountain Standard Time, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: << I saw somewhere, maybe on the web? (and possibly unreliable) that Elamite was spoken in SW Iran until the 10th c. AD or so -- I think that may have been 10th century BCE? From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Nov 3 09:19:24 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 09:19:24 +0000 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: Patrick Ryan writes: > What would really be interesting is for Larry Trask to show statistically > how likely his immense group of unattested proto-Romance etyma are as a > source for Basque, which, evidently never met a foreign word it did not > like --- while tenaciously preserving a most usual morphological system. Well, a most engaging challenge, but, I'm afraid, an incomprehensible one. I confess I have not the faintest idea what "[my] immense group of unattested proto-Romance etyma" might be, or how such a thing, whatever it is, might be "a source for Basque". The source of Basque is not in doubt. That source is a language spoken in Gaul before the IE languages -- first Celtic, then Latin -- arrived there. As for the curious remark about borrowing words, it is true that Basque has borrowed heavily from Latino-Romance. But this observation is anything but surprising. Compare English after the Norman Conquest. The Normans were always a tiny minority in England, and most people in England never learned Norman French. Moreover, Norman French survived as a spoken language in England only for a couple of centuries, after which it died out. Nevertheless, the Norman French impact on the English vocabulary was colossal. Virtually the *entire* abstract, elevated and technical vocabulary of English was obliterated, and replaced by French words. The proportion of the attested Old English vocabulary which was lost is variously estimated at anything from 60% to 85%. Even such everyday words as the native equivalents of 'river', 'mountain', 'face', 'picture', 'army' and 'language' were lost in favor of French words. In great contrast, Basque has been surrounded by a sea of IE speech for around 2500 years, and it still is today. At least after the Roman conquest of the area, that surrounding speech was always immensely more prestigious than was Basque. In the circumstances, the enormous impact of Latin and Romance on the Basque vocabulary is not even slightly surprising. What is surprising is that the language has survived at all. All of the other pre-Latin languages of Italy, Gaul, Spain and Portugal -- including even Celtic -- were blatted long ago. Nevertheless, it is not true that we Vasconists routinely assign every vaguely troublesome word we come across to a Latino-Romance source. We do this only when we have good evidence for such a source. And nobody in the field takes seriously such vaporings as the ignorant old proposal to derive Basque 'son' from Latin 'seed'. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Nov 3 17:43:39 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 11:43:39 -0600 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? In-Reply-To: <001f01c04485$e7a58f20$149f113f@patrickr> Message-ID: [ moderator edited ] >[PR] >What would really be interesting is for Larry Trask to show statistically >how likely his immense group of unattested proto-Romance etyma are as a >source for Basque, which, evidently never met a foreign word it did not >like --- while tenaciously preserving a most usual morphological system. If you've read most histories of the Spanish language, you come across a couple of pages on pre-Roman Iberia and a list of words and an ascription that amounts to "I don't know where it comes from so it must be from Basque." Most of the histories focus on the development of Latin to Spanish. And if the authors know any non-Romance languages, those will be generally limited to Greek, German and Arabic. When Basque or Celtic are mentioned, it tends to be via a dictionary of modern Basque or a modern Celtic language, often without any input vis-a-vis what Basque or Hispano-Celtic must have looked like when the loan word in question entered Ibero-Romance. A lot of what is writen about pre-Romance substrate in Spanish [in general histories of the language] also tends to be received information with little or no attempt to verify, update or revise it. Keep in mind that non-specialists tend to read only these general histories and not the specialized research publications, which [from what I perceive] began to flourish after the death of Franco. To give an example of what I'm talking about. Spanish "cinnabar" < Hispano-Latin [and also the Min~o/Minho River] is often ascribed to Basque based on Basque "shiny, lit up, sparkling" Larry Trask has explained on the list [many times] that Basque had no /m/ at that period so the logical assumption would be to look elsewhere and so I looked at the on-line MacBain's Gaelic Etymological Dictionary and found m?in, m?inn "ore, mine" Irish m?in, mianach, Early Irish m?anach, Welsh mwyn: < *meini-, meinni-, < root mei, smei, smi; see Old Slavonic m?di, aes; OHG sm?da, metal, English smith (Schr?der) Now, I would be hypocritical if I stopped there and said it must be from Celtic, since I don't know exactly what the word would like like in Hispano-Celtic and I don't know the phonetic differences among Celtiberian, SW & NW Hispano-Celtic and Gaulish. Also, keep in mind that MacBain's is about 100 years old. And, mnore importantly, Celtic was not the only pre-Roman IE language spoken in Iberia. There was also Lusitanian/Sorotaptic. I'd also want to check a Basque etymological dictionary to see about a possible *bin, etc. But, I think there's enough information there to hypothesize that likely came from IE If you want to see a language that is even more skewed than Basque in terms of Spanish vocabulary, look at some on-line pages for Chamorro The lexicon seems to be about 90-95% Spanish yet the language by and large maintains its original morphology. Other than a knowledge of topics, it is not comprehensible to Spanish speakers. I imagine that part of the answer for Basque goes beyond just being surrounded by IE languages for the last 2-3,000 years. As hill people, the Basque acquired new technology, fashions, ideologies, etc. from IE-speakers. I suppose they also needed a rudimentary knowledge of IE languages for doing business at IE-speaking market towns and dealing with IE-speaking political and religious functionaries. The language has many dialects and I imagine that speakers just used the IE word they heard for new-fangled things and concepts This process may predate the Romans. Roz Frank once mentioned an idea that the Celts may have had the same relationship with the Basques. I've also seen some articles that talk about a similar but reversed relationship between Celts and Tartessians. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Nov 3 17:48:23 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 11:48:23 -0600 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Does any of this substrate overlap with the so-called "Baltic" substrate in Germanic; i.e. words of non-IE, non-Uralic origin such as ship, sea, seal (animal), etc.? [snip] >And in addition to this, the western Uralic languages have a huge amount >of words of unknown origin. It seems that one is dealing here with an >extensive lexical substrate not unlike that in Germanic. Because the >putative substrate words look nothing like Indo-European (having e.g. >affricates and palatalized consonants), there must have been non-Uralic >and non-IE substrate languages in the Baltic Sea area. The Uralic data >does not seem to support the idea that there would have been some kind of >"para-IE" languages in this area before the arrival of the predecessors of >northwest IE langauges in the region. >Regards, >Ante Aikio Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Nov 3 05:58:34 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 00:58:34 EST Subject: The PIE substrate in Uralic Message-ID: In a message dated 11/2/2000 7:00:13 PM, anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi writes: << The Uralic data does not seem to support the idea that there would have been some kind of "para-IE" languages in this area before the arrival of the predecessors of northwest IE languages in the region. >> Actually, a strong case for dating PIE to before 5000BC and Danubian culture came from your presentation of the *PIE substrate in proto-Uralic on this list awhile back. (If you recall, back then (january of this year) I gave you Hajdu's (1975) 5000BC terminus dating from Dolukhanov (1996). This is based if I remember on the expansion of Niemen, Sperrings, Upper Volga, etc. communities across northeastern Europe in early neolithic times. The maps indicate that pit comb culture common to them moved south and overlapped the northeastern range of Tripolye-Cucuteni in the northern Ukraine before or around 5000BC. The main and more southern Ukraine candidate for IE hometown, Sredni Stog, did not appear until about 500 years later.) I should point out something here. If you look at my initial post, I wasn't REALLY asking why we shouldn't look for a pre-PIE substrate. I was actually asking what it would look like if we were to look for one. That is, if we didn't decide ahead of time there couldn't be one. Actually, looking back in the archives, you did address this issue. You wrote: << 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 changed beyond our recognition. >> (Mon, 31 Jan 2000 15:26:18, Re: PIE and Uralic) Of course, if the Danubian culture that was in contact with Proto-Uralic before 5000BC was *PIE, the question about identifying pre-PIE might well be irrelevant. You also wrote: <> Well, that doesn't really appear to negate my question (based on the Cavalli-Sforza quote). If Pre-IE arose around the Danube and gave a substrate to the later "daughter" PIE language of the Ukraine cultures (Cavalli-Sforza's idea, not mine) -- then other substrates are STILL totally acceptable. You see the archaeological evidence supports some very well developed mesolithic cultures across north central and eastern Europe that PREDATE the neolithic Danubian culture. In fact, the spread of full domestication of plants and animals to the more northern regions would only occur with the coming of Corded Ware around 3000BC. So the existence of those supposed non-IE substrates in Germanic or Uralic does not really negate the question: if PIE superimposed itself on Pre-IE, what would it look like? What would one look for? Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Nov 3 06:07:33 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 01:07:33 EST Subject: Basque and Germanic Message-ID: In a message dated 11/2/2000 6:26:18 PM, proto-language at email.msn.com writes: <<...how likely his immense group of unattested proto-Romance etyma are as a source for Basque, which, evidently never met a foreign word it did not like --- while tenaciously preserving a most usual morphological system. >> Ironically, this is kind of what Ringe describes in Germanic. Earlier morphology shared with Slavic, but later lexical commonality with Celtic and Italic. Regards, S. Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Nov 3 07:44:21 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 02:44:21 EST Subject: Elamite Message-ID: In a message dated 11/2/2000 7:23:22 PM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: << I saw somewhere, maybe on the web? (and possibly unreliable) that Elamite was spoken in SW Iran until the 10th c. AD or so>> Apparently a characteristic of "Elamite" is that the texts that are readable (e.g., the Behistun inscription) are "like Ottoman Turkish, made up of many borrowed words, particularly Persian and Semitic." Early "Elamite" texts have not been deciphered. Two problems are reflected here. One is that it is difficult for a language that has done a lot of borrowing to create an identifiable substrate (or adstrate) in the language it has heavily borrowed from. The other is that Elamite seems to be a language of uncertain identity, so that one might not recognize it in a substrate if one saw one. Regards, S. Long From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sat Nov 4 17:08:56 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2000 19:08:56 +0200 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <001b01c044e0$413f3b80$162a63d1@texas.net> Message-ID: On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, David L. White wrote: > For English /th/ vs/ /dh/, the question to ask is something like "In a > story where two brothers were named "Lith" and "Lidh", would an > audience be able to keep them apart?" The answer is clearly yes, > regardless of the various other consideration that some have noted, > therefore the distinction is (not surprisingly) phonemic. No, the answer is: if there were two brothers named Lith and Lidh then the distinction would be phonemic. As long as there aren't, there is no phonemic distinction. It doesn't matter that the two sounds are capable of being distinct phonemes. Until they are used as phonemes by the speakers of the language, they aren't phonemes for all that they are recognizably different sounds. When speakers start coining unrelated words where [th] contrasts with [dh] then they will be phonemes. The fact that you could coin words where they contrast is not sufficient. And as you unintentionally point out, when they become phonemes, [dh] will have to be written , otherwise you couldn't distinguish between and . Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Nov 5 18:51:56 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2000 20:51:56 +0200 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 21 Oct 2000 "Ross Clark (FOA LING)" wrote: >RW> On Fri, 28 Apr 2000 Ross Clark wrote: >RC>> I trust that we share the assumptions that (i) we are >RC>> talking about the synchronic phonology of modern English, and >RC>> (ii) the reality that we are trying to get at is what is in >RC>> speakers' heads. >RW> First, let me assure you that we are indeed talking about >RW> the synchronic phonology of modern English. About the second >RW> point, I am much less sanguine. I think it is possible to >RW> describe how language works linguistically (some areas are easier >RW> than others), but I don't think that we are in a position to say >RW> what goes on in a speaker's head to produce language. While it >RW> would certainly be nice to know, I think that the cognitive >RW> processes that produce language are beyond our reach at the >RW> moment. Speakers themselves don't know how they produce >RW> language, so you can't find out by just asking them. So the only >RW> reality that we can get at is the language that speakers produce. >RW> Historical grammar, when we have a written record, is based >RW> on empirically verifiable facts. Synchronic grammar is based on >RW> a hypothesis about how native speakers produce their language. A >RW> hypothesis is not a fact. It is an explanation put forward to >RW> account for observable facts. People tend to forget this and >RW> consider synchronic grammar a fact. But whatever reality may >RW> exist in the speaker's head just can't be gotten at at the >RW> present time with our present knowledge. In general, I agree >RW> that what we are trying to get at is the reality in speakers' >RW> heads, but it is a roundabout road that we have to take and we >RW> have to have a realistic picture of language before we are likely >RW> to get there. >I'm not sure what you mean by "historical grammar" here. By "historical grammar" I mean the changes in grammar through time, studied systematically. By grammar I mean those features of language that one will usually find in a standard grammar book: phonology, morphology, and syntax, but generally not including pragmatics and lexicon. >If it is an account of changes in the language, then it is >surely an account of transitions from one synchronic grammar to >another, and hence subject to the same epistemological >vulnerability you attribute to the latter. Hardly. At any given period the speakers of a language will produce a corpus of language. For this to be useful for historical purposes it must be recorded somehow -- either as texts or by being recorded as a spoken corpus by a competent field linguist. The recorded corpus of language becomes a body of data. This data can be minutely compared with similar data from other periods and the differences noted in detail. Consider the following diagram: speakers + rules --> Old English | speakers + rules --> Middle English | speakers + rules --> Modern English Synchronic (generative) grammar is concerned with the horizontal rows. Historical grammar is concerned only with the final column. Since we don't know what goes on in speaker's minds, everything to the left of the arrows is an assumption. We assume that speakers start from a certain point and apply a certain set of rules to arrive at the corpus on the right of the arrows. But everything to the right of the arrows is data. When we move from one set of data to another we also formulate rules to account for the changes. The difference is that that the historical rules are not based on assumptions about how speakers produce language, but on observed differences in the language that speakers have produced. Synchronic grammar is simply cut out of the loop in historical grammar. I am not trying to say by this that historical grammar is all cut and dried and that synchronic grammar is all guesswork. Far from it. Historical rules still have to be deduced, but the difference is that the forms on either side of the rules are known and thus there is a qualitative difference in the derivation of historical rules and synchronic rules. Now when we are talking about phonetics (pronunciation) based solely on written records (as opposed to a phonetic transcription in IPA made by a linguist) there will always be uncertainties because writing systems vary in their fit to the phonological system of the language they express. Still, there are enough strong clues in the writing (spelling variants; puns; and, in poetry, alliteration, rhyme, and meter) to narrow down pronunciations with reasonable precision. >So, in your view, we have, on the one hand, "the language that >speakers produce" -- texts, I guess. Presumably the "empirically >verifiable facts" on which you see historical grammar as being >based are of the same sort. Precisely. This is what I have said. The language that speakers produce synchronically is exactly the same language that we arrive at by tracing its historical development. The outcomes of both methods are the same. But the historical rules and the synchronic rules that produce it will not necessarily be the same. >On the other hand we have "the cognitive processes that produce >language", "whatever reality may exist in a speaker's head", >which is at present unknowable. Yet apparently we are able to >describe "how language works linguistically", "a realistic >picture of language". And what criteria do we have as to what is >"realistic" in this description? Is this what was once called the >Hocus Pocus view -- that a linguistic description is simply an >efficient and elegant description of a body of data, without >reference to any possible mental reality? Realistic means based on realia -- things that actually exist as opposed to mental constructs. When you start talking about "mental reality" you are getting into a murky area of philosophy. Is there such a thing as "mental reality"? This is something that can be discussed endlessly and inevitably inconclusively. Language is essentially a mental construct, one that is shared among its speakers. Because of the transitory nature of sounds, unless language is recorded somehow it exists only in the minds of its speakers (and hearers). When the last speaker of a language dies, unless that language has been recorded somehow, it is gone forever. There is no hope of reconstructing it. There are currently some 6000 to 10,000 or more languages in the world (depending on who is doing the counting and what criteria they are using for identifying different languages), many, if not most, of which have not been recorded. And who knows how many thousands of other languages have existed since the use of human language began and have disappeared without a trace. So one of the urgent tasks of linguists is recording languages that have no written records in the hope that the more languages that are available for study, the greater the possibility of obtaining a "realistic picture of language" and thus determining "how language works linguistically." So long as everything to the left of the arrows in the diagram above is uncertain, the only clue to it is in what is to the right of the arrows. Thus the constant (and usually frustrating) search for linguistic universals in the hope that such universals will provide clues to universals of human cognition and thus help explain what goes on on the left side of the arrows. >RC>> The rest of your post is entirely dependent on the further >RC>> assumption that native speakers of modern English (in general, >RC>> not just linguists) distinguish "foreign" from "native" words, >RC>> and that the words I listed with /th/ in voiced environments are >RC>> marked as "foreign". Since I don't share this assumption, I would >RC>> like to know what evidence leads you to it. Do you have any such >RC>> evidence, other than the fact that by excluding these hundreds of >RC>> words you can arrive at a nice phonological generalization? >RW> Let me answer this from back to front. >RW> You ask what evidence I have that native speakers >RW> distinguish by rule the [th] of loan words from the [dh] of >RW> native words other than hundreds of examples and the fact that it >RW> produces a nice phonological generalization. >This is not quite what I said. I said that in order to arrive at >your nice generalization you need to *exclude* hundreds of >English words, and I asked what independent evidence you had that >these words are somehow marginal to the structure of English? I don't remember saying that these words were marginal to the structure of English and I don't remember your saying it previously. I didn't say these words were marginal to the structure of English. I said that these words follow a different rule from native English words and that foreign words don't necessarily follow the same rules as native words. So these words aren't marginal to English -- there are too many of them -- they just follow different rules. But I can see that I shouldn't expect connections to be made when these connections have not been expressly stated. So let's start again. Grimm's Law says that certain PIE consonants shift in a certain way in Germanic. But there are a large number of exceptions. One exception is that unvoiced stops don't shift when the stop is the second part of a voiceless cluster (thus /sp/, /st/, and /sk/ remain unshifted). However, even with this, there are still a large number of exceptions to Grimm's Law. Verner's Law says that when the PIE stress fell after the consonant then the consonant shifted in a different way. So Verner's Law in effect *excludes* hundreds of Germanic words from the effects of Grimm's Law thereby producing a nice phonological generalization. What independent evidence is there that Verner's Law correctly excludes these words? Only the fact that when it can be checked, the PIE stress does fall after the consonant in those cases where the consonant does not shift according to Grimm's Law. Of course this might just be coincidence, and some people might not accept Verner's Law and ask what independent evidence there is for it other than that when you exclude these words using this rule you get the nice phonological generalization known as Grimm's Law. >RW> This seems rather like asking what evidence I have for >RW> Grimm's Law or Verner's Law other than hundreds of examples and >RW> the fact that they provide a nice phonological generalization. >No, because you are not presenting this as a historical law. As >a historical explanation of why /th/ occurs in certain places and >/dh/ in others, it is not in dispute. Historical law - historical explanation -- What's the difference in your mind? What happened happened. If the explanation can be stated as a rule and is not in dispute, what is the problem? The outcome of the historical processes that produced the modern language and the synchronic (generative) processes that produce the modern language are the same: the modern language. The generative rule that produces [th] in these words may be (probably is) different from the historical rule (explanation), but there must be a rule or else there wouldn't be a pattern. It is a basic premise of generative grammar that alternations must be explained by rules. >The general possibility is not in question; the question is >about particular examples. Hock offers evidence in the Old Irish >case, namely the failure of p-initial words "for some time" to >participate in the lenition process. This would certainly mark >them as exceptional in that respect. But note that he does not >argue that the mere fact of having initial p- is evidence of >their "foreign" status. And as I have said, it doesn't matter whether it is considered "foreign" or not. It is sufficient that it is recognized as following a different rule. >RW> If not, how can one account for the un-Anglicized >RW> pronunciation of 'chanson' in English at least 400 years after >RW> it entered the language (first attested in 1601 according to my >RW> dictionary). >Actually, my American Heritage dictionary gives a fully >anglicized pronunciation /S'?ns at n/ (initial sh-, rhymes with >"Manson"), but I admit I've never heard it. The word has probably >been re-introduced once or twice since 1601, but the persistence >of the nasal-vowel pronunciation is no mystery: the word refers >to specifically French things (medieval epic poems or 19th-20th >century popular songs), and it is used almost entirely by people >who have some familiarity with French and could tell you (if you >would allow this as data) that it's a French word. I believe that I said exactly the same thing concerning 'chanson' in another posting. What I said there was: But 'chanson' has been in the language for about 400 years and it still has its French pronunciation. It simply resists Anglicization because it is not known to most naive native speakers. People who know this word are likely to know that it has a French pronunciation and to know why. I would have to make an exception among naive native speakers to include the AHD, but otherwise I think we agree that people who know this word are likely to know French as well. So long as English and French are in contact (i.e., have bilingual speakers) it is even possible that this word is reborrowed by every generation. And, of course, I would accept a speaker's explanation that the pronunciation of this word as French is because it is a French word as data. But I would be skeptical if a speaker told me that its pronunciation was because it was a medieval term or because it referred to music or poetry. >RW> But ultimately, it is unimportant whether speakers can still >RW> recognize foreign words after several centuries or not. The >RW> pronunciation rules are marked in the lexicon. The native >RW> speaker learns these rules and follows them. It is these rules >RW> that produce the pattern, not the speaker's perception of the >RW> words as native or non-native. >RW> For other evidence that native speakers distinguish by rule >RW> the [th] of loan words from the [dh] of native words I offer the >RW> pattern created by the presence of intervocalic [th] and [dh] in >RW> English words. >This is not "other evidence". This *is* your evidence. Then my position is unassailable. As with Verner's Law, the fact that the rule by which the exclusions are made is valid and leads to a valid generalization is sufficient. >RW> One thing that can be noticed is that there are only 15 >RW> lemmata with intervocalic [th] that can be marked as non-native >RW> (and 5 of these are clearly derivative). You say that there are >RW> hundreds of these words in the language (and so there are, if not >RW> thousands). This makes one point quite clear. While there may >RW> be quite a large number of loan words in English, the core >RW> vocabulary -- the most commonly used words -- remains primarily >RW> native. Thus a search of 6318 lemmata with over 800 occurrences >RW> in a corpus of over 6 million words turns up only 15 (10 if you >RW> eliminate derivatives) of these lemmata. >I'm not sure this elaborate demonstration was necessary. Nobody >disputes that the pattern exists in words of OE origin. Nor is it >any secret that non-OE words are less frequent in basic >vocabulary than in the lexicon at large. Perhaps, but it is nice to have data to back up one's opinions. >RW> This further suggests that the knowledge of many of the >RW> lemmata with intervocalic [th] is a function of vocabulary size. >RW> The larger one's vocabulary the more such lemmata (not simply as >RW> an absolute, but as a percentage of the total) one is likely to >RW> know. Vocabulary size is also correlated with educational level. >RW> Hence by the time that one has acquired a large number of such >RW> lemmata, one is likely to be sufficiently educated to realize >RW> that such words are loans. Poorly educated native speakers are >RW> not likely to realize that these words are loans. They may even >RW> mispronounce them; but then, dictionaries are not written (nor >RW> often consulted) by native speakers of this educational level. >RW> Thus my test of the pronunciation of these words may not be >RW> entirely accurate, since I am relying on my own pronunciation and >RW> on the pronunciation given by the dictionary. As a turnabout, if >RW> you have evidence that native speakers regularly mispronounce >RW> these words because they don't know that they are loans, that >RW> would be germane. >I'm puzzled by you asking me for this evidence. And I'm puzzled by your being puzzled. >As I understand your position, you are claiming that there is a >single phoneme, say /th/, with a realization rule that says >(among other things) that /th/ is realized as [dh] >intervocalically, except in certain exceptional words. Close. I claim that there was once a single phoneme /th/ in English. Then that this phoneme became voiced to [dh] intervocalically without creating any new contrasts (/th/ now has allophones [th, dh]). Then that any words that came into the language with intervocalic [th] after this sound change operated retain [th] intervocalically (this is not necessarily restricted to loanwords; it could also include new coinings -- there just don't seem to be any with intervocalic [th]). There is nothing particularly exceptional about words with intervocalic [th] except that the vast majority of them came into the language after the sound change. There are a few native words with intervocalic [th] (for reasons that can be accounted for), but there are no loanwords that originally had intervocalic [th] that now have [dh]. This is exceptional, at least to the extent that there are no exceptions. >Only the more educated and literate speakers may realize that >these exceptional words are loans. (Surely, however, this is not >a function of the number of such words in one's vocabulary, but >of things one reads or is taught.) What I said was "Vocabulary size is also correlated with educational level." What, then, is the difference between "educational level" and "things one reads or is taught"? The more things one reads or is taught, the higher one's educational level, and the more likely one is to have a larger vocabulary and hence the more likely one's vocabulary is to contain a larger percentage of loan words or neologisms. By educational level I do not refer to passing thorough required fixed stages of education without having learned anything. As Henry Fielding has Tom Jones say: "it is as possible for a man to know something without having been at school, as it is to have been at school and to know nothing." It has been my experience that many graduates of high school and some colleges and universities do not have a particularly high educational level. >Meanwhile, how do we know that children and the less educated >actually formulate the rule this way? If they did, one would >expect that errors consisting of pronouncing [dh] >intervocalically in words which should have [th] would be common. >I don't recall any such tendency from my experience as a native >speaker of English, but surely it's you that should be looking >for such evidence. My point is that we don't know how any speaker actually formulates the rule. What goes on on the left side of the arrows is a mystery. All we know is that there is a pattern, the historical reason for the pattern, and that, synchronically, patterns must be accounted for by rules. My further point is that it doesn't matter that we can't formulate the synchronic rule. There must be one, or the pattern wouldn't be there. And I must confess that I did not consider the effect of mispronunciation in the same way that you do. You said that native speakers don't recognize these words with intervocalic [th] as loans. My assumption was that if they don't recognize them as loans, then they would mispronounce them by treating them as native words and pronouncing intervocalic as [dh]. This would support your contention. But your assumption seems to be that if they do recognize them as loans then they would see them as words in need of nativization and would mispronounce them in an attempt to nativize them. This would support what you see as my contention. But it is not my contention that native speakers recognize these words as loans. That is, as you so readily agree, merely the historical explanation for why these words have intervocalic [th], and what you have assumed is my contention. I will quite as readily agree that I don't really know how native speakers recognize the words as exceptional. The more educated may recognize them as loans, the less educated may simply memorize the correct pronunciation as exceptions (as they memorize the exceptions in plural forms such as 'foot' / 'feet'. Since neither of us have noticed any tendency to mispronounce these words the point about what such mispronunciation would prove is moot. But I do maintain that there is some synchronic rule that maintains this pronunciation or else *all* loans with intervocalic [th] wouldn't still have this pronunciation. >By the way, 6318 words is a pretty basic vocabulary. And your >list doesn't include some words (arithmetic, ether, various >personal names) that were part of my vocabulary and that of all >my contemporaries by the age of 10. I apologize for the inadequacies of the list, but it is not really "my" list. All I did was extract words with intervocalic from somebody else's list. As such 'arithmetic' would not appear in "my" list because it does not have intervocalic (but I must report that the original list did not have 'arithmetic' either and therefore it had fewer than 800 occurrences in the six-million-plus words of the corpus). To my knowledge, personal names do not occur in the list because they are not lemmata. >RW> The best evidence that the pattern is created by rule by the >RW> speakers of the language is the fact that the pattern exists. >RW> For if there is a pattern in a language, synchronically it must >RW> be created by its speakers because that is the only place that >RW> language comes from. If the pattern is not created by rule, then >RW> it is simple coincidence. >No, this is where you go wrong. I presume that "this is where you go wrong" is your way of saying that your opinion is different from mine. :) >The pattern has been created by historical changes in the >language. That is what creates the distribution of [dh] and [th] >that is the input to each speaker's language-learning task. There >is no general principle that speakers must recognize (consciously >or unconsciously) any such pattern, or make use of it in their >rule-governed language behaviour. No, the modern language is not created by the historical events that brought it about. The modern language is created by what goes on on the left side of the arrows in the diagram above. This is the assumption of generative grammar. And it is a basic premise of generative grammar that patterns must be accounted for by rules. If you have evidence, rather than just an intuition, that linguistic patterns are not created by rules, then please share it. It will revolutionize synchronic grammar. Children learning a language as a native speaker do not learn the history of the language. Children learning a language do not memorize rules that lead to grammatically correct utterances (this comes later, in school, after the child has essentially already learned to speak the language; but if the child never goes to school, it will still speak the language). Children learn the language by imitation of what they hear and by internal analysis of what they hear through deduction, induction and abduction to arrive at their own rules of grammar. In doing this, they make a lot of mistakes. Sometimes these mistakes are corrected, either externally, or internally, by better imitation or analysis. Sometimes they are not. In essence the synchronic grammar is recreated by each generation of native speakers (with a little help from their ancestors and their peers). This is one reason why living languages constantly change and dead languages (those with no native speakers) don't. But to say than native speakers learn their language by memorizing historically created patterns flies in the face of all theories of generative grammar and L1 acquisition. L2 (and higher) acquisition may work this way, but, unless accompanied by total immersion in the language, it seldom leads to native fluency (and often not even then). RW> You said above that RC>> The rest of your post is entirely dependent on the further RC>> assumption that native speakers of modern English (in general, RC>> not just linguists) distinguish "foreign" from "native" words, RC>> and that the words I listed with /th/ in voiced environments RC>> are marked as "foreign". Since I don't share this assumption, RC>> ... >RW> You are saying that this pattern can't be based on the fact >RW> that words in English with intervocalic [th] are overwhelmingly >RW> loan words because the speakers of the language are unaware that >RW> these are loans. As I mentioned above, this is not just a weak >RW> argument, it is a spurious one. It may be true that most >RW> speakers do not know that these are loans, but that is irrelevant >RW> to the phonemic analysis of the language. Were it not, then most >RW> linguistic analyses would have no validity because speakers of a >RW> language are in general woefully ignorant of the linguistic >RW> mechanisms of their language. >Actually, I am arguing that English speakers do not consider >words like "author", "Ethel", or "method" to be unusual in any >way. First, let us dispense with the idea that there is nothing in any way unusual about 'Ethel'. You can't say that 'Ethel' is not unusual in any way because it is unusual from the moment it stops being a word in the language and becomes a personal name. It is no longer a lemma of the language, it becomes part of a special corpus, the corpus of personal names. Generally, you won't find personal names listed in the lexicon (dictionary), although they may be collected in a separate section. If personal names are listed in the lexicon, they do not have a meaning, only a functional label: "masc. PN", "fem. PN", or the like. In addition to being lexically exceptional, personal names, are also phonologically exceptional. Personal names are, well, personal. People identify with their names in more ways than one. When someone has been called something all his life (his name), he will resist changing it; even if the sounds in his name change in the language he will resist introducing these changes into his name. If others mispronounce his name, he will correct them. Personal names, then, have the potential to withstand phonetic changes that take place elsewhere in the language with the result that such changes often bypass personal names. So linguistically, practically everything is unusual about 'Ethel'. Historical linguists know that personal names are a fruitful hunting ground for archaisms -- forms that have long disappeared from the rest of the language. Even small children know that names are different. When my daughter was about 3, she got a new doll. She soon began saying "sisibamakin". When I asked her what "sisibamakin" was she said it was her doll. "But what does it mean?", I asked. "It doesn't mean anything, it's her name," was her reply. So speakers don't really treat personal names as a normal part of language. They are simply labels without linguistic connotations. They stand outside both the normal lexicon and normal phonological rules. So if someone tells you that his or her name is Abraham or Avram or Ethel or Stanley or Ahmed or Rumpelstiltskin, you don't question how it fits into the phonology of your language. You just accept it because that's his or her name. >Your only basis for disagreement seems to be that your >single-phoneme analysis requires them to be marked as exceptions. >Other evidence one might imagine, such as deviant morphophonemic >behaviour, acquisition difficulties, or the existence of more >"nativized" variants, appears to be entirely lacking. Yes, they are only marked by having intervocalic [th] where the vast majority of native words have intervocalic [dh]. But the very fact that all loanwords that came into the language with intervocalic [th] still have this pronunciation is sufficient to show that speakers must know some rule that preserves this pronunciation. Otherwise, words with intervocalic [th] and intervocalic [dh] wouldn't fall into such neat piles. There is no need to nativize words with intervocalic [th] because there are native words with intervocalic [th] (which are again exceptions that can be accounted for). Speaker can either memorize the pronunciation of each of these words or they can find some way of generalizing a rule so that they don't have to. Uneducated speakers probably do the former, and those with more education or experience probably do the latter. But either way, they don't get any help from the orthography. >Excuse me. I'm tired, and I see there are at least a dozen >paragraphs left. I'll snip them for now, and perhaps we can >return to them another time, if this has not drifted too far >off-topic for IE. Well, at least we're talking about an IE language. And I for one find it interesting. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From bonewits at warwick.net Sun Nov 5 17:46:18 2000 From: bonewits at warwick.net (Isaac Bonewits) Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2000 12:46:18 -0500 Subject: "witch" and "warlock" Message-ID: I'll leave lurk-mode for a moment to ask if anyone can direct me to *current* resources discussing the history and evolution of these two terms (a summary would be nice, too, if someone would be kind enough to take the time). An article or book discussing IE religious terminology would be of great value to my current research! thanks, Isaac B. -- ******************************************************************* * Isaac Bonewits * * Snailmail: Black Dirt PG, ADF, Box 372, Warwick, NY 10990-0372 * ******************************************************************* From bronto at pobox.com Sat Nov 4 19:23:12 2000 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2000 11:23:12 -0800 Subject: "nightmare" Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: > A Latin noun is normally borrowed into Basque in its accusative > singular form. Assuming that the accusative of would > have been , the expected Basque treatment of this would > be *, without nasalization, or *, with nasalization. > But I don't know what inflectional class belonged to. Regular 2m (thus ) according to Lewis & Short. -- Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/ From mcv at wxs.nl Sun Nov 5 22:33:10 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2000 23:33:10 +0100 Subject: *sr- roots in PIE (2) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick wrote: >In the same section, Corominas also ascribes to "Basque-Aquitanian" or >"Basque-Iberian" Catalan, Occitan estalviar "ahorrar, salvar [la vida, la >dignidad] (to save up, to save [a life, dignity])" >/st-/ doesn't look at all Basque to me Basque , means "to hide, cover". is cover or protection. There are a number of native Basque words beginning with esC- (or ezC-), so there is no reason to assume the word is not Basque (even though the similarity with Indo-European words for "stable" is noteworthy. >On page 126 >He ascribes Spanish >barruntar "to have a premonition" >socarrar "to half-dress or half-roast meat" [Vela/zquez]; "to engage in >knavery" >mellar "to notch, hack" >zurrar "to dress leather; chastize; whip" and a dozen or so other meanings >to "Basque-Iberian" I don't have the Castilian Corominas, and all of these words are absent from Gomez de Silva's etymological dictionary (he seems unwilling to include words with doubtful etymologies). >[...] >I'm curious about the occasional initial /s-/ > /s^, c^, x/ in various >Ibero-Romance words >e.g. >Spanish jabo/n < sapo:n- >Spanish chorizo, Port. chouric,o /s^owrisu/ < sauriculum >The easy way out would be to lay all of this at the feet of Basque >but what else can be said about this? It is often said that this is due to (Moz)Arabic influence. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From dlwhite at texas.net Mon Nov 6 05:20:49 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2000 23:20:49 -0600 Subject: Germanic and Balto-Slavic Morphology Message-ID: When people say that Germanic and Balto-Slavic have a common morphology (which if interpreted literally is absurd), are they talking about anything other than the dative plurals in /m/ rather than /b/? That is not much to hand one's hat on, in part because it could conceivably have arisen (as I pointed out long ago before my swan-dive into dissertation slogging) by suffixing /bhis/ (or whatever) to the accusative rather than the stem. Since in neuter singulars the accusative IS the stem, ambiguity and re-analysis are plausible. In other words there is no reason to posit a mysterious dative plural suffix in /m/ just for Germanic and Balto-Slavic, as is traditionally done. A point of contact between the two that should also be noted, though as far as I know it never has been, is that both have developed what might be called "short form" and "long form" adjectives, with the distribution of these being controlled by syntactic factors related to definiteness. However, the suffixes used are entirely different. Common tendency? Common substrate? It is clear (to me anyway) that there is Uralic substratal influence in Balto-Slavic, but as far as I know Uralic could not be a source for this. Does some one out there know if it could be, or if not what else could be? Dr. David L. White From douglas at nb.net Mon Nov 6 07:28:33 2000 From: douglas at nb.net (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 02:28:33 -0500 Subject: Incuba (Nightmare) Message-ID: From "Lexicon Latinitatis Nederlandicae Medii Aevi" (Johanne W. Fuchs et al., eds.) (Brill [Leiden], 1990), p. I 307: incuba, ae, m. f. -- ... 2. daemon quidam (cf. incubus): CONFL. VOC. incuba, een mare vel een meerminne vel elfinne, talis mulier; GEMMA een nachtmerrinne; et vid. neptina. ---------- This is apparently satisfactory semantically and morphologically (1st declension, acc. sg. "incubam"); chronologically, I don't know. -- Doug Wilson From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Mon Nov 6 10:58:06 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 12:58:06 +0200 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? In-Reply-To: <00b001c0452d$5e04ed80$879f113f@patrickr> Message-ID: On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, proto-language wrote: > Is there an available listing of these substrate roots? Not a complete one, I'm afraid. But you could use e.g. Juhani Lehtiranta's "Yhteissaamelainen sanasto" ('common Samic vocabulary') (M?moires de la Soci?t? Finno-Ougrienne 200 [1989]). It contains 1479 Proto-Samic roots and references to their etymologies (in the cases where there is one; Lehtiranta has 637 items with no etymology at all). The glosses are in Finnish, so you need a dictionary if you don't know Finnish. And if you are interested in trying to etymologize the roots, you'll at the very least need a pile of other dictionaries (e.g., of the various Samic languages) and knowledge of the Samic sound changes in addition to this (an excellent introduction to Samic linguistics is Pekka Sammallahti's "The Saami languages: an Introduction"). regards, Ante Aikio From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com Mon Nov 6 16:14:00 2000 From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader) Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 11:14:00 -0500 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Maybe peripheral to the topic, but I think Larry's concept of the length of time Anglo-French influenced English is rather outdated. The literate classes of medieval England had at least a good working knowledge of Anglo-French well after 1250, judging by its use in commerical transactions and Parliamentary and court records. Far more prose writing in Anglo-French survives from the period after 1250 than from before. Later Anglo-French tends to be devalued because of its increasing semantic, morphological, and phonological departure from francien, i.e., Parisian French, but this is just traditional linguistic purism--Anglo-French was a valid dialect of medieval French well into the 15th century, and for lawyers its use in reports and professional notes continued into the 17th century. For a corrective view, see some of the articles by William Rothwell, e.g., "The Legacy of Anglo-French: in French and English," _Zeitschrift f|r Romanische Philologie_, Bd. 109 (1993) and "The Missing Link in English Etymology: Anglo- French," _Medium Aevum_, v. 60 (1991). Jim Rader > Compare English after the Norman Conquest. The Normans were always > a tiny minority in England, and most people in England never learned > Norman French. Moreover, Norman French survived as a spoken language > in England only for a couple of centuries, after which it died out. > Nevertheless, the Norman French impact on the English vocabulary was > colossal. Virtually the *entire* abstract, elevated and technical > vocabulary of English was obliterated, and replaced by French words. > The proportion of the attested Old English vocabulary which was lost > is variously estimated at anything from 60% to 85%. Even such everyday > words as the native equivalents of 'river', 'mountain', 'face', 'picture', > 'army' and 'language' were lost in favor of French words. > Larry Trask Jim Rader Etymology Editor Merriam-Webster, Inc. 47 Federal St., P.O. Box 281 Springfield MA 01102 http://www.merriamwebster.com From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Mon Nov 6 16:44:37 2000 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 18:44:37 +0200 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 3 Nov 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Does any of this substrate overlap with the so-called "Baltic" > substrate in Germanic; i.e. words of non-IE, non-Uralic origin such as > ship, sea, seal (animal), etc.? I don't think anyone has tried to do any serious research on this. It would be quite interesting to compare the assumed substrate vocabularies. But there's the problem that even in a postive case, the results would probably be doubtful at best, as the standard methods of etymology are inapplicable when we are dealing with borrowings but have no knowledge of the asssumed donating language. However, there are lexical correspondences between western Uralic and Germanic which have no further etymologies in either language family, e.g. Germ. *saiwa- ~ Samic *saajv? 'fresh water', Finnic *kauka- 'long' ~ Germ. *hauha- 'high', Germ. *ailda- 'fire' ~ Samic *aalt?-nk?-ss? 'lightning'. But all of these can be explained as borrowings in one direction or the other, so there is no special reason to asssume separate borrowing from some substrate language in these cases. Regards, Ante Aikio From sonno3 at hotmail.com Mon Nov 6 19:03:06 2000 From: sonno3 at hotmail.com (Christopher Gwinn) Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 14:03:06 -0500 Subject: "witch" and "warlock" Message-ID: > I'll leave lurk-mode for a moment to ask if anyone can direct me to > *current* resources discussing the history and evolution of these two > terms (a summary would be nice, too, if someone would be kind enough > to take the time). > Calvert Watkins in "The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo European Roots" has Witch derive from the root *weg- (2) "to be strong/to be lively" (which also is the root of English "to wake"). Witch, from Old English masculine Wicca (Feminine Wicce), ultimately comes from a suffixed PIE form, *weg-yo and likely may represent a Proto Germanic *wikkjaz meaning "necromancer" or (more literally) "one who wakes the dead." Warlock (Old English Waeloga), on the other hand, comes from a compound of two PIE roots, *werH-o "true/trustworthy" and *leugh- "to tell a lie." Warlock literally means "pledge/oath breaker" (the Old English word waeloga meant "oath breaker/damned soul/wicked person" and was often assigned as an epithet of Satan). -Christopher Gwinn From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Nov 6 16:18:55 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 10:18:55 -0600 Subject: *sr- roots in PIE (2) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I remember hearing that in grad school but the problem I perceive is that [I would guess that] this is based on Mozarabic's perceived adaptation of Arabic phonology; Arabic has /s, _S_, z, _Z_, s^/ and one suppose that Castillian apical /S/ would be perceived as Arabic emphatic /_S_/, rather than /s^/ Off the top of my head, and please correct me if I'm wrong, most of these examples sibilants before /a, o, u/ [snip] >>I'm curious about the occasional initial /s-/ > /s^, c^, x/ in various >>Ibero-Romance words >>e.g. >>Spanish jabo/n < sapo:n- >>Spanish chorizo, Port. chouric,o /s^owrisu/ < sauriculum >>The easy way out would be to lay all of this at the feet of Basque >>but what else can be said about this? >It is often said that this is due to (Moz)Arabic influence. >======================= >Miguel Carrasquer Vidal >mcv at wxs.nl Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From dlwhite at texas.net Mon Nov 6 04:56:35 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2000 22:56:35 -0600 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: > No, the answer is: if there were two brothers named Lith and Lidh then > the distinction would be phonemic. As long as there aren't, there is > no phonemic distinction. It doesn't matter that the two sounds are > capable of being distinct phonemes. Until they are used as phonemes > by the speakers of the language, they aren't phonemes for all that they > are recognizably different sounds We will just have to agree to differ. DLW From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Mon Nov 6 05:09:45 2000 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2000 23:09:45 -0600 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: >On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, David L. White wrote: > > > >> For English /th/ vs/ /dh/, the question to ask is something like "In a >> story where two brothers were named "Lith" and "Lidh", would an >> audience be able to keep them apart?" The answer is clearly yes, >> regardless of the various other consideration that some have noted, >> therefore the distinction is (not surprisingly) phonemic. Bob Whiting replied: >No, the answer is: if there were two brothers named Lith and Lidh then >the distinction would be phonemic. As long as there aren't, there is >no phonemic distinction. It doesn't matter that the two sounds are >capable of being distinct phonemes. Until they are used as phonemes >by the speakers of the language, they aren't phonemes for all that they >are recognizably different sounds. When speakers start coining unrelated >words where [th] contrasts with [dh] then they will be phonemes. The >fact that you could coin words where they contrast is not sufficient. This is simply wrong. We could, theoretically, coin words where aspirated [ph] contrasted with plain [p] -- but if we did, people would have to learn to control, and pay attention to, a hitherto redundant feature. But people already hear, and pay attention to, the voicing distinction in the interdental fricatives, just as they do in the other English fricatives and affricates. And there are those minimal pairs, such as ether:either and thigh:thy, which cannot be dismissed by *synchronically* attributing them to some morphological conditioning or to a native:foreign dichotomy. Let me drag in a notorious German example. [x] and palatal [c,] are very nearly in complementary distribution, with [x] found only immediately after back vowels a(:) o(:) u(:) au. [c,] is found after front vowels and diphthongs, all consonants, and (for some speakers) initially. But the diminutive suffix -chen has only [c,] even after back vowels -- a rare occurrence, since -chen normally fronts ("umlauts") the preceding vowel. So one finds alleged minimal pairs such as Kuchen [khu.c, at n] 'cake' and baby-talk Kuhchen [khu:c, at n] 'little cow', which some claim demonstrate that [x] and [c,] must be assigned to different phonemes. And furthermore, many (most?) German speakers hear the difference quite clearly. But are they separate phonemes? No, as is shown by the fact that Kuchen : Kuhchen form a subminimal pair: the vowel of the latter is clearly (but non-distinctively) longer than the former, indicating that it was in root-final position, before suffix -chen. Then, on synchronic grounds along, we may write the alleged minimal pair as /ku:x at n/ 'cake' but /ku:+x at n/ 'little cow': the boundary /+/ conditions both the extra vowel length and the palatal realization of /x/. The fact that all such "minimal pairs" contain precisely the diminutive suffix -chen confirms this analysis. It is therefore unlikely, though possible, that German could coin new words in which [x] and [c,] would (appear to) contrast in some other environment, just as it is unlikely that English would coin new words contrasting precisely in aspired [ph] vs. plain [p]. But English does have a few minimal pairs for the interdentals, ones which cannot be explained on phonologucal grounds. True, in my pronunciation, the stressed vowel of _either_ is longer than that of _ether_ -- but this is in line with vowel length before other voices vs. voiceless consonants. And there's no difference in _thigh_ vs. _thy_. So the fact that new words contrasting only in having [T] vs. [D] could be formed without any new feature becoming distinctive confirms that the two are searate phonemes, and have ben so for some time. >And as you unintentionally point out, when they become phonemes, [dh] >will have to be written , otherwise you couldn't distinguish between > and . Well, it should be so written already, but we ignore all sorts of other distinctions, and it doesn't bother us. stands for /s z S Z/ (the latter two as in _pressure_ and _pleasure_ -- in fact, we don't evan have an official way to spell /Z/, though would seem obvious. And don't even ask about the vowels: treating as doublets of , we have effective five vowel symbols for a very large phonemic inventory. I'd be glad to see ,dh. in use, but it really has nothing to do with whether [T D] are separate phonemes. regards Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at memphis.edu University of Memphis From sarima at friesen.net Mon Nov 6 16:13:29 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 08:13:29 -0800 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 07:08 PM 11/4/00 +0200, Robert Whiting wrote: >On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, David L. White wrote: > >> For English /th/ vs/ /dh/, the question to ask is something like "In a >> story where two brothers were named "Lith" and "Lidh", would an >> audience be able to keep them apart?" The answer is clearly yes, >> regardless of the various other consideration that some have noted, >> therefore the distinction is (not surprisingly) phonemic. >No, the answer is: if there were two brothers named Lith and Lidh then >the distinction would be phonemic. As long as there aren't, there is >no phonemic distinction. It doesn't matter that the two sounds are >capable of being distinct phonemes. ... Actually David has a good point (at least if you make it a play rather than a story to be read). Try writing a Japanese play with characters named Shil and Shir. The result will be confusion and incomprehension. Or try an English play with characters named Lit and Lit' (where /'/ represents aspiration, since we are already using /th/ to mean voiceless interdental fricative). You will get the same result. And this is despite the fact that both the pair /r/ and /l/ and the pair /t/ and /t'/ *can* be distinguished, since some languages do exactly that. The the fact that an non-specialist native speaker can *hear* the difference is good reason to consider it to be phonemic. >And as you unintentionally point out, when they become phonemes, [dh] >will have to be written , Not at all. The natural spelling of /lidh/ in English would be Lihthe or something like that (If "lithe" did not already exist with a long 'i', that would be the spelling) -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Mon Nov 6 15:40:44 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 17:40:44 +0200 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there In-Reply-To: <20000426082023.29305.qmail@hotmail.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 26 Apr 2000 G?bor S?ndi wrote: >[ Moderator's note: > Robert Whiting's posting quoted below was in response to, and > quoted from, a previous message from John McLaughlin dated 13 > Apr 2000. I have added the proper attribution where needed. > --rma ] >On Saturday, 22 April, 2000 Robert Whiting > wrote: >Subject: RE: minimal pairs are not always there >[ JMcL wrote:] >>> [Robert Whiting] >>> I would say that even a minimal pair is not a sufficient >>> condition to establish two sounds as separate phonemes. >I am entering this debate somewhat late, but I do have strong >opinions on it. >In my view, the main purpose of phonemic analysis is to provide >for an unambiguous way to describe the pronunciation of every >utterance in a language. Yes, well, this is what we have the IPA for. But you may have noticed that IPA is the International PHONETIC Alphabet, not the *International PHONEMIC Alphabet. You are simply confusing phonemics with phonetics. Phonemic transcription (/.../) is neither phonetically unambiguous nor necessarily phonetically accurate. Phonetic transcription ([...]) is necessarily (or at least to the best of the transcriber's ability) an accurate mapping of the pronunciation of every utterance in a language. But phonetic transcription doesn't care what the phonemes are; it records the actual sounds (phones) of the utterance. As a simple example, English 'pin' is transcribed phonemically as /pin/ but phonetically as [p'in] or [p^hin] because the initial /p/ is aspirated (followed by a puff of air). The consensus is that aspirated and unaspirated /p/ in English are simply allophones of a single phoneme (although a case could be made that they aren't). Now consider 'spin', which has the unaspirated allophone of /p/ (or /P/ if you are into archiphonemes). Phonemically it is /spin/ but phonetically you could most accurately represent it as [sbin] (the puff of air of the aspirated consonant delays the onset of voicing; without the puff of air, voicing of the vowel sound begins before the consonant is finished, making the consonant seem voiced). So while the phonetic transcription may be accurate, it is at odds with the phonemic transcription. Whenever you have allophones of a single phoneme, phonemic transcription is not necessarily an accurate phonetic mapping of an utterance since each phoneme can have several members. Phonemic and phonetic transcriptions do not have to look very much alike. This is why we have a provision for both phonetic and phonemic transcriptions. A phonetic transcription is an accurate mapping of the pronunciation of an utterance. A phonemic transcription is an abstraction. This is because phonemes themselves are abstractions. Phones are realia. They exist in the real world. They can be measured and identified with a voice spectograph. Phonemes exist in the minds of the speakers of a language (and for the most part, they don't even exist there consciously). Two (or more) phones may be allophones of the same phoneme in one language but separate phonemes in another. You can't tell from looking at a voice spectograph whether a phone is a phoneme or not. You can't even tell what the phonemes of a language are by asking its speakers, because they won't be able to give you a list of the phonemes of their language. Native speakers learn their phonemes through contrasts. The never sit down with a list of the phonemes and memorize them the way the memorize multiplication tables. You can only tell what the phonemes of a language are by analyzing the speech of its speakers and seeing which sounds contrast and under what circumstances. >Therefore if there is a single pair of words distinguished by >the presence of sound A in one and sound B in the other (this is >the definition of "minimal pairs"), this should be sufficient to >establish a phonemic difference. In any dialect of English where >"either" may be pronounced /i:dh at r/ (@ stands for the schwa), the >existence of the minimal pair either/ether is then sufficient to >establish the existence of separate phonemes /dh/ and /th/. This is like saying that [x] and [?] (the ich-laut) must be separate phonemes in German because you can find "minimal pairs" with these two sounds ('Kuhchen' [ku:?en] "little cow" and 'Kuchen' [ku:xen] "cake" or 'Tauchen' [tau?en] "little rope" and 'tauchen' [tauxen] "to dive, submerge"). This is just not so. The presence of these sounds can be explained by rule (even if it isn't a phonological rule). I expect that most native speakers of German would not accept these as "minimal pairs" even if they are by your definition. And a single "minimal pair" doesn't establish separate phonemes; it establishes a contrast between two segments. If one accepts 'ether' and 'either' as a minimal pair, this proves only that [th] and [dh] contrast. It doesn't prove that [th] and/or [dh] are not allophones of /t/ and/or /d/. See below. Perhaps we can eliminate some of the discord about whether minimal pairs define phonemes by refining the definition of minimal pair, rather than refining the definition of phoneme. The problem, in my view, stems from defining phoneme in terms of meaning. Unfortunately, because of the way language works (as a system that expresses meaning through sound), it is very difficult to avoid tying meaning to sound definitionally at some point. But phonemes are not about differences in meaning; phonemes are about being able to make arbitrary contrasts that result in differences in meaning. Differences in meaning may be a result of phonemes. Phonemes are not a result of differences in meaning. The key word here is "arbitrary". The relationship between sound and meaning is arbitrary. If two words differ by only one segment, the differing segments are different phonemes only if their presence in the words is arbitrary. If the sounds are required to be in those words by some rule, the distinction can't be phonemic. To say that words with different meanings must have different phonemes is to require that homonyms have invisible (inaudible?) phonemes that provide the difference in meaning. So let us keep the meaning of phoneme as "the smallest unit of sound that can make a difference in meaning" (although I still don't like this, because in practice any difference in sound can make a difference in meaning, but any difference in sound is not necessarily a different phoneme) with the proviso that phonemes do not make any *specific* difference in meaning. A phoneme should be semantically empty. If it is not, then it is no longer (just) a phoneme. Phonemic contrasts must be arbitrary. If we have the words 'big' and 'pig' and 'fig', these are arbitrary contrasts. Nothing requires the phonemes /b/ or /p/ or /f/ to be in any of these words. We can check this by comparing other words like 'bad', 'pad', and 'fad' or 'ban', 'pan', and 'fan' and so on, and seeing that there is nothing about any of the phonemes in these words that tells you anything about their meanings or anything about their meanings that tells you what particular phonemes have to be present. To put this another way, ask yourself a question: If the phoneme /b/ occurs in an English word, what does that tell you about the meaning of that word? The answer should be: "absolutely nothing." In the pair ether/either, 'ether' belongs to a class of words where the pronunciation of as [th] is required (by rule based on a clearly established pattern [Greek loans originally containing theta]); 'either' belongs to a class of words where the pronunciation of as [dh] is required (by rule based on a clearly established pattern [native words with an intervocalic spirant where the original voiceless spirant was voiced by rule]). Since the respective pronunciations of these words are required by rule, this cannot be a phonemic distinction because the choice of these sounds is not arbitrary. If 'ether' had [dh] and 'either' had [th], this would be a phonemic distinction because the opposition would not be predictable. Saying that native speakers don't know that 'ether' is originally from a Greek word with theta doesn't make any difference. There must be some synchronic rule that forces this [th] pronunciation or else the pattern wouldn't be there in the language synchronically. Now it might be argued that [th] and [dh] don't make any *specific* difference in meaning in these two words and therefore the contrast should be considered phonemic. And it is true that 'ether' could mean anything and 'either' could mean anything else. But so long as 'ether' comes from a Greek word that had theta in it and 'either' is a native word that had an intervocalic /th/ when the voicing rule operated, then 'ether' would *have* to be pronounced with [th] and 'either' would *have* to be pronounced with [dh]. There is nothing arbitrary about the choice of [th] and [dh]; these pronunciations are required by rule, therefore the contrast is not phonemic. >Of course, other pairs like thy/thigh, this'll/thistle etc. will >reinforce this analysis. Indeed they will. Whenever the distribution of the sounds can be explained by rule, the distinction is not phonemic. The point about phonemes is that a speaker can use them to make a distinction in meaning. When a speaker is required to use a certain sound in a certain place (for reasons other than simply to effect the desired meaning) then that usage is not phonemic (for all that it may create a different meaning). >You may of course not accept my approach, but I do not see the >utility of a phonemic system that cannot uniquely map the >pronunciation of every word in a language. But this is not the purpose of a phonemic system. Phonemic systems do not uniquely map the pronunciation of every word in a language. Again, you are confusing phonemics with phonetics. Phonemic analysis accounts for the different phones used in a language by assigning them to phonemes. And this is done by determining which phones contrast and which do not. But a phonemic inventory is coextensive with a phonetic inventory of a language only if there are no allophones. >Imagine writing a description of the English sound system, say >of the "General American" dialect. If you don't accept the >phonemicity of /dh/, you will presumably provide a list of eight >fricatives: >/f/ /v/ /th/ /s/ /z/ /sh/ /zh/ /h/ >Next you will say that some of these come in voiceless/voiced >pairs: /f/ - /v/, /s/ - /z/ and /sh/ - /zh/. One (/h/) is always >voiceless. Finally, there is a curious phoneme /th/, which is >voiceless initially (except in function words) and in word-final >position in nouns (bath) and adjectives (uncouth), but voiced >between vowels (except when not), after consonants (further), and >in word-final position in verbs (bathe). Words of foreign origin >(as if native speakers cared) would have their own rules (Athens, >anthem). No doubt other sub-rules could be added, ad infinitum. >Now why would this analysis be superior to one that said that >English had nine fricatives (/f/ /v/ /th/ /dh/ /s/ /z/ /sh/ >/zh/ /h/ )? Because it is more accurate and accounts for all of the evidence? Besides, I don't deny that English has nine fricatives. You can prove it with a spectograph. What I deny (or at least can't find evidence to prove) is that all these nine fricatives (or spirants as I prefer to call them) are phonemically distinct. The fact that certain sounds occur in a language doesn't ipso facto prove that they are all phonemes in that language. English (and most other languages as well) has lots of sounds that aren't phonemes (or, rather, that are different from, but not distinct from, other members of the same phoneme). I'm surprised that you haven't included /x/ as an English fricative. Although once present and then lost, is has surely been borrowed back in words like 'ach', 'loch' and names like 'Bach'. >Here you need no distributional rules, just a specification of the >articulation of each phoneme: voiceless labiodental fricative etc. >[snip] I fail to see the point of this. You can describe the articulation of each sound regardless of whether it is a phoneme in any particular language or not. [th] is still a voiceless alveolar (dental) fricative and [dh] is still a voiced alveolar (dental) fricative regardless of whether they are separate phonemes or not. They will be pronounced the same way whether they are separate phonemes or allophones of the same phoneme. Phonemicity doesn't have anything to do with how a sound is pronounced. Two sounds can be pronounced differently (have different features) and still not be phonemically distinct. Two sounds can be phonemically distinct in one language and not phonemically distinct in another, but they will still be two sounds. Consider bright /l/ and dark /l/: allophones of /l/ in English, but separate phonemes in Russian. Now a distinctive feature analysis may make it easier to check sounds cross-linguistically, but for a single language, it makes little difference whether you identify its sounds through features or as phonemes and their allophones. Many sounds have both distinctive features and redundant features. Redundant features belong to allophones of sounds whose distinctive features contrast (in at least one feature) with all the other phonemes in the language. For example English /k/ has at least 6 allophones: a palatal, a labial, a neutral, with aspirated and unaspirated variants of each. But for purposes of phonemic analysis, English /k/ is simply a voiceless velar stop. The redundant features that distinguish its allophones are just not considered in phonemic analysis. >> No problem. I have no vested interest in any theory that >> either requires or doesn't require [th] and [dh] to be separate >> phonemes. I'm just looking to find out what the evidence is and >> how the evidence proves it one way or the other. >[ JMcL wrote:] >>> The evidence for establishing /th/ and /dh/ as separate >>> phonemes is no worse than that for establishing /zh/, /ng/, and >>> /oj/ as phonemes (depending on whether or not one considers >>> diphthongs to be on the same footing as other phonemes in the >>> language). >> I think it is quite a bit worse. How many of /zh/, /ng/, or >> /oj/ occur only in certain classes of words or only as >> morphophonemic alternants? Show me that in all the words where >> /zh/ occurs that /zh/ limits or restricts the meanings that it >> can have and I will grant you the point. It is said that /ng/ >> only occurs in word final position, but even this is not true >> (compare 'finger' - 'singer'). These may be difficult to >> establish as phonemes, but there is solid evidence: places where >> these sounds provide the only contrast and cannot be predicted by >> rule. Show me the same for [dh] and I will grant you the point. >[GS] >Once you accept nonphonetic conditioning factors, there is no >end to the elimination of phonemes from a system. Of course there is an end. This is just hyperbole. There is no way to eliminate /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/, /f/, /v/, /s/, /z/, /th/, /sh/, /m/, /n/, and /h/ as phonemes in English. It is rather the other way around: if you eliminate all nonphonetic conditioning factors and say that all sounds that are potentially distinctive are phonemes, there is no end to the number of phonemes in a language. Phonological purists always insist that morphology can't affect phonology (i.e., no nonphonetic conditioning factors) and the next thing you know they are talking about the phonological effects of morpheme boundaries and word boundaries. In fact, it is almost impossible to discuss phonology without these concepts. But morpheme boundary and word boundary are not phonological conditions, but morphological ones. Somehow they seem to get smuggled into phonology. So it is not a matter of "no nonphonetic conditioning factors," it is a matter of how much morphological conditioning you are willing to allow into phonology. My own answer to this tends to be "as much as you can." Language is a fully integrated system. It expresses meaning (morphemes) through phonological form (phonemes). So in my view it is very difficult to completely separate morphology from phonology. Systems engineers know that when you start mucking around with one part of a system, you are likely to cause unexpected havoc in some other (apparently unrelated) part of the system. Software developers are intensely aware of this; they just can't explain it to judges, apparently. :) >Take two of your examples above: >/ng/ - not a phoneme. We can analyze it as the allophone of /n/ >before /k/ and /g/. /g/ is then dropped ("zero allophone" - why >not?) in final position after /n/, and before the derivative >suffix -er (as in "singer"), although not before the comparative >-er (as in "longer"). There remain some exceptions, like the name >of my favourite Canadian city (Vancouver is pronounced >/vaenku:v at r/ by locals), but this is clearly a loanword, or >(maybe) two morphemes: Van Couver. Well, yes, we could analyze it this way (with some modifications), but then we would have to have a silent phoneme in the language, because you can't just elide final /g/. Phonemically, its place has to be held by a marker of the zero allophone of /g/. Otherwise, in pairs like 'run', 'rung'; 'sin', 'sing'; and especially 'sinner', 'singer' you would have [n] and [ng] contrasting (and we all know that allophones can't contrast in different words). Therefore 'sinner' would have to be analyzed as /sin at r/ and 'singer' would have to be analyzed as /sing0(g)@r/ (where 0(g) represents the zero allophone of /g/) or else you would just have /sin at r/ contrasting with /sing at r/ suggesting that [n] and [ng] are not allophones. Of course, you will also have a different syllable structure (si'-n at r vs. sing'- at r) because [ng] can't occur in syllable initial position. This doesn't affect [n] / [ng] contrasts in final position, however, so we have /r at n/ and /r at ng0(g)/. One of the modifications that it seems to me would have to be made is that g --> 0 / ng ___# has to be the next rule applied after n --> ng / ___ [velar]. This gets rid of the complication of saying that /g/ goes to zero after [ng] in final position and before the agentive suffix '-er'. Stem-final /g/ goes to zero immediately and (nearly) all derivative suffixes (agentive '-er', '-ing', '-ish', '-ly', '-y', etc.) are added to this base. All that is needed then is a rule that triggers the restoration of /g/ before the comparative '-er' (and for completeness, the superlative '-est'): 0(g) --> g /ng ___ [COMPARATIVE, SUPERLATIVE]. So it is not too difficult to account for the distribution of [n] and [ng] in English with synchronic (generative) rules and treating [ng] as an allophone of [n]. The only real problem is that it requires a silent phoneme (a stem-final zero allophone of /g/). There is nothing particularly wrong with this (as someone pointed out, French does a lot of this, and John McLaughlin has pointed out that Numicists do it for Comanche). Furthermore, it is not a particularly difficult phoneme for speakers to keep track of: wherever you have a bare [ng] (i.e., without a following velar), it is followed by a zero allophone of /g/. There is another problem for phonological purists, because the initial assimilation rule obviously doesn't operate across morpheme boundaries (compare 'unclear', 'unclean', but 'uncle') and sometimes even across perceived morpheme boundaries (e.g., 'mangrove', 'mongoose', your 'Vancouver', 'vanguard', and sometimes even 'vanquish' [analogy?]). This simply means that the original assimilation rule has to be marked [+root] as part of the environment. And the zero allophone of /g/ rule probably doesn't work in New York City because too many people live on "Long Gisland." :) All things considered then, it is probably simpler to operate with /n/ and /ng/ as different phonemes because this does not require the zero allophone of /g/ to maintain their allophonic status *and* there is no indication of a morphophonemic alternation between [n] and [ng] (there is no connection between pairs like 'bun' / 'bung', 'pin' / 'ping', 'thin' / 'thing', 'clan' / 'clang', etc., etc.). /ng/ is frequently used in expressive and imitative words (e.g., 'ding', 'ping', 'zing', 'ring' 'clang', 'twang', 'bong', etc. -- even cross-linguistically: 'gong' is a loan from Malay, and the Sumerian word for "harp" was 'balang'), but not exclusively so (e.g., 'thing', 'lung' 'rung' [noun], 'strong', 'among', 'gang', and, most commonly, the derivative suffix '-ing'). But the analysis does show that it is possible to analyze two sounds both as separate phonemes and as allophones of a single phoneme, accounting for all the observed data in each case. In such instances we usually resort to Occam's Razor for a resolution. In this case we accept the separate phoneme theory because the allophone theory requires an additional entity (a zero allophone of /g/). But this does not necessarily mean that this is the correct solution. Occam's Razor is just a heuristic. It tells us that the simpler solution (that accounts for all the evidence) is to be preferred, but it doesn't tell us that it has to be correct. The simple solution is more likely to be correct, but unlikely things do happen. >/zh/ - who needs it? Using the logic of reductionism, we shall >elaborate a set of rules to account for this sound: This is an oxymoron. Reductionism doesn't elaborate rules; it simplifies them. >(1) It is an allophone of the phoneme /j/, occurring in >loanwords from French (genre, garage, mirage). First, let's get our terminology straight. What we will call the phoneme /j/ is j with hachek [dzh] and not to be confused with IPA j which is English y. As such, /j/ is the voiced counterpart of /ch/ (c with hachek [tsh]). Now to facts. The sound [zh] occurs predominantly in French loans borrowed after about 15-1600, but it also appears in some loans from Slavic; I remember at least 'muzhik' "peasant" from Russian, but there are probably others. But the thrust of the statement is correct: [zh] in this environment is found only as a received pronunciation in words of foreign origin. >The phoneme /j/ in native words like 'edge' /ej/ remains [j], >whereas this pronunciation does not occur in loanwords. Sure it does. It is found in words from Japanese ('jinricksha', 'judo', 'jujitsu' [not to mention 'Japan']); Arabic ('jihad', 'jinni' ['genie']); and many others. But most of the loanwords with this pronunciation come from French. In speaking of loans from French, the pronunciation of this segment depends on when the word was borrowed. Words borrowed before about 15-1600 will have [j (dzh)]; words borrowed later will have [zh]. This parallels exactly the treatment of the voiceless counterparts of these sounds. Words borrowed before the sound change in French will have [ch (tsh)] ('chief', 'chandler'). Words borrowed later will have [sh] ('chef', 'chandelier'). This last change does not cause any controversy in English because /s/ and /sh/ had already been established as separate phonemes. However, the pronunciation of as [sh] makes it easy to pick out French loans of the last 4-500 years. But 'chief' never had a pronunciation with [sh] in English. >Where it does, one may always set up a new word category: >loanwords that have been fully assimilated to the sound structure >of English. This will take care of troublesome words like jet, >gene and magenta. No, the vast majority of loans from French with [j] never had a pronunciation of [zh] in English. This is a matter of a sound change in French, not of nativization of the sound in English. So your statement is a distortion of the evidence, especially of the evidence you have offered. Of the three examples given, 'jet' is in a different category. I'm not entirely sure about this, but I seem to remember that _j_ from Latin _j_ went to [zh] later than _ge_ from Latin _ge_. Perhaps someone can help out on this. I would need a philologist of French to verify this, but I expect that 'jet' never had a pronunciation with [zh] in English despite the fact that it wasn't borrowed until the 17th century. Contrast with 'jet?' [zh at te:] (a technical term in ballet, where unnativized French terms abound), a 19th century borrowing. Words like 'joy' 'joust' 'judge', 'jury', and so on, never had a pronunciation with [zh] in English. Again, contrast 'juggler' (14th cent.; with [j]) with 'jongleur' (18th cent.; with [zh]). The second example is a modern coining based on the suffix '-gen', as in 'pathogen', 'halogen', 'oxygen', 'hydrogen'. 'Gene' never had a pronunciation with [zh] in English. The final example is Italian, not French. The in 'magenta' is exactly parallel to its voiceless counterpart in Italian loans such as 'cello' or 'vermicelli', regularly pronounced with [ch]. 'Magenta' never had a pronunciation with [zh] in English (except for those who give it a French pronunciation as an affectation). So there are two strata of French loans in English: the earlier will have or and [j] ('jet', 'jelly', 'jaunty', 'juggler'; 'gender', 'gelatin', 'genteel'); the later will have or and [zh] ('genre', 'gel?e', 'gendarme'; 'jet?', 'jongleur', 'jeunesse'). The earlier borrowings never had a pronunciation with [zh] in English. Now despite your poor choice of examples, there is a process of nativization going on with recent French loans. To my knowledge, 'm?nage' has only [zh] but 'menagerie' can have either [j] or [zh]. Similarly 'm?lange', 'garage', 'genre', 'gendarme', etc., can have either. The pronunciation of 'garbage' with [zh] is an affectation; apparently French garbage is considered to have more class than English garbage. :) But it does illustrate the point that the pronunciation with [zh] is considered by speakers to be connected with French and that a native (or nativized) word can be "Frenchified" by using this pronunciation.. >(2) In words like azure, seisure and invasion, /zh/ is derived >from the sequence of phonemes z + y. (/azyu:r/, /si:zy at r/ and >/inveyzy at n/). Come to think of it, didn't Chomsky and Halle >analyze English along these lines, to get back at those dreadful >structuralists of the 50's? I think that Chomsky and Halle were trying to show that English pronunciation and English orthography were not so disparate as generally assumed (as an antidote to Shaw, etc.) and that English spelling provides a great deal of information to the reader that the pronunciation has lost. But the analysis of this instance of [zh] is quite correct. It is a palatalized allophone of [z] before a palatal ('confuse' [z], 'confusion' [zh]) parallel with the palatalized allophone [sh] of [s] in the same environment ('confess' [s], 'confession' [sh]). This is quite regular and very common cross-linguistically: consonant + palatal --> palatalized consonant. In short, the palatal, originally associated with a (usually front) vowel, is transferred to become associated with the preceding consonant. Again, [sh] in this environment is a palatalized allophone of [s], but since /s/ and /sh/ are already considered phonemes ('sore' / 'shore', 'seat' / 'sheet'), the rule (concept) "once a phoneme, always a phoneme" causes it to be considered as a phoneme even in this environment where it is clearly an allophone. Many people then consider that since /sh/ is a phoneme in this environment then [zh] must also be a phoneme. They then collect numerous examples of minimal pairs and near minimal pairs to show that /sh/ contrasts with [zh] in the same environment ('Confucian' / 'confusion', 'kosher' / 'closure', 'vicious' / 'vision', 'pollution' / 'collusion') and then claim that this proves that [zh] is a phoneme because it contrasts with /sh/. But as Ante Aikio has quite correctly reminded us on Wed, 26 Apr 2000: 1. One minimal pair, such as above, does not establish phonemes - it establishes an opposition in a non-contrastive environment. A phoneme is the sum of its oppositions: what makes something a phoneme is that it is in opposition to -all- the other phonemes. You can establish phonemes only in the context of the whole phonological system. To which I would add that a hundred minimal pairs, or a thousand, that all express the same contrast (e.g., [sh] and [zh]) does not establish phonemes, only a contrast between the two particular segments involved. This is where the definition of "phoneme" that I use comes into play. The definition that I use is that a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound recognized as distinct from all other such units by the speakers of a language. This definition has a number of disadvantages. Namely, it does not account for suprasegmental phonemes and it also defines the concept in terms of itself. Its main advantages are that it keeps "meaning" out of the definition and it stresses the psychological nature of the phoneme. And it tells you how you go about identifying phonemes. To be a phoneme, a sound must contrast with *all* other phonemes in the language. If it contrasts with all other phonemes except one, it is not a phoneme, but an allophone of that one (unless the two sounds are so distant phonetically that they simply cannot be considered allophones [like English /h/ and /ng/]). I consider this a conceptual definition; it tells you what phonemes are, as opposed to the functional definition ("a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that can make a difference in meaning") which tells you what phonemes do. Phonemes can make differences in meaning. But you can have differences in meaning without having different phonemes (homonyms). Therefore, a difference in meaning is not a sufficient condition for insisting on the presence of different phonemes. And a minimal pair is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for establishing different phonemes. What is necessary is to show that a sound is a phoneme is to show that it contrasts with every other phoneme in the language. And this is where Ante Aikio seems to have forgotten what he made so clear in his first point when he wrote in his second point: 2. It must be once again stressed that for many languages it is impossible to establish all the contrasts using minimal pairs - this is precisely the case with English /sh/ vs. /zh/, which was discussed earlier. The phonemes contrast with each other even though there are no minimal pairs, because their distribution cannot be accounted for with a rule. I.e., they show contrast in non-contrastive environments (vicious vs. vision etc.). The contrast of /sh/ and [zh] does not prove that [zh] is a phoneme. As Ante Aikio made clear in his first point, it only proves a contrast with /sh/. It cannot be proved that [zh] is a phoneme unless it can be shown that [zh] contrasts with *all* other phonemes (or is so phonetically distant from some phoneme for which a contrast cannot be shown that it cannot be considered an allophone of that phoneme). Particularly, it is crucial to show that [zh] contrasts with /z/. Because if [zh] is an allophone of /z/ then [zh] will contrast with all other phonemes except /z/ because /z/, as a phoneme, will contrast with all other phonemes and so, therefore, will all of its allophones. And /z/ and [zh] are so close phonetically that the second criterion does not apply. Now it has been correctly pointed out that [zh] in English has two origins: 1) It is a received pronunciation in loanwords. Such loanwords are predominantly from French where the pronunciation is primarily a result of first palatalization of /g/ to /j/ ([dzh]) before [e] and then unpacking of the complex sound ([dzh] > [d]+[zh]) and elision of the initial [d]. This development took place in French, not in English where the phoneme /j/ is still found in both native words ('hedge') and borrowed words ('judge'). 2) It is a palatalization of /z/ before palatal vowels (z --> zh / ___ [palatal]). As such, it is clearly an allophone of /z/. Since zh(2) is an allophone of /z/ it cannot contrast with /z/. It can, however, contrast with /j/ (and, presumably therefore, with its allophones) Since we have 'legion' ([j]) and 'lesion' ([zh(2)]) this contrast is validated. There is also one pronunciation of 'azure' (I don't know the pronunciation that you give: /azyu:r/; I know [?zh at r] and [@zhUr], the first with accent on the first syllable, the second with accent on the second syllable) that shows this contrast: 'adjure' [@jUr] (this also contrasts with [sh]: 'assure' [@shUr]). On the other hand, zh(1) can contrast with /z/. Thus we have 'ruse' [ruz] and 'rouge' [ruzh] (although 'rouge' is also realized as [ruj] in some dialects or by some speakers) and 'lose' [luz] and 'luge' [luzh] (also 'loser' [luz at r] and 'luger' [luzh at r]). So we are faced with the fact that zh(1) (as an allophone of /j/) can contrast with /z/ and zh(2) (as an allophone of /z/) can contrast with /j/. But to my knowledge, zh(1) does not contrast with /j/ and zh(2) does not contrast with /z/. Thus the question becomes: are we justified in considering identical allophones of different phonemes as phonemes in their own right? If the answer is yes, then [zh] is a phoneme in English; if not, not. In Akkadian, there are three phonemic short vowels (a, i, u) and three corresponding long vowels. There is also a short and long e, but this is not considered phonemic because it is always an allophone of either a or i. Now it is possible to find "minimal pairs" in which e (as an allophone of a) contrasts with i and in which e (as an allophone of i) contrasts with a. Thus it is possible to show four different contrasts, but not that there are four different vowel phonemes. I would say that the case of English [zh] is entirely similar. On the other hand, Akkadian being a dead language, the grammar was explicated by philologists rather than by linguists. A linguistic approach might reach different conclusions. >With sufficient ingenuity, I am sure we can come up with rules >to eliminate other phonemes from English: /v/ and /@r/ (bird, >fern, word) come immediately to mind. With sufficient ingenuity, we can come up with anything we want. The question is, will anyone believe it. >My main point, I hope readers realize, is that this kind of >analysis is not very helpful. A simple description of the >phonemic structure of a language should account for all >differences that are potentially distinctive, irrespective of the >morphology, semantics or etymological provenance of the words in >question. And it is not very helpful to say that every different sound in a language is a phoneme. For any different sounds in a language are potentially distinctive. Whether they are actually distinctive depends on how the speakers of the language use them. If they aren't used to make arbitrary contrasts, then they aren't phonemes (in that particular language). >It is a noteworthy fact that there tend to be correlations >between certain phonemes and certain grammatical and semantic >criteria. In English, /dh/ starts many function words and /th/ >never does - so what? The phoneme /h/ (or the cluster /hw/, >depending on the dialect) starts many interrogatives (where, >which, what, when) while /k/ never does - is this a reason to >bunch them together under one phoneme? This is mere sophistry. The one situation has no relevance to the other. To say that it does may make it look like a valid argument to anyone who doesn't know anything about historical linguistics, but it is easy to refute by anyone who does. The split between initial [th] and [dh] is quite recent in English. There can be no question that [th] and [dh] were originally the same phoneme. Initial /th/ is the normal Germanic reflex of PIE *t as captured in Gothic. English has preserved /th/ while German has generally shifted to /d/. Thus: PIE Gothic English German *ter- thaurnus thorn Dorn *trei- thrija (neut.) three drei *tr.s- thaurstei thirst Durst *tar- thar there dar, da *tu:- thu thou du etc etc etc etc By comparison, /hw/ is the normal Germanic reflex of PIE *k^w (just as /h/ is the normal Germanic reflex of PIE *k' [palatal k]). All the interrogatives in /hw/ (English or ) are derived from the Teutonic pronoun base *hwo- / *hwe- (presumably phonetically [x^w]) which is derived from PIE *k^wo- / *k^we-. So the reason that there are no interrogatives beginning with /k/ in English is that there is no initial PIE *k^w left in English. Any English initial /k/ has come from some other source (normally shifted from PIE *g or *g^w; otherwise borrowed from a language that has preserved PIE *k^w like 'quart(er)', or from an unrelated language ['Quetzalcoatl', 'Kwakiutl'). That is why no one claims that modern English /hw/ and modern English /k/ are the same phoneme. They aren't and they never have been. English /hw/ and PIE *k^w are the same (i.e., one has developed into the other), but there is no initial /k/ in English that has been inherited from PIE *k^w or *k'. Therefore saying that [th] and [dh] can't belong to the same phoneme in English because /hw/ and /k/ aren't the same phoneme in English is a completely spurious argument and I can't imagine why anyone who has ever heard of Grimm's Law would put it forward. >[ JMcL wrote:] >>> [Me] >>> The distribution of /th/ and /dh/ cannot be determined by the >>> assignment of a PHONOLOGICAL rule. >> Let me see if I have your take on this straight. Are you >> saying that allophones automatically become separate phonemes >> when the phonological conditioning environment that maintains >> their allophonic identity is lost? And that they are phonemes >> even if they never contrast in an environment that can't be >> predicted, so long as the basis for predicting the environment is >> not phonological? >[GS] >Yes, that's how it should be. Once the conditioning factor is >lost, we have separate phonemes. German (+Swedish, Danish and >Norwegian) umlauts, Southern British /e@/ (bare, care) and French >nasal vowels come to mind as examples. You can probably invent a >series of complex rules to eliminate these from the inventories >of phonemes, explain the exceptions as loanwords, analogies or >whatever, but what would be the purpose of this? The purpose is accuracy and thoroughness. Insisting on simplicity at the expense of accuracy is a particularly pernicious type of reductionism. Another name for it is "oversimplification." There are various kinds of reductionism. A productive kind is found in breaking apart a system that is too complex to be studied as a whole into its subsystems and studying the subsystems independently. This type of reductionism is frequently applied to language because it is an extremely complex system with many interacting levels. Thus we have specialists in various linguistic subsystems: Phoneticians and phonologists, grammarians dealing with morphology and syntax, lexicographers dealing with the lexicon, pragmatists dealing with matters of style and discourse, and so on. The danger with this kind of reductionism is that the specialists in the various subsystems sometimes forget that their specialty is not the entire system and that it has to be integrated with all the other subsystems in order for the system to work. On the whole, however, this kind of reductionism yields good results. Another kind of reductionism is simply refusing to allow complexity to be considered as a possible explanation. The simple solution is always correct. This kind of reductionism elevates Occam's Razor from a heuristic to a religion. Complicating factors are simply ignored. As an example consider the short term observations of the apparent motion of the sun, moon, and fixed stars from the earth. The simplistic explanation of these observations is that the earth is stationary and the heavenly bodies revolve around it. This works fine, except for the irregular motion of the planets. But what would be the purpose of working out complex explanations for the motion of the planets that might upset the simplistic explanation of the observations? Let us just call the planets "wanderers" and ignore their wayward motion, maintaining the earth as the center of the universe. Saying that evidence of complexity should be ignored so that we can have simple explanations may be fine in the everyday world where principle often gives way to expediency. But in a scientific context it is generally considered bad form. >>I just invented a phonological explanation for 'ether' - 'either' >>so it is no longer a minimal pair (just like Comanche [papi] and >>[pavi] aren't a minimal pair, although presumably these two words >>are both native in Comanche). >To use someone else's analysis of Comanche as supporting >evidence for your analysis of English is not very convincing. Very perceptive. It wasn't meant to be convincing. On the contrary, it was meant to show that creating silent phonemes to block distinctions between other phonemes is not very good methodology because it is too easy to do (see above, on the discussion of /n/ and /ng/). If whenever we don't want two contrasting sounds to be phonemes we just invent a silent phoneme so that the sounds are no longer contrasting, we no longer have a sound basis (pun intended) for our phonological analysis. My point was that if the Numicists can do it for Comanche, then I can do it for English with exactly the same result. But I wouldn't do it for English because, as you say, it is unconvincing, and by implication, if it is unconvincing for English, it is unconvincing for Comanche as well. >If I analyzed Comanche, I would probably accept the p/v contrast >as phonemic, even if the contrast existed only intervocally. Since you have already said that you consider all different sounds that occur in a language to be phonemes, this is hardly surprising. But it is obvious that the Numicists feel that there is good reason why [p] and [v] should not be considered phonemically distinct in Comanche. If one is not a specialist in these languages one has to respect their view. I only disagree with their method of establishing this by using a silent phoneme that is an obvious concession to the requirement that there can be no non-phonological conditioning environments. >It is quite common in language change for certain new phonemes >to exist at first only in specific environments. Subsequently, >the new phoneme is introduced into other environments by >borrowing (from other languages or from other dialects of the >same language) or by processes other than the one that gave rise >to the new phoneme in the first place. Yes, and that is how you can tell that they are being used as phonemes. Until that happens, though, the only reason for saying that they are phonemes is symmetry, slot filling, or analogy. Actual usage as a phoneme would seem to be a more viable criterion. >Examples: >1. /v/, /z/, and /j/ in English. These phonemes arose from >internal /f/, /s/ and /g > y/ in Old English under certain >conditions (live, cheese, hedge), and they were introduced >initially later on in loanwords (very, zero, jet) and from >dialects (vat, vixen). While this explanation is essentially correct for /v/ and /z/, you seem to be somewhat confused about the development of /j/ in native English words. Native /g/ does shift to /y/ in English, but it either remains in initial position (compare native 'yard' with borrowed 'garden') or is elided intervocalically (compare borrowed 'wagon' or 'waggon' with native 'wain', or native 'weigh' ("move"; OE 'weyan') with German '(be)wegen' ("move") and finally (although it may be preserved graphically, it is not preserved phonetically except as part of a diphthong; compare 'way' [wei] with German 'Weg' "way"). English /j/ developed from a geminated g (usually in ME and in OE). As such it will normally correspond to in German: Old English Middle English Modern English German ecg egge edge Eck, Ecke (un)flecge flegge fledge flucki (OHG) hecg hegge hedge Hecke wecg wegge wedge Weck brycg brigge bridge brucka (OHG) hrycg rigge ridge rucki (OHG) etc etc etc etc Since there is no initial /gg/ in English, initial /j/ in English is usually found in loan words. This does not cause a problem because there is a native /j/ phoneme and the maxim "once a phoneme, always a phoneme" allows the acceptance of such words on a native basis and even allows new coinings with initial /j/ like 'jingle', 'jive', and 'jitterbug'. That's how you can tell it's a phoneme. >2. /b/, /d/ and /g/ in my native Hungarian. These phonemes are >the natural development of the Proto-Finno-Ugric (PFU) internal >clusters /-mp-/, /-nt-/ and /-nk-/, respectively. On the other >hand, they should not exist initially, as there is no regular >phonetic change that could produce them from PFU etyma. Yet >Hungarian is full of words beginning with voiced stops: they are >loanwords from Turkic, Slavic etc., and there are even a few >words of FU origin where initial *p- and *t- changed into *b- and >*d- ("sporadic sound change"). The dictum "once a phoneme, always a phoneme" will account for this. >There exist as well curious cases where an allophone acquires >phonemic status ONLY because of the introduction of loanwords >into a language. I am thinking of Japanese, where the phoneme /h/ >is pronounced as the voiceless bilabial fricative (normally >denoted as the Greek letter phi, but let's write it [ph] here) >before the vowel /u/ (the Hepburn transliteration is used for >the gloss, followed by a phonemic and phonetic transcription): >Fujimori /huzimori/ is pronounced [phujimori], fune /hune/ 'boat' >is [phune]. Nowadays, loanwords from English are introducing [ph] >into environments other than pre-/u/, e.g. ftku [pho:ku] 'fork', >fairu [phairu] 'file'. According to my thinking, a new phoneme is >being born in Japanese: the next generation of speakers will not >necessarily know that these are "loanwords", so any phonetic rule >based on their being loanwords will be purely ad-hoc: the only >reason for labelling some words as loanwords will be in order to >account for the presence of "unusual" occurrences of sounds like >[ph] not before /u/, [sh] before /e/ etc. It is better, IMHO, to >allow for the addition of new phonemes into the structure. To me, the importance of this paragraph is not what it says about the phonemicization of allophones (although the points made are valid), but lies in the fact that it shows that you (or at least a part of you) really do know the difference between phonemics and phonetics. Therefore, you should not be having this discussion with me, but with yourself. Specifically, the part of you that knows the difference between phonemic /huzimori/ and phonetic [phujimori] should try to convince the part of you that says things like: "the main purpose of phonemic analysis is to provide for an unambiguous way to describe the pronunciation of every utterance in a language" that it is wrong. Please do this, and I hope one of you will let me know who wins. I certainly hope that it is the one who knows that "/huzimori/ is pronounced [phujimori]." Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From stevegus at aye.net Tue Nov 7 03:20:11 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 22:20:11 -0500 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: Jim Rader wrote: > Maybe peripheral to the topic, but I think Larry's concept of the > length of time Anglo-French influenced English is rather outdated. > The literate classes of medieval England had at least a good > working knowledge of Anglo-French well after 1250, judging by its > use in commerical transactions and Parliamentary and court > records. Far more prose writing in Anglo-French survives from the > period after 1250 than from before. Later Anglo-French tends to be > devalued because of its increasing semantic, morphological, and > phonological departure from francien, i.e., Parisian French, but this > is just traditional linguistic purism--Anglo-French was a valid dialect > of medieval French well into the 15th century, and for lawyers its > use in reports and professional notes continued into the 17th > century. For a corrective view, see some of the articles by William > Rothwell, e.g., "The Legacy of Anglo-French: in > French and English," _Zeitschrift f|r Romanische Philologie_, Bd. > 109 (1993) and "The Missing Link in English Etymology: Anglo- > French," _Medium Aevum_, v. 60 (1991). The French used by lawyers was increasingly a jargon applied by rote, and I suspect without real understanding of French. It lost grammatical gender early on. The formulaic parts of pleadings are set forth in what is standard for the language, since most of them are copied from earlier books; but when new ideas are required, their vocabulary fails them, so you get phrases like "li ject un brickbat a le dit justice." [an actual example] Peculiarly, the scriveners were better etymologists than spellers. They routinely wrote the first person plural verb forms with the curlicue that is the standard Latin abbreviation for -mus. We don't really know how the lawyers said these verbs; and latterday editions of the Year Books and similar texts routinely print "parlomus" and so forth. English was not routinely used in statutes until the early Tudors; statutes were drafted in this French, or in Latin. Pleading in this sort of French was permitted in court until it was abolished by Charles II at the Restoration. -- Quae vestimenta induet misella in conviviis crastinis? From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Nov 7 09:04:51 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2000 09:04:51 +0000 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: Jim Rader writes: > Maybe peripheral to the topic, but I think Larry's concept of the > length of time Anglo-French influenced English is rather outdated. > The literate classes of medieval England had at least a good > working knowledge of Anglo-French well after 1250, judging by its > use in commerical transactions and Parliamentary and court > records. Far more prose writing in Anglo-French survives from the > period after 1250 than from before. Later Anglo-French tends to be > devalued because of its increasing semantic, morphological, and > phonological departure from francien, i.e., Parisian French, but this > is just traditional linguistic purism--Anglo-French was a valid dialect > of medieval French well into the 15th century, and for lawyers its > use in reports and professional notes continued into the 17th > century. For a corrective view, see some of the articles by William > Rothwell, e.g., "The Legacy of Anglo-French: in > French and English," _Zeitschrift f|r Romanische Philologie_, Bd. > 109 (1993) and "The Missing Link in English Etymology: Anglo- > French," _Medium Aevum_, v. 60 (1991). Yes, of course. But, in my posting, I was careful to say that Norman French died out as a *spoken language* -- that is, as a mother tongue -- after a couple of centuries. The later administrative Anglo-French was nobody's mother tongue. This is in great contrast to the position in the Basque Country, in which Latin and Romance continued to be not only living languages but also the languages of the vast majority of the people in the whole area surrounding the Basque Country, as well as the languages of the states within which the Basques were incorporated from the 10th century on. My point was this. The English were ruled by a handful of French-speakers for a couple of centuries. The Basques have been an island in a sea of Latino-Romance speech for around 2000 years, they were part of the western Roman Empire as long as that empire lasted, and they have been incorporated into Romance-speaking states for around 1000 years. In the circumstances, then, the enormous number of Latino-Romance loans in the language is in no way surprising. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Nov 7 04:54:05 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 23:54:05 EST Subject: Iranian and Indo-Aryan Message-ID: I've been looking over some documents in Avestan and Rigvedic Sanskrit, but I'm not really conversant with either. Would they have been mutually comprehensible? From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Nov 7 09:11:30 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2000 09:11:30 +0000 Subject: Incuba (Nightmare) Message-ID: Douglas Wilson writes: > From "Lexicon Latinitatis Nederlandicae Medii Aevi" (Johanne W. Fuchs et > al., eds.) (Brill [Leiden], 1990), p. I 307: > incuba, ae, m. f. -- ... > 2. daemon quidam (cf. incubus): CONFL. VOC. incuba, een mare vel een > meerminne vel elfinne, talis mulier; GEMMA een nachtmerrinne; et vid. > neptina. > This is apparently satisfactory semantically and morphologically (1st > declension, acc. sg. "incubam"); chronologically, I don't know. Splendid, and many thanks. I couldn' find this form in even the biggest Latin dictionaries in our library, but I don't think they cover medieval Latin. As for the chronology, I would like the word to have entered Basque by about the 11th century, in order to allow that /k/ to undergo the regular voicing after /n/. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From r.clark at auckland.ac.nz Tue Nov 7 05:14:44 2000 From: r.clark at auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark (FOA LING)) Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2000 18:14:44 +1300 Subject: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: I've tried to keep this short by eliminating some inessential paragraphs. RC -----Original Message----- From: Robert Whiting [mailto:whiting at cc.helsinki.fi] Sent: Monday, 6 November 2000 7:52 a.m. To: 'Indo-European at xkl.com' Subject: RE: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut) On Sat, 21 Oct 2000 "Ross Clark (FOA LING)" wrote: [snip] >RW> Historical grammar, when we have a written record, is based >RW> on empirically verifiable facts. Synchronic grammar is based on >RW> a hypothesis about how native speakers produce their language. A >RW> hypothesis is not a fact. It is an explanation put forward to >RW> account for observable facts. People tend to forget this and >RW> consider synchronic grammar a fact. But whatever reality may >RW> exist in the speaker's head just can't be gotten at at the >RW> present time with our present knowledge. In general, I agree >RW> that what we are trying to get at is the reality in speakers' >RW> heads, but it is a roundabout road that we have to take and we >RW> have to have a realistic picture of language before we are likely >RW> to get there. RC>I'm not sure what you mean by "historical grammar" here. RW>By "historical grammar" I mean the changes in grammar through RW>time, studied systematically. By grammar I mean those features RW>of language that one will usually find in a standard grammar RW>book: phonology, morphology, and syntax, but generally not RW>including pragmatics and lexicon. RC>If it is an account of changes in the language, then it is RC>surely an account of transitions from one synchronic grammar to RC>another, and hence subject to the same epistemological RC>vulnerability you attribute to the latter. RW>Hardly. At any given period the speakers of a language will RW>produce a corpus of language. For this to be useful for RW>historical purposes it must be recorded somehow -- either as RW>texts or by being recorded as a spoken corpus by a competent RW>field linguist. The recorded corpus of language becomes a body RW>of data. This data can be minutely compared with similar data RW>from other periods and the differences noted in detail. Consider RW>the following diagram: speakers + rules --> Old English | speakers + rules --> Middle English | speakers + rules --> Modern English RW>Synchronic (generative) grammar is concerned with the horizontal RW>rows. Historical grammar is concerned only with the final RW>column. Since we don't know what goes on in speaker's minds, RW>everything to the left of the arrows is an assumption. We assume RW>that speakers start from a certain point and apply a certain set RW>of rules to arrive at the corpus on the right of the arrows. But RW>everything to the right of the arrows is data. When we move from RW>one set of data to another we also formulate rules to account for RW>the changes. The difference is that that the historical rules RW>are not based on assumptions about how speakers produce language, RW>but on observed differences in the language that speakers have RW>produced. Synchronic grammar is simply cut out of the loop in RW>historical grammar. I doubt that this description fits anything that we are familiar with under the name of historical grammar. A corpus is not a language, and I find it hard to imagine, say, historical syntax couched in terms of differences between a sentence found in an OE corpus and another one found in a ME corpus. (I don't mean examples, I mean the statements of historical grammar.) As soon as you even begin to talk about, say, cases, constituents or constructions, you are already moving left of the arrows. [snip] RC>So, in your view, we have, on the one hand, "the language that RC>speakers produce" -- texts, I guess. Presumably the "empirically RC>verifiable facts" on which you see historical grammar as being RC>based are of the same sort. RW>Precisely. This is what I have said. The language that speakers RW>produce synchronically is exactly the same language that we RW>arrive at by tracing its historical development. The outcomes of RW>both methods are the same. But the historical rules and the RW>synchronic rules that produce it will not necessarily be the same. RC>On the other hand we have "the cognitive processes that produce RC>language", "whatever reality may exist in a speaker's head", RC>which is at present unknowable. Yet apparently we are able to RC>describe "how language works linguistically", "a realistic RC>picture of language". And what criteria do we have as to what is RC>"realistic" in this description? Is this what was once called the RC>Hocus Pocus view -- that a linguistic description is simply an RC>efficient and elegant description of a body of data, without RC>reference to any possible mental reality? RW>Realistic means based on realia -- things that actually exist as RW>opposed to mental constructs. This is not sufficient to make any discrimination among linguistic descriptions. Any linguist of any theoretical persuasion will claim that their description is "based on" "things that actually exist". However, I guess it might distinguish you from a radical Hocuspocusian. RW>When you start talking about RW>"mental reality" you are getting into a murky area of philosophy. RW>Is there such a thing as "mental reality"? This is something RW>that can be discussed endlessly and inevitably inconclusively. Well, that's what philosophers are paid to do. As linguists, I think we should simply admit that insofar as our synchronic descriptions are any more than mere transcription, they are attempts to capture some aspect of mental reality. [snip] >RC>> The rest of your post is entirely dependent on the further >RC>> assumption that native speakers of modern English (in general, >RC>> not just linguists) distinguish "foreign" from "native" words, >RC>> and that the words I listed with /th/ in voiced environments are >RC>> marked as "foreign". Since I don't share this assumption, I would >RC>> like to know what evidence leads you to it. Do you have any such >RC>> evidence, other than the fact that by excluding these hundreds of >RC>> words you can arrive at a nice phonological generalization? >RW> Let me answer this from back to front. >RW> You ask what evidence I have that native speakers >RW> distinguish by rule the [th] of loan words from the [dh] of >RW> native words other than hundreds of examples and the fact that it >RW> produces a nice phonological generalization. RC>This is not quite what I said. I said that in order to arrive at RC>your nice generalization you need to *exclude* hundreds of RC>English words, and I asked what independent evidence you had that RC>these words are somehow marginal to the structure of English? RW>I don't remember saying that these words were marginal to the RW>structure of English and I don't remember your saying it RW>previously. I didn't say these words were marginal to the RW>structure of English. I said that these words follow a different RW>rule from native English words and that foreign words don't RW>necessarily follow the same rules as native words. So these RW>words aren't marginal to English -- there are too many of them -- RW>they just follow different rules. RW>But I can see that I shouldn't expect connections to be made when RW>these connections have not been expressly stated. So let's start RW>again. Grimm's Law says that certain PIE consonants shift in a RW>certain way in Germanic. But there are a large number of RW>exceptions. One exception is that unvoiced stops don't shift RW>when the stop is the second part of a voiceless cluster (thus RW>/sp/, /st/, and /sk/ remain unshifted). However, even with this, RW>there are still a large number of exceptions to Grimm's Law. RW>Verner's Law says that when the PIE stress fell after the RW>consonant then the consonant shifted in a different way. So RW>Verner's Law in effect *excludes* hundreds of Germanic words from RW>the effects of Grimm's Law thereby producing a nice phonological RW>generalization. This is the most peculiar interpretation of Verner's Law I have ever seen. The fact is that Verner made it possible to *include* many words which had previously simply been sidelined as "exceptions". RW>What independent evidence is there that Verner's RW>Law correctly excludes these words? Only the fact that when it RW>can be checked, the PIE stress does fall after the consonant in RW>those cases where the consonant does not shift according to RW>Grimm's Law. Of course this might just be coincidence, and some RW>people might not accept Verner's Law and ask what independent RW>evidence there is for it other than that when you exclude these RW>words using this rule you get the nice phonological generalization RW>known as Grimm's Law. If someone asked this I would have to conclude that they had not understood either. >RW> This seems rather like asking what evidence I have for >RW> Grimm's Law or Verner's Law other than hundreds of examples and >RW> the fact that they provide a nice phonological generalization. RC>No, because you are not presenting this as a historical law. As RC>a historical explanation of why /th/ occurs in certain places and RC>/dh/ in others, it is not in dispute. RW>Historical law - historical explanation -- What's the difference RW>in your mind? You misunderstood me. I was not proposing an antithesis. RW>What happened happened. If the explanation can be RW>stated as a rule and is not in dispute, what is the problem? What I said was that the *historical* explanation of the distribution of [th] and [dh] in native English words was not in dispute. What we are arguing about is a *synchronic* account of [th] and [dh] in Modern English. This is why the comparison with Grimm/Verner was not appropriate. [snip] >RW> But ultimately, it is unimportant whether speakers can still >RW> recognize foreign words after several centuries or not. The >RW> pronunciation rules are marked in the lexicon. The native >RW> speaker learns these rules and follows them. It is these rules >RW> that produce the pattern, not the speaker's perception of the >RW> words as native or non-native. >RW> For other evidence that native speakers distinguish by rule >RW> the [th] of loan words from the [dh] of native words I offer the >RW> pattern created by the presence of intervocalic [th] and [dh] in >RW> English words. RC>This is not "other evidence". This *is* your evidence. RW>Then my position is unassailable. I think you should be worried about this. "Self-validating" might be another way of putting it. RW>As with Verner's Law, the fact RW>that the rule by which the exclusions are made is valid and leads RW>to a valid generalization is sufficient. Not in the slightest like Verner's Law, as I've pointed out. Consider: For any pair of English phonemes (say /p/ and /b/) it is possible to extract a subset of the words in which they occur where the two are in "complementary distribution". (Say [p] initially and [b] medially, so we include pig, nibble and rubber, but exclude big, nipple and supper.) We then state that there is only one phoneme, but that the excluded words "follow a different rule". What principle would exclude such a ridiculous analysis? [snip] RC>As I understand your position, you are claiming that there is a RC>single phoneme, say /th/, with a realization rule that says RC>(among other things) that /th/ is realized as [dh] RC>intervocalically, except in certain exceptional words. RW>Close. I claim that there was once a single phoneme /th/ in RW>English. Then that this phoneme became voiced to [dh] RW>intervocalically without creating any new contrasts (/th/ now RW>has allophones [th, dh]). Then that any words that came into the RW>language with intervocalic [th] after this sound change operated RW>retain [th] intervocalically (this is not necessarily restricted RW>to loanwords; it could also include new coinings -- there just RW>don't seem to be any with intervocalic [th]). There is nothing RW>particularly exceptional about words with intervocalic [th] RW>except that the vast majority of them came into the language RW>after the sound change. There are a few native words with RW>intervocalic [th] (for reasons that can be accounted for), but RW>there are no loanwords that originally had intervocalic [th] that RW>now have [dh]. This is exceptional, at least to the extent that RW>there are no exceptions. [snip] RC>Meanwhile, how do we know that children and the less educated RC>actually formulate the rule this way? If they did, one would RC>expect that errors consisting of pronouncing [dh] RC>intervocalically in words which should have [th] would be common. RC>I don't recall any such tendency from my experience as a native RC>speaker of English, but surely it's you that should be looking RC>for such evidence. RW>My point is that we don't know how any speaker actually RW>formulates the rule. What goes on on the left side of the arrows RW>is a mystery. All we know is that there is a pattern, the RW>historical reason for the pattern, and that, synchronically, RW>patterns must be accounted for by rules. My further point is RW>that it doesn't matter that we can't formulate the synchronic RW>rule. There must be one, or the pattern wouldn't be there. Since you are sure there is a rule, and are even willing to state it, I don't see why you claim it is such a mystery. RW>And I must confess that I did not consider the effect of RW>mispronunciation in the same way that you do. You said that RW>native speakers don't recognize these words with intervocalic RW>[th] as loans. My assumption was that if they don't recognize RW>them as loans, then they would mispronounce them by treating them RW>as native words and pronouncing intervocalic as [dh]. This RW>would support your contention. But your assumption seems to be RW>that if they do recognize them as loans then they would see them RW>as words in need of nativization and would mispronounce them in RW>an attempt to nativize them. This would support what you see as RW>my contention. RW>But it is not my contention that native speakers recognize these RW>words as loans. That is, as you so readily agree, merely the RW>historical explanation for why these words have intervocalic RW>[th], and what you have assumed is my contention. I will quite RW>as readily agree that I don't really know how native speakers RW>recognize the words as exceptional. The more educated may RW>recognize them as loans, the less educated may simply memorize RW>the correct pronunciation as exceptions (as they memorize the RW>exceptions in plural forms such as 'foot' / 'feet'. Since RW>neither of us have noticed any tendency to mispronounce these RW>words the point about what such mispronunciation would prove is RW>moot. But I do maintain that there is some synchronic rule that RW>maintains this pronunciation or else *all* loans with RW>intervocalic [th] wouldn't still have this pronunciation. We may be working from fundamentally different conceptions of how languages are organized here. I repeat your schema from the discussion of historical grammar: speakers + rules --> Old English >From this it would appear that, for you, "rules" includes all the information commonly thought of as being part of the lexicon. Just above, you stated that "The pronunciation rules are marked in the lexicon", which makes me wonder whether you share an assumption that I had been taking as given, namely that there are two different types of information/knowledge relevant here: (i) information about the phonological shape of particular lexical items -- for example, the fact that the English word for "fish" has an /f/ in initial position. (ii) general information about the realization of particular segments and configurations (such as allophonic and morphophonemic rules). In my experience, most people would use the term "rules" of the latter type of information, but not the former. [snip] >RW> The best evidence that the pattern is created by rule by the >RW> speakers of the language is the fact that the pattern exists. >RW> For if there is a pattern in a language, synchronically it must >RW> be created by its speakers because that is the only place that >RW> language comes from. If the pattern is not created by rule, then >RW> it is simple coincidence. RC>No, this is where you go wrong. RW>I presume that "this is where you go wrong" is your way of saying RW>that your opinion is different from mine. :) Isn't that what "wrong" usually means? :) RC>The pattern has been created by historical changes in the RC>language. That is what creates the distribution of [dh] and [th] RC>that is the input to each speaker's language-learning task. There RC>is no general principle that speakers must recognize (consciously RC>or unconsciously) any such pattern, or make use of it in their RC>rule-governed language behaviour. RW>No, the modern language is not created by the historical events RW>that brought it about. ?There is obviously a distinction in your mind between "create" and "bring about" which I am not picking up. Otherwise you have contradicted yourself. Or is it the tense distinction between "is created" (by speakers,now) and "brought it about" (in the past). In either case, I am happy to re-state my claim above as: The historical changes *brought about* the present distribution of [dh] and [th]. RW>The modern language is created by what RW>goes on on the left side of the arrows in the diagram above. RW>This is the assumption of generative grammar. And it is a basic RW>premise of generative grammar that patterns must be accounted for RW>by rules. If you have evidence, rather than just an intuition, RW>that linguistic patterns are not created by rules, then please RW>share it. It will revolutionize synchronic grammar. No, I don't think it will. My view is one you have probably heard before: That there are two distinct phonemes /th/ and /dh/, which occur in various words in various positions. A subset of the English vocabulary shows a pattern of complementary distribution between these phonemes. The pattern is there in the vocabularies of English speakers because it is there in the corpus of presently spoken English on which they have based their internalized knowledge of English. And it is in the corpus as a consequence of changes which took place long ago in the history of the language. Your analysis (again, correct me if I'm wrong) postulates a single phoneme /th/ with two different "pronunciation rules". Some words follow a rule that says intervocalic /th/ is pronounced [th], and others a rule that says it is pronounced [dh]. Which words follow which rule presumably has to be marked on individual lexical items. In the broad sense implicit in your schema, both analyses produce the [th]/[dh] pattern by "rules". (In the narrower sense, however, your analysis has "rules" that mine doesn't.) Now that we have two analyses to compare, perhaps you can explain why you think yours is superior. Ross Clark [snip] The following is something of an excursus, but too interesting to snip: RC>Actually, I am arguing that English speakers do not consider RC>words like "author", "Ethel", or "method" to be unusual in any RC>way. RW>First, let us dispense with the idea that there is nothing in any RW>way unusual about 'Ethel'. You can't say that 'Ethel' is not RW>unusual in any way because it is unusual from the moment it stops RW>being a word in the language and becomes a personal name. It is RW>no longer a lemma of the language, it becomes part of a special RW>corpus, the corpus of personal names. Generally, you won't find RW>personal names listed in the lexicon (dictionary), although they RW>may be collected in a separate section. If personal names are RW>listed in the lexicon, they do not have a meaning, only a RW>functional label: "masc. PN", "fem. PN", or the like. Personal names are semantically distinctive, it is true. I don't agree that they don't have a meaning. (Their meaning is roughly "person named X", where X is the phonological shape. Thus defining them in dictionaries would be a rather tedious waste of space.) Still less do I agree that they are not words of the language. RW>In addition to being lexically exceptional, personal names, are RW>also phonologically exceptional. Personal names are, well, RW>personal. People identify with their names in more ways than RW>one. When someone has been called something all his life (his RW>name), he will resist changing it; even if the sounds in his name RW>change in the language he will resist introducing these changes RW>into his name. If others mispronounce his name, he will correct RW>them. Personal names, then, have the potential to withstand RW>phonetic changes that take place elsewhere in the language with RW>the result that such changes often bypass personal names. How we feel about our names has nothing to do with their phonological exceptionality or otherwise. If you have actual evidence of the resistance-to-sound-change phenomenon, let's hear it. My ancestors appear to have offered no resistance to the relatively recent sound change by which "Clerk" became "Clark". RW>So linguistically, practically everything is unusual about RW>'Ethel'. Historical linguists know that personal names are a RW>fruitful hunting ground for archaisms -- forms that have long RW>disappeared from the rest of the language. A personal name is a distinct lexical item from any word that may have gone into its formation. As such, it may survive when the original word is lost. Just as OE guma "man" survives only in "bridegroom". This is not indicative of a special status for personal names. RW>Even small children RW>know that names are different. When my daughter was about 3, she RW>got a new doll. She soon began saying "sisibamakin". When I RW>asked her what "sisibamakin" was she said it was her doll. "But RW>what does it mean?", I asked. "It doesn't mean anything, it's RW>her name," was her reply. So speakers don't really treat RW>personal names as a normal part of language. Names are distinctive in that they are attached to people (and dolls) in a particular way. This does not mean that they are phonologically extra-systemic. RW>They are simply RW>labels without linguistic connotations. Surely you can't mean this. RW> They stand outside both RW>the normal lexicon and normal phonological rules. So far I've seen no evidence for this. RC>So if someone tells you that his or her name is Abraham or Avram RC>or Ethel or Stanley or Ahmed or Rumpelstiltskin, you don't RC>question how it fits into the phonology of your language. You RC>just accept it because that's his or her name. Do you really mean that English speakers never drop the /h/ from "Ahmed" to make it fit English phonotactics? I'm astonished. [end of excursus] [snip some rather repetitive material] From sarima at friesen.net Tue Nov 7 16:21:43 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2000 08:21:43 -0800 Subject: minimal pairs are not always there In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 05:40 PM 11/6/00 +0200, Robert Whiting wrote: >On Wed, 26 Apr 2000 G?bor S?ndi wrote: >yourself a question: If the phoneme /b/ occurs in an English >word, what does that tell you about the meaning of that word? >The answer should be: "absolutely nothing." Seems reasonable, though perhaps a bit overstated. There are plenty of words with some sort of sound-symbolism involving perfectly good phonemes to make this too strong a statement. (And I do not just mean onomatopoeia). >In the pair ether/either, 'ether' belongs to a class of words >where the pronunciation of as [th] is required (by rule >based on a clearly established pattern [Greek loans originally >containing theta]); I disagree. I do not respond to any such rule in my own listening. No such rule governs any pattern in my speech production. As far as I am aware, I just memorized the word 'ether' as such. > 'either' belongs to a class of words where >the pronunciation of as [dh] is required (by rule based on a >clearly established pattern [native words with an intervocalic >spirant where the original voiceless spirant was voiced by >rule]). Ditto. > Since the respective pronunciations of these words are >required by rule, this cannot be a phonemic distinction because >the choice of these sounds is not arbitrary. It is in MY speech. And I doubt many other English speakers could be shown to have even a subliminal awareness of any such rules. >Greek word with theta doesn't make any difference. There must be >some synchronic rule that forces this [th] pronunciation or else >the pattern wouldn't be there in the language synchronically. Not at all - there is such a thing as a *relictual* pattern. one that is left over from prior history, but which has no *current* linguistic significance. The only evidence I would accept for a synchronic rule is evidence from the speech behavior of native speakers. The mere existence of a pattern is not, by itself, sufficient to establish a rule. The very fact that having characters names Lith and Lihthe(/lidh/) is *comprehensible* in English shows that English speakers *perceive* the two sounds as being semantically arbitrary. If they did not, then someone hearing such a pair of names would necessarily attempt to interpret them according to the supposed rules, and thus have a difficult time hearing them as a pair of names. Instead they would hear two words in different categories, as required by the rules. >to be pronounced with [dh]. There is nothing arbitrary about the >choice of [th] and [dh]; these pronunciations are required by >rule, therefore the contrast is not phonemic. The pronunciations are "required" by *historical* rules that are no longer active. In my speech I have merely learned the two words by rote. I apply no rules to determine their pronunciation. >smuggled into phonology. So it is not a matter of "no >nonphonetic conditioning factors," it is a matter of how much >morphological conditioning you are willing to allow into >phonology. As little as possible to still produce a coherent theory of a given language. I.e., apply Occam's Razor here. Do not postulate an entity - in this case a particular type of morphological conditioning - unless it is *necessary* to explain the facts. You might also call this the KISS principle. >My own answer to this tends to be "as much as you can." Then here is the fundamental disagreement. I prefer to minimize special handling, not maximize it. >> Take two of your examples above: >> /ng/ - not a phoneme. We can analyze it as the allophone of /n/ >> before /k/ and /g/. /g/ is then dropped ("zero allophone" - why >> not?) Because it is *simpler* to treat it as a phoneme? [Though in this case there is actually a reasonable argument for allophonic status, given its *very* limited distribution - and the fact that trying to use /ng/ to coin arbitrary new words results in words that do not sound like English]. >before the agentive suffix '-er'. Stem-final /g/ goes to zero >immediately and (nearly) all derivative suffixes (agentive '-er', >'-ing', '-ish', '-ly', '-y', etc.) are added to this base. All >that is needed then is a rule that triggers the restoration of >/g/ before the comparative '-er' (and for completeness, ... I would prefer to reorder the rules so that the comparative suffix is added prior to the application of the rule that deletes the /g/. I do not like rules that restore. >All things considered then, it is probably simpler to operate >with /n/ and /ng/ as different phonemes because this does not >require the zero allophone of /g/ to maintain their allophonic >status *and* there is no indication of a morphophonemic >alternation between [n] and [ng] The main problem with that is that this supposed phoneme cannot be used arbitrarily. A made-up 'ngib' is NOT a possible English word contrasting with 'nib'. [Interestingly, when playing with this "word" I tended to "hear" it as 'gib' (hard 'g') - which supports a 'silent g' interpretation]. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Nov 7 18:22:13 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2000 18:22:13 +0000 Subject: More on dental fricatives Message-ID: Given our recent discussion of dental fricatives in English, I'm hoping it will be interesting to mention a curious fact about dental fricatives in Basque. But first a word about Castilian Spanish. As is well known, Castilian in the north of Spain -- the only variety relevant here -- has a phonemic contrast between a voiceless apico-alveolar fricative, noted , and a voiceless dental fricative, noted in general but before a front vowel. There are minimal pairs like 'house' and '(a) hunt'. Basque has no dental fricatives, but it does have an unusual contrast between two voiceless alveolar fricatives: an apical, noted , and a laminal, noted . There are minimal pairs, like 'fire' and 'you', or like 'see' and 'wash'. Traditionally, and still today, in borrowings from Castilian, Basque takes over Castilian as its apical , and Castilian as its laminal . Examples: Cast. 'tailor' > Bq. ; Cast. 'class' > Bq. ; Cast. 'cinema' > Bq. ; Cast. 'rice' > Bq. ; Cast. 'socialist' > Bq. . Castilian is never borrowed into Basque as a dental fricative, even by speakers who are fully fluent in Castilian. Now, northern Castilian has another well-known feature: word-final /d/ is pronounced as a voiceless dental fricative, theta. Words like 'Madrid' and 'net' are thus pronounced in the north with final theta. Few of these words were borrowed into Basque in the past. When they were borrowed, Basque, which tolerates no word-final voiced plosives, did interesting things to them. For example, 'Madrid' is in Basque , with a legal final /l/. But today Castilian has a number of acronyms, and some of these acronyms end in the letter D. An example is , which is the Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia. Naturally, northerners pronounce these too with final theta. But now comes the interesting bit. When these acronyms are used in Basque, they are frequently pronounced with final theta! So, even though Castilian theta is never taken into Basque as a dental fricative, which Basque does not have, Castilian word-final /d/, which is locally a phonetic theta, is taken into Basque as a dental fricative. This is a pretty little phonological problem, don't you think? The observation was made by J. I. Hualde, who reports it in an article in Folia Linguistica 27 (1993). Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Nov 8 04:47:52 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2000 23:47:52 EST Subject: Anglo-French Message-ID: >Jim Rader writes: >The literate classes of medieval England had at least a good > working knowledge of Anglo-French well after 1250, judging by its > use in commerical transactions and Parliamentary and court > records. Far more prose writing in Anglo-French survives from the > period after 1250 than from before. In a message dated 11/7/2000 9:59:51 PM, stevegus at aye.net writes: << The French used by lawyers was increasingly a jargon applied by rote, and I suspect without real understanding of French. >> In a message dated 11/7/2000 10:36:38 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: << Yes, of course. But, in my posting, I was careful to say that Norman French died out as a *spoken language* -- that is, as a mother tongue -- after a couple of centuries. The later administrative Anglo-French was nobody's mother tongue.>> Steve Gustafson's comments about the "Anglo-Norman" used in English law being a jargon may have been the case very early. Awhile ago I had to work with A-N texts and from what I understood about the translations that were given to me, very little "Anglo" was involved, especially in the areas of trade regulation. Looking in Black's Law Dictionary, they quote Wharton in "properly" describing it as "Norman French". It also says that Norman French was "the language of English legal procedure till 36 Edw. III (A.D. 1362)." But wasn't this Norman version an odd dialect of French and not the one that penetrated into English about the time of Chaucer? I seem to recall in notes in Canterbury Tales that Chaucer was picking up a lot Parisian that may have been fashionable at Court at the time, but that he also felt comfortable putting into the mouths of his common folk characters. So I'm just wondering if "Anglo-Norman," as opposed to a different later influx of more conventional French, was anything but an "occupation" language that was never really spoken in the streets. Regards, Steve Long From BMScott at stratos.net Wed Nov 8 05:40:12 2000 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 00:40:12 -0500 Subject: Incuba (Nightmare) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: LT> Splendid, and many thanks. I couldn' find this form in even the biggest LT> Latin dictionaries in our library, but I don't think they cover LT> medieval Latin. As for the chronology, I would like the word to have LT> entered Basque by about the 11th century, in order to allow that /k/ LT> to undergo the regular voicing after /n/. Latham's Revised Medieval Latin Word-List (OUP 1980) has 'nightmare, demon' in British and Irish sources between 1250 and ca.1362; however, the form is listed as being of regular occurrence between ca.1160 and 1528. Brian M. Scott From jer at cphling.dk Wed Nov 8 14:46:55 2000 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 15:46:55 +0100 Subject: Iranian and Indo-Aryan In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 6 Nov 2000 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: > I've been looking over some documents in Avestan and Rigvedic Sanskrit > [...] > Would they have been mutually comprehensible? Most certainly! It should be remembered that the handbook impression of Avestan is anachronistic, since the recital form of the old text has simply participated in over a millennium of further Old and Middle Iranian phonetic development. If pushed back to its time, even if only to a point where the metre of the Gathas gets consistent, it takes on an appearance which looks like Sanskrit just as much as British and American English resemble each other. Jens From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Nov 8 08:26:09 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 03:26:09 EST Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: In a message dated 11/5/2000 7:44:49 PM, stevegus at aye.net writes: <> I think that in Cavalli-Sforza's scenario (PIE in the Ukraine replaces Pre-IE in the Danube, etc.) you have a situation where the sound changes might become opaque. The time span would be about 1500-1000 years between the first Danubian expansion into the middle Ukraine (yielding Sredni Stog) and the earliest appearance of Corded Ware. If that is in fact the location of *PIE (rather than among the early PitGrave culture over by the Caucasus and the Caspian sea), than there was pretty much constant contact during that time. In its mildest form, it might be analogous to the difference between British and American cultures, multiplied by about four times as many years. A Spanish substrate in American English would seem to reflect two long of a time difference - as between a Romance language and English. On the other hand, if they had as little information as we have about the Neolithic language, wouldn't it look like American English had a Latin substrate? Or adstrate? Or even Norman-style Latin conquerors? << The proto-Germans apparently respected these folks, and their arts and culture, enough to borrow both the cultural practices and the vocabulary that went with. >> Unless of course it was "the proto-Germans" who borrowed the language and some practices, but pretty much stayed where they were. There is basic cultural continuity from the neolithic and really right from the mesolithic. Even the Cavalli-Sforza genetic evidence, which I do not put an awful lot of stock by, suggests that post-neolithic incursions from the south and east barely affected southern Scandinavia and Denmark. And only a bit more the southern rim of the Baltic. Regards, Steve Long From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com Wed Nov 8 17:07:44 2000 From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader) Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 12:07:44 -0500 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I'm not disputing your point about Basque--obviously, the sociolinguistic pressures of Romance on Basque are not comparable to the French/English relationship. But one might draw the conclusion from your post that the period during which Anglo-French served as a source for English loans lasted two centuries, when in reality it was at least twice as long, and many loans and calques took place in the two centuries that Anglo- French was "dying out." Its gradual extinction as a first language of the elite did not end its role as a vital auxiliary language, on a par with Latin, in English society. Jim Rader > Jim Rader writes: >> Maybe peripheral to the topic, but I think Larry's concept of the >> length of time Anglo-French influenced English is rather outdated. >> The literate classes of medieval England had at least a good >> working knowledge of Anglo-French well after 1250, judging by its >> use in commerical transactions and Parliamentary and court >> records. Far more prose writing in Anglo-French survives from the >> period after 1250 than from before. Later Anglo-French tends to be >> devalued because of its increasing semantic, morphological, and >> phonological departure from francien, i.e., Parisian French, but this >> is just traditional linguistic purism--Anglo-French was a valid dialect >> of medieval French well into the 15th century, and for lawyers its >> use in reports and professional notes continued into the 17th >> century. For a corrective view, see some of the articles by William >> Rothwell, e.g., "The Legacy of Anglo-French: in >> French and English," _Zeitschrift f|r Romanische Philologie_, Bd. >> 109 (1993) and "The Missing Link in English Etymology: Anglo- >> French," _Medium Aevum_, v. 60 (1991). > > Yes, of course. But, in my posting, I was careful to say that Norman > French died out as a *spoken language* -- that is, as a mother tongue -- > after a couple of centuries. The later administrative Anglo-French was > nobody's mother tongue. This is in great contrast to the position > in the Basque Country, in which Latin and Romance continued to be not > only living languages but also the languages of the vast majority > of the people in the whole area surrounding the Basque Country, as > well as the languages of the states within which the Basques were > incorporated from the 10th century on. > > My point was this. The English were ruled by a handful of French-speakers > for a couple of centuries. The Basques have been an island in a sea > of Latino-Romance speech for around 2000 years, they were part of the > western Roman Empire as long as that empire lasted, and they have been > incorporated into Romance-speaking states for around 1000 years. > In the circumstances, then, the enormous number of Latino-Romance loans > in the language is in no way surprising. > > Larry Trask From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Nov 8 08:32:48 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 03:32:48 EST Subject: The Germanic substrate - knives? Message-ID: In a message dated 11/5/2000 7:44:49 PM, stevegus at aye.net writes: << There is an obvious and similar substrate in Germanic, apparently the language of the Ship and Sword Guys; not sure if they have a technical academic name. Like the Western movie words, the borrowed vocabulary seems to have focused on cultural territory that was retained by the proto-Germans. Boating is the area that sticks out most prominently; most Germanic languages share a group of unique words like ship, keel, oar, and sail. There is another group that features swords, knives, and helmets.>> But there's something that just doesn't seem to ring true about some of the words often mentioned as evidencing the substrate - at least as far as it being non-IE. Rick Mc Callister, on his very informative web site on the Germanic substrate (http://www.muw.edu/~rmccalli/subsGerIntro.html), mentions the reasons that words are included in this category: "....most evidence suggesting that a given word is non-Indo-European is essentially negative : * the word does not exist in other branches of Indo-European * its phonology does not conform to the norms of Indo-European * the evolution of the word does not correspond to known phonological laws of the branch in question" Looking at some of the most commonly cited words however, one might wonder if these criteria may not be producing the substrate. And without questioning the value of the comparative method in the least, it just seems like narrowing the meanings of these words can sometimes be the big problem in tracing them, rather than the phonology. Starting with a word like "knife." I'm not positive how it got on the list, but I suspect that it might be from an anachronistic idea of what knives are. What we might call "knives" in English appear very early in the archaeological record in Germany and across Europe. Knives made in shapes almost identical to modern ones were made in great number from stone and perhaps in even greater number from bone, antler and wood, which are perishable. Knives don't only predate metal, but "knives" made of bone and antler also continue to be made into the iron age. So, that in the bronze age, the word might well have referred to tools made of a variety of materials. This is important because the most common uses of knife-like objects was not as weapons or even kitchen implements, but as tools. There's evidence of knives regularly being used as scrapers for the dressing of skins, for the gathering and processing of wool (before shears), for pruning, cutting holes in hides and cloth and a variety of other tasks. On that basis, there is a whole flock of words in Greek alone that show something close to the variations of "knife" found in Germanic. (Along with the forms OED also reports "kneupe, gneip, gnippe" in Germanic). In Greek, we see: knao: (L&S adds "but in correct Att., kn?i,...") - to scrape, grate or scratch knaph-os - the "card" used to clean or dress wool, cloth and presumably hides knapto: - "carding" of wool, but also tearing or mangling anything knaps - to cut short (dalos) knapsis, later gnapsis - the dressing of "cloth" or presumably hides kne:phe: - itch (ie, something to scratch) knupo? - fencing with thorn bushes knizo: - (Dor, eknixa; pass, knizon) scratch, gash, cut up, grate, also associated with sacrificial cutting-up. kata-knizo: - chop up, mince,cut grooves in, score, and let blood from, again sacrificially kne:s-ma - scrapings, sting, bite kne:s-trion - scraper, kne:s-tos - scraped, rasped knide: - nettle nusso: - touch with a sharp point, prick, stab, pierce nuxis - pricking, stabbing chnauo: - nibble, bite chnauma - slice In Lithuanian, "gnybti" is to pinch or prune. (Cf., kni:pen (MGer) pinch, prune) In Polish, "no:z:" is knife, but "gnyp" is a leather dresser or shoemaker's knife. (The notion that "gnyp" and "gnybti" are borrowed from Germanic runs somewhat in the face of the distinct possibility that the proto-speakers of those other two languages had prunning or dressing knives as early or earlier than other northern Europeans.) None of the words above may qualify for strict phonological relationships with the Germanic "knife", but it seems rather implausible that so many close examples have no relationship to the word. If anything, it suggests that if "knife" is in fact part of a substrate, that substrate might well also be Indoeuropean. There are a fair number of other common examples of the Germanic substrate that suggest the same thing. Regards, Steve Long From dlwhite at texas.net Wed Nov 8 08:13:58 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 02:13:58 -0600 Subject: More on dental fricatives Message-ID: > Given our recent discussion of dental fricatives in English, > I'm hoping it will be interesting to mention a curious fact > about dental fricatives in Basque. This is not meant to be an objection to anything Dr. Trask has said, but it is fairly well-known in cases of what might be called routine full bilingualism for phonemic distinctions of one language to be imported into another. Good examples fail me at this late hour (still recovering as I am from the shock of seeing Florida called and then uncalled for Gore), but I think a few can be found in Thomason and Kaufman. So perhaps the difference in treatment (if I have understood the facts correctly) has to do with the extent to which Basque speakers were fully fluent in Spanish at different times. Perhaps it could even be a good indirect indicator of this. (The bad example I can think of involves Japanese speakers, who as a group are apparently quite well trained in English from a young-enough age, importing English phonemic distinctions into Japanese, and is accordingly a bit unnatural. But the phenomenon is real enough.) Dr. David L. White From dlwhite at texas.net Fri Nov 10 01:03:11 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2000 19:03:11 -0600 Subject: Mutual Comprehensibility, Reconvergence Message-ID: It used to be that, as far as I knew, the situation in the Danelaw areas of England, where two dialects but recently separated began (in my opinion) to reconverge, was unique. However it has recently come to my attention that a similar situation developed between Spanish and Portugese in northern Uruguay, which is to say on the border with Brazil. Is there anyone out there who can tell me what the results of this were, without demanding that I read Spanish? (I suppose I could, but being lazy would rather not.) Dr. David L. White From ibonewits at neopagan.net Fri Nov 10 04:53:21 2000 From: ibonewits at neopagan.net (Isaac Bonewits) Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2000 23:53:21 -0500 Subject: "witch" and "warlock" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Christopher Gwinn said... >Calvert Watkins in "The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo European Roots" >has Witch derive from the root *weg- (2) "to be strong/to be lively" (which >also is the root of English "to wake"). >Witch, from Old English masculine Wicca (Feminine Wicce), ultimately comes >from a suffixed PIE form, *weg-yo and likely may represent a Proto Germanic >*wikkjaz meaning "necromancer" or (more literally) "one who wakes the dead." >Warlock (Old English Waeloga), on the other hand, comes from a compound of >two PIE roots, *werH-o "true/trustworthy" and *leugh- "to tell a lie." >Warlock literally means "pledge/oath breaker" (the Old English word waeloga >meant "oath breaker/damned soul/wicked person" and was often assigned as an >epithet of Satan). My books (most of which are old) have OE wicca < OE wic- < PIE *weik-, with four meanings, mostly having to do with "magic or sorcery" or "bending, twisting", and also related to "wych" and "willow." Is that tracing obsolete? Have any articles on "witch" and "warlock" been published in JIES or elsewhere in the last twenty years? cheers, Isaac B. -- ******************************************************************* * Isaac Bonewits * * Snailmail: Black Dirt PG, ADF, Box 372, Warwick, NY 10990-0372 * ******************************************************************* From colkitto at sprint.ca Sat Nov 11 05:54:19 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 00:54:19 -0500 Subject: "witch" and "warlock" Message-ID: >I'll leave lurk-mode for a moment to ask if anyone can direct me to >*current* resources discussing the history and evolution of these two >terms (a summary would be nice, too, if someone would be kind enough >to take the time). >An article or book discussing IE religious terminology would be of >great value to my current research! [ moderator snip ] for "warlock" see a fascinating article by Joanna Nichols in an issue of Stanford Slavic Studies, the Whitfield festschrift (I'm afarid I can't remember the exatc details) Robert Orr From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Fri Nov 10 17:42:46 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2000 12:42:46 -0500 Subject: The Germanic substrate - knives? In-Reply-To: <64.8276a69.273a69b0@aol.com> Message-ID: You make a very interesting point regarding I think of knife in the sense of "cut, tear, strike, kill" but I can see how "flesher, scraper" can work Watkins (1985: 19) lists knife under *gen- "hypothetical Indo-European base of a range of Germanic words referring to compact, knobby bodies and projections, sharp blows". 11 derivative forms are offered. He cites Pokorny *gen. Unfortunately, I don't have access to Pokorny and don't know if he also included knife. I found Watkins's wording as an expression of doubt. I also realize that Watkins only includes IE roots found in English BTW: does anyone know roughly what percentage of all IE roots these include? Looking through *KVn- in Watkins, the closest other root to knife is *ghwen- "to strike, kill [1985: 25] Do your sources offer any IE roots for the words you cite? Initial /*gwh-/ would have yielded Germanic /b, g/ --IF followed by a vowel. Someone more knowledgeable will have to fill us in on what /*ghwn-V-/ would have produced. Regarding initial (non-clustered) consonants, following Watkins, Greek initial (non-clustered) /kh-/ (also /th-/) corresponds to Lithuanian /g/ < IE *ghw-. Lithuanian initial (non-clustered) /g-/ can also come from IE *gw-; which gives Greek /b, d, g/ Greek initial (non-clustered) /k-/ can come from IE *k (Lithuanian /s-/) & *kw (Lithuanian /k, c, c^/) Again, I don't know what *Kn- would yield in Greek & Lithuanian The closest roots for "scraping" in Watkins are *gerbh-, *gher-, *ghrei-, *ghreu-, *grat-. I've seen instances of /kn-/ > /kr-/ but never the other way. BUT I'm not a linguist, so maybe someone with more experience can fill me in. Keep in mind that the list is essentially a compilation of claims (and possibilities) rather than my own work. I agree that a fair percentage of the items in the list are probably from IE and I'm convinced that a small percentage definitely are. >Rick Mc Callister, on his very informative web site on the Germanic substrate >(http://www.muw.edu/~rmccalli/subsGerIntro.html), mentions the reasons that >words are included in this category: >"....most evidence suggesting that a given word is non-Indo-European is >essentially negative : >* the word does not exist in other branches of Indo-European >* its phonology does not conform to the norms of Indo-European >* the evolution of the word does not correspond to known phonological laws >of the branch in question" [ moderator snip ] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From sonno3 at hotmail.com Fri Nov 10 18:50:36 2000 From: sonno3 at hotmail.com (Christopher Gwinn) Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2000 13:50:36 -0500 Subject: Continental Celtic mailing list Message-ID: I am sending this message to invite all those interested in the languages and cultures of the Continental Celts to join a new mailing list that I have created via www.egroups.com - "Continental Celtic" (Main Page: http://www.egroups.com/group/continentalceltic ). It is my hope that both academics and laypeople alike will consider joining this group, which will be unmoderated for now, but will focus on issues like Gaulish linguistics, Galatian social structure, and remnants of Celtiberian religious beliefs, to name only a few topics. British and Irish issues should be discussed only when relevant to Continental Celtic issues. Cheers, Christopher Gwinn Moderator/List Owner For those wishing to subscribe, please go to: http://www.egroups.com/subscribe/continentalceltic OR, send a BLANK email to: Subscribe: continentalceltic-subscribe at egroups.com Then reply to the confirmation letter that you receive Other Important Addresses for the site: Post message: continentalceltic at egroups.com Unsubscribe: continentalceltic-unsubscribe at egroups.com List owner: continentalceltic-owner at egroups.com From colkitto at sprint.ca Sat Nov 11 06:44:26 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 01:44:26 -0500 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: One small point : Rick McCallister wrote: > "To give an example of what I'm talking about. > Spanish "cinnabar" < Hispano-Latin > [and also the Min~o/Minho River] > is often ascribed to Basque based on Basque "shiny, lit up, sparkling" > Larry Trask has explained on the list [many times] > that Basque had no /m/ at that period > so the logical assumption would be to look elsewhere > and so I looked at the on-line MacBain's Gaelic Etymological Dictionary > and found > mhin, mhinn "ore, mine" > Irish miin, mianach, Early Irish mmanach, Welsh mwyn: > < *meini-, meinni-, < root mei, smei, smi; > see Old Slavonic mjdi, aes; OHG smnda, metal, English smith (Schrdder)" "MacBain's Gaelic Etymological Dictionary" is not the best source for early Celtic in any case. Apparently it is best for providing a corpus of Inverness-shire Gaelic for the last century. Robert Orr From colkitto at sprint.ca Sat Nov 11 16:16:32 2000 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 11:16:32 -0500 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? Message-ID: Perhaps Georgiev's Pelasgian (in his 1981. An Introduction to the History of the Indo-European Languages. Sofia: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.) or Holzer's Temematisch (in his 1989. Entlehnungen aus einer bisher unbekannten indogermanischen Sprache im Urslavischen und Urbaltischen. Vienna: Verlag der Vsterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.) might provide some pointers to the question posed below. Robert Orr >Putting aside for the moment the question of how much Kurgan actually ever >came to most of Europe, the quote above suggests that if there is a substrate >to look for in early European IE languages -- as described above -- it might >consist of "pre-proto" IE languages. >My question is: what would such a substrate be like? What would one look for? >Thinking of other examples of where IE has folded over on itself, so to speak >-- where one IE language exhibits a substrate of an earlier IE language -- >where would one look for such a "pre-proto" substrate in PIE? How would one >separate "pre-proto" features from "proto" features, since both would >ultimately be of the same origin? >Regards, Steve Long From dlwhite at texas.net Sat Nov 11 17:39:43 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 11:39:43 -0600 Subject: Motivating the Root Restrictions of PIE Message-ID: [ Moderator edited. Please do not send HTML mail to the list. ] Sorry if you folks have heard this before, but I never got a response... According to Lehmann, PIE shows three kinds of root restrictions. Accepting for now the traditional interpretation and using "D" to represent any voiced plosive, "T" to represent any voiceless plosive, and "DH" to represent any voiced aspirate plosve, these are: 1) no /DeD/ 2) no /TeDH/ 3) no /DHeT/ Note that 2 and 3 are the inverse of each other, and are assimilatory, whereas 1 is dissimilatory. The problem is that if the traditional interpretation is correct, these restrictions (not to mention the /b/-gap) do not make sense. So here is one way (the only way I can see) that they could make sense. 1) The voiced plosives were orginally not voiced but pharyngealized. Pharyngealization is a crude gesture, and if occuring on both sides of a vowel would distort this in the direction of /o/. If PIE was attempting to maintain a distinction between /e/ and /o/, this would not be good. Alternatively, the restriction could be related to avoiding having pharyngealization noise mess up a distinction of laryngealixed versus murmured vowels, see below. Pharyngealization would also explain the /b/-gap, as pharyngealized labials are, for good acoustic reasons, disfavored generally. It could also explain part of what JER has noted, that vowels in the vicinity of voiced sounds in PIE tend to come out as /o/. (The other part would have to be related to the vague back-round resonance of sonorants generally, as seen in modern English "prison, prism, bottle", where it is not entirely clear whether a [U] sound, as in "foot", is to be regarded as present or not.) 2) The voiceless plosives were orginally laryngealized (which is not the same as glottalized). 3) The voiced aspirates were as traditionally posited, technically murmured. More specifically, what I have in mind here is that the voiceless and voiced aspirated series were originally associated with what Ladefoged and Maddieson call "stiff voice" and "slack voice" respectively, which are in effect weak laryngealization and weak murmur. (Where what we would consider normal phonation ("modal voice") does not occur, there is no point in going to the trouble of producing the strong forms of laryngealization and murmur.) Laryngealization and murmur are phonetic opposites. This would explain why they could not co-occur, especially if the original distinction of phonation type was on the vowels, and was only later reanalyzed as belonging to the consonants. Such a system would be typologically (or rather statistically) odd, even unattested, but no more normal system motivates the root restrictions seen. It is not true, contrary to what is sometimes alledged, that languages never contain unique features. For example, the stress system of Estonian is (so I have it on good authority) absolutely unique. House-husbandry calls, more (on place) anon. Congratiulations in advance to anyone who spots what (I see) is wrong (though not uncorrectably) with all this. Dr. David L. White From dlwhite at texas.net Sat Nov 11 21:34:05 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 15:34:05 -0600 Subject: Rhotacism in Norse Message-ID: I cannot find among my home sources here when it was that rhotacism of final /z/ occurred in Norse, leading to the characteristically Norse profusion of /-r/. More precisely, when is it that the original two runes begin to be confused? Does anyone out there know? Dr. David L. White From Tristan at MAIL.SCM-RPG.COM.AU Sat Nov 11 22:26:10 2000 From: Tristan at MAIL.SCM-RPG.COM.AU (Tristan Jones) Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 17:26:10 -0500 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: This message was originally submitted by Tristan at MAIL.SCM-RPG.COM.AU to the INDO-EUROPEAN list at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG. [ moderator snip ] ----------------- Message ------------------ I do not think elite dominance is enough for a conquered people to adopt the invaders language, sure they will adopt some words from the invading language and change the conquered peoples language, depends if the invaders or the invaded are more advanced than another. In those cases where a small elite domaites over a conquerored nation (i.e. the Franks in Gaul, Germanic Tribes in Italy and Spain, Mongols and Tartars in Russia) these invading cultures where just absorbed into the local culture. People only adopt the language of invader as a primary tongue because lots of peoples of the invaders actually come to their homeland and make a statement like this "adopt out language, we are here to stay!, if you do not like it go somewhere else". In the moments where invader languages replaced the languages of the conquered, Slavic over the various languages of Eastern Europe, Indo-European over the pre Indo european languages of Europe in the 4th to 3rd Millennium BC, Anglo-Saxons over the Welsh, Turks over the Greeks in Anatolia and the Indo-Aryans over the Dravidian speaking people's of Northern India. We have seen huge migrations of the invaders come to the lands they conquered, not just replacing the elite of the society, however huge sections of it. The main question is how much of invaded population would the Invaders have to make up to impose their language onto the invaded people's From stevegus at aye.net Sun Nov 12 01:37:29 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 20:37:29 -0500 Subject: Mutual Comprehensibility, Reconvergence Message-ID: David L. White wrote: > It used to be that, as far as I knew, the situation in the Danelaw > areas of England, where two dialects but recently separated began (in my > opinion) to reconverge, was unique. I suspect that the current situation in Scandinavia is similar. All three (or four) of the continental Scandinavian languages are to some degree mutually comprehensible. At the close of the Viking era, the dialects of Norway (and Iceland) [West Scandinavian] were distinct from those of Sweden and Denmark [East Scandinavian]; these latter two shared a number of common features. A number of important social and political developments followed. All three languages were strongly influenced by Low German, the mercantile language of the Hanse. There were a number of political unions among the several nations; the longest lasting of these was the union of Denmark and Norway, which lasted until the early 1900's. During the early modern period, Danish evolved away from the northern standard with some fairly comprehensive vowel and consonant shifts. These changes were not shared by Norwegian or (most) Swedish. Danish continued to be the government and prestige language of Norway, but the Danish imported there was spoken in accordance with the more conservative Norwegian phonology. The net result was that Norwegian and Swedish generally share a common phonology, while Danish and Norwegian share a common vocabulary that Swedish occasionally dissents from. The most common form of Norwegian has lost its West Scandinavian distinctiveness and has been assimilated to Swedish in its pronunciation, and Danish in its vocabulary. The complicating factor in all of this is a nineteenth century attempt to revive the surviving features that once made Norwegian different, by proposing a new standard language based on rural and western dialects that had preserved some of the West Scandinavian distinctiveness. While the numbers of schools teaching the new standard suggest that it has not been particularly successful, both seem to be relatively stable, and both Norwegian dialects freely borrow from one another. -- Quae vestimenta induet misella in conviviis crastinis? From nee1 at midway.uchicago.edu Sun Nov 12 03:38:07 2000 From: nee1 at midway.uchicago.edu (Barbara Need) Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 21:38:07 -0600 Subject: Mutual Comprehensibility, Reconvergence In-Reply-To: <000b01c04ab1$ffcbff80$3f2363d1@texas.net> Message-ID: Something called Portunol (tilde over the n). I don't have any references and don't remember very many details, but a friend of mine is from Uruguay and did a paper on Portunol for our class on diglossia. Barbara Need University of Chicago--Linguistics > It used to be that, as far as I knew, the situation in the Danelaw >areas of England, where two dialects but recently separated began (in my >opinion) to reconverge, was unique. However it has recently come to my >attention that a similar situation developed between Spanish and Portugese >in northern Uruguay, which is to say on the border with Brazil. Is there >anyone out there who can tell me what the results of this were, without >demanding that I read Spanish? (I suppose I could, but being lazy would >rather not.) > Dr. David L. White From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Nov 12 17:39:11 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000 12:39:11 -0500 Subject: Mutual Comprehensibility, Reconvergence In-Reply-To: <000b01c04ab1$ffcbff80$3f2363d1@texas.net> Message-ID: In themselves, Spanish and Portuguese are pretty much mutually comprehensible --say like American English and Scots, or American and Caribbean English. Educated speakers usually don't have any problems understanding one another but some class and regional dialects can be impenetrable. Some Portuguese dialects, or so I've been told, are more difficult for standard Portuguese speakers than Spanish is. It takes a few minutes to sort out the handful of common false cognates but even children of one language understand speakers of the other --as mine did at the University of Texas when they played with Brazilian kids. Brazilian movies are usually pretty easy to understand without subtitles. Although both languages, of course, have different standardized forms, forms in one language are often common non-standard forms in the other; e.g. Spanish & Portuguese non-standard entonces, ninguie/n--ninguem, mismo vs. Portuguese enta~o, nadie, mesmo; Portuguese & Spanish non-standard onde, agora, mesmo vs Spanish donde, ahora, mismo. Some forms are non standard in both languages, e.g. asina/assina. The Gau/cho dialect from southern Brazil, however, is close to Uruguayan & Argentine Spanish. Standardized spelling masks some shared pronunciations; e.g. hallar vs. achar /as^ar/ "to find, to have an opinion" People that I've met from Rio Grande du Sul sound almost as if they were Argentines or Uruguayans pronouncing Spanish as if it were Portuguese. It shares a local culture and regional vocabulary with Uruguayan & Argentine Spanish. It does have an overlay of modern Brazilian slang but much of this is known to Spanish speakers across the border. Uruguayan & Argentine Spanish also share a Tupi-Guarani adstrate with Brazilian Portuguese, so much of the local flora, fauna and agricultural produce share the same names. Early settlers speaking both languages settled on both sides of the offical linguistic frontier and there has been massive immigration from Spanish-speaking countries to southern Brazil. Native speakers of one language who are familiar with the sound shifts and the handful of grammatical differences of the other language often pass as native speakers of the other language with no formal study. Interestingly enough, I was told in grad school that Portuguese and Spanish were much father apart in the Middle Ages but that the tremendous load of latinisms from the Renaissance, the use of Galician as a prestige language for poetry in Spain during the latter Middle Ages and Renaissance, the use of Salmantine (from Salamanca in western Spain, with some Portuguese-like features) in Spanish Renaissance drama and Spain's cultural dominance of the Iberian peninsula after 1500 brought the two languages closer. My intuitive reaction is that Spanish and Portuguese are much closer than say northern & southern Italian "dialects" or French & Occitan > It used to be that, as far as I knew, the situation in the Danelaw >areas of England, where two dialects but recently separated began (in my >opinion) to reconverge, was unique. However it has recently come to my >attention that a similar situation developed between Spanish and Portugese >in northern Uruguay, which is to say on the border with Brazil. Is there >anyone out there who can tell me what the results of this were, without >demanding that I read Spanish? (I suppose I could, but being lazy would >rather not.) > Dr. David L. White Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From stevegus at aye.net Sun Nov 12 04:49:39 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 23:49:39 -0500 Subject: Rhotacism in Norse Message-ID: David L. White wrote: << I cannot find among my home sources here when it was that rhotacism of final /z/ occurred in Norse, leading to the characteristically Norse profusion of /-r/. More precisely, when is it that the original two runes begin to be confused? Does anyone out there know? >> I was out of town when it happened. But it was after 800 C.E. that the elder futhark, which contained the symbol for z/R, yielded to the reduced younger futhark. This alphabet appeared first in Denmark, and spread throughout the rest of Scandinavia by the year 900. We know that Gothic, written by Ulfilas in around 375, was wholly innocent of the s > r change. The change seems to have taken hold in two steps; the intermediate one, preseved in the runes, is a sound written by the 'yr' rune, and usually transliterated as 'R.' The earlier runic inscriptions always carefully distinguished between 'r' and 'R;' inscriptions after 800 are less careful, and occasionally use 'r' in word-final positions where 'R' would be expected. The Ro"k stone from around 900 sometimes uses 'R' in mid-word, which suggests that its carver heard it as a phoneme. R remained part of the alphabet at least until after 1000, when the semi-Christianised Rune Song was written. Generally 'r' is used much more often than 'R' by around 1150, at least in Denmark and Sweden. It may be that too much can be read in the runic evidence, if only because the switch to the shortened alphabet was probably not motivated by purely phonetic considerations. The shorter alphabet is in fact noticeably inferior to the one it replaced. It flattened out distinctions between voiced and unvoiced consonants, that were surely still meaningful in the spoken language, and consistently observed when the Latin script was used to write the language. Later rune writers found it helpful to add dots to distinguish voiced characters from the unvoiced ones. If they made so unhelpful a change to their alphabet, though, their writing may be conventional rather than phonemic. For more info, look at E.V. Gordon's -Introduction to Old Norse-, (2nd edition, revised by A. R. Taylor, 1954); and E. Haugen's -The Scandinavian Languages- (don't have it handy, sorry) -- Quae vestimenta induet misella in conviviis crastinis? From BMScott at stratos.net Sun Nov 12 06:36:47 2000 From: BMScott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000 01:36:47 -0500 Subject: Rhotacism in Norse In-Reply-To: <000c01c04c27$1ea46660$e26263d1@texas.net> Message-ID: DLW> I cannot find among my home sources here when it was that rhotacism of DLW> final /z/ occurred in Norse, leading to the characteristically Norse DLW> profusion of /-r/. More precisely, when is it that the original two DLW> runes begin to be confused? Does anyone out there know? Einar Haugen (Scandinavian Language Structures: A Comparative Historical Survey) says that /R/ (from /z/) had merged with /r/ by 900-1100, as shown by runic evidence. Brian M. Scott From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Nov 12 04:55:46 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 23:55:46 EST Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: In a message dated 11/11/00 9:24:02 PM Mountain Standard Time, Tristan at MAIL.SCM-RPG.COM.AU writes: << The main question is how much of invaded population would the Invaders have to make up to impose their language onto the invaded people's >> -- it's a little more complext than mere gross numbers of newcomers vs. established population, although that is important. There are subtle social factors involved as well. To dominate and replace a previous language, the new language has to be in a majority _in the households and immediate communities_ of the intruders. If they're a very thin layer of overlords, this is of course unlikely. Eg., the Gothic and Frankish barbarian overlords of various post-Roman provinces. Furthermore, the social structure of the population bearing the intrusive language has to have a social mechanism for assimilating outsiders _as individuals_. Mallory points out (in IN SEARCH OF THE INDO-EUROPEANS) that Brahui-speakers assimilate Pathan-speakers in Afghanistan, rather than vice-versa, despite the numerical and even military superiority of the Pathans. This is because the Brahui chieftainship structure allows Pathans to enter as junior members and work their way up -- at the price of cultural assimilation. The more egalitarian and clan-centered Pathan social milieu finds accepting and assimilating outsiders much less easy. The proto-IE speakers wouldn't have to be in large numbers vs. a vs. the populations they linguistically "converted"; what they would have to be is dominant _locally_. Thus their numbers would continue to grow _at the expense of the speakers of the indigenous language_ by a sort of "one-way assimilation". Even if it was quite slow, over centuries it would be also quite certain. The locals might be assimilated into IE-speaker households and communities in a number of ways: as war-captives, as young people seeking patrons, as women moving to the patrilocal IE-speakers' homes, etc. I'd say that in a preliterate milieu, the minimal requirement for language replacement is that the intrusive community come in complete family groups (children learn language from their mothers, after all), that they come in -some- numbers, so they're not a drop of ink in a bucket of milk, and that they have social mechanisms for assimilating the local population _as individuals_. From dlwhite at texas.net Sun Nov 12 05:28:39 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 23:28:39 -0600 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: > I do not think elite dominance is enough for a conquered people to adopt > the invaders language, It depends. There are many examples where "huge numbers" of invaders (proportionally) did not come in, yet were able to linguistically dominate. One may note for example 1) Latin in the Roman empire, 2) Spanish and Portugese in Latin America, 3) English in Ireland (outside of Ulster) and "the Celtic Fringe" generally, 4) Arabic outside Arabia (esp. Egypt, where Arabs cannot possibly have numerically dominated the original population), and 5) (a bit more murkily) Greek in Anatolia (quite probably also Turkish). I have probably missed more than a few other very good examples. It should be noted as well that one study (whose author I all too typically forget; I can get it if anyone wants it) concludes that the number of Saxons that come over to Britain was in the range of 10-40 thousand, hardly overwhelming masses, and that in general recent scholarship (see especially various works by Higham) suggests quite strongly that the extent of "Celtic survival" in Roman Britain was quite shockingly high, from the standpoint of older conceptions. Dr. David L. White From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Nov 12 18:07:20 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000 13:07:20 -0500 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory In-Reply-To: <200011120415.WAA06444@sunmuw1.MUW.Edu> Message-ID: Ideology and cultural dominance may be a key. Most Germanic tribes tended to merely replace the local elite while respecting a variation of the existing system. The Goths and Franks were Christians (albeit Arianist) and attempted to maintain the same structures through an aparteid-like social hierarchy. The Turks were also a small minority elite but they welcomed anyone into their fold who converted to Islam. This probably made the difference >I do not think elite dominance is enough for a conquered people to adopt the >invaders language, sure they will adopt some words from the invading language >and change the conquered peoples language, depends if the invaders or the >invaded are more advanced than another. In those cases where a small elite >domaites over a conquerored nation (i.e. the Franks in Gaul, Germanic >Tribes in >Italy and Spain, Mongols and Tartars in Russia) these invading cultures where >just absorbed into the local culture. People only adopt the language of >invader as a primary tongue because lots of peoples of the invaders actually >come to their homeland and make a statement like this "adopt out language, >we are here to stay!, if you do not like it go somewhere else". In the >moments where invader languages replaced the languages of the conquered, >Slavic >over the various languages of Eastern Europe, Indo-European over the pre Indo >european languages of Europe in the 4th to 3rd Millennium BC, Anglo-Saxons >over >the Welsh, Turks over the Greeks in Anatolia and the Indo-Aryans over the >Dravidian speaking people's of Northern India. We have seen huge migrations of >the invaders come to the lands they conquered, not just replacing the elite of >the society, however huge sections of it. The main question is how much of >invaded population would the Invaders have to make up to impose their language >onto the invaded people's Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From edsel at glo.be Sun Nov 12 10:49:06 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000 11:49:06 +0100 Subject: "nightmare" Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Sunday, October 29, 2000 5:03 PM > Steve Long writes: >> So once again, based on this much at least, it seems the "mare" (in >> nightmare) is a Germanic-Slavic thing. And though the word may be >> reconstructible as IE, its meanings and usage appear to be too local and >> complex to justify seeing it as IE. (Of course, I don't know how this whole >> idea ran in Basque.) > The only Basque word for 'nightmare' in the 'creature' sense I know of > is . This is pretty clearly of Latino-Romance origin, though > the direct source would appear to be an unrecorded Latin *, > an altered form of the familiar . So far as I am aware, the > Basque word is unmarked for sex, and it translates both 'incubus' and > 'succubus'. > Other Basque words, like and , are used much more > generally, to denote just about any kind of hobgoblin or imp. [Ed Selleslagh] I don't remember if it was already mention, but in Dutch, e.g. 'mare' is an archaic word for (usually bad) news. On the other hand, a nightmare is 'nachtmerrie', with literally the same meaning. I once read that 'nachtmerrie' was actually a popular misinterpretation of what was originally 'nachtmare', i.e. bad news in a dream. From edsel at glo.be Sun Nov 12 11:52:45 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000 12:52:45 +0100 Subject: More on dental fricatives Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Tuesday, November 07, 2000 7:22 PM > Given our recent discussion of dental fricatives in English, > I'm hoping it will be interesting to mention a curious fact > about dental fricatives in Basque. [snip] > Now, northern Castilian has another well-known feature: word-final /d/ > is pronounced as a voiceless dental fricative, theta. Words like > 'Madrid' and 'net' are thus pronounced in the north > with final theta. Few of these words were borrowed into Basque in > the past. When they were borrowed, Basque, which tolerates no > word-final voiced plosives, did interesting things to them. For > example, 'Madrid' is in Basque , with a legal final /l/. [Ed Selleslagh] But the Castilian adjective is 'madrile?o'. Interesting isn't it? On the other hand, I often hear an edh in 'Madrid', 'la?d' etc. Or is there something wrong with my hearing ? > But today Castilian has a number of acronyms, and some of these > acronyms end in the letter D. An example is , which is the > Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia. Naturally, northerners > pronounce these too with final theta. > But now comes the interesting bit. When these acronyms are used > in Basque, they are frequently pronounced with final theta! > So, even though Castilian theta is never taken into Basque as a > dental fricative, which Basque does not have, Castilian word-final > /d/, which is locally a phonetic theta, is taken into Basque as > a dental fricative. > This is a pretty little phonological problem, don't you think? [Ed] Probably they are just using the Spanish pronunciation. The same thing happens with English computer terms in Western languages. Note that there are virtually no monolingual Basques left, so the necessity to convert the phonemes (OR 'phones???) when borrowing may not be so strong any more. What do the French Basques say, who don't speak Spanish? THAT will be interesting! > The observation was made by J. I. Hualde, who reports it in an > article in Folia Linguistica 27 (1993). > Larry Trask From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Nov 12 17:49:58 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000 12:49:58 -0500 Subject: Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate? In-Reply-To: <009001c04baa$d67529a0$d38f6395@roborr.uottawa.ca> Message-ID: I won't argue with you but for me, it's the only source. I'd appreciate any corrections. Partridge (1958) also has similar information on this entry --perhaps also from MacBain. [ moderator snip ] >"MacBain's Gaelic Etymological Dictionary" is not the best source for early >Celtic in any case. Apparently it is best for providing a corpus of >Inverness-shire Gaelic for the last century. >Robert Orr Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From dlwhite at texas.net Mon Nov 13 03:26:24 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000 21:26:24 -0600 Subject: Mutual Comprehensibility, Reconvergence Message-ID: > In themselves, Spanish and Portuguese are pretty much mutually > comprehensible --say like American English and Scots, or American and > Caribbean English So (as I sort of suspected) Spanish and Portugese have not really diverged to the point where something like creolization (in practical effect) might be expected in circumstances where they have been thrown together again. Thus the parallel is not close enough. Too bad. It might have provided some useful insights. On a vaguely related point, what is the earliest evidence for the development of the post-positive article in Norse? I do not recall that it is found in runic (before Roman-alphabet literacy). Dr. David L. White From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Nov 13 04:12:15 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000 23:12:15 EST Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: In a message dated 11/12/00 9:01:44 PM Mountain Standard Time, dlwhite at texas.net writes: >3) English in Ireland (outside of Ulster) >> -- Ireland (and not just Ulster) was a major destination of English and Scottish emigration, numbering in the hundreds of thousands in the 17th century and substantial numbers in the 18th. And that's not counting the medieval influx, which was substantial and which had already Anglicized the area around Dublin. Prior to about 1720, Ireland absorbed more immigrants from Britain than the whole of the Americas. The linguistic history of Ireland is incomprehensible unless these facts are taken into consideration. (See the Oxford History of the British Empire, vs. I & II). Likewise, southern Wales was extensively colonized by English peasants imported by the Marcher lords in the medieval period. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Mon Nov 13 04:12:45 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000 23:12:45 EST Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: In a message dated 11/12/00 9:01:44 PM Mountain Standard Time, dlwhite at texas.net writes: << concludes that the number of Saxons that come over to Britain was in the range of 10-40 thousand, >> -- this is generally regarded as exceedingly dubious. From Tristan at mail.scm-rpg.com.au Mon Nov 13 06:05:00 2000 From: Tristan at mail.scm-rpg.com.au (Tristan Jones) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 17:05:00 +1100 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: > Ideology and cultural dominance may be a key. Most Germanic tribes > tended to merely replace the local elite while respecting a variation of > the existing system. The Goths and Franks were Christians (albeit Arianist) > and attempted to maintain the same structures through an aparteid-like > social hierarchy. The Turks were also a small minority elite but they > welcomed anyone into their fold who converted to Islam. This probably made > the difference I suddenly got this interesting thought. I think spread of languages has to do with Inclusive and Exclusive Elites thing, Inclusive Elites like the Roman Empire was allowed Conquered peoples to become part of elite as long as they adopted the conqueror's language and culture. Exclusive elites do not allow conquered people's to become apart of the elite such as White South Africa. Inclusive elite systems must have been more successfully in imposing the language of conqueror's onto the conquered. Maybe that's how Indo-Aryan Languages managed to spread to 75% of India, despite the migration of Indo-Aryan Speaks must have been pretty small. Maybe that inclusive elite thing might explain the success of spread of Arabic over vast areas of Middle East and Africa, Mandarin and Cantonese over huge areas of China, I think before the spread of Chinese Empire, Austronesian Languages would have been spoken over large areas of Southern China's Rice Growing Zones. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Nov 13 11:18:56 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 11:18:56 +0000 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: Tristan Jones writes: > I do not think elite dominance is enough for a conquered people to adopt the > invaders language, sure they will adopt some words from the invading language > and change the conquered peoples language, depends if the invaders or the > invaded are more advanced than another. In those cases where a small elite > domaites over a conquerored nation (i.e. the Franks in Gaul, Germanic Tribes > in Italy and Spain, Mongols and Tartars in Russia) these invading cultures > where just absorbed into the local culture. People only adopt the language > of invader as a primary tongue because lots of peoples of the invaders > actually come to their homeland and make a statement like this "adopt out > language, we are here to stay!, if you do not like it go somewhere else". > In the moments where invader languages replaced the languages of the > conquered, Slavic over the various languages of Eastern Europe, Indo-European > over the pre Indo european languages of Europe in the 4th to 3rd Millennium > BC, Anglo-Saxons over the Welsh, Turks over the Greeks in Anatolia and the > Indo-Aryans over the Dravidian speaking people's of Northern India. We have > seen huge migrations of the invaders come to the lands they conquered, not > just replacing the elite of the society, however huge sections of it. The > main question is how much of invaded population would the Invaders have to > make up to impose their language onto the invaded people's I don't think it's possible to generalize like this. Take the Turks. The Turkish conquest of Anatolia resulted in the almost total replacement of the earlier languages in favor of Turkish. But we cannot conclude that this came about because vast numbers of Turkic-speakers poured into the area and overwhelmed the indigines. The Turks of Turkey look very little like the Turkic-speakers of central Asia, but very much like their Greek, Armenian, Kurdish and Lebanese neighbors. Cavalli-Sforza, in his big genetic atlas, reports that there is "very little difference" between the Turks and their neighbors, with the Turks being genetically closest to the speakers of Persian, Kurdish, Lebanese Arabic and Aramaic ('Assyrian'). He concludes that the number of Turkish-speaking invaders was "probably rather small", and that these invaders were apparently absorbed into the indigenous population (The History and Geography of Human Genes, 1994, pp. 242-243). He further notes that the Turks seem to be more than averagely genetically heterogeneous, and that further study is called for to investigate this heterogeneity. The speakers of Arabic appear to be another case in point. C-S's organization by continents makes these a little awkward to investigate, but it appears that Arabic-speakers are genetically a very diverse group, with each local group related more strongly to speakers of neighboring languages -- Turkish, Persian, Kurdish, Aramaic, Berber, Cushitic, Ethiopian Semitic -- than to speakers of Arabic elsewhere. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From dlwhite at texas.net Mon Nov 13 19:53:51 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 13:53:51 -0600 Subject: Reference on Numbers of Saxons Message-ID: Since more than one of you has asked, here it is: Jones, Michael Eugene. 1985. "Provinces of Iron and Rust: the End of Roman Britain". Unpublished dissertation, UT Austin. It should, if all is in order, be available from UMI in the usual manner. Practically speaking, I doubt that there is anything in it that does not also occur in various works by Higham, notably "Rome, Britain, and the Anglo-Saxons" (I think). Interested readers may also wish to consult various contributions to Tristram 2000 "Celtic Englishes II", notably those by Gary German "Britons, Anglo-Saxons, and Scholars: 19th Century Attitudes Towards the Survival of Britons in Anglo-Saxon England", and by Wolfgang Viereck "Celtic and English -- An Intricate Relationship". The first of these shows quite clearly (as I too have always argued) that the traditional interpretation or "double X model" (my term), by which the original Celtic inhabitants were expelled or exterminated, is the result of arbitrary prejudices (which I would not shrink from calling "proto-Nazi") being projected into what was thought of as a black box. But there is considerable evidence after all, and it strongly suggests very substantial "Celtic survival". Dr. David L. White From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Nov 13 12:24:57 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 12:24:57 +0000 Subject: More on dental fricatives Message-ID: Ed Selleslagh writes: [on final /d/ in European Spanish] > On the other hand, I often hear an edh in 'Madrid', 'la?d' etc. Or is > there something wrong with my hearing ? No; this is the more widespread pronunciation in Spain. But it is not the pronunciation used in the north, in and around the Basque Country, where theta is usual. [on Spanish final /d/ as theta taken into Basque] > Probably they are just using the Spanish pronunciation. The same thing > happens with English computer terms in Western languages. Yes, but the curious thing is that they accept phonetic theta when it represents Spanish /d/, but not when it represents Spanish theta. > Note that there are virtually no monolingual Basques left, so the necessity > to convert the phonemes (OR 'phones???) when borrowing may not be so strong > any more. Nevertheless, Spanish phonemic theta is *always* rendered in Basque as the laminal sibilant , and never as phonetic theta. > What do the French Basques say, who don't speak Spanish? THAT will be > interesting! I have no data, I'm afraid. Hualde didn't look at this, and I can't recall hearing a French Basque pronounce a suitable recent borrowing from French. Anyway, there really are no ordinary lexical items ending in /d/ in the kind of southern French spoken in and near the French Basque Country. A word that has final /d/ in standard Parisian French always has a following schwa in this southern French, and this schwa is always taken into French Basque as /a/. For example, French comes into French Basque as . I guess we really need a suitable French acronym, but I can't think of one. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Nov 13 15:19:59 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 10:19:59 -0500 Subject: More on dental fricatives In-Reply-To: <017001c04ca0$cb4eeec0$3603703e@edsel> Message-ID: /_DH_/ (edh) is the standard pronunciation for final besides /_TH_/ theta in northern Spain other regional pronunciations (that I have come across) are /0/ in lowland Spanish /maDHri, maDHri:/ /s/ as a hypercorrection in lowland Spanish; occasionally /S, _TH_/ in parts of Central America /maDHris, maDHriS/ and /t/ in Yucatan /madrit, matrit/ but only among speakers whose native language was yucateco note also the lastname Madriz [snip] >On the other hand, I often hear an edh in 'Madrid', 'la?d' etc. Or is >there something wrong with my hearing ? [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From sonno3 at hotmail.com Mon Nov 13 18:25:03 2000 From: sonno3 at hotmail.com (Christopher Gwinn) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 13:25:03 -0500 Subject: "witch" and "warlock" Message-ID: > My books (most of which are old) have OE wicca < OE wic- < PIE > *weik-, with four meanings, mostly having to do with "magic or > sorcery" or "bending, twisting", and also related to "wych" and > "willow." > Is that tracing obsolete? Have any articles on "witch" and "warlock" > been published in JIES or elsewhere in the last twenty years? Pokorny offers an alternative: Ueik- "aussondern" which would give a suffixed Proto-Germanic *wikkan (thus m.germ. wicken "zaubern" and wicker "zauberer, Wahrsager"). Calvert Watkins analysis is the most current, other than that I can't say which is preferred by most Indo European scholars. -Chris Gwinn From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Tue Nov 14 14:36:54 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 14:36:54 GMT Subject: Elamite Message-ID: How likely is the supposed connection between Elamite and Dravidian? [ Moderator's note: Mr. Appleyard's query is in response to Steve Long's post of 3 Nov 2000: > Apparently a characteristic of "Elamite" is that the texts that are > readable (e.g., the Behistun inscription) are "like Ottoman Turkish, made > up of many borrowed words, particularly Persian and Semitic." Early > "Elamite" texts have not been deciphered. The context was not included in his original due to technical difficulties. --rma ] From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Nov 14 01:59:16 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 20:59:16 EST Subject: The Last Influx Message-ID: TO THE LIST, FYI: The following, a news story and two abstracts, seem to state that the last major migration into Europe occurred in the Neolithic period, accounting for about 20% of the current population. Judging past events based on current genes has its problems, but note that Cavalli-Sforza, L.L is listed in the head of one of the two studies. This was originally posted on the Mother Tongue list. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- >From the Associated Press: DNA Study Traces Europeans Ancestry By PAUL RECER The Associated Press WASHINGTON (AP) - Four out of five of the men in Europe shared a common male ancestor that lived as a primitive hunter on a wild continent some 40,000 years ago, researchers say. In a study appearing Friday in the journal Science, researchers say that an analysis of a pattern found in the Y chromosome taken from 1,007 men from 25 places in Europe shows that about 80 percent of Europeans arose from the Paleolithic people who first migrated to Europe. Peter A. Underhill, a senior researcher at the Stanford Genome Technology Center in Palo Alto, Calif., and co-author of the study, said the research supports conclusions from archaeological, linguistic and other DNA evidence about the settlement of Europe by ancient peoples. ``When we can get different lines of evidence that tell the same story, then we feel we are telling the true history of the species,'' said Underhill. Underhill said the researchers used the Y chromosome in the study because its rare changes establish a pattern that can be traced back hundreds of generations, thus helping to plot the movement of ancient humans. The Y chromosome is inherited only by sons from their fathers. When sperm carrying the Y chromosome fertilizes an egg it directs the resulting baby to be a male. An X chromosome from the father allows a fertilized egg to be female. The Y chromosome has about 60 million DNA base pairs. Changes in those base pairs happen infrequently, said Underhill, but they occur often enough to establish patterns that can be used to trace the ancestry of people. He said researchers looking at the 1,007 chromosome samples from Europe identified 22 specific markers that formed a specific pattern. Underhill said the researchers found that about 80 percent of all European males shared a single pattern, suggesting they had a common ancestor thousands of generations ago. The basic pattern had some changes that apparently developed among people who once shared a common ancestor and then were isolated for many generations, Underhill said. This scenario, he said, supports other studies about the Paleolithic European groups. Those studies suggest that a primitive, stone-age human came to Europe, probably from Central Asia and the Middle East, in two waves of migration beginning about 40,000 years ago. Their numbers were small and they lived by hunting animals and gathering plant food. They used crudely sharpened stones and fire. About 24,000 years ago, the last ice age began, with mountain-sized glaciers moving across most of Europe. Underhill said the Paleolithic Europeans retreated before the ice, finding refuge for hundreds of generations in three areas: what is now Spain, the Balkans and the Ukraine. When the glaciers melted, about 16,000 years ago, the Paleolithic tribes resettled the rest of Europe. Y chromosome mutations occurred among people in each of the ice age refuges, said Underhill. He said the research shows a pattern that developed in Spain is now most common in northwest Europe, while the Ukraine pattern is mostly in Eastern Europe and the Balkan pattern is most common in Central Europe. About 8,000 years ago, said Underhill, a more advanced people, the Neolithic, migrated to Europe from the Middle East, bringing with them a new Y chromosome pattern and a new way of life: agriculture. About 20 percent of Europeans now have the Y chromosome pattern from this migration, he said. --------------------- Semino, O., Passarino, G., Oefner, P.J., Lin, A.A., Arbuzova, S., Beckman, L.E., De Benedictis, G., Francalacci, P., Kouvatsi, A., Limborska, S., Marcikia, M., Mika, A., Mika, B., Primorac, D., Santachiara-Benerecetti, A.S., Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. & Underhill, P.A. (2000) The genetic legacy of Paleolithic Homo sapiens sapiens in extant Europeans: A Y chromosome perspective. Science. 290 (5494). 1155 - 9 (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/290/5494/1155) Abstract: A genetic perspective of human history in Europe was derived from 22 binary markers of the nonrecombining Y chromosome (NRY). Ten lineages account for >95% of the 1007 European Y chromosomes studied. Geographic distribution and age estimates of alleles are compatible with two Paleolithic and one Neolithic migratory episode that have contributed to the modern European gene pool. A significant correlation between the NRY haplotype data and principal components based on 95 protein markers was observed, indicating the effectiveness of NRY binary polymorphisms in the characterization of human population composition and history. ------------------------------ Gibbons, A. (2000) Europeans Trace Ancestry to Paleolithic People. Science. 290 (5494). 1080 - 1. (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/290/5494/1080) Summary: Y chromosome data show that living Europeans have deep roots in the region--and researchers say genetic markers may be linked to cultures known from archaeological remains. In a report on page 1155, an international team reports that a wealth of data from the Y chromosome show that more than 80% of European men have inherited their Y chromosomes--which are transmitted only from father to son--from Paleolithic ancestors who lived 25,000 to 40,000 years ago. Thus, the genetic template for European men was set as early as 40,000 years ago, then modified--but not recast--by the Neolithic farmers who arrived in the region about 10,000 years ago. =============== From sarima at friesen.net Tue Nov 14 02:17:16 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 18:17:16 -0800 Subject: Motivating the Root Restrictions of PIE In-Reply-To: <001201c04c06$6f7dbd00$726063d1@texas.net> Message-ID: At 11:39 AM 11/11/00 -0600, David L. White wrote: >According to Lehmann, PIE shows three kinds of root restrictions. Accepting >for now the traditional interpretation and using "D" to represent any voiced >plosive, "T" to represent any voiceless plosive, and "DH" to represent any >voiced aspirate plosve, these are: > 1) no /DeD/ > 2) no /TeDH/ > 3) no /DHeT/ >correct, these restrictions (not to mention the /b/-gap) do not make sense. >So here is one way (the only way I can see) that they could make sense. > 1) The voiced plosives were orginally not voiced but pharyngealized. > 2) The voiceless plosives were orginally laryngealized (which is not > the same as glottalized). > 3) The voiced aspirates were as traditionally posited, technically > murmured. I suspect that a slightly different set of alternatives can cover most of the same problems. 1. The traditional voiced plosives were actually voiceless unaspirated plosives. 2. The traditional voiceless plosives were actually voiceless *aspirated* plosives. 3. The traditional voiced aspirates were either simple voiced plosive or voiced fricatives. At the very least this avoids the typological issues. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Tue Nov 14 02:27:28 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 18:27:28 -0800 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory In-Reply-To: <9e.c1a66f1.273f7cd2@aol.com> Message-ID: At 11:55 PM 11/11/00 -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >I'd say that in a preliterate milieu, the minimal requirement for language >replacement is that the intrusive community come in complete family groups >(children learn language from their mothers, after all), that they come in >-some- numbers, so they're not a drop of ink in a bucket of milk, and that >they have social mechanisms for assimilating the local population _as >individuals_. I would also say that it would be a great "help" if membership in the intrusive community is seen locally as bringing prestige. This would encourage not only direct assimilation, but also *imitation*. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From dlwhite at texas.net Tue Nov 14 03:22:22 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 21:22:22 -0600 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: > In a message dated 11/12/00 9:01:44 PM Mountain Standard Time, > dlwhite at texas.net writes: > << concludes that the number of Saxons that come over to Britain was in the > range of 10-40 thousand, >> > -- this is generally regarded as exceedingly dubious. No it isn't, not in the general trend anyway, though perhaps the range given is at the low end of the scale. You might want to consult the recent scholarship noted. Dr. David L. White From dlwhite at texas.net Tue Nov 14 04:30:50 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 22:30:50 -0600 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: > The Goths and Franks were Christians (albeit Arianist) ... I don't know who said this, but the Frankish half, though of perhaps minor importance, is wrong: the Franks were critically (to their success in forging alliances with the Church) not Arians. Dr. David L. White From summers at metu.edu.tr Tue Nov 14 09:01:10 2000 From: summers at metu.edu.tr (Geoffrey SUMMERS) Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 11:01:10 +0200 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: > I don't think it's possible to generalize like this. Take the Turks. > The Turkish conquest of Anatolia resulted in the almost total > replacement of the earlier languages in favor of Turkish. Is this sweeping statement correct?. How many languages were spoken on the Central Plateau in, say, AD 1900? How long did the replacement take? To what extent did replacement spread through Turkish controlled lands beyond Anatolia, depending on what you mean by Anatolia? What was the Ottoman court language. To go one step further, the script was changed. To what extent did the change of script (rather than, say, cultural or political orientation) influence the incorporation of European words into modern Turkish? > But we > cannot conclude that this came about because vast numbers of > Turkic-speakers poured into the area and overwhelmed the indigines. Exactly! Geoff -- Geoffrey SUMMERS Dept. of Political Science & Public Administration, Middle East Technical University, Ankara TR-06531, TURKEY. Office Tel: (90) 312 210 2045 Home Tel/Fax: (90) 312 210 1485 The Kerkenes Project Tel: (90) 312 210 6216 http://www.metu.edu.tr/home/wwwkerk/ From edsel at glo.be Tue Nov 14 20:01:59 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 21:01:59 +0100 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tristan Jones" Sent: Monday, November 13, 2000 7:05 AM [snip] > I suddenly got this interesting thought. > I think spread of languages has to do with Inclusive and Exclusive Elites > thing, Inclusive Elites like the Roman Empire was allowed Conquered peoples > to become part of elite as long as they adopted the conqueror's language and > culture. Exclusive elites do not allow conquered people's to become apart of > the elite such as White South Africa. [Ed Selleslagh] White South Africa is quite interesting: it was in a sense a Selectively Inclusive Elite: it excluded blacks but in a certain way kind of co-opted the so-called 'colored' people, many if not most of whom speak Afrikaans. It shows that there is a lot of grey between black and white, figuratively speaking. Ed. From sarima at friesen.net Wed Nov 15 03:01:30 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 19:01:30 -0800 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory In-Reply-To: <002801c04d37$aa0ea380$bc00a8c0@vic.bigpond.net.au> Message-ID: At 05:05 PM 11/13/00 +1100, Tristan Jones wrote: >small. Maybe that inclusive elite thing might explain the success of spread >of Arabic over vast areas of Middle East and Africa, Mandarin and Cantonese >over huge areas of China, I think before the spread of Chinese Empire, >Austronesian Languages would have been spoken over large areas of Southern >China's Rice Growing Zones. I think this is fairly well established. Certainly there are still relict Austronesian languages in Southern China even today. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From stevegus at aye.net Tue Nov 14 02:59:21 2000 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 21:59:21 -0500 Subject: Mutual Comprehensibility, Reconvergence Message-ID: David L. White wrote: > On a vaguely related point, what is the earliest evidence for the > development of the post-positive article in Norse? I do not recall that it > is found in runic (before Roman-alphabet literacy). My recollection is that it generally does not appear in Norse runic inscriptions until around 1250 or so. It does not appear often, either, in verse. It may have been spoken well before then, but the ritual and formulaic nature of the runic monuments, or the density of expression and hard metres of the poetry poetry, may have kept it at bay. -- Quae vestimenta induet misella in conviviis crastinis? From joao at britanic-ih.com.br Tue Nov 14 19:25:08 2000 From: joao at britanic-ih.com.br (Joao) Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 17:25:08 -0200 Subject: Mutual Comprehensibility, Reconvergence Message-ID: The Portuguese of Portugal and of the former Portuguese Empire is markedly different from the Portuguese of Brazil. The Portuguese of Portugal is a stress-timed language. Weakening of stress yields vowel-centering, as in the English of the USA, the UK etc. Varieties of the language are predominantly regional, as of Italian. The Portuguese of Brazil is a syllable-timed language, as in Spanish generally, the English of the Caribbean, etc. Varieties are predominantly class-distinguished, as in UK English. There is great homogeneity within Brazil, where the Globo TV network has been a strong unifier. When Ramalho Eanes, the first President of post-revolution Portugal, visited Brazil, the Globo network supplied subtitles. President Eanes's accent is, admittedly, one of the more marked in Portugal, from the Beira Alta region. Brazil and her Spanish-speaking neighbours can, indeed, get along without detailed tranlation, given the will to do so. The gray area is called Portinhol by Brazilians. There is currently no creolizing. The societies of the Brazilian State of Rio Grande do Sul and of Uruguay and Northern Argentina, on the River Plate, share a lot of features, and generally get on well together. The new factor is the Mercosur/Mercosul common market, which has led to much interest within Brazil in speaking Spanish well. Quite beside Dr White's interest, the Eastern half of the Pacific island of Timor (the name itself means East), an ex-colony of Portugal, has opted for the Brazilian variety of Portuguese, rather than the ex-imperial variety. Cheers! Chester Graham From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Nov 14 04:15:47 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 23:15:47 EST Subject: Reference on Numbers of Saxons Message-ID: In a message dated 11/13/00 9:01:40 PM Mountain Standard Time, dlwhite at texas.net writes: << The first of these shows quite clearly (as I too have always argued) that the traditional interpretation or "double X model" (my term), by which the original Celtic inhabitants were expelled or exterminated, is the result of arbitrary prejudices (which I would not shrink from calling "proto-Nazi") >> -- I'm afraid I'd have to answer that anti-migrationist arguments like this are driven not by any archaeological or linguistic evidence, or any reasoning based on this evidence, but by political ideology and moral-aesthetic preferences. [ Moderator's note: I'm going to invoke Godwin's Rule (familiar to old Usenet readers): Once a poster to the thread uses the word "Nazi", all further discussion is moot, and the thread is officially ended. -- rma ] From dlwhite at texas.net Tue Nov 14 04:53:07 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 22:53:07 -0600 Subject: More on dental fricatives Message-ID: > but the curious thing is that they accept phonetic theta when > it represents Spanish /d/, but not when it represents Spanish theta. Perhaps I am merely displaying my ignorance (or lack of full comprehension of previous missives), but aren't positional considerations relevant here? Does Spanish theta (when not from /d/) occur finally? Perhaps in acronyms, and that is what I missed, due to the trauma of election night. But from what little I know, it seems that perhaps the where is as important as the what, so to speak. Dr. David L. White From edsel at glo.be Tue Nov 14 20:29:35 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 21:29:35 +0100 Subject: More on dental fricatives Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Rick Mc Callister" Sent: Monday, November 13, 2000 4:19 PM > /_DH_/ (edh) is the standard pronunciation for final > besides /_TH_/ theta in northern Spain > other regional pronunciations (that I have come across) are > /0/ in lowland Spanish /maDHri, maDHri:/ > /s/ as a hypercorrection in lowland Spanish; occasionally /S, _TH_/ in > parts of Central America /maDHris, maDHriS/ > and /t/ in Yucatan /madrit, matrit/ but only among speakers whose native > language was yucateco [ moderator snip ] [Ed Selleslagh] This pronunciation of d as edh is quite frequent, not only in final positions, but it is by no means arbitrary and I haven't been able yet to figure out the rules. A very similar phenomenon is that of b being pronounced as fricative v in certain positions (e.g. Avraham Lincoln in Spanglish), even by native speakers who "can't" pronounce fricative v knowingly. Two cases of non-phonemic alternate pronunciation?? From edsel at glo.be Tue Nov 14 20:19:58 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 21:19:58 +0100 Subject: More on dental fricatives Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Monday, November 13, 2000 1:24 PM > Ed Selleslagh writes: > [on final /d/ in European Spanish] >> On the other hand, I often hear an edh in 'Madrid', 'la?d' etc. Or is >> there something wrong with my hearing ? > No; this is the more widespread pronunciation in Spain. But it is > not the pronunciation used in the north, in and around the Basque > Country, where theta is usual. [Ed] OK, I had overlooked that in your comment. > [on Spanish final /d/ as theta taken into Basque] >> Probably they are just using the Spanish pronunciation. The same thing >> happens with English computer terms in Western languages. > Yes, but the curious thing is that they accept phonetic theta when > it represents Spanish /d/, but not when it represents Spanish theta. [Ed] I would guess that this is because in Castilian theta (written as c or z) is considered a sibilant of sorts. In the Americas it is pronounced /s/ anyway. >> Note that there are virtually no monolingual Basques left, so the necessity >> to convert the phonemes (OR 'phones??') when borrowing may not be so strong >> any more. > Nevertheless, Spanish phonemic theta is *always* rendered in Basque as > the laminal sibilant , and never as phonetic theta. [Ed] This brings us back to the old discussion about the origins of the two sibilants s/theta in Castilian (the often heard idea is that it comes from an affricated s) and its possible relationship to the two (apical/laminal) sibilants written as s/z in Basque. After all, Castilian originated in the fringe of the Basque speaking area. Remember also my remark about the Castilian adjective Madrile?o, with an l like in Basque 'Madril'. >> What do the French Basques say, who don't speak Spanish? THAT will be >> interesting! > I have no data, I'm afraid. Hualde didn't look at this, and I can't > recall hearing a French Basque pronounce a suitable recent borrowing > from French. Anyway, there really are no ordinary lexical items > ending in /d/ in the kind of southern French spoken in and near the > French Basque Country. A word that has final /d/ in standard Parisian > French always has a following schwa in this southern French, and this > schwa is always taken into French Basque as /a/. For example, French > comes into French Basque as . I guess we really need > a suitable French acronym, but I can't think of one. [Ed] That (ancronym) is what I meant. From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Nov 14 05:53:10 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 00:53:10 EST Subject: The Germanic substrate - knives? Message-ID: In a message dated 11/11/2000 9:19:50 PM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: << You make a very interesting point regarding I think of knife in the sense of "cut, tear, strike, kill" but I can see how "flesher, scraper" can work>> That really is the problem with so many of these early words. They probably originated in a very specific, narrow, down-to-earth usage. But the reconstructed meaning creates the impression that they started with broad general abstract meanings like "cut, tear, strike, kill." Which immediately obscures the real practical meanings and processes. There is loads of evidence that the "knife" was fundamentally a tool or a group of tools among hunter-gathers and early farmers and trades folk. It undoubtedly had multiple uses. But any farmer, butcher, woolcutter, wood carver, fur trapper or a hunter who has actually dressed an animal will tell you that "killing" is a rare use for a knife. The OED for example lists "knifer" not as a killer but as an old term for someone who cut the heels for shoes. But I see in the old Britannica that is not quite right. The knifer actually "trimmed or smoothed" down the heel to match the already made shoe. He didn't even accurately "cut" them, much less tear or kill them. <> I suspect that this sort of amalgamation of meanings is almost useless. Just an example. On the web, you can buy "antler knives" and "bone knives," some of them brand new where the handle is made of bone, the others Native American antiques where the whole knife is made from bone. You see exquisitely carved knives made from bone in New Guinea at http://www.art-pacific.com/artifacts/nuguinea/weapons/bneknife.htm. At the non-pointed end of each is the natural "knob" of the bone joint or "knuckle" of the handle (cf. Pol., knuckle, , bone). Perhaps knives are named after the bones they were once made from? Perhaps not. But a pruning knife does not make "a sharp blow," yet if you look back at my original list you'll see pruning is one of the closest verbs in earlier German. Perhaps "knife" come from analogy to wild animal teeth. See the Greek, , , venemous beast, especially snake, wild beast, pin, pivot, , two projecting teeth on the blade of a hunting spear, , bear, bear teeth. Cf., Pol, , boar, tusk, blade, trowel. Perhaps and perhaps more likely it was the other way around, these things getting their names by analogy with knife. All these etymologies have to be conjectural. More importantly, if "knife" and all the similar words I found in Greek are in fact all connected in some way, how do we think about them? How is it that by looking closer at the real meanings of words in context we see strong similarities where alledgedly there were none before? You write: < /kr-/ but never the other way.>> Well, something is wrong there, that's pretty clear. Watkins is missing something, big time. But then again, if this is strictly between German/Slavic and Greek, then couldn't /kn-/ > /kn-/? <> And what does Watkins have <<*ghwen- "to strike, kill>> turn into? I bet this is rebuilt from some form of knife. <> I used Lidell-Scott and they occasionally offer comments on roots but not often. I don't recall any. <> Well, the factuality of these supposed non-IE words is often repeated and without question. In fact many have dead ringers with clear etymologies in other IE languages. It seems the connections between them however have been discounted either because of bad definitions or because of the sound laws -- which of course should not make us blind to obvious similarities that are impossible to assign to coincidence. There are more of these words I'd like to address. Regards, Steve Long From kastytis.beitas at gf.vu.lt Wed Nov 15 00:17:20 2000 From: kastytis.beitas at gf.vu.lt (Kastytis Beitas) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 01:17:20 +0100 Subject: The Germanic substrate - knives? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:42 10.11.2000 -0500, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Initial /*gwh-/ would have yielded Germanic /b, g/ --IF followed by >a vowel. Someone more knowledgeable will have to fill us in on what >/*ghwn-V-/ would have produced. > <...> > Again, I don't know what *Kn- would yield in Greek & Lithuanian Lithuanian: knaibyti, knebenti, knyburiuoti 'to peck, pick' knapteleti 'to nod suddenly (usually about sleepy person)' knez:inti 'to break/smash to pieces' kniede 'rivet' knieteti 'to itch, tickle' kniubti 'to kneel/fall with one's face downwards' knotis 'to come off (tear off ) (spontaneously) [about bark]' But there are no words with meaning 'knife'. But I have one fresh crazy idea, based on this *kn- thing. :-) There is Russian word okno 'window; opening, orifice, hole'. Usually it is explained as derivative from Slavonic oko 'eye'. But there is other possibility. There are some Russian words with initial o-, where this o is a prefix. For example: Russian okorok 'ham' is explained as derivative from Old Slavonic *kork-, where krak in many Slavonic languages means 'leg, thigh, hip'. Russian ovrag 'ravine' is derived from Old Russian form vrag. /These examples are from Chernykh's 'Historical etymological dictionary of modern Russian language' (1999)/ It is possible to find other similar examples too. Idea is that Russian okno 'window' is actually o-kno, where kn- means something (hole, opening etc) that is cut by knife or punched by some sharp or similar implement... And this kn- in okno is maybe the lonely last relic in Russian... His nearest relative may be is Russian verb kinut' 'to cast, throw'. Other group of related words are words with gn- (Russian gniot etc) and gin- ... Kastytis Beitas ********************************** Kastytis Beitas ---------------------------------- Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics Faculty of Natural Sciences Vilnius University Ciurlionio 21 Vilnius 2009, Lithuania ---------------------------------- Fax: (370 2)235409 E-Mail: kastytis.beitas at gf.vu.lt ********************************** From kastytis.beitas at gf.vu.lt Tue Nov 14 23:50:36 2000 From: kastytis.beitas at gf.vu.lt (Kastytis Beitas) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 00:50:36 +0100 Subject: The Germanic substrate - knives? In-Reply-To: <64.8276a69.273a69b0@aol.com> Message-ID: At 03:32 08.11.2000 -0500, Steve Long wrote: >Starting with a word like "knife." I'm not positive how it got on the list, >but I suspect that it might be from an anachronistic idea of what knives are. <....> >This is important because the most common uses of knife-like objects was not >as weapons or even kitchen implements, but as tools. >There's evidence of knives regularly being used as scrapers for the dressing >of skins, for the gathering and processing of wool (before shears), for >pruning, cutting holes in hides and cloth and a variety of other tasks. I think that the words with meanings 'to cut, to carve' may semantically change to closely related meanings, as: 1. 'hack, chop' 2. 'edge, brim, rim' 3. 'divide to parts' 4. 'kill' 5. 'geld, castrate' 6. 'short' 7. 'strike (blunt)' 8. 'press, squeeze' 9. 'thrust, stab' 10. ... The meanings 'to bite' and 'to gnaw' are close too. So examples presented by Steve Long look rather convincing. >In Greek, we see: >knao: <...> - to scrape, grate or scratch ><...> >knaps - to cut short (dalos) >knizo: - (Dor, eknixa; pass, knizon) scratch, gash, cut up, grate, also >associated with sacrificial cutting-up. It is similar to Lithuanian "nizho" '(it) itched shortly' and "niezhai" 'itch, scabies (disease)'. I am sorry, I am not linguist and I don't know how to present sounds phonetically correct. May be these words must be presented as "niz:o" and "niez:ai". >nusso: - touch with a sharp point, prick, stab, pierce >nuxis - pricking, stabbing Lith. niuksas 'punch. cuff' >In Lithuanian, "gnybti" is to pinch or prune. (Cf., kni:pen (MGer) pinch, >prune) >In Polish, "no:z:" is knife, but "gnyp" is a leather dresser or shoemaker's >knife. >(The notion that "gnyp" and "gnybti" are borrowed from Germanic runs somewhat >in the face of the distinct possibility that the proto-speakers of those >other two languages had prunning or dressing knives as early or earlier than >other northern Europeans.) In Lithuanian there is "z:nybti" too . It is another form of "gnybti" with the same meanings. "gnybti" ir "z:nybti" have an aspects of single act. And there is a group of related words: z:naibyti -- 'to pinch, nib, tweak (repeated action)', z:nyples -- 'tongs, pliers, nippers' or 'claws of crayfish' and other. Lithuanian "shnioti" (or must be s:nioti?) means 'strike, lach, whip; to cut, mow, reap' A similar group of words exist in Russian too: (po)z:i:nat' -- 'to reap' z:nec -- 'reaper (of corn)' These Lithuanian and Russian words are related to words with meanings 'press, squeeze': Lithuanian: gniauz:ti -- 'to squeeze, to clutch, to press' gniuz:ti -- 'to give up to pressing' gniu:z:te -- 'snowball (and similar objects, produced by sqeezing)' knisti -- 'to nuzzle, root up (about swine)' and knaiso (the past time of verb "knaisyti" that means more prolongated nuzzling) Russian gniot -- 'press, squeezing' gnesti -- 'to press, to squeeze' Very similar forms are in other Slavonic languages (Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Czech na-gnetat' -- 'to press, to pump' >None of the words above may qualify for strict phonological relationships >with the Germanic "knife", but it seems rather implausible that so many close >examples have no relationship to the word. It seems to me too that to abundant connections of "knife" to another Indo-European words rejects the possibility that "knife" is non-Indo-European word. The similar case is with Lithuanian "peilis" 'knife'. It is similar to Russian "pila" 'saw', Lat. "pilum" 'heavy javelin, pestle', OHG "pfil" 'arrow, stake'. In this context OE "pil" 'stake, shaft, spike' and Eng "pile" 'arrow, dart' may be not borrowings as it is stated in Chambers Dict. of Etym. ( p.794)] but words of common Indo-European origin. And there are copious words roots of what begins as pi- (pin-, pik- etc; and spin-, spik- too) that mean various sharp implements for stabbing or sharp things: German Pike, English pike, Spanish picca 'spear' English pick, Lat. spiculum English spike 'large nail' and all its Germanic relatives, Lithuanian spyglys 'needle, spine, thorn' and speigas 'bitting (hard) frost' English pin and peak (Russian pinat' means 'to strike with foot, to kick'), English spine, Old Saxon pin 'peg'... You can find many other examples. These words are related to meanings 'to press, squeeze' and 'strike' too: Lith. spausti 'to press, squeeze', may be English pound ' etc. Kastytis Beitas ********************************** Kastytis Beitas ---------------------------------- Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics Faculty of Natural Sciences Vilnius University Ciurlionio 21 Vilnius 2009, Lithuania ---------------------------------- Fax: (370 2)235409 E-Mail: kastytis.beitas at gf.vu.lt ********************************** From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Tue Nov 14 16:36:18 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 18:36:18 +0200 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <01JW73M7JRC4AM3R9Y@LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU> Message-ID: On Sun, 05 Nov 2000 CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU wrote: >>On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, David L. White wrote: >> >>> For English /th/ vs/ /dh/, the question to ask is something >>> like "In a story where two brothers were named "Lith" and "Lidh", >>> would an audience be able to keep them apart?" The answer is >>> clearly yes, regardless of the various other consideration that >>> some have noted, therefore the distinction is (not surprisingly) >>> phonemic. >Bob Whiting replied: >>No, the answer is: if there were two brothers named Lith and >>Lidh then the distinction would be phonemic. As long as there >>aren't, there is no phonemic distinction. It doesn't matter that >>the two sounds are capable of being distinct phonemes. Until >>they are used as phonemes by the speakers of the language, they >>aren't phonemes for all that they are recognizably different >>sounds. When speakers start coining unrelated words where [th] >>contrasts with [dh] then they will be phonemes. The fact that >>you could coin words where they contrast is not sufficient. >This is simply wrong. Which means that opinions differ. :) >We could, theoretically, coin words where aspirated [ph] >contrasted with plain [p] -- but if we did, people would have to >learn to control, and pay attention to, a hitherto redundant >feature. This is simply wrong. :) If we started using aspirated p [p'] and unaspirated p [p] contrastively, the real problem would be distinguishing unaspirated [p] from [b]. People can easily distinguish [p'] from [p] as in Chinese (a billion Chinese can't be wrong :>). When pinyin transcription was introduced in 1979, most people seemed to get the impression that the pronunciation of Chinese had changed: Peking was now called Beijing. Linguists know (or should know) that Chinese pronunciation didn't change a bit. The new system was just considered closer to the actual pronunciation (particularly for English speakers) than the Wade-Giles system that it replaced. The

in Peking and the in Beijing both represent the same Chinese sound, unaspirated [p] (Chinese does not have a voiced/voiceless distinction). English [b] is simply closer to the sound than English [p'] is in this position (where it is always aspirated). A speaker of Finnish would have no difficulty getting the correct pronunciation from Peking (except for the final nasal velar which does not appear in this position in Finnish) because Finnish has only unaspirated [p] and no /b/ phoneme. Indeed, as a native speaker of English, my English-trained ear almost always hears Finnish initial [p] (both word and syllable) as [b] because it is not used to hearing unaspirated [p] in this position and the nearest equivalent to it is [b] (the puff of air that constitutes the aspiration of [p'] delays the onset of voicing for the following vowel; without this puff of air, voicing begins earlier with the result that the consonant sounds voiced. Not enough to make it sound like a full-bodied [b], but enough to make it sound more like [b] than [p], especially in an unexpected environment. So you can't just start shifting contrasts around one at a time. You have to consider the effect on rest of the phonological system. If we wanted to use [p] and [p'] contrastively, we would probably have to give up /b/ as a phoneme. And the same is true of other stops. English only gets away with using unaspirated stops after [s] ('pin' vs. 'spin', 'top' vs. 'stop', 'cot' vs 'Scot') because English phonotactics does not permit [sb], [sg], or [sd] (except at morpheme boundaries: 'disburse', 'disguise', 'disgrace', 'disdain', 'jurisdiction'). Using [p], [p'], and [b], etc. all contrastively is cutting distinctions very fine. Consider the minimal (if any) difference in pronunciation between 'discussed' and 'disgust' in contrast to the clear(er) distinction between 'cussed' and 'gust'. I suspect that there are very few languages that actually do this. I suspect that most languages will either have a contrast between voiceless [p] and voiced [b] or between unaspirated [p] and aspirated [p'], but not a three-way contrast between [p], [p'], and [b]. Perhaps some typologist could confirm or refute this. Stefan? >But people already hear, and pay attention to, the voicing >distinction in the interdental fricatives, just as they do in the >other English fricatives and affricates. And I still say that the fact that a person can hear and recognize the difference between two sounds does not ipso facto make those sounds phonemes of his language. I can hear the difference between bright l and dark l. You might say that I can only do this because I have studied Russian and Arabic. But I imagine that most English speakers could hear the difference between bright l and dark l. Does this mean that bright l and dark l are phonemes in English? No, because they are not used contrastively. Does this mean that they aren't phonemes in Russian? No, because there they are used contrastively. So whether two sounds are phonemes or not does not depend on whether they can be be recognized as different sounds or not, it depends on whether they are used contrastively by the speakers of the language or not. A native speaker of English who hears a Chinese pronounce the initial unaspirated [p] of will probably hear it as [b]. If he then hears the same Chinese pronounce an initial aspirated [p'], he will probably be able to hear the difference. But he will probably think that the contrast is between voiced [b] and unvoiced [p(')] because that is the contrast in his own language. The fact that he can hear the difference between [p] and [p'] does not mean that these two sounds are phonemes in his language (although they are in Chinese). He will just assume that the contrast is the same as in his own language (nearest equivalent). >And there are those minimal pairs, such as ether:either and >thigh:thy, which cannot be dismissed by *synchronically* >attributing them to some morphological conditioning or to a >native:foreign dichotomy. Part of the problem is that these words were there in the language before there was any question of [th] and [dh] being separate phonemes. For a long time 'thigh' and 'thy' were pronounced the same. Then, with the lenition of the initial [th] of unstressed function words, 'thigh' and 'thy' suddenly have different initial sounds and constitute that holy grail of the phonologists, a "minimal pair." Golly, says everyone, this must mean that [th] and [dh] are different phonemes because they make it possible to distinguish 'thigh' and 'thy' as different words. The problem is that 'thigh' and 'thy' were always different words. So the question is, for those who insist that differences in meaning must mean the presence of different phonemes, what phonemes differentiated 'thigh' and 'thy' just before this event? Answer: none. The lenition of initial [th] in function words is simply a change that affected a class of words (function words) and didn't affect the complementary class (content words). Whatever the reason for this change may have been, I am fairly confident that it didn't happen so that it would be possible to distinguish 'thigh' from 'thy'. The two words just happen to be in different classes and so end up with different initial sounds. Since these sounds are determined by the class that the word belongs to, and not by the fact that they are different words, I find it difficult to accept that this is a phonemic distinction. >Let me drag in a notorious German example. Please do, because I think that this example clearly illustrates exactly what I have been talking about. >[x] and palatal [c,] are very nearly in complementary >distribution, with [x] found only immediately after back vowels >a(:) o(:) u(:) au. [c,] is found after front vowels and >diphthongs, all consonants, and (for some speakers) initially. >But the diminutive suffix -chen has only [c,] even after back >vowels -- a rare occurrence, since -chen normally fronts >("umlauts") the preceding vowel. So one finds alleged minimal >pairs such as Kuchen [khu.c, at n] 'cake' and baby-talk Kuhchen >[khu:c, at n] 'little cow', which some claim demonstrate that [x] >and [c,] must be assigned to different phonemes. And >furthermore, many (most?) German speakers hear the difference >quite clearly. But are they separate phonemes? No, as is shown >by the fact that Kuchen : Kuhchen form a subminimal pair: the >vowel of the latter is clearly (but non-distinctively) longer >than the former, indicating that it was in root-final position, >before suffix -chen. Then, on synchronic grounds along, we may >write the alleged minimal pair as /ku:x at n/ 'cake' but /ku:+x at n/ >'little cow': the boundary /+/ conditions both the extra vowel >length and the palatal realization of /x/. But this is precisely my point. Juncture (or morpheme boundary) is not a phonological condition but a morphological one. Creating a silent phoneme /+/ and calling it juncture doesn't change this fact. It just eases the phonologist's conscience. The justification for considering juncture (morpheme boundary) a phonological condition seems to be axiomatic. Phonologists start with the axiom that only phonological conditions can affect phonology. Since morphological conditions (morpheme boundary, word boundary) often affect phonology, these must be phonological conditions because, axiomatically, only phonological conditions can affect phonology. Doesn't anyone see this argument as even a little bit circular? Apparently the phonologists don't because they then import these morphological conditions into phonology as symbols (+ and #) and then proceed to bandy them about as if they were really phonological conditions. If, whenever you have good reason to believe that two apparently contrasting sounds aren't really phonemes, you invent a silent phoneme that has some morphological (or morphophonemic or morpho-lexical or lexico-historic) basis, call it a segmental phoneme, and insert it into the phonemic analysis so that the two sounds no longer contrast, then you are just pandering to those who say that only phonological conditions can affect phonology. I'm not trying to say that juncture doesn't exist, or even that it doesn't affect pronunciation (it often effects things like pitch, duration, and pause), or that it doesn't affect meaning (consider the difference between 'I see you've got an ice cream' and 'I see you've got a nice scream'). All I'm saying is that juncture is not a phonological condition, it is a morphological one, and making a segmental phoneme out of it and throwing it in among the segmental phonemes and saying "see, the sounds don't contrast any more" may not be the best methodology. Admittedly, doing this makes it easier to understand some things (for example, analyzing 'unclean' as /@n+kli:n/ in contrast to 'uncle' /@ngk at l/ makes it clear why the n of 'unclean' doesn't assimilate to the velar), but if there is a "phoneme" that is only trotted out when it is needed and ignored otherwise, one begins to wonder about its reality quotient (as a phoneme, not as an event). >The fact that all such "minimal pairs" contain precisely the >diminutive suffix -chen confirms this analysis. Actually, it makes it seem more like a self-fulfilling prophecy, since '-chen', as a bound morpheme, specifically a suffix, will always be preceded by juncture, whereas in words where the is part of the root, can't be preceded by juncture. I'm not saying that the analysis is wrong. Quite the contrary, I agree with the conclusion completely: [c,] and [x] are not different phonemes in German despite the apparent contrast in words like 'Kuchen' and 'Kuhchen'. I'm just saying that I would have gotten there by a method other than making a phoneme out of a morphological feature. I would have said that contrasts that can be accounted for by rules are not phonemic contrasts. The allophonic distribution rules say that [x] appears after back vowels and [c,] after front vowels. Therefore the pronunciation of [x] in 'Kuchen' is required by rule. There is another rule, obviously of higher precedence, that says that the diminutive suffix '-chen' is always pronounced with [c,] regardless of its environment. Therefore the pronunciation of [c,] in 'Kuhchen' is required by rule. Since both pronunciations are required by rule, the contrast is not phonemic. QED. Now some people will say that the rule that says that '-chen' is always pronounced with [c,] is not a phonological rule, but a morpho-lexical one and that one can only evaluate phonemic contrasts through phonological rules. These people will then take a morphological feature, make it into a segmental phoneme and then show that it blocks the contrast. Occam's Razor gives my method the edge, because it does not need the additional entity of a silent phoneme. >It is therefore unlikely, though possible, that German could >coin new words in which [x] and [c,] would (appear to) contrast >in some other environment, just as it is unlikely that English >would coin new words contrasting precisely in aspired [ph] vs. >plain [p]. This is an interesting spin that you have put on this. It makes it seem like your analysis supports what David L. White said while in fact it demolishes it. I would have said that it is possible, but unlikely, rather than the other way around. But either way, clearly the Germans recognize [c,] and [x] as two different sounds (otherwise they wouldn't appear to contrast in 'Kuhchen' and 'Kuchen'), but they don't use them contrastively (as phonemes). We agree on this. So let's modify what Dr. David said just a little bit. "In a German story where two brothers were named 'Luchen' [lu:x at n] and 'Luhchen' [lu:c, at n], would an audience be able to keep them apart?" The answer is clearly yes ('Kuchen' and 'Kuhchen' prove this). Would [c,] and [x] then be phonemes? Well, yes (as long as you can convince the audience that 'Luhchen' doesn't mean "little Luh") because the sounds are used contrastively in a way that can't be predicted by rule. Does this mean that [c,] and [x] are already phonemes in German? Most emphatically not. You have proved that they are not your way and I have proved it mine. The fact that two sounds are potentially contrastive does not prove that they are phonemes in any particular language. The mere fact that the same two sounds can be phonemes in one language but allophones of the same phoneme in another language should be adequate proof of this. >But English does have a few minimal pairs for the interdentals, >ones which cannot be explained on phonologucal grounds. But you haven't explained German [c,] and [x] on phonological grounds. You have explained them using morpho-lexical information. The fact that you have made a morphological condition into a phonological one (or rather used one that the phonologists already had waiting to be used for purposes like this) doesn't make this a phonological explanation for anyone who knows the difference. >True, in my pronunciation, the stressed vowel of _either_ is >longer than that of _ether_ -- but this is in line with vowel >length before other voices vs. voiceless consonants. And there's >no difference in _thigh_ vs. _thy_. I have explained my reasons for not considering 'thigh' and 'thy' a minimal pair above. My reasons for not considering 'ether' / 'either' a minimal pair are similar (ultimately relying on the fact that the pronunciations are required by rules), but if you prefer, I could invent a silent phoneme that blocks the voicing of intervocalic [th] in loanwords (there is no need for this since it wouldn't voice anyway [there is no indication of one having voiced], but it does provide a "phonological" basis for the lack of contrast). Everyone seems to object to my using these rules to determine whether the sounds involved are phonemes or not, saying "you can't use these rules because they aren't phonological rules." To which I could say (if I really wanted to) "Of course they are phonological rules because they are rules about how these words are pronounced. And what is phonology about except how things are pronounced." But I don't want to say this (yet) because there are other aspects of phonology that I don't want to get involved in. Everyone also seems to be under the impression that I am trying to prove that [th] and [dh] are not separate phonemes. This is not the case. It would not bother (nor surprise) me if [th] and [dh] could be shown to be separate phonemes. All I am saying is that the evidence that [th] and [dh] are phonemes is inadequate. As I have said before, there is no reason why [th] and [dh] shouldn't or couldn't be phonemes. Indeed, when one looks at the evidence, they should be phonemes based on the parallel development of /z/ and /v/. All I say is "where is the evidence?" Where are all the contrasts that would show unequivocally that that [th] and [dh] are phonemes as there are contrasts that show that /z/ and /v/ are phonemes. And I don't consider 'thigh' and 'thy' or 'ether' and 'either' any more indicative of the phonemicity of [th] and [dh] than 'Kuhchen' and 'Kuchen' are indicative of the phonemicity of German [c,] and [x]. >So the fact that new words contrasting only in having [T] vs. >[D] could be formed without any new feature becoming distinctive >confirms that the two are searate phonemes, and have ben so for >some time. And I still say that when new words with this contrast are formed, then they will be phonemes. They might be phonemes now, as you claim, but if so, they are unused phonemes -- just sitting in the closet with their wrapping and ribbons still on. But the argumentation used here seems considerably less than convincing. For instance, one might say that [x] could be used as a phoneme in English by forming new words where it contrasts with /k/ or /g/. Since these words could be formed without any new feature becoming distinctive (as a voiceless velar fricative the contrast between /x/ and /k/ or /g/ would be the same as the contrast between /f/ and /p/ or /b/), this confirms that [x] is already a phoneme in English and has been for some time. I don't think so. >>And as you unintentionally point out, when they become phonemes, >>[dh] will have to be written , otherwise you couldn't >>distinguish between and . >Well, it should be so written already, but we ignore all sorts of >other distinctions, and it doesn't bother us. It's not so much that we ignore other distinctions as it is that the graphic system's ways of distinguishing them are not always consistent or intuitively transparent. But once you get the hang of it, the writing system is actually quite well adapted to the language, and the lack of transparency is generally because the writing has preserved etymological information that has disappeared from the spoken language. Perhaps you should read Chomsky and Halle. Except for some word final distinctions between - and -, no attempt is made to distinguish between [th] and [dh]. It's a good thing the pronunciation is predictable. One thing you can say for sure though is that never represents [dh] (except in the name of the character 'edh'). Otherwise it is regularly realized as [d] ('dhow', 'dharma', 'jodhpurs') and generally indicates a foreign word (except, of course, in native compounds where it represents two sounds [e.g., 'madhouse', 'deadhead', etc.]). Incidentally, I'm still looking for an explanation of why words from languages with phonemic /dh/ don't come into English with [dh]. It seems curious, what with [dh] being a phoneme in English and all, that phonemic /dh/ comes into English as [d]. Many people have hastened to assure me that [th] and [dh] are indeed phonemes in English, but everyone seems reluctant to address this point. > stands for /s z S Z/ (the latter two as in _pressure_ and >_pleasure_ -- in fact, we don't evan have an official way to >spell /Z/, though would seem obvious. And don't even ask >about the vowels: treating as doublets of , we have >effective five vowel symbols for a very large phonemic inventory. >I'd be glad to see ,dh. in use, but it really has nothing to do >with whether [T D] are separate phonemes. Maybe not, but you don't get any help from the orthography on how to pronounce them. And although there are only five vowel symbols in English, there are actually quite a few more, because the five are combined in various (but not always consistent) ways to provide much more than five representations for various vowel sounds. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Wed Nov 15 08:36:49 2000 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 10:36:49 +0200 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <4.3.1.2.20001106080244.00aff400@getmail.friesen.net> Message-ID: On Mon, 06 Nov 2000 Stanley Friesen wrote: >At 07:08 PM 11/4/00 +0200, Robert Whiting wrote: >>On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, David L. White wrote: >> >>> For English /th/ vs/ /dh/, the question to ask is something >>> like "In a story where two brothers were named "Lith" and "Lidh", >>> would an audience be able to keep them apart?" The answer is >>> clearly yes, regardless of the various other consideration that >>> some have noted, therefore the distinction is (not surprisingly) >>> phonemic. >>No, the answer is: if there were two brothers named Lith and >>Lidh then the distinction would be phonemic. As long as there >>aren't, there is no phonemic distinction. It doesn't matter that >>the two sounds are capable of being distinct phonemes. ... >Actually David has a good point Yes, but the good point is simply a truism. When he says that if these two sounds were used contrastively then they would be phonemes, that is a good point. It is like my saying that if I had a million dollars I would be a millionaire. You can't argue with the logic of that. But when he says that since they could be used contrastively, then they are already phonemes, that is not a good point. It is like saying that since I could easily make a million dollars (after all, I get several emails every day telling me how easy it is and offering to sell me the secret for a paltry sum :>), then I am already a millionaire. We are all lucky that the IRS doesn't think this way or else they would be after us to pay taxes on all the money that we could have earned but didn't. >(at least if you make it a play rather than a story to be read). >Try writing a Japanese play with characters named Shil and Shir. >The result will be confusion and incomprehension. This is certainly true. Japanese (and Chinese) just don't distinguish these sounds. As a somewhat chilling example of the extent of the confusion and incomprehension that is possible, the Singapore Airlines plane that crashed and burned at Taipei recently was taking off on the wrong runway. In so doing, it struck some parked equipment and burst into flames. The pilot was supposed to be using runway 50L but was actually using runway 50R. The presumption is that the controler's instructions were not understood by the pilot. It would be funny if it weren't such a tragedy. But there is nothing funny about nearly 100 people killed by allophones. >Or try an English play with characters named Lit and Lit' (where >/'/ represents aspiration, since we are already using /th/ to >mean voiceless interdental fricative). You will get the same >result. It is almost impossible to articulate a final unaspirated stop in normal speech. To do so, you either have to stop breathing until you make the next sound or else keep your mouth closed and breathe through your nose. Otherwise, as soon as you release the stop you also release a puff of air. So it is not surprising that it is very difficult to contrast final aspirated and unaspirated stops. On the other hand, if the brothers were named Till and T'ill, the audience would have no trouble telling them apart. It would be easier if the audience were Chinese, because this distinction is phonemic in Chinese. But an English speaking audience would still be able to tell them apart. They would probably hear the initial unaspirated [t] as [d] (the puff of air that constitutes the aspiration delays the onset of voicing for the following vowel; without this puff of air, voicing begins earlier and partly overlaps the preceding consonant). Not perhaps a full-bodied [d], but a sound with enough voicing to make it sound more like [d] than [t]. The English speaking audience would just assume that one brother was named Till and the other Dill. Does this prove that [t] and [t'] are already phonemes in English? Hardly. >And this is despite the fact that both the pair /r/ and /l/ and >the pair /t/ and /t'/ *can* be distinguished, since some >languages do exactly that. Oriental speakers are notorious for not being able to distinguish [r] from [l]. And nobody can really articulate final unaspirated stops without contortions. >The the fact that an non-specialist native speaker can *hear* the >difference is good reason to consider it to be phonemic. This is just not true. Native speakers of German can hear the difference between [?] and [x]. Does this mean that they are different phonemes in German? Not a bit. No one that I know of would say that [?] and [x] are anything but allophones in German. Let's look at it another way. I can hear the difference between bright l and dark l. Although I have training that helps me, I suspect that most English speakers could hear the difference; they are, after all, pretty distinctive. So suppose the brothers were named Tilt and Til-t (l for bright l and l- for dark l). Would the audience be able to hear the difference? Probably -- although it might take a few repetitions before they were comfortable with it. Would that make bright l and dark l phonemes? Yes, because they are arbitrary contrasts used to differentiate meaning. Does that mean that they are phonemes now? Not in English (but if the play were written in Russian they would have been phonemes before the play, because Russian uses them contrastively). What makes different sounds phonemes is their use as arbitrary contrasts that make a difference in meaning. The fact that speakers can hear the difference between two sounds does not make them phonemes if they are not used as phonemes. Phonemes have to have a certain amount of distinctiveness to be used as phonemes or else you get confusion and ambiguity. But above this level, identifying phonemes doesn't depend on how distinctive they are, but on how they are used. If they aren't used to make arbitrary contrasts then they aren't phonemes no matter how distinctive they are. >>And as you unintentionally point out, when they become phonemes, >>[dh] will have to be written , >>Not at all. The natural spelling of /lidh/ in English would be >Lihthe or something like that (If "lithe" did not already exist >with a long 'i', that would be the spelling) Actually you'd probably do better with Lithth or Liththe. But the point was that whatever way you come up with for expressing [dh] it will have to be something that is not used now. Once [th] and [dh] can contrast without any conditioning whatsoever, there will have to be some way to distinguish them graphically or else you will have a completely opaque writing similar to . You will probably say that the writing is already opaque because you don't have any rules that tell you how to pronounce and you have memorized the pronunciation of every occurrence of in the lexicon. But I have generalized rules for the pronunciation of because I have better things to do than to memorize the dictionary. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Nov 15 23:02:24 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 18:02:24 EST Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: In a message dated 11/15/2000 5:42:33 PM, dlwhite at texas.net writes: << I don't know who said this, but the Frankish half, though of perhaps minor importance, is wrong: the Franks were critically (to their success in forging alliances with the Church) not Arians. >> Actually it may not be of minor importance. Arianism was a fundamentally Greek form of Christianity and as such was the source of the first strong foreign influx of Christian meaning and terminology into a Germanic language. S. Long From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Nov 15 22:24:44 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 17:24:44 -0500 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory In-Reply-To: <001f01c04df3$abbdaca0$032863d1@texas.net> Message-ID: The Franks were evidently Arians until Clovis converted to Catholicism after the pope's representative promised him victory >> The Goths and Franks were Christians (albeit Arianist) ... > I don't know who said this, but the Frankish half, though of perhaps >minor importance, is wrong: the Franks were critically (to their success in >forging alliances with the Church) not Arians. > Dr. David L. White Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Nov 16 04:02:15 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 23:02:15 EST Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: In a message dated 11/15/00 3:42:33 PM Mountain Standard Time, dlwhite at texas.net writes: << the Franks were critically (to their success in forging alliances with the Church) not Arians. >> -- correct. They were, in fact, still pagan at the time they set up shop in Gaul. When they converted, it was to Catholicism. The Goths and Vandals, of course, were Arian 'heretics'. That's why we have the Gothic bible, a priceless source of information on East Germanic. From r.clark at auckland.ac.nz Thu Nov 16 05:12:53 2000 From: r.clark at auckland.ac.nz (Ross Clark (FOA LING)) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 18:12:53 +1300 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Stanley Friesen [mailto:sarima at friesen.net] Sent: Wednesday, 15 November 2000 4:02 p.m. At 05:05 PM 11/13/00 +1100, Tristan Jones wrote: >>small. Maybe that inclusive elite thing might explain the success of spread >>of Arabic over vast areas of Middle East and Africa, Mandarin and Cantonese >>over huge areas of China, I think before the spread of Chinese Empire, >>Austronesian Languages would have been spoken over large areas of Southern >>China's Rice Growing Zones. >I think this is fairly well established. Certainly there are still relict >Austronesian languages in Southern China even today. No. The only AN language in China today (apart from Taiwan of course) is Tsat, spoken by a few thousand people on Hainan island, and it is a relatively late intrusion from further south. That Chinese replaced Austronesian languages as it expanded is quite possible, but none of them survived on the mainland. Ross Clark From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Nov 16 10:09:52 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 10:09:52 +0000 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: Geoffrey Summers writes: [LT] >> The Turkish conquest of Anatolia resulted in the almost total >> replacement of the earlier languages in favor of Turkish. > Is this sweeping statement correct?. Yes; I think so. Turkish is today the mother tongue of about 90% of the population of Turkey. Most of the rest are speakers of Kurdish, in a large eastern area. A number of other languages are spoken by smaller groups, mostly along the borders: Laz and other Caucasian languages next to the Caucasus, Azerbaijani and Arabic along the eastern and southern borders, and so on. There are a few other odds and ends. When I was living in Turkey, I was told that there was a single Polish-speaking village somewhere in the middle of the country. I never got to see it, but anyway I doubt that Polish was already spoken in Anatolia before the Ottoman conquest. > How many languages were spoken on the Central Plateau in, say, AD 1900? The chief differences from today would have been a sizeable number of Armenian-speakers, most of them massacred a few years later, and a large number of Greek-speakers along the Aegean coast, almost all of them expelled after the Greco-Turkish war. So far as I know, the central plateau would not have been very different linguistically. > How long did the replacement take? I simply don't know, and I don't know if anybody knows. Greek was the prestige language before the Turkish conquest, but I've never seen even a guess as to how many mother tongues were spoken in Byzantine Anatolia, or as to how long any of these languages lasted after the conquest. I would certainly be interested in finding out, if anybody knows of any work on this topic. > To what extent did replacement spread through Turkish controlled lands > beyond Anatolia, depending on what you mean by Anatolia? Not very greatly, as far as I know, but then I was only talking about Anatolia. > What was the Ottoman court language. As far as I know, it was Ottoman Turkish. > To go one step further, the script was changed. To what extent did the > change of script (rather than, say, cultural or political orientation) > influence the incorporation of European words into modern Turkish? An interesting question, but probably not very much. Ottoman Turkish was already full of loanwords from European languages at the time of the Turkish revolution. Indeed, alongside his switch to the roman alphabet, Atat?rk charged the Turkish Linguistic Society with finding "pure" Turkish replacements for words of foreign origin. Most of these words were from Arabic or Persian, of course, but hundreds of them were from European languages, especially from French, but also from German, Italian, English and perhaps Greek. The new script doubtless made it easier to write these words in an orderly way, but they were already in use in everyday speech. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Nov 15 23:50:21 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 18:50:21 EST Subject: Elite dominance theory vs. Practicality Message-ID: Just a quick note. What Asia Minor and Pannonia had in common before moving towards a single language was the presence of an unusually large number of different languages. I heard someone roll off 22 languages that reportedly were spoken in the general area of modern day Hungary during the first millennium AD. And of course the area of modern day Turkey may well have had similar diversity before Ottoman Turkish became the "universal" language. In both cases, both languages may have solved a very practical problem. A third language is a good compromise, especially when it represents the new administrative powers that would affect one's official if not private life. In essence, this would have provided a neutral bridge over previous language barriers between a large number of different language elements - permitting a new and better channel of communications. Overcoming such barriers would probably have been commercially if not socially advantageous to those speakers who adopted the new second languages and to the next generations that made them their first languages. Regards, Steve Long From dlwhite at texas.net Thu Nov 16 03:00:06 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 21:00:06 -0600 Subject: English in Ireland Message-ID: One hundred thousand English arriving in Ireland over a hundred years is one thousand per year, which is not proportionally significant. It is roughly equivalent, on a proportional basis, to the number of Mexicans arriving per year in America. In any event, it is not controversial, to my knowledge, that the triumph (so to speak) of English over Irish in Ireland is largely a result of "elite dominance", not numerical preponderance. Dr. David L. White From dlwhite at texas.net Wed Nov 15 23:59:52 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 17:59:52 -0600 Subject: Motivating the Root Restrictions of PIE Message-ID: > I suspect that a slightly different set of alternatives can cover most of > the same problems. > 1. The traditional voiced plosives were actually voiceless unaspirated > plosives. > 2. The traditional voiceless plosives were actually voiceless *aspirated* > plosives. > 3. The traditional voiced aspirates were either simple voiced plosive or > voiced fricatives. > At the very least this avoids the typological issues. But under this proposal no reason is given that roots with voiceless unaspirated plosives (TET corresponding to traditional DED) should be avoided. Nor is the dissimilation seen in the other two types motivated, as there is no reason that voiceless aspirated plosives and either voiced plosives or fricatives should not co-occur. We find nothing "hard to say" about "tub" (or "but"), or "peeve" (or "veep"), for example, nor should we. The typological issues, I think, are minor, as the idea that there are no unique languages implies that it is somehow mystically illegal, if only two languages have a certain feature, for one of them to go extinct. I do not think reality works that way. The sort of "stiff voice" vs. "slack voice" contrast that is two thirds of what I posit is, by the way, not unattestasted. It occurs in some SE Asian languages, in particular (if memory serves) Mpi. How it sounds can be heard by those having access to the UCLA program called "Sounds of the World's Languages" (or something like it). Both stiff voice and slack voice occur, non-phonemically, in English, and there is nothing particularly exotic about either. Stiff voice is what is sometimes called "vocal fry" or "creak", and is often used by men (esp. in RP, I have heard) trying to sound more manly, and slack voice is the breathy voice (for some reason considered "sexy" by a good part of humanity) heard from such luminaries as Marilyn Monroe and George Michael. Nor is it unheard of for pharyngealization, which is technically a secondary articulation, to be used as if it is a phonation type, which is essentially what Semitic does. What is unattested is for both these ways of doing things to be used in the same language, but this could well be just a coincidence, as neither of them is terribly common to begin with. Dr. David L. White From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Nov 16 00:07:16 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 18:07:16 -0600 Subject: Motivating the Root Restrictions of PIE Message-ID: Dear Stanley and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stanley Friesen" Sent: Monday, November 13, 2000 8:17 PM > At 11:39 AM 11/11/00 -0600, David L. White wrote: >> According to Lehmann, PIE shows three kinds of root restrictions. Accepting >> for now the traditional interpretation and using "D" to represent any voiced >> plosive, "T" to represent any voiceless plosive, and "DH" to represent any >> voiced aspirate plosve, these are: >> 1) no /DeD/ >> 2) no /TeDH/ >> 3) no /DHeT/ >> correct, these restrictions (not to mention the /b/-gap) do not make sense. >> So here is one way (the only way I can see) that they could make sense. >> 1) The voiced plosives were orginally not voiced but >> pharyngealized. >> 2) The voiceless plosives were orginally laryngealized (which is >> not the same as glottalized). >> 3) The voiced aspirates were as traditionally posited, >> technically murmured. > I suspect that a slightly different set of alternatives can cover most of > the same problems. > 1. The traditional voiced plosives were actually voiceless unaspirated > plosives. > 2. The traditional voiceless plosives were actually voiceless *aspirated* > plosives. > 3. The traditional voiced aspirates were either simple voiced plosive or > voiced fricatives. [PR] This conforms very closely to my own views with the exception that I would add: 4. The traditional voiceless aspirates were voiceless fricatives. Pat From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Thu Nov 16 04:05:43 2000 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 22:05:43 -0600 Subject: Motivating the Root Restrictions of PIE Message-ID: To explain the well know restrictions of PIE roots, >> 1) no /DeD/ >> 2) no /TeDH/ >> 3) no /DHeT/ , David L White proposed: >>So here is one way (the only way I can see) that they could make sense. >> 1) The voiced plosives were orginally not voiced but pharyngealized. >> 2) The voiceless plosives were orginally laryngealized (which is not >> the same as glottalized). >> 3) The voiced aspirates were as traditionally posited, technically >> murmured. Surely he can't mean that *all* of these applied: what sort of typological system would that be, with pharyngealized, laryngealized, and murmured stops, but no other kind? Stanley Friesen rejected this proposal, saying: >I suspect that a slightly different set of alternatives can cover most of >the same problems. >1. The traditional voiced plosives were actually voiceless unaspirated >plosives. >2. The traditional voiceless plosives were actually voiceless *aspirated* >plosives. >3. The traditional voiced aspirates were either simple voiced plosive or >voiced fricatives. This set of alternatives hardly seems "slightly different" to me. SF continued: >At the very least this avoids the typological issues. That depends on which alternative is chosen in the third series: while a system with voiced stops (possibly with fricative allophones) is typologically impeccable, voiced fricative phonemes would be at least very unusual for a system lacking corresponding voiceless fricative phonemes. Pax Domini semper vobiscum. Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at memphis.edu University of Memphis From dlwhite at texas.net Thu Nov 16 03:20:40 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 21:20:40 -0600 Subject: Problems with DLW's "Motivating the Root Restrictions of PIE" Message-ID: The problem (that I see) with reinterpreting voicing (in obstruents) as pharyngealization is that in addition to predicting a /b/-gap it would also predict a /gw/-gap, which does not occur. This problem can, I think, be solved by positing that the labio-velars where "originally" (at the time the root restrictions evolved) uvulars, and were only later reanalyzed as labio-velars, due to some phonetic similarity involving lowered F2 in both cases, though uvulars are primarily characterized by raised F1, and only secondarily by lowered F2. Dr. David L. White From dlwhite at texas.net Thu Nov 16 03:34:04 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 21:34:04 -0600 Subject: Observation on the Laryngeals Message-ID: It is interesting that these affect only /e/, leaving original /o/ alone. What this suggests, very strongly as far as I can see, is that the laryngeals affected tongue-position, not general acoustics. Otherwise a back/rounding (from H3) of /e/ and a fronting (from H1) of /o/ should have produced more or less the same result. This in turn suggests that the laryngeals were not really laryngeals in the sense that that term is traditionally intended (sounds produced behind the velum) but rather were, as various German linguists these days suggest, dorsal sounds of the normal kind, produced in front of the velum. Thus the original effects would have been motivated by articulation, not perception, and the resistiance of /o/ (reminiscent of Greek vowel contraction, where /o/ dominates /e/) can be explained. This would, however, be a pretty much fatal blow to attempts to connect IE laryngeals with what might be called true laryngeals in Semitic, and therefore to Nostratic. (Please, let's not get into that.) Dr. David L. White From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Thu Nov 16 04:21:59 2000 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 22:21:59 -0600 Subject: More on dental fricatives Message-ID: David L. White wrote: > Perhaps I am merely displaying my ignorance (or lack of full >comprehension of previous missives), but aren't positional considerations >relevant here? Does Spanish theta (when not from /d/) occur finally? Yes, in words such as _luz_ 'light', _vez_ 'occasion' < Lat. _lu:cem_, _vicem_. Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at memphis.edu University of Memphis From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Nov 16 10:21:53 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 10:21:53 +0000 Subject: More on dental fricatives Message-ID: David White writes: [LT, on Basque] >> but the curious thing is that they accept phonetic theta when >> it represents Spanish /d/, but not when it represents Spanish theta. > Perhaps I am merely displaying my ignorance (or lack of full > comprehension of previous missives), but aren't positional considerations > relevant here? Does Spanish theta (when not from /d/) occur finally? Yes, though the frequency is not high, except in names: 'sheaf', 'time, occasion', 'voice', 'chess', 'light', 'cross', and all those Spanish surnames like , , , , , and . There are also some Basque place names which get final theta in Spanish, an example being Spanish for Basque . Spanish 'voice' is borrowed into Basque as , with a laminal sibilant, and not with theta, or sometimes as , with the more normal (in final position) laminal affricate. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Nov 16 14:18:29 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 09:18:29 -0500 Subject: More on dental fricatives In-Reply-To: <000501c04df6$c8af5040$3f2863d1@texas.net> Message-ID: You're right, (in areas where it occurs) /-_DH_/ > /-_TH_/ only occurs finally --at the end of words or syllable final before nasals (I can't think of any other consonants that might follow ) >> but the curious thing is that they accept phonetic theta when >> it represents Spanish /d/, but not when it represents Spanish theta. > Perhaps I am merely displaying my ignorance (or lack of full >comprehension of previous missives), but aren't positional considerations >relevant here? Does Spanish theta (when not from /d/) occur finally? >Perhaps in acronyms, and that is what I missed, due to the trauma of >election night. But from what little I know, it seems that perhaps the >where is as important as the what, so to speak. > Dr. David L. White Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Nov 16 14:24:24 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 09:24:24 -0500 Subject: More on dental fricatives In-Reply-To: <004201c04e7e$f2631740$9c03703e@edsel> Message-ID: I think you're missing the point. In standard Spanish is ALWAYS fricative /_DH_/ except when sentence initial (or after a pause in a sentence), after /l/ & after /n/ The variant forms occur in syllable final [snip ] >[Ed Selleslagh] >This pronunciation of d as edh is quite frequent, not only in final positions, >but it is by no means arbitrary and I haven't been able yet to figure out the >rules. A very similar phenomenon is that of b being pronounced as fricative v >in certain positions (e.g. Avraham Lincoln in Spanglish), You mean /aBHraNG liNGkoNG/? :> > even by native >speakers who "can't" pronounce fricative v knowingly. Two cases of >non-phonemic >alternate pronunciation?? Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Nov 16 14:31:18 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 09:31:18 -0500 Subject: More on dental fricatives In-Reply-To: <004101c04e7e$f1f53a40$9c03703e@edsel> Message-ID: >[Ed] more like a thibilant :> >I would guess that this is because in Castilian theta (written as c or z) is >considered a sibilant of sorts. In the Americas it is pronounced /s/ anyway. [snip] Spanish are from Old Spanish /c, DZ/. Some try to assign a clean dichotomy of < /c/ & < /DZ/ but a check of the various spellings doesn't seem to allow that Someone more knowledgeable than I am can elaborate on voiced vs. unvoiced affricates in Old Spanish or whether dialect had anything to do with it >[Ed] >This brings us back to the old discussion about the origins of the two >sibilants s/theta in Castilian (the often heard idea is that it comes from an >affricated s) and its possible relationship to the two (apical/laminal) >sibilants written as s/z in Basque. After all, Castilian originated in the >fringe of the Basque speaking area. Remember also my remark about the >Castilian adjective Madrile?o, with an l like in Basque 'Madril'. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From lmfosse at elender.hu Wed Nov 15 21:05:34 2000 From: lmfosse at elender.hu (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 22:05:34 +0100 Subject: SV: Elamite Message-ID: Anthony Appleyard [SMTP:mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk] skrev 14. november 2000 15:37: > How likely is the supposed connection between Elamite and Dravidian? Apparently not very likely. The American scholar McAlpin suggested such a connection and tried to establish arguments for it, but his work has been rejected by leading Dravidianists. Best regards, Lars Martin Fosse Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114, 0674 Oslo Norway Phone: +47 22 32 12 19 Mobile phone: +47 90 91 91 45 Fax 1: +47 22 32 12 19 Fax 2: +47 85 02 12 50 (InFax) Email: lmfosse at online.no From Georg at home.ivm.de Thu Nov 16 18:49:48 2000 From: Georg at home.ivm.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 19:49:48 +0100 Subject: Elamite In-Reply-To: <6079D1033C3@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: >How likely is the supposed connection between Elamite and Dravidian? As an (obvious) non-specialist, I may throw in a few remarks: So far, the only *substantial* work to demonstrate this relationship is McAlpins's TPhilSoc work of 1981, which I have recently had between my hands. I don't know much Dravidian, and I don't know Elamite. *But*: McAlpin does *not* compare a haphazard list of words which somehow resemble each other. He is at pains to find regularity, and - although some comparisons do look a bit, say, not-first-class, when it comes to semantics - it looks like he found a great deal of it. On Dravidian: he is an expert, holding (or having hold 20 years ago) a chair in Dravidian studies. On Elamite, I cannot comment on his expertise, but, in the work, he seems to be able to do a lot of necessary homework, i.e.: he cites Elamite texts at length, arguing for specific functions of some affixes from context. He is aware of chronological layers of Elamite texts. On the whole, he seems to have familiarized himself quite thoroghly with the language (including to learn how to read it and interpret actual primary sources). What struck me as best in his work is that he is eager to find cognate morphology (fulfilling the requirement of finding polydimensional paradigmaticity) and seems to succeed in that. Moreover, some of his sound-laws work in affoxes as well, i.e. once they are found, a lot of morphology seems to fall into place. Given all that, McAlpin's attempt looks very good and inspiring. I'*m not aware, whether there have been any reactions from the Dravidianist and/or Elamicist communities, and what their criticisms, if any, were. His conclusion is, quite surprisingly, that Elamite is just another Dravidian language, or, if I remember correctly, that it is even closer to (most of) Dravidian, than Brahui is. What could be done now, would be to check his Elamite data with the fine and comprehensive dictionary of Hinz', which was published after McAlpin's work, and anything which has been published on E. grammar since (those cuneiform-languages are really moving targets ...). That's everything I, as a non-connoisseur of both language (families) should say. In method and spirit of approach it looks *miles above* what Greenberg, Ruhlen and the whole lot are able to produce. But it could be wrong, nevertheless, let's hear the experts. StG -- Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstra?e 7 D-53111 Bonn FRG Tel./Fax +49-228-691332 From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Nov 17 05:04:15 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 00:04:15 EST Subject: Elamite Message-ID: In a message dated 11/15/2000 2:33:21 PM, mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk writes: << How likely is the supposed connection between Elamite and Dravidian? [ Moderator's note: Mr. Appleyard's query is in response to Steve Long's post of 3 Nov 2000: > Apparently a characteristic of "Elamite" is that the texts that are > readable (e.g., the Behistun inscription) are "like Ottoman Turkish, made > up of many borrowed words, particularly Persian and Semitic." Early > "Elamite" texts have not been deciphered. >> The foremost mentioned work in terms of making the Elamite-Dravidian connection is David McAlpin's "Proto-Elamian-Dravidian: the evidence and its implications" (1981). (See also "Elamite and Dravidian: Further evidence of relationship" (With discussion by M.B. Emeneau, W.H. Jacobsen, F.B.J. Kuiper, H.H. Paper, E. Reiner, R. Stopa, F. Vallat, R.W. Wescott, and a reply by McAlpin) 16 Current Anthropology (1975); also, N. Lahovary, Dravidian Origins and the West (Madras,1957) -- notes structural similarities in the Dravidian, Sumerian and Elamite languages.) One problem is, once again, that the supposed "proto-Elamite" language of the pre-cuneiform inscriptions is still undeciphered. This leaves open the opinion that the similarities between later cuneiform Elamite and Dravidian are the result of borrowings -- this Elamite showing a great deal of foreign influence otherwise. This is why Kamil Zvelebil, Possehl and other Dravidian-Tamil scholars refer to the relationship with Elamite as being "poorly understood." Bernard Sergent -- a proponent of the idea that Harappan-Indus was Dravidian -- in "Genesis of India" (1997) apparently also takes the position that the isoglosses cited by McAlpin can be explained "through contact rather than common origin." It seems the main commonality between Elamite and Dravidian is that they are both agglutinating. Proto-Dravidian however has been reconstructed as exclusively suffixal while Elamite apparently is not strict about the location of the lexical root. McAlfin also found a number of common agricultural terms that suggested that Proto-Elam-Dravidian separated after "neolithization." Much of the cuneiform texts are however heavily influenced by Semitic, Persian and possibly even Turkic -- suggesting that Dravidian-like elements may have been transfered in a number of ways. The pictographic "proto-Elamite" script itself apparently shows some affinities with Harappan scripts, but also shares some common elements with Anatolian and Sumerian scripts. The Harappan scripts have not been deciphered according to any consensus. >From what I can see there is no clear consensus that Elamite and Dravidian were the same or related languages. BTW - in the category of credibility of ancient historians - Herodotus scored big points by matching almost perfectly the report regarding Darius the Great given on the Behistun (or Bisutun) Stone located in modern Iran. His list of Darius' local conspiratorial enemies was the first key to deciphering the official royal inscriptions written in three undeciphered languages -- Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. Regards, Steve Long From milan.rezac at utoronto.ca Thu Nov 16 09:45:34 2000 From: milan.rezac at utoronto.ca (milan.rezac at utoronto.ca) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 04:45:34 -0500 Subject: The Germanic substrate - knives? In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.1.20001115001915.00b1dc50@voruta.vu.lt> Message-ID: The vowels are a problem. I think OCS shows the hard yer for _okuno_; the Finnish borrowing is _akkuna_ < *_okuno_ (dial., for std. _ikkuna_). So PSlv. *okuno. That makes a lot of sense as a derivative of IE. *okw-, *okw-no- > *okuno-: cp. Greek op-, omma < *okw-mnt- 'eye', Lat. oculus, etc. A connection with Russ. _kinut'_ is improbable because of the vowels: _kinut'_ < kynOti (O=syllabic nasal), best connected with kyv- (something like 'move in a swinging fashion'), sc. *kyv-nO- > kynO-. Interestingly, the Gothic word for window is auga-dauro 'eye-door', English window < Old Norse vind-auga 'wind-eye'. On Wed, 15 Nov 2000, Kastytis Beitas wrote: > But I have one fresh crazy idea, based on this *kn- thing. :-) > There is Russian word okno 'window; opening, orifice, hole'. Usually it is > explained as derivative from Slavonic oko 'eye'. But there is other > possibility. > There are some Russian words with initial o-, where this o is a prefix. For > example: .... > Idea is that Russian okno 'window' is actually o-kno, where kn- means > something (hole, opening etc) that is cut by knife or punched by some sharp > or similar implement... And this kn- in okno is maybe the lonely last relic > in Russian... His nearest relative may be is Russian verb kinut' 'to cast, > throw'. Other group of related words are words with gn- (Russian gniot etc) > and gin- ... > Kastytis Beitas From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com Thu Nov 16 19:26:04 2000 From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 14:26:04 -0500 Subject: The Germanic substrate - knives? In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.1.20001115001915.00b1dc50@voruta.vu.lt> Message-ID: Imaginative etymology, but this word is spelled in a late 10th cent. East Slavic text with a back jer, i.e., oku^no, which is most likely continued by the modern Russian genitive pl. . A derivative of "eye" as a word for "window" suggests Old Norse , literally, "wind-eye," whence English , Irish , etc. Jim Rader > But I have one fresh crazy idea, based on this *kn- thing. :-) > There is Russian word okno 'window; opening, orifice, hole'. Usually it is > explained as derivative from Slavonic oko 'eye'. But there is other > possibility. > Idea is that Russian okno 'window' is actually o-kno, where kn- means > something (hole, opening etc) that is cut by knife or punched by some sharp > or similar implement... And this kn- in okno is maybe the lonely last relic > in Russian... His nearest relative may be is Russian verb kinut' 'to cast, > throw'. Other group of related words are words with gn- (Russian gniot etc) > and gin- ... > Kastytis Beitas From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Nov 17 15:43:59 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 09:43:59 -0600 Subject: The Germanic substrate - knives? Message-ID: Dear Steve and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Monday, November 13, 2000 11:53 PM > In a message dated 11/11/2000 9:19:50 PM, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: > << You make a very interesting point regarding I think of knife in > the sense of "cut, tear, strike, kill" but I can see how "flesher, scraper" > can work>> > Well, the factuality of these supposed non-IE words is often repeated and > without question. In fact many have dead ringers with clear etymologies in > other IE languages. It seems the connections between them however have been > discounted either because of bad definitions or because of the sound laws -- > which of course should not make us blind to obvious similarities that are > impossible to assign to coincidence. There are more of these words I'd > like to address. [PR] It was the ambiguity of headings like *gen- in Pokorny that first started me looking at proposals for Nostratic; however, I now believe I may have come close to disambiguating: pre-Ablaut-IE *gAn, 'press together'; pre-Ablaut-IE *g(^)En-, 'puncture' -> 'penetrate sexually' pre-Ablaut-IE *gOn-, 'twist' This really does not cover all the meanings because IE *g also is the residue of an earlier velar nasal, [ng], which may have passed through a stage of [G] before merging with [g]: pre-Ablaut-IE *ngAn, 'tube'; pre-Ablaut-IE *ng(^)En-, 'lump' pre-Ablaut-IE *ngOn-, 'ball' My best guess would be that the 'knife' words started out as pre-Ablaut-IE *g(^)En-, and originally signified 'daggers'. 'Cut' seems to be universally attached to pre-Ablaut-IE *k(h)Ol-. 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/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ec at ec hecc, vindga meipi a netr allar nmo, geiri vnda~r . . . a ~eim mei~i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rstom renn." (Havamal 138) From CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU Thu Nov 16 20:48:43 2000 From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU (CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 14:48:43 -0600 Subject: thy thigh etc. Message-ID: On Tuesday Robert Whiting responded at great length to my post on the English interdental fricatives, in which I attempted to draw some lessons from the German non-distinction between [x] and [c,] in _Kuchen_ 'cake' vs. _Kuhchen_ 'little cow', which I analyzed as /ku:x at n/ vs. /ku:+x at n/. The gist of his argument seems to be that if it is fair to use phonological boundaries (which he identifies as always ultimately morphological boundaries), then it is also fair to use morphological and lexical information to account for the distribution of the intedental fricatives [T] and [D] in English. He overlooks a significant difference between morphological -> phonological boundaries and other types of morphological information: boundaries can be located precisely between morphemes. It is therefore to show them in phonological representations, for their position (and type) seems to matter for the phonetic realization. But information such as "native/foreign" or "content/function word" cannot be so located and cannot be described in any real sense as "morphological", but rather as lexical and (for the latter, at least) "syntactic". There is no inconsistency in saying that boundaries are phonologically relevant while other information is not. (I do not mean to imply that boundaries are *always* relevant while other information *never* is, only that there is no inconsistency in treating them differently.) A few other points: How did _thy_ and _thigh_ differ before the former developed a voiced fricative? Easy: the Old English forms were _thi:n_ and _the:oh_, where the final -h represented a velar fricative. The loss of the final consonants in these words seems to be much later than the initial voicing. As the possibility of a three-way /ph : p : b/ contrast: While I agree that English speakers tend to hear unaspirated [p] as /b/ (at least, if the stop has a lenis pronunciation; the fortis stops of the Romance languages are normally perceived as /p/), systems with this contrast are by no means rare. It was found in ancient Greek and a variety of modern languages. It could not *on typological grounds* be ruled out for some future version of English. And finally, I have read Chomsky & Halle. Seems to me they thought that had proved we didn't need phonemes to do phonology. and that various problems (of the type to which the thy thigh controversy belongs) could be resolved if we accepted "minor rules". Well, that's very nice, but that's not the framework in which we have been arguing, so I don't see why you invoked them. Regards and peace Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures connolly at memphis.edu University of Memphis From dlwhite at texas.net Thu Nov 16 13:19:31 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 07:19:31 -0600 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Look, either we admit that English speakers could coin /lith/ vs /lidh/, whereas Japanese speakers could not coin /biri/ versus /bili/ or we (somewhat obstructionistically) do not. If we admit it, there must be an explanation. The view of "the phonemic principle" that I and several others have been pushing provides this, while the view that Mr. Whiting has been pushing does not. I personally prefer to construe the concept of "phoneme" in such a way that meaningful and accurate predictions, which yield an increase in understanding of linguistic behavior (even hypothetical), can be made. The sort of distributional standards that are commonly used to determine phonemes can fail to predict what speakers are sensitive to and able to control. For example there is in one African language (I forget which, but I think it is in the Nuer Dinka area) which has predictable long-range nasalization that speakers are sensitive to. The long-range is the key, because the nasalization, though abstractly predictable, is not predictable from phonetic implementation. (Speakers do not really feel compelled to open their velums the whole way, as opposed to the way that English speakers feel compelled to aspirate under certain circumstances.) In a case like this, the question of whether nasalization is or is not phonemic depends on what we want the word to capture. I prefer it to capture speakers abilities, enabling us to predict (among other things) what coinages are possible and what are not. Mr. Whiting evidently prefers it to capture distributional truths, among other things. As I said before, perhaps over-charitably, we will have to agree to differ. It should be noted that the matter of boundaries, how many types there are and how (other than elegance of description) they are to be detected, is not so clear as some would have us think. For example, it is fairly common in Old English for what we think of as the first element of a compound to be written as a separate word. Nor is it clear that the sort of boundaries we have been talking about are properly described as "morphological", as any account of phonetics and phonology described in their own terms would at the very least have to include a recognition of word boundaries. But if we admit that at least there are stronger "word-like" boundaries on the one hand and things quite a lot weaker than that on the other, then the matter of "kuchen" can be handled by treating the diminutive as "ku-chen" or even, more radically, "ku chen", with "chen" as a somewhat exceptional word (given a looser definition of the word "word", which does not after all have a revealed meaning). The pronunciation referred to does indicate the presence of a strong boundary of a fundamentally different type, general rather than merely morphological, compared to the boundary in something like Latin "paribus" (however we divide that). Dr. David L. White From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Nov 16 13:58:17 2000 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 07:58:17 -0600 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Dear Robert and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Whiting" Sent: Tuesday, November 14, 2000 10:36 AM > On Sun, 05 Nov 2000 CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU wrote: >>>On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, David L. White wrote: >>>> For English /th/ vs/ /dh/, the question to ask is something >>>> like "In a story where two brothers were named "Lith" and "Lidh", >>>> would an audience be able to keep them apart?" The answer is >>>> clearly yes, regardless of the various other consideration that >>>> some have noted, therefore the distinction is (not surprisingly) >>>> phonemic. > >Bob Whiting replied: > I would have said that contrasts that can be accounted for by > rules are not phonemic contrasts. Back in the Early Logocene, when this thread started, the question was posed as to whether Ablaut variation in IE roots established *e and *o as phonemes in IE. Am I correct in assuming that, for you, at least, an IE *Ce/oC- does not establish *e and *o as IE phonemes? 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/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ec at ec hecc, vindga meipi a netr allar nmo, geiri vnda~r . . . a ~eim mei~i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rstom renn." (Havamal 138) From sarima at friesen.net Thu Nov 16 16:16:32 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 08:16:32 -0800 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 06:36 PM 11/14/00 +0200, Robert Whiting wrote: >So you can't just start shifting contrasts around one at a time. >You have to consider the effect on rest of the phonological >system. If we wanted to use [p] and [p'] contrastively, we would >probably have to give up /b/ as a phoneme. And the same is true This is not necessarily true. Classical Greek had all three sounds as distinct phonemes: pi, phi, and beta. (And similarly for the other stops: the consonants that are *now* pronounced as voiceless fricatives were originally voiceless aspirates). >And I still say that the fact that a person can hear and >recognize the difference between two sounds does not ipso facto >make those sounds phonemes of his language. I can hear the >difference between bright l and dark l. You might say that I can >only do this because I have studied Russian and Arabic. But I I think this very likely - as I certainly cannot normally distinguish them (except when I am listening *very* carefully, and the speaker is speaking slowly and clearly). Nor can most people I know. >The problem is that 'thigh' and 'thy' were always different >words. So the question is, for those who insist that differences >in meaning must mean the presence of different phonemes, what This does not sound like any rule I have ever heard suggested before. (Though in the case in point the distinction seems to have originally been phonemic accent). >I have explained my reasons for not considering 'thigh' and 'thy' >a minimal pair above. And I find it unconvincing. The categorical difference may once have been significant, but I doubt it is currently "real" in the minds of most speakers, which is a minimal requirement for some linguistic pattern to be available for use in phonemic rules. > My reasons for not considering 'ether' / >'either' a minimal pair are similar (ultimately relying on the >fact that the pronunciations are required by rules), but if you >prefer, I could invent a silent phoneme that blocks the voicing >of intervocalic [th] in loanwords (there is no need for this Such a rule can *only* exist if normal, non-specialist speakers "know" that the words belong to different categories (even if they do not know what the categories originally represented). Speakers cannot apply a rule based on some category they are unaware of. Since I see no *synchronic* evidence that any non-linguist feels these words to belong to different relevant categories, there is no way such a rule could exist in the minds of such speakers. Yes, the pattern *exists*, but *most* living speakers are *not* *aware* *of* *it*, so they cannot have any rule involving it. >Everyone seems to object to my using these rules to determine >whether the sounds involved are phonemes or not, saying "you >can't use these rules because they aren't phonological rules." Not me. I object on the grounds that the average English speaker is unaware of the antecedents in the suggested rules, and so is incompetent to apply them. In order to enable these supposed rules you must *first* show by some set of behavioral differences that the average speaker is *aware* of the distinctions the rule makes use of. If the difference in pronunciation is the *only* difference in behavior, it requires fewer theoretical constructs (per Occam's Razor) to simply posit the sounds involved are phonemes. >development of /z/ and /v/. All I say is "where is the evidence?" >Where are all the contrasts that would show unequivocally that >that [th] and [dh] are phonemes as there are contrasts that show >that /z/ and /v/ are phonemes. And I don't consider 'thigh' and >'thy' or 'ether' and 'either' any more indicative of the >phonemicity of [th] and [dh] than 'Kuhchen' and 'Kuchen' are >indicative of the phonemicity of German [c,] and [x]. The difference here is that the basis for this rule is patently and obviously known by all speakers of German, since the -chen suffix is still *productive* in German. Thus it is clear on *independent* *grounds* that the speakers are aware of the difference in structure (or category) of the two words. Thus we know *a* *priori* that this difference is available for use in various rules. None of the suggested rules you have proposed meet this requirement. They almost all involve *dia*chronic patterns that few living speakers are even *aware* of, unless they are unusually educated in linguistic matters (such as all of us here). >convincing. For instance, one might say that [x] could be used >as a phoneme in English by forming new words where it contrasts >with /k/ or /g/. Since these words could be formed without any The difference here is that: A. All speakers would consider the word to be "odd" and think it sounds foreign. B. A great many speakers would hear it as having a /k/. (Check out how most people perceive German words with [x]: 'ik leebe dik' is how most English speakers pronounce "ich liebe dich"). >between [th] and [dh]. It's a good thing the pronunciation is >predictable. Only if you are a linguist and know what categories the words *used* to belong to. >One thing you can say for sure though is that never >represents [dh] (except in the name of the character 'edh'). So? The natural spelling for [dh] in English is not . >Otherwise it is regularly realized as [d] ('dhow', 'dharma', >'jodhpurs') and generally indicates a foreign word (except, of >course, in native compounds where it represents two sounds [e.g., >'madhouse', 'deadhead', etc.]). Incidentally, I'm still looking >for an explanation of why words from languages with phonemic /dh/ >don't come into English with [dh]. It seems curious, what with Well, the examples you give above do not establish this point. Those are Indic words, and the there represents a "voiced aspirate" (or murmured voiced stop) not a voiced fricative. You need to find *recent* borrowing from language with phonemic [dh] to establish this "fact". (Recent is necessary because any borrowing prior to the establishment of [dh] as a phoneme would *naturally* be treated that way). >Maybe not, but you don't get any help from the orthography on how >to pronounce them. And although there are only five vowel So? Pronunciation is prior, orthography secondary. Writing is just a set of "hints" as to how to say something. Some writing systems are more explicit about these hints than others. English falls in the middle, it is less explicit than Russian or German or Latin, but more so than Hebrew or Heiroglyphic Egyptian. Indeed unpointed Hebrew shows just *how* "incomplete" a writing system can be and still remain adequate for representing a language. People normally learn words not from *reading* but from *listening* - certainly during the first five years of life, and largely even afterwards. How a particular word is written is largely arbitrary. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From sarima at friesen.net Thu Nov 16 16:28:17 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 08:28:17 -0800 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 10:36 AM 11/15/00 +0200, Robert Whiting wrote: >stop you also release a puff of air. So it is not surprising >that it is very difficult to contrast final aspirated and >unaspirated stops. Difficult, but I am not sure it is impossible. Did Classical Greek lack final tau's? If it had them, then it constitutes an example of a language that had this contrast. >On the other hand, if the brothers were named Till and T'ill, the >audience would have no trouble telling them apart. It would be OK, so try Till (unaspirated) and Dill. This distinction, also, *can* be made, since some languages *do* make it. >easier if the audience were Chinese, because this distinction is >phonemic in Chinese. But an English speaking audience would >still be able to tell them apart. They would probably hear the >initial unaspirated [t] as [d] (the puff of air that constitutes >the aspiration delays the onset of voicing for the following >vowel; without this puff of air, voicing begins earlier and >partly overlaps the preceding consonant). Not perhaps a >full-bodied [d], but a sound with enough voicing to make it sound >more like [d] than [t]. The English speaking audience would just >assume that one brother was named Till and the other Dill. Does >this prove that [t] and [t'] are already phonemes in English? >Hardly. No, in proves that in English the unaspirated stops are normally allophones of the voiced stops, not the unvoiced. >> And this is despite the fact that both the pair /r/ and /l/ and >> the pair /t/ and /t'/ *can* be distinguished, since some >> languages do exactly that. >Oriental speakers are notorious for not being able to distinguish >[r] from [l]. And nobody can really articulate final unaspirated >stops without contortions. I am not sure of this. Can somebody give me the scoop on Classical Greek? Or how about Sanskrit? Did it have final unaspirated voiceless stops? >Actually you'd probably do better with Lithth or Liththe. But >the point was that whatever way you come up with for expressing >[dh] it will have to be something that is not used now. Once >[th] and [dh] can contrast without any conditioning whatsoever, >there will have to be some way to distinguish them graphically or >else you will have a completely opaque writing similar to . So? I see no reason that such a change would be *necessary*. As long as people recognize the words as written, does it matter if they accurately represent the pronunciation? Oh, sure, a distinction in spelling would make learning to read and write *easier* - but that is hardly a *requirement* for a writing system. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From bronto at pobox.com Sat Nov 18 07:09:44 2000 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 23:09:44 -0800 Subject: admin: duplicates? Message-ID: I got two copies of several postings today. Anyone else? -- Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/ [ Moderator's response: My apologies to all. Due to human error, a batch job which should have sent out only 8 (new) messages instead re-sent 20 which had already been sent. Because it was automated, I was not aware of the problem until much too late to do anything about it. --rma ] From dlwhite at texas.net Fri Nov 17 21:35:48 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 15:35:48 -0600 Subject: Franks as Arians Message-ID: About the Franks having been, at one point, Arians, is that in Gregory, as I imagine it must be? Most of my secondary sources are ambiguous, and one speaks of Clovis as "a barbarian king who contemplated conversion", which under ordinary circumstances would be taken to imply, if perhaps a bit weakly, that he was pagan. Not that I doubt it very much, that the Franks were at one point Arians, just a little bit ... 5%. Dr. David L. White From dlwhite at texas.net Fri Nov 17 22:28:02 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 16:28:02 -0600 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: > << the Franks were critically (to their success in forging alliances with > the Church) not Arians. >> > -- correct. They were, in fact, still pagan at the time they set up shop > in Gaul. When they converted, it was to Catholicism. Upon further examination, only two of my secondary sources say anything explicit about the matter, and they both say that the Franks were pagans before converting to Catholicism. 1) Hoyt and Chodorow, "Europe in the Middle Ages", p. 72: [Clovis] had an inestimable advantage of being, with the rest of the Franks, merely a heathen rather than a hated Arian heretic. 2) Cantor, "The Civilization of the Middle Ages", p. 110: Unlike the Visigoths, [the Franks] had not been converted by Arian missionaries ... So at this point until and unless I see otherwise in some primary source (is there any besides Gregory?), I am not going to believe it. But if I have perpetuated the errors of these scholars, I apologize. Dr. David L. White From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Nov 18 18:37:05 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 13:37:05 EST Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: In a message dated 11/17/00 10:46:51 PM Mountain Standard Time, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: > The Franks were evidently Arians until Clovis converted to Catholicism after > the pope's representative promised him victory -- no, they were _pagans_ until Clovis converted to Catholicism. They worshipped the standard Germanic pantheon: Wothan, Thunor, Nerthus and so forth. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Nov 18 18:43:35 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 13:43:35 EST Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: In a message dated 11/17/00 10:46:51 PM Mountain Standard Time, rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes: << The Franks were evidently Arians until Clovis converted to Catholicism after the pope's representative promised him victory >> -- incidentally, the 5th-century AD continental Germanics still had Tiw/Tiwaz as their primary god; a derivative of the PIE "sky" or "sky father" deity, by the usual *d ==>t. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Nov 18 03:04:57 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 22:04:57 EST Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: In a message dated 11/17/00 3:22:26 PM Mountain Standard Time, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: << > To what extent did replacement spread through Turkish controlled lands > beyond Anatolia, depending on what you mean by Anatolia? >> -- quite extensively. Eg., the population of Bulgaria was 40% Turkish at the time of the Bulgarian War of Independence in the mid 1870's. Crete had a 1/3 Turkish minority in 1898; there were other substantial Turkish minorities -- in Thessaly and Thrace, for instance -- and as far northwest as Serbia before the beginning of the various Balkan wars of independence starting in roughly the 1820's. Kemal Attaturk was born in Salonika, which is now a fairly homogenous Greek city. From a.rosta at newmail.net Sat Nov 18 04:54:07 2000 From: a.rosta at newmail.net (And Rosta) Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 04:54:07 -0000 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Ross Clark: > From: Stanley Friesen [mailto:sarima at friesen.net] > At 05:05 PM 11/13/00 +1100, Tristan Jones wrote: >>> small. Maybe that inclusive elite thing might explain the success of spread >>> of Arabic over vast areas of Middle East and Africa, Mandarin and Cantonese >>> over huge areas of China, I think before the spread of Chinese Empire, >>> Austronesian Languages would have been spoken over large areas of Southern >>> China's Rice Growing Zones. >> I think this is fairly well established. Certainly there are still relict >> Austronesian languages in Southern China even today. > No. The only AN language in China today (apart from Taiwan of course) is > Tsat, spoken by a few thousand people on Hainan island, and it is a > relatively late intrusion from further south. That Chinese replaced > Austronesian languages as it expanded is quite possible, but none of them > survived on the mainland. (Not really relevant to the elite dominance thread or to IE list, but...:) Laurent Sagart told me a few years back that he'd published a hypothesis that Chinese is AN (I don't know whether the Tibetan half of S-T is), and it expanded its territory at the expense of its close AN kin, the spread being due to a 'millet cult'. Unfortunately I no longer have the reference for this, the paper dealing with China as the AN homeland (because my university now and again likes to delete its employees' saved email for them). (If anyone would care to point me to literature discussing this issue (off-list, if appropriate), I'd be most grateful.) --And Rosta. From summers at metu.edu.tr Sat Nov 18 11:50:58 2000 From: summers at metu.edu.tr (Geoffrey SUMMERS) Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 13:50:58 +0200 Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: Many thanks for your reply. I have commented on select parts. >> How many languages were spoken on the Central Plateau in, say, AD 1900? > The chief differences from today would have been a sizeable number of > Armenian-speakers, most of them massacred a few years later, and a > large number of Greek-speakers along the Aegean coast, almost all > of them expelled after the Greco-Turkish war. So far as I know, > the central plateau would not have been very different linguistically. I do not have figures to back up my impressions, surely someone does. Certainly sizeable number of Armenian speakers all over the central plateau, as evidenced by the writings of many European travellers, the presence of churches (mostly undocumented), and doubtless in the Ottoman defters. There was also a sizeable Greek (religion and language) population in central Cappadocia right down until the excahnge of populations in the early days of the Republic. I have understood that in the 19th century some of the "Greeks" were moving from villages into towns like Nevsehir. There were also Greek speakers in the Lake District. Much of the steppe was essentailly grazing land, transhumant Turkish even and some Kurdish speakers. I know nothing much about others, although I note that the written language of at least some of the Bektashi Order was Persian. In short, I doubt that Turkish was the dominant language on the Central Plateau in the early Middle Ages, and perhaps did not become so until the 18th or even the 19th century >> How long did the replacement take? > I simply don't know, and I don't know if anybody knows. Greek was > the prestige language before the Turkish conquest, but I've never > seen even a guess as to how many mother tongues were spoken in > Byzantine Anatolia, or as to how long any of these languages lasted > after the conquest. I would certainly be interested in finding out, > if anybody knows of any work on this topic. I am not able to help. >> To what extent did replacement spread through Turkish controlled lands >> beyond Anatolia, depending on what you mean by Anatolia? > Not very greatly, as far as I know, but then I was only talking > about Anatolia. But there were, and remain, many Turkish speakers in the Balkans. I have heard it claimed that there were more Turkish speakers in the Balkans in the 18th century than there were on the Anatolian plateau. Could anyone substantiate this? >> What was the Ottoman court language. > As far as I know, it was Ottoman Turkish. Someone jump on me if I am wrong here, but I had thought that the court language was Persian and that the court rather looked down on Turkish. Music, minature painting and other things also had a strong eastern flavour. If I am correct, when did the change occur? Geoff -- Geoffrey SUMMERS Dept. of Political Science & Public Administration, Middle East Technical University, Ankara TR-06531, TURKEY. Office Tel: (90) 312 210 2045 Home Tel/Fax: (90) 312 210 1485 The Kerkenes Project Tel: (90) 312 210 6216 http://www.metu.edu.tr/home/wwwkerk/ From Tristan at mail.scm-rpg.com.au Sat Nov 18 00:01:29 2000 From: Tristan at mail.scm-rpg.com.au (Tristan Jones) Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 11:01:29 +1100 Subject: Elite dominance theory vs. Practicality Message-ID: > I heard someone roll off 22 languages that reportedly were spoken > in the general area of modern day Hungary during the first millennium AD. > And of course the area of modern day Turkey may well have had similar > diversity before Ottoman Turkish became the "universal" language. 22 languages in Hungary, come on Hungary is only the size of Indiana state, 22 languages is a lot for a small region like that [ Moderator's comment: California was home to several dozen languages prior to European contact, as was the region of the United States called New England. This is not at all unusual. --rma ] From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Nov 18 03:09:03 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 22:09:03 EST Subject: Elite dominance theory vs. Practicality Message-ID: Before the battle of Manzikert in the late 11th century, as far as I know Anatolia spoke mainly Greek, with Kurdish and Armenian in the east. The old Anatolian languages -- Phyrgian, Isaurian, etc. -- were pretty well extinct by late Byzantine times. Of course, Hellenic colonization of Anatolia was also very old by then; the western fringe was settled by Greek-speakers in the early Iron Age, after the fall of Mycenaean civilization; and after Alexander's time Greek cities were established far into the interior, by Greek colonists settled there by various Hellenistic monarchs. Even the Pontine kings, who were Persian by origin, encouraged Hellenization. By the early Roman period Greek had become the predominant language in all the cities and towns and among the upper classes generally. Over the following centuries it gradually penentrated the rural zones east of the old areas of Greek settlement. From dlwhite at texas.net Sat Nov 18 00:08:13 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 18:08:13 -0600 Subject: Turkish Message-ID: >> How many languages were spoken on the Central Plateau in, say, AD 1900? > The chief differences from today would have been a sizeable number of > Armenian-speakers, most of them massacred a few years later, and a > large number of Greek-speakers along the Aegean coast, almost all > of them expelled after the Greco-Turkish war. So far as I know, > the central plateau would not have been very different linguistically. Dawkins(1916) is a study (mainly) of Cappadocian Greek, which was presumably still spoken when he was studying it. (I have it only second-hand, though it is on my too-long list of things to read. But my impression has always been his study was first-hand.) Cappadocia is in central Anatolia, more or less. Cappadocian Greek brings up many interesting issues in language transfer that are perhaps too off-subject to be worth going into. >> To what extent did replacement spread through Turkish controlled lands >> beyond Anatolia, depending on what you mean by Anatolia? > Not very greatly, as far as I know, but then I was only talking > about Anatolia. It's dominant in European Turkey, not surprisingly, and occurs in various islands in Bulgaria, esp. in the northeast. The Bulgarian perfect has apparently been remodeled as an inferentional through Turkish influence. (Because in many cases something like "It has snowed" is easily reconstrued (by a Turk anyway) as "Evidently it has snowed", "I infer it has snowed", or something of the sort.) This is, I think, difficult to explain if Turkish was not at one time more common in Bulgaria than it has been more recently. Dr. David L. White Message-ID: <000c01c05173$1aab59a0$366263d1 at texas.net> References: Subject: Dawkins Reference Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 09:20:35 -0600 Sorry. I meant to inclue this but forgot. It is: Dawkins, R. M. 1916. "Modern Greek in Asia Minor ..." Cambridge: University Press. Dr. David L. White From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sat Nov 18 03:15:37 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 22:15:37 EST Subject: English in Ireland Message-ID: In a message dated 11/17/00 4:16:26 PM Mountain Standard Time, dlwhite at texas.net writes: >One hundred thousand English arriving in Ireland over a hundred years is one >thousand per year, which is not proportionally significant. -- several hundred thousand English over a period of about 100 years. Several thousand a year, in a population of very limited size. Contemporary surveys indicate that the population of Ireland as a whole in this period dipped well below 1,000,000, particularly in the mid to late 17th century. Half the people in the island may well have died between the 1640's and 1680's; certainly over a third died, due to war and war-related famine and plague. And this was precisely the period of maximum English and Scottish-lowland immigration. The immigrants and their descendants numbered over 1/5th of the population by the early 18th century; and they were concentrated in precisely the eastern and northeastern zones where Gaelic first went extinct. And they were thinnest on the ground -- a mere layer of landlords -- in precisely the far western areas where Gaelic persisted for the longest period, and remains down to our time. The drastic shrinkage of Gaelic from western Ireland was a 19th-century phenomenon, largley post-1846, quite distinct from the Anglicization of the eastern half, which began in medieval times. >the triumph (so to speak) of English over Irish in Ireland is largely a >result of "elite dominance", not numerical preponderance. -- both, in fact. Elite dominance backed up by continuing contact with the English-speaking homeland, and by a steady and substantial immigration of native English-speakers. (And Lallans-speakers, if you want to get technical.) From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Wed Nov 22 11:08:33 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2000 11:08:33 GMT Subject: Elamite In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Stefan Georg wrote:- > ... McAlpin's ... conclusion is, quite surprisingly, that Elamite is just > another Dravidian language, or, if I remember correctly, that it is even > closer to (most of) Dravidian, than Brahui is. ... Before we compare things with Brahui, what came of a thread that was on this list or Nostratic list a while ago?, where someone claimed that, of the modern outlying northern Dravidian languages:- > The Brahui-speakers were descended from soldiers raised in Dravidian South > India and dumped in Baluchistan when they got due for discharge. > The Kurukh and Malto migrated from South India in recent centuries. > Thus, their languages are irrelevant when discussing ancient linguistics. Is this genuine? Or are these ideas derived from old legends of exotic origin such as an old writer who equated "Scot" and "Scythian", or legends that particular north European peoples or their kings or gods were descended from Greeks or Trojans? There is a discussion on gothic-l at egroups.com about how quickly among illiterate uneducated tradition all sorts of unlikely matter can get into tribal legends. From xavier.delamarre at free.fr Sat Nov 18 11:57:04 2000 From: xavier.delamarre at free.fr (Xavier Delamarre) Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 12:57:04 +0100 Subject: New books on Ancient Celts Message-ID: I mentionned, a few days ago, on 'the Continental Celtic List' two forthcoming books for the study of Continental Celtic linguistics : Lambert's RIG II-2 and my Gaulish Dictionary. We now have an other important book just issued (last week) about Ancient Celts : Venceslas KRUTA : "Les Celtes. Histoire et Dictionnaire. Des origines ? la romanisation et au christianisme." Robert Laffont (Paris), collection "Bouquins", Nov. 2000, 1005 pp. Price : 189 FRF (? 29 Euro). V. KRUTA is the leading editor, with PY LAMBERT of the journal "Etudes Celtiques" and professor of European prehistory in Sorbonne (EPHE). The book is divided in 3 parts : - pp 1-386 : "Les Celtes avant Rome et le Christianisme" (a linear description of the history of the Celts) - pp 387-876 : "Dictionnaire" (more than 2000 entries dealing with ethnonyms, anthroponyms, theonyms, toponyms, and main aspects of material civilisation) - pp 877-1003 : List of Classical Authors quoted, Bibliography, List of European Museums (with ph./fax/e-mail), Indices. KRUTA's book will be an indispensable tool for those interested in the history & archaeology of ancient Europe. The Dictionnaire will be a very pratical instrument to get quickly a reference & the main literature on a specific subject. An other important feature is the systematic inclusion of archaeological founds made in Central Europe, Bohaemia, Hungary, Slovenia etc. This is new and very welcome. However, Kruta being mainly an archaeologist, the weakest point of the book is clearly linguistics and mythology. His few linguistic statements are often outdated or even erroneous (e.g. Uolcae connected with Germ. Volk !, Eburo- translated 'boar' [rather 'yew'], no analysis of gutu-ater and druid- etc.). I hope that my "Dictionnaire" will provide a complement to this. The mythological entries, especially the Irish stuff, are clearly second-hand and cursory : for the T?in we are referred to Medb (9 short lines poorly informative) etc. The recent dictionary of Bernhard Maier "Dictionary of Celtic Religion & Culture" (Boydell Press 1997), transl. from the German, will give a useful complement. But we cannot blame Kruta for not being a linguist & mythologist. Each one has his one speciality. We often have the same problems in the discussions about Proto-Indo-European culture : the results of archaeologists (who usualy are not linguists) do not match those of the linguists (who are not archaeologists). I warmly recommend the book, published in the very handy & practical paperback collection "Bouquins". Xavier DELAMARRE Vaucresson > From v.ferreira at gmx.de Sat Nov 18 14:48:48 2000 From: v.ferreira at gmx.de (Vera Ferreira) Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 14:48:48 -0000 Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Mir=E2ndes?= Message-ID: Hi, I'm doing my doctorate at the University of Munich, in Germany, on the Portuguese language and its dialects. Now I'm looking for information about the second offial language in Portugal, namely Mirandjs (its origins, development, and actual state). Does any of you know where I can find such information? (Maybe you can send me some by email!! - I would be very pleased.) Vera Ferreira Institut f|r Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitdt M|nchen Email: v.ferreira at gmx.de From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Wed Nov 22 17:03:59 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2000 17:03:59 GMT Subject: Observation on the Laryngeals Message-ID: "David L. White" wrote:- > It is interesting that these affect only /e/, leaving original /o/ alone. > What this suggests, very strongly as far as I can see, is that the > laryngeals affected tongue-position, not general acoustics. Otherwise a > back/rounding (from H3) of /e/ and a fronting (from H1) of /o/ should have > produced more or less the same result. ... Hereinafter # is the voiceless version of ayin, as in the Arabic name "Mu#ammad", and is often written as h with a dot below, and in the Arabic alphabet as a thing like an inverted (= turned) "2" without dots. The effects of one sound on another seem to me to vary much according to each language's speakers' speech habits. E.g. single stop consonants between vowels stayed as stable as the Rock of Gibraltar in many languages for a very long time, but in one or another language (e.g. Hebrew and Gaelic) they started weakening to fricatives. In one language, vowels shift one way; in another language, the same vowels shift different ways. Likewise how # and ayin affect sounds around likely can vary between languages. I see no great objection to H1 H2 H3 being glottal-stop and # and ayin. If there were two H1's, as some say, the other H1 was likely the ordinary h sound as in English "hat". From dlwhite at texas.net Sat Nov 18 03:15:13 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 21:15:13 -0600 Subject: Final Theta in Spanish Message-ID: > You're right, (in areas where it occurs) /-_DH_/ > /-_TH_/ only > occurs finally --at the end of words or syllable final before nasals (I > can't think of any other consonants that might follow ) I meant theta from Latin /k/ before /i, e/, corresponding to various affricates and sibilants in other Romance. I was not aware (or had managed to forget) that in some cases (one might also note "paz") final vowels had been lost, pretty much destroying my developing argument, unless perhaps the present situation has been created by some sort of dialect mixture. Why are these words so rare, evidently? Should not all Latin 3rd declension nouns in /k/ show up with final theta in Spanish, if "lux" and "pax" do? I cannot at the moment think of any more, but there must have been more than 2 ... Dr. David L. White From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Nov 18 21:17:39 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 16:17:39 -0500 Subject: More on dental fricatives In-Reply-To: <01JWL2MQWAWSAM6LNQ@LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU> Message-ID: and "soft c" are /_TH_/ in only northern & Central Spain, of course in a few places in Spain and among some Central American speakers, > /_TH_/ >David L. White wrote: >> Perhaps I am merely displaying my ignorance (or lack of full >>comprehension of previous missives), but aren't positional considerations >>relevant here? Does Spanish theta (when not from /d/) occur finally? >Yes, in words such as _luz_ 'light', _vez_ 'occasion' < Lat. _lu:cem_, >_vicem_. >Leo A. Connolly Foreign Languages & Literatures >connolly at memphis.edu University of Memphis Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Nov 18 21:26:39 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 16:26:39 -0500 Subject: More on dental fricatives In-Reply-To: Message-ID: How are Spanish & (and "soft c") treated in loan words? Is always & always ? Do Spanish-speaking Basques use apical /S/ or laminal /s/? Is apical /S/ is dying out --or diminishing-- in Spain? Most Spaniards I've met (from northern and central Spain) in the US and Latin America use laminal /s/. Is this linked to social class or is it a generational thing? >David White writes: >[LT, on Basque] >>> but the curious thing is that they accept phonetic theta when >>> it represents Spanish /d/, but not when it represents Spanish theta. >> Perhaps I am merely displaying my ignorance (or lack of full >> comprehension of previous missives), but aren't positional considerations >> relevant here? Does Spanish theta (when not from /d/) occur finally? >Yes, though the frequency is not high, except in names: 'sheaf', > 'time, occasion', 'voice', 'chess', 'light', > 'cross', and all those Spanish surnames like , , >, , , and . There are also >some Basque place names which get final theta in Spanish, an example >being Spanish for Basque . >Spanish 'voice' is borrowed into Basque as , with a laminal >sibilant, and not with theta, or sometimes as , with the more >normal (in final position) laminal affricate. >Larry Trask Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From alderson+mail at panix.com Mon Nov 20 19:12:02 2000 From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2000 14:12:02 -0500 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <4.3.1.2.20001116081819.00b4b420@getmail.friesen.net> (message from Stanley Friesen on Thu, 16 Nov 2000 08:28:17 -0800) Message-ID: On 16 Nov 2000, Stanley Friesen (sarima at friesen.net) wrote: >> So it is not surprising that it is very difficult to contrast final >> aspirated and unaspirated stops. > Difficult, but I am not sure it is impossible. Did Classical Greek lack > final tau's? If it had them, then it constitutes an example of a language > that had this contrast. Classical Greek had a very limited set of permitted finals: All the vowels (5 short, 7 long), /Vn/, /Vs/, /Vps/ and /Vks/, where the two clusters involve neutralization of voicing and aspiration, as for example in /thriks/ "hair" where the genitive /trikhos/ undergoes Grassmann. In those cases where a dental would cluster with /s/, an old rule reduces the cluster simply to /s/. > Or how about Sanskrit? Did it have final unaspirated voiceless stops? Indeed. All absolutely final stops are voiceless and unaspirated, though the sandhi rules conspire not to allow many absolutely final stops. The citation forms of nouns, though, is a good example, being the nominative singular--lots of cluster simplification and the like going on. BTW, the usual notation for the theta and edh sounds in 7-bit environments like mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups is /T/ and /D/ respectively, leaving /th/ and /dh/ to represent aspirates, all according to the 1992 ASCII IPA standard, described by the author at http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Evan_Kirshenbaum/IPA/ Rich Alderson From petegray at btinternet.com Mon Nov 20 20:25:23 2000 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2000 20:25:23 -0000 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: > Can somebody give me the scoop on Classical Greek? > Or how about Sanskrit? Did it have final unaspirated voiceless stops? Classical Greek had no final stops at all, except for the two words ek and ouk. The form oukh is found, as expected, only before a rough breathing. The word ek uses the form eks to avoid this combination. Despite this purely phonetic rule about ouk/oux, there are examples in the Greek New Testament of oukh before pure vowel, and ouk before rough breathing. Modern editions tend to "improve" the text and remove them, but one or two do survive, eg Acts 2:7 oukh idou hapantes, where a word has intervened. At Galatians 2:14 the text oukhi ioudaiko:s has been preferred in modern editions to oukh ioud.... In Sanskrit in absolute final position (ie in pause, or when the word is isolated) only voiceless unaspirated stops can occur - others are devoiced and/or de-aspirated. Peter From acnasvers at hotmail.com Tue Nov 21 19:14:17 2000 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2000 19:14:17 -0000 Subject: thy thigh etc. Message-ID: Leo A. Connolly (16 Nov 2000) writes: >On Tuesday Robert Whiting responded at great length to my post on the English >interdental fricatives, in which I attempted to draw some lessons from the >German non-distinction between [x] and [c,] in _Kuchen_ 'cake' vs. _Kuhchen_ >'little cow', which I analyzed as /ku:x at n/ vs. /ku:+x at n/. The gist of his >argument seems to be that if it is fair to use phonological boundaries (which >he identifies as always ultimately morphological boundaries), then it is also >fair to use morphological and lexical information to account for the >distribution of the intedental fricatives [T] and [D] in English. >He overlooks a significant difference between morphological -> phonological >boundaries and other types of morphological information: boundaries can be >located precisely between morphemes. It is therefore to show them in >phonological representations, for their position (and type) seems to matter >for the phonetic realization. But information such as "native/foreign" or >"content/function word" cannot be so located and cannot be described in any >real sense as "morphological", but rather as lexical and (for the latter, at >least) "syntactic". There is no inconsistency in saying that boundaries are >phonologically relevant while other information is not. (I do not mean to >imply that boundaries are *always* relevant while other information *never* >is, only that there is no inconsistency in treating them differently.) >A few other points: How did _thy_ and _thigh_ differ before the former >developed a voiced fricative? Easy: the Old English forms were _thi:n_ and >_the:oh_, where the final -h represented a velar fricative. The loss of the >final consonants in these words seems to be much later than the initial >voicing. The loss of final consonants probably is later than the establishment of initial [T:D] distinction, but one should not assume that this distinction arose by the selective voicing of initial [T] to [D] in what Whiting loosely labels "function words". (It escapes me how has any more "function" or less "content" than . What English words with initial [D] share is definiteness, not some murky "functionality".) Old English clearly did not consider [T:D], [f:v], and [s:z] to be phonemic oppositions. The characters "thorn" and "edh" are used indiscriminately in the manuscripts, and no special signs for "v" or "z" are found. In the usual treatment the OE fricatives are regarded as unvoiced when doubled, when adjacent to unvoiced stops, and when occurring initially or finally in words or compound-elements. The first two conditions are solidly established, but the third may be doubted: did morphemic boundaries in OE necessarily make adjacent fricatives unvoiced in connected speech? Some light is shed on the problem by the "Cuckoo Song" manuscript of circa 1240, which contains an Early Middle English folk-song in parallel with a Medieval Latin hymn. The English of the song shows no significant influence from Norman French or Latin. The scribe uses typical ML orthography with "u" and "v" indiscriminately representing both the vowel [u] and the voiced fricative [v], which creates no ambiguity in practice. For the English text, the scribe requires "w" and "thorn" to convey the non-ML sounds. More importantly, he carries the ML graphemic distinction "f:u/v" into his English transcription. We find "f" in , but "u" in , , and most significantly '(the) buck farts'. Here the scribe has preserved initial [v], conditioned by a final vowel in the previous word. This verb appears in later ME as ; it is unattested in OE but is a transparent cognate of Greek and Sanskrit . The manuscript does not distinguish [s:z] and [T:D] because these oppositions are unknown in Medieval Latin. In my opinion the Early ME dialect recorded here most likely made no phonemic distinction between voiced and unvoiced fricatives, but maintained an allophonic contrast on the basis of adjacent sounds regardless of morphemic boundaries, and this scheme was probably inherited from OE. For the composer of the "Cuckoo Song" the words and would have begun with [T] or [D] according to the unvoiced or voiced nature of the preceding sound. Turning now to Chaucer we find the "f:v" distinction consistently made, initially and medially, even in native words like 'to give' from OE . The character "z" is used only in foreign words, mostly from French and Arabic: , , , etc. Chaucer retains "s" for medial [z] in native words: , , , etc. Printed editions give no information about the dental fricatives, using "th" everywhere. Chaucer's language has a large component of recent loanwords in sometimes forming minimal pairs with older words in : 'to have value' ~ 'to fail', 'verse' ~ 'chess-queen'. It appears that this large influx of words beginning with [v] which does not alternate allophonically with [f] has forced the older words beginning with [f/v] to abandon the voiced allophone and become words beginning with invariant [f]. That is, this influx of loanwords has created a new phonemic distinction /f:v/ in initial position which the orthography of Chaucer's time (late 14th cent.) regards as fully established. For initial [s:z] Chaucer has only the sub-minimal pair 'zeals' ~ 'sealed', and since "z" is otherwise used to denote loanwords this provides no direct evidence for a phonemic opposition. The status of initial [T:D] in Chaucer is equivocal. Contractions like 'art thou' and 'sayest thou' suggest that already had invariant [D], since the old rule would require [T] here and [tT] usually contracts to [T], which would yield * etc. However, this argument is extremely weak. Statistical analysis of Chaucer's alliterations in "th" might resolve the issue, but I am not aware of such a study. At any rate it is clear that the English /f:v/ distinction resulted from loanwords and was well established by Chaucer's time. The /s:z/ distinction, if not already made by Chaucer, followed shortly. It can be attributed partly to loanwords, partly to the earlier establishment of /f:v/ as phonemic. The [T:D] opposition was left as an orphaned allophonic pair, very difficult for speakers to maintain, especially in initial position. They would have been obliged to enunciate some words with invariant initial [f], [v], [s], [z] and others with variable [T] or [D] according to the preceding sound. Under these circumstances any mechanism tending to fix [T] or [D] in particular words would have operated rather strongly. In my opinion this probably began with the statistics of utterances: demonstratives like and commonly follow prepositions, which in a majority of cases end in voiced sounds. Once the invariant [D] was fixed in the most common demonstratives, it would have spread by analogy to the other "th"-words of pronominal origin which carry definiteness. The situation would then have resembled the pre-Chaucerian stage of ME in which one class (recent loanwords) had invariant initial [v] and another class (older words) had variable initial [f/v]. In that case the older class was forced to fix its initial sound as [f], establishing /f:v/ as a phonemic distinction. In the case under discussion the non-pronominal, non-definite words beginning with [T/D] were forced to fix their initial sounds as [T], which yielded the fixed opposition in initial [T:D] that is found today. I would guess that the process was complete (in East Midland at least) by 1500, if indeed it was not by Chaucer's time. Hence one should not say that or its antecedent "developed" a voiced fricative. What happened, one way or another, is that the pronunciation with the unvoiced fricative, occurring after unvoiced sounds, was lost in this word. So is the initial [T:D] distinction phonemic in present-day English? Absolutely; it can and should be written /T:D/. It was phonemic as soon as the process of fixing invariant [T] and [D] on particular words was completed, even though minimal pairs for these phones probably did not exist at that time. Minimal pairs are luxury items. They are nice to have, but one can (and in many situations must) establish phonemic oppositions without them. When distinct phones occur in contrastive distribution in corresponding morphemic positions, they are either allophones of one phoneme or represent distinct phonemes. Allophones are regularly distributed according to phonologic environment. No conceivable phonologic rule could predict the distribution of [T] versus [D] in modern English words. They are indeed distinct phonemes. Doug Kilday From xiang at free.fr Sat Nov 18 11:17:11 2000 From: xiang at free.fr (Guillaume JACQUES) Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 12:17:11 +0100 Subject: Elamite Message-ID: [ moderator translated from base64 encoding ] | Bernard Sergent -- a proponent of the idea that | Harappan-Indus was Dravidian -- in "Genesis of India" (1997) apparently also | takes the position that the isoglosses cited by McAlpin can be explained | "through contact rather than common origin." You did not read his book. Sergent rejects the communis opinio that Harappa was dravidian, following Elfenbein 1987 who showed that all the aryan-looking loanwords in Brahui, the only dravidian language as far north as pakistan, are from baluchi, a language that we know came late in this region. This suggested brahui was not a remnant from earlier northern dravidians, but a wandering people that ended up far north. Sergent suggests Harappa might have been burushaski (he has good reasons for it), but on the whole we don't have enough proofs: if Harappan was indeed burushaski, we would expect a burushaski substrate in Vedic, which seems not to be the case (see Michael Witzel's online paper, 'substrates in old indo-aryan') Guillaume From lmfosse at elender.hu Thu Nov 23 09:25:53 2000 From: lmfosse at elender.hu (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 10:25:53 +0100 Subject: SV: Elamite Message-ID: Anthony Appleyard [SMTP:mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk] skrev 22. november 2000 12:09: > Before we compare things with Brahui, what came of a thread that was on this > list or Nostratic list a while ago?, where someone claimed that, of the > modern outlying northern Dravidian languages:- >> The Brahui-speakers were descended from soldiers raised in Dravidian South >> India and dumped in Baluchistan when they got due for discharge. >> The Kurukh and Malto migrated from South India in recent centuries. >> Thus, their languages are irrelevant when discussing ancient linguistics. > Is this genuine? This is more or less the received scholarly wisdom for the time being. I am away from my library, so I can't give you any precise references, but I believe that Bernard Sergeant discusses this in his book "Genese the l'Inde". Lars Martin Fosse Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114, 0674 Oslo Norway Phone: +47 22 32 12 19 Mobile phone: +47 90 91 91 45 Fax 1: +47 22 32 12 19 Fax 2: +47 85 02 12 50 (InFax) Email: lmfosse at online.no From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Mon Nov 27 14:27:30 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2000 14:27:30 GMT Subject: Elamite Message-ID: On 16 Nov 2000, Stanley Friesen (sarima at friesen.net) wrote: > Difficult, but I am not sure it is impossible. Did Classical Greek lack > final tau's? If it had them, then it constitutes an example of a language > that had this contrast. Classical Greek did not have final {t}. We can't tell with Mycenean (Linear B) Greek, as the spelling omits many consonants which are at the ends of syllables. But: Greek (1) {egraphe} = "he was writing" < IE *{eghrabhet}, but (2) {graphe} = "write!" (imperative) < IE *{grabhe} without a final {t}. In Classical Greek (1) adds a final n-ephelkoustikon if the next word starts with a vowel or h-vowel, but (2) does not, as if that -n was altered from an earlier -t derived from the old final consonant persisting in liaison. The Greeks were capable of pronouncing final stops, as is shown e.g. in Aristophanes: {op o:-op} as a spelling of a noise made while rowing a boat. Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2000 14:12:02 -0500 Reply-To: Indo-European at xkl.com Sender: The INDO-EUROPEAN mailing list From: Rich Alderson Subject: Re: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) Comments: To: Indo-European at xkl.com In-Reply-To: <4.3.1.2.20001116081819.00b4b420 at getmail.friesen.net> (message from Stanley Friesen on Thu, 16 Nov 2000 08:28:17 -0800) Classical Greek had a very limited set of permitted finals: All the vowels (5 short, 7 long), /Vn/, /Vs/, /Vps/ and /Vks/, where the two clusters involve neutralization of voicing and aspiration, as for example in /thriks/ "hair" where the genitive /trikhos/ undergoes Grassmann. In those cases where a dental would cluster with /s/, an old rule reduces the cluster simply to /s/. > Or how about Sanskrit? Did it have final unaspirated voiceless stops? Indeed. All absolutely final stops are voiceless and unaspirated, though the sandhi rules conspire not to allow many absolutely final stops. The citation forms of nouns, though, is a good example, being the nominative singular--lots of cluster simplification and the like going on. BTW, the usual notation for the theta and edh sounds in 7-bit environments like mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups is /T/ and /D/ respectively, leaving /th/ and /dh/ to represent aspirates, all according to the 1992 ASCII IPA standard, described by the author at http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Evan_Kirshenbaum/IPA/ Rich Alderson From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Nov 25 18:41:02 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 25 Nov 2000 13:41:02 -0500 Subject: Elamite 10th c. AD ?!? In-Reply-To: <6C42B3B1421@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: After rooting around I found the article "Elamite" in Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia by Samuel N. Kramer stating that Arabic sources in Khuzestan indicated that Elamite was still spoken in the 10th c. AD How reliable can this be? BTW: I also found a curious article on Avars in F & W stating that their descendents are "Lezghians [who speak] a language similar to Arabic"!!! Can anyone explain that? Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Nov 23 03:48:58 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2000 22:48:58 EST Subject: Franks as Arians Message-ID: In a message dated 11/22/00 8:46:16 PM Mountain Standard Time, dlwhite at texas.net writes: << About the Franks having been, at one point, Arians, is that in Gregory, as I imagine it must be? >> -- no, they weren't. Prior to Clovis' conversion, they mainly weren't Christians of any variety. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Nov 23 04:46:53 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2000 23:46:53 EST Subject: Questioning of the elite dominance theory Message-ID: "Traditionally the first Germanic king to convert directly from paganism to Catholicism was Clovis, and by extension, the first Germanic people to become Catholic were the Franks. In fact this statement needs some modification; the Suebi were certainly Catholics and were ruled by Catholic kings long before Clovis' conversion, and the Burgundians may also have been, although Gundobad [the Burgundian king], who ruled between ca. 476 and 516, was uquestionably Arian. Further, it is clear that Clovis spent some time considering the rival merits of the Catholic and Arian variants of Christianity." -- LATE ANTIQUITY: A GUIDE TO THE POSTCLASSICAL WORLD, p. 394. From Tristan at mail.scm-rpg.com.au Thu Nov 23 08:23:32 2000 From: Tristan at mail.scm-rpg.com.au (Tristan Jones) Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 19:23:32 +1100 Subject: Elite dominance theory vs. Practicality Message-ID: Well I will be dammed, I thought 22 languages for a area the size of Indiana was a bit shocking a first. > [ Moderator's comment: > California was home to several dozen languages prior to European contact, > as was the region of the United States called New England. This is not at > all unusual. > --rma ] From lmfosse at elender.hu Thu Nov 23 09:13:30 2000 From: lmfosse at elender.hu (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 10:13:30 +0100 Subject: SV: Elite dominance theory vs. Practicality Message-ID: Tristan Jones [SMTP:Tristan at mail.scm-rpg.com.au] skrev 18. november 2000 01:01: > 22 languages in Hungary, come on Hungary is only the size of Indiana state, > 22 languages is a lot for a small region like that Hungary covered a much bigger area before the First World War, but lost more than half of it at the Peace of Trianon (still much regretted by Hungarians). Before that period at least the following languages were spoken on traditional Hungarian territory: Magyar, German, Slovakian, Serbo-Kroat, Turkish and Rumanian. (The Turkish speakers of course eventually left). Until the 19th century, Latin was widely used, Magyar only recently became the dominant language of the country (after about 1850). The Jews that came to Hungary in the 19th century may have spoken several different languages, but were quickly Magyarized. Of course, after Trianon, there are not many minority language speakers left. Lars Martin Fosse Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114, 0674 Oslo Norway Phone: +47 22 32 12 19 Mobile phone: +47 90 91 91 45 Fax 1: +47 22 32 12 19 Fax 2: +47 85 02 12 50 (InFax) Email: lmfosse at online.no From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Thu Nov 23 11:32:16 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 11:32:16 GMT Subject: Turkish Message-ID: Someone wrote:- > How many languages were spoken on the Central Plateau in, say, AD 1900? "David L. White" wrote:- > The chief differences from today would have been a sizeable number of > Armenian-speakers ... and a large number of Greek-speakers along the > Aegean coast, almost all of them expelled after the Greco-Turkish war. And Kurdish. Re Greeks in Anatolia, in the 1960's or 1970's I read a UK scuba diving magazine article about Turkish sport scuba divers, and one of them was called Triyandafilidis, which is clearly modern Greek for "son of Trinity-lover". ? Dawkins(1916) is a study (mainly) of Cappadocian Greek ... I read that book or a similar book, about Pontus etc. Some of those Greek dialects had many loanwords from Turkish, e.g. a verb {du"su"ndo} from Turkish {du"su"nmek}. Turkish vowel harmony had also got in. > [Turkish is] dominant in European Turkey, not surprisingly ... Some history books seem to say that Turkish Thrace spoke largely Greek and Bulgarian right up to the suburbs or walls of Constantinople, until a big exchange of populations in the 1920's. On BBC TV (=UK TV) news from Kosovo during the recent Kosovo troubles I saw road signs in various languages including Turkish (e.g. {U"sku"b} for {Skopje}). Is there still an outlier of Turkish speech there, or what? > The Bulgarian perfect has apparently been remodeled as an inferentional > through Turkish influence. ... This is, I think, difficult to explain if > Turkish was not at one time more common in Bulgaria than it has been more > recently. Likely many Bulgarians knew enough Turkish for necessary dealings with the Ottoman Turkish authorities, until Turkish authority and Islamic rule were slung out of Bulgaria bag and baggage in the Russo-Turkish War in the 1880's. For more information about those events and their causes, see a history book. Likely afterwards very many bilingual Christian Bulgarians totally rejected all things Turkish including the language, and the Bulgarian government seems to have systematically renamed nearly every place with a Turkish-looking name, e.g. Hasi-ko"y -> Khaskovo, except for a few large towns such as Kazanl#k (# = the hard-sign), and Eski Dzhumaya, which (I think) was renamed to Dimitrovgrad in Communist times. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Nov 25 18:51:11 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 25 Nov 2000 13:51:11 -0500 Subject: Turkish In-Reply-To: <000d01c050f3$b4aa2b60$d86063d1@texas.net> Message-ID: Aren't the Gaugaz [sp?] an Anatolian Turkish-speaking Christian ethnic group in Ukraine, Rumania et al.? BTW: On maps I've seen references to Pomaks, Sanjaks & Nogays (among others) in the Balkans. Are these Turkish groups, former Turkish-speakers or local Muslims speaking Slavic languages? >>> To what extent did replacement spread through Turkish controlled lands >>> beyond Anatolia, depending on what you mean by Anatolia? >> Not very greatly, as far as I know, but then I was only talking >> about Anatolia. > It's dominant in European Turkey, not surprisingly, and occurs in >various islands in Bulgaria, esp. in the northeast. The Bulgarian perfect >has apparently been remodeled as an inferentional through Turkish influence. >(Because in many cases something like "It has snowed" is easily reconstrued >(by a Turk anyway) as "Evidently it has snowed", "I infer it has snowed", or >something of the sort.) This is, I think, difficult to explain if Turkish >was not at one time more common in Bulgaria than it has been more recently. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From vjpaniego at worldonline.es Thu Nov 23 22:50:49 2000 From: vjpaniego at worldonline.es (Victor y Rosario) Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 23:50:49 +0100 Subject: =?iso-8859-1?B?TWlyYW5k6nM=?= Message-ID: >I'm doing my doctorate at the University of Munich, in Germany, on the >Portuguese language and its dialects. >Vera Ferreira Regarding the research on Mirandjs, a couple of articles that might be useful: "O Mirandjs e as lmnguas do Noroeste peninsular", by Manuela Barros Ferreira Published by the Academia de la Llingua Asturiana in their journal Lletres Asturianes, 57 "Convengao Ortografica da Lmngua Mirandesa" Camara Municipal de Miranda do Douro. Both can be obtained from: Centro de Lingumstica da Universidade de Lisboa Avenida 5 de Outubro, 85, 5: e 6: 1000 Lisboa PORTUGAL Vmctor J. Paniego From dalazal at hotmail.com Tue Nov 28 05:14:36 2000 From: dalazal at hotmail.com (Diogo Almeida) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 00:14:36 -0500 Subject: Mirbndes Message-ID: "Vera Ferreira" Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 14:48:48 -0000 wrote: >Hi, >I'm doing my doctorate at the University of Munich, in Germany, on the >Portuguese language and its dialects. >Now I'm looking for information about the second offial language in >Portugal, namely Mirandjs (its origins, development, and actual state). >Does >any of you know where I can find such information? >(Maybe you can send me some by email!! - I would be very pleased.) Actually, Mirandjs is not a Portuguese or Galician dialect, but a different romance language, a survival of Asturo-Leonese (I hope that is the name in English :) ). I found a website about Mirandjs (in Portuguese). It's on http://www.eb2-miranda-douro.rcts.pt/mirandes/mirandes.html . There is a bibliography section. maybe it can help you. Best regards, Diogo Alvares de Azevedo e Almeida From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Nov 25 19:05:36 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 25 Nov 2000 14:05:36 -0500 Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Mir=E2ndes?= In-Reply-To: <009c01c0516e$e8c12b80$783d06d5@telepac.pt> Message-ID: There is a Mirandes webpage. I don't have the url but I believe it is linked to the local government or chamber of commerce page for the town of Miranda. I found it by typing in <> on Altavista. It doesn't have too much information but the authors may be able to put you in touch with local scholars. The authors of the page essentially see the language as closer to Leonese Spanish than Portuguese. >Hi, >I'm doing my doctorate at the University of Munich, in Germany, on the >Portuguese language and its dialects. >Now I'm looking for information about the second offial language in >Portugal, namely Mirandjs (its origins, development, and actual state). Does >any of you know where I can find such information? >(Maybe you can send me some by email!! - I would be very pleased.) >Vera Ferreira >Institut f|r Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft >Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitdt M|nchen >Email: v.ferreira at gmx.de Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Fri Nov 24 09:00:45 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Fri, 24 Nov 2000 09:00:45 GMT Subject: The Germanic substrate - knives? Message-ID: People have connected Germanic "knife" with various Greek and other words starting with "kn-", e.g. Greek {knao:} = "scrape". But surely PIE {kn-} would become Common Germanic {hn-}? Perhaps when metalworking and how to make copper or bronze came to the Germanic speakers, some time after the PIE -> Germanic consonant shifts happened, it brought with it an IE but not Germanic word which got into Germanic with the meaning "metal knife". From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Fri Nov 24 09:49:32 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Fri, 24 Nov 2000 09:49:32 GMT Subject: Reference on Numbers of Saxons Message-ID: INDO-EUROPEAN mailing list "David L. White" wrote:- > ... by which the original Celtic inhabitants were expelled or exterminated > ... It is likelier that any big loss of Celtic population in lowland Britain at this time was due to natural causes. I saw a TV program a year or two ago that showed that at that time something, perhaps a very massive volcanic eruption in Indonesia, darkened the sky so badly that across the world two successive harvests were wiped out, causing famine. It also said that in those conditions cattle survived better than horses, and that gave the Central Asian Turkic people an advantage over their Mongol etc neighbours and started the big expansion of the Turkic peoples in Asia and into Europe. Mike Baillie (m.baillie at qub.ac.uk) has theorized about a natural disaster at this time. I have seen speculations that there was a Tunguska-type comet fragment impact in the English Midlands at that time. As to where the eruption was, the TV program said Krakatoa, but I and Baillie suspect not. I read that the Javan `Book of Kings' records about this time a massive blow-out-and-subsidence eruption in the east end of the Sunda Strait, sinking land called Kapi which previously joined Java to Sumatra. From rayhendon at satx.rr.com Fri Nov 24 19:02:26 2000 From: rayhendon at satx.rr.com (Ray Hendon) Date: Fri, 24 Nov 2000 13:02:26 -0600 Subject: Celtic Germanic relationship Message-ID: I am confused about the linguistic relationship, if any, between Celt and German. I think I read somewhere that Celtic was an Italic language, and that German was a daughter language of Celtic, developing after Celtic became distinguished from other Italic languages. Also, if there is a relationship, has anything of a time-line been established for the periods of transition? [ Moderator's comment: The traditional Indo-European family tree (to use the model most familiar to non-specialists) has Germanic, Celtic, and Italic as three separate branches. Some, but by no means all, Indo-Europeanists believe that the Italic and Celtic branches should be considered to form a sub-unit of the tree, based on certain morphological developments; this branch is called Italo-Celtic. The Germanic branch shares some developments and vocabulary with Italic and Celtic, and others with Balto-Slavic. This has recently led a few people to posit an early separation of Germanic from the rest of the family (but from a branch that later led to Balto-Slavic), then massive influence from Celtic and Italic. No authoritative Indo-Europeanist to my knowledge has suggested the branch structure you outline. --rma ] From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Nov 23 12:08:44 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 12:08:44 +0000 Subject: More on dental fricatives Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister writes: > How are Spanish & (and "soft c") treated in loan words? Spanish is borrowed as Basque apical , and Spanish is borrowed as Basque laminal . But there is a complication in words containing both. Basque has sibilant harmony, and a single word cannot contain both kinds of sibilant. Assimilation is always in favor of the apical. So, for example, Castilian 'French' was borrowed as Basque (attested), but the usual form today is . > Is always & always ? Yes, except as just explained. > Do Spanish-speaking Basques use apical /S/ or laminal /s/? Apical, always. > Is apical /S/ is dying out --or diminishing-- in Spain? xx Don't know. But something is happening in Basque: the contrast between and is being lost, in favour of apical . The first evidence for the merger appears in the west in the 17th century. Today the merger is categorical in the west. In the center, the merger is variable, being often present in urban areas but still absent in rural areas. In the east, there is no trace of the merger, and the contrast is still robust. > Most Spaniards I've met (from northern and central Spain) in the US > and Latin America use laminal /s/. I'm astonished. In my experience, northern Spaniards invariably use apical /s/. The shushy quality of this thing is quite striking to my ears. A French Basque friend of mine who moved south and learned Spanish unhesitatingly identified the Spanish with his own apical . > Is this linked to social class or is it a generational thing? In the north, in my experience, there is no variation, and apical is universal. Don't know what happens elsewhere. I had thought the variation was strictly geographical. Not sure how far south the apical runs, but the Madrile?os I've met always seem to have it. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Nov 23 11:33:44 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 11:33:44 +0000 Subject: Final Theta in Spanish Message-ID: David White writes: > Should not all Latin 3rd declension nouns > in /k/ show up with final theta in Spanish, if "lux" and "pax" do? I cannot > at the moment think of any more, but there must have been more than 2 ... There were, but I'm not sure they were all that numerous, and anyway not all of them survived into modern Castilian. For example, Latin 'leader' should have yielded Castilian *, but no such form is recorded, and modern 'duke' is clearly borrowed from Old French , which itself appears to be an analogical form. Anyway, the history of final /e/-loss in Castilian is a trifle complicated. For example, Latin yielded the expected , well attested in medieval Castilian, but the variant seemingly never disappeared, and modern exhibits not only the final /e/ but also an extra /l/ which it picked up somehow. As for '12', from , I confess I have little idea why that /e/ is still there. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu Nov 23 12:49:44 2000 From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max Wheeler) Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 12:49:44 +0000 Subject: Final Theta in Spanish In-Reply-To: <000701c0510d$c5417540$752863d1@texas.net> Message-ID: [ moderator edited ] --On Friday, November 17, 2000 21:15 -0600 "David L. White" wrote: >> You're right, (in areas where it occurs) /-_DH_/ > /-_TH_/ only >> occurs finally --at the end of words or syllable final before nasals (I >> can't think of any other consonants that might follow ) > > I meant theta from Latin /k/ before /i, e/, corresponding to > various affricates and sibilants in other Romance. I was not > aware (or had managed to forget) that in some cases (one might also note > "paz") final vowels had been lost, pretty much destroying my developing > argument, unless perhaps the present situation has been created by some > sort of dialect mixture. Why are these words so rare, evidently? Should > not all Latin 3rd declension nouns in /k/ show up with final theta in > Spanish, if "lux" and "pax" do? I cannot at the moment think of any > more, but there must have been more than 2 ... Indeed more than 2 (and adjectives, and other sources). here's a few, pending a look in a reverse dictionary: atroz audaz capaz cicatriz codorniz contumaz cruz diez eficaz emperatriz -ez abstract noun suffix '-ez surname suffix faz feliz feraz feroz fugaz haz hoz luz matriz mordaz nariz paz perdiz perspicaz pertinaz pez precoz procaz pugnaz salaz secuaz suspicaz tenaz veraz vivaz voraz voz ?Basta? 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 dziewon at xs4all.nl Thu Nov 23 02:02:46 2000 From: dziewon at xs4all.nl (R.C. Bakhuizen van den Brink [Rein]) Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 02:02:46 +0000 Subject: Final Theta in Spanish Message-ID: On Fri, 17 Nov 2000, David L. White wrote: >these words so rare, evidently? Should not all Latin 3rd declension nouns >in /k/ show up with final theta in Spanish, if "lux" and "pax" do? I cannot >at the moment think of any more, but there must have been more than 2 ... > Not just nouns? Feliz navidad !! gtx, Rein -- Rein Bakhuizen van den Brink URL http://www.xs4all.nl/~dziewon +00-31-71-5212950 [voice] /-5234587 [fax] P.O.Box 749, NL-2300 AS Leiden ISO-8859-2 ????????? ????????? From bronto at pobox.com Fri Nov 24 01:00:54 2000 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 17:00:54 -0800 Subject: Final Theta in Spanish Message-ID: "David L. White" wrote, of Spanish words in -z: > Why are these words so rare, evidently? Should not all Latin > 3rd declension nouns in /k/ show up with final theta in Spanish, > if "lux" and "pax" do? I cannot at the moment think of any more, > but there must have been more than 2 ... (find Spanish wordlist, http://www.vada.nl/software/files/spanish.zip) (decompress) (grep "z$") ...478 words including: atroz barniz ( Message-ID: At 02:12 PM 11/20/00 -0500, Rich Alderson wrote: >On 16 Nov 2000, Stanley Friesen (sarima at friesen.net) wrote: >>> So it is not surprising that it is very difficult to contrast final >>> aspirated and unaspirated stops. >> Difficult, but I am not sure it is impossible. Did Classical Greek lack >> old rule reduces the cluster simply to /s/. >> Or how about Sanskrit? Did it have final unaspirated voiceless stops? >Indeed. All absolutely final stops are voiceless and unaspirated, though the >sandhi rules conspire not to allow many absolutely final stops. The citation >forms of nouns, though, is a good example, being the nominative singular--lots >of cluster simplification and the like going on. Hmm, interesting. From this I conclude that Sansktrit does not *contrast* /t/ and /th/ finally, nor does Greek. So apparently in many or most languages that otherwise have this contrast it is neutralized finally. Does anybody have any examples of a language that *retains* /t/ vs. /th/ finally? -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Nov 28 06:34:34 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 01:34:34 EST Subject: Elite dominance vs. Practicality/Turkey Message-ID: In a message dated 11/17/2000 5:52:28 PM, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: << I heard someone roll off 22 languages that reportedly were spoken in the general area of modern day Hungary during the first millennium AD. And of course the area of modern day Turkey may well have had similar diversity before Ottoman Turkish became the "universal" language. >> The idea was that perhaps Turkish became universal in part because it solved the problem of too much language diversity among the speakers already there. On the pre-Turkish language diversity in Asia Minor I have this: "The coastal areas, save for the mountainous part of Cilicia (Isauria), where the Taurus range advances to the very edge of the sea, had been hellenized for a good thousand years and more before Justinian's reign.... Quite different from the coastal areas of Asia Minor was the high inland plateau,... The ethnic composition of the plateau had not undergone any notable change for some seven hundred years before Justinian's reign. It was a bewildering mosaic of native peoples as well as immigrant enclaves of long standing, such as the Celts of Galatia, the Jews who had been planted in Phrygia and elsewhere during the Hellenistic period and Persian groups of even more ancient origin. It appears that many of the indigenous languages were still spoken in the Early Byzantine period: Phrygian was probably still extant, since it appears in inscriptions as late as the third century AD, Celtic in Galatia, Cappadocian farther east. The unruly Isaurians, who had to be pacified by force of arms in about 500 AD and many of whom drifted all over the Empire as professional soldiers and itinerant masons, were a distinct people speaking their own dialect, often to the exclusion of Greek.... Lying to the east of Cappadocia and straddling a series of high mountain chains were a number of Armenian provinces that had been annexed to the Empire as late as 387 AD when the Armenian kingdom was partitioned between Persia and Rome. These were strategically very important, but practically untouched by Graeco-Roman civilization... All [this was before] the ethnographic changes that the Empire witnessed after the sixth century... The Persians initiated a development that was to have important demographic consequences by striking at Constantinople through Asia Minor. In so doing they caused immense havoc. When the Arabs had succeeded to the Persians and made themselves masters of all the territories up to the Taurus mountains, they, too, struck into Asia Minor- not once or twice, but practically every year- and this went on for nearly two centuries.... ...it is also known that Greek survived in Asia Minor on a continuous basis only in Pontus and a small part of Cappadocia, whereas it had become practically extinct in the western part of the subcontinent until its reintroduction there by immigrants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Emperor Justinian Il... moved 'a great multitude' of Slavs to Bithynia.... In the 760s, however, we are told that 208,000 Slavs came to live in Bithynia of their own accord.... In addition to the Armenians and the Slavs, there were many other foreign elements, such as the Georgians and the Balkan Vlachs. A massive influx of Syrians and other Christian orientals followed the eastward expansion of the Empire at the end of the tenth century.... Early in the 11th century Turkic [but not necesaarily Turkish] tribes and families in ever-increasing numbers had begun to filter into Asia Minor.... - Cyril Mango, Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome (1980) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Nov 28 07:14:28 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 02:14:28 EST Subject: Reference on Numbers of Saxons Message-ID: Any theory dealing with the Saxon migrations to Britain has to deal with the differences in linguistic results. On the continent, Germanic migrants into the Roman provinces were generally linguistically assimilated within a few generations -- beyond some loanwords, little trace of Gothic remains in Iberian Romance, for instance. In fact, it was probably extinct or moribund by the time of the 8th-century Muslim invasions. It lasted much better in the Crimea! In Britain not only did the local Celtic and Romance speeches disappear, but the Anglo-Saxon that emerged after the conversion to Christianity was singularly lacking in both Romance and Celtic vocabulary. About 14 Celtic loan-words in all, and no more Latin loans than the continental Germanic of the period. In fact, when it emerges into the light of documentary day, Old English is a remarkably conservative West Germanic language still mutually comprehensible with the ancestors of Netherlandish, Frisian, and Low German, not to mention the nascent Scandinavian tongues. Which is why English missionaries were so important in the conversion of the continental Germans. And this despite the fact that we're talking about the Wessex dialect of Old English, which emerged on the western fringe of the English-speaking zone and which we know _was_ in contact with proto-Welsh speakers, since the laws of Wessex recognize a separate (and legally inferior) Welsh-speaking social group within the kingdom. The linguistic evidence alone strongly militates against any prolonged period of mass bilingualism in the areas of Anglo-Saxon speech. Since Anglo-Saxon in its early phase was the speech of an illiterate people divided into a multiplicity of small, unstable kingdoms with no standard court or chancery language, it should have been very open to influence from any substrate. In fact, in such situations linguistic influence occurrs without the speakers of either language being conscious of it. Yet there's less Celtic influence on Old English than there is Algonquian Indian influence on the English of New England! Indian place-names and loan-words are more common there, despite what we know was an extremely brusque dispossession of the previous population and very limited contact between the incomers and the indigenous people. The place-names tell the same story. They become common only in the western fringes of England, which we know from historical sources remained in British/Welsh hands until the 6th-7th centuries. And even there, they're often misunderstood -- rivers called "river" and hills called "hill". We also know that there was a very substantial drop in the population of post-Roman Britain. Estimates for Britannia in the late Roman period -- 4th century CE -- range as high as 3.5 million or more. By the time of the Norman conquest (a period for which we have unusually good historical-demographic documentation) England had about 1.5 million people; and that was after several centuries of what's generally agreed upon to be steady expansion. Other lines of evidence also testify to widespread depopulation in the transitional Romano-British and early Anglo-Saxon periods. For example, as late as the 11th century, London buildings were drawing on domestic sources of long, thick, straight oak timbers, the type that can only been drawn from closed-canopy forest at least 300 years old. These disappear from the domestic record not long after, and only the curved timber characteristic of coppice- and field-edge oaks is found -- at precisely the time when population, and forest clearance, again reach the Romano-British level. From edsel at glo.be Tue Nov 28 10:07:24 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 11:07:24 +0100 Subject: Turkish Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Anthony Appleyard" To: Sent: Thursday, November 23, 2000 12:32 PM Subject: Re: Turkish > Someone wrote:- [snip] > Re Greeks in Anatolia, in the 1960's or 1970's I read a UK scuba diving > magazine article about Turkish sport scuba divers, and one of them was called > Triyandafilidis, which is clearly modern Greek for "son of Trinity-lover". [Ed Selleslagh] On the other hand, lots of Greeks have hellenized Turkish names, e.g. Karamanli's, the former prime minister. (Or Italian/Venetian ones: Kapodistrias = Capo d'Istria). > ? Dawkins(1916) is a study (mainly) of Cappadocian Greek ... [snip] > On BBC TV (=UK TV) news from Kosovo during the recent Kosovo troubles I saw > road signs in various languages including Turkish (e.g. {U"sku"b} for > {Skopje}). Is there still an outlier of Turkish speech there, or what? [Ed] When I was there several decades ago (before the big earthquake) the city of Skop(l)je had a vast Turkish quarter from every point of view: language, bazar-like streets with artisans making Turkish coffee or hammering away at copper coffee sets, historical mosques etc. (There were more ethnic buroughs: a large Gipsy shanty town, the traditional Christian-Orthodox one, and the new part built under Tito). On the countryside there are many very Turkish-looking villages with minarets etc. In general, Macedonia is extremely multi-cultural, but often with physically separate communities (Albanian, Turkish, Gipsy/Roma, Slav-Macedonian (close to Bulgarian), Serb,...). The use of its name for a fruit cocktail has some very good reasons. As opposed to Bosnia-Hercegovina (Bosna-Hersek in Turkish; Hercegovina < Hersek Novi) where the Muslims are generally converted Serbians (one more reason to be hated by others), in Macedonia the Muslims are generally ethnic Turks, except in the area near Albania where virtually all are ethnic Albanians. [snip] > Likely many Bulgarians knew enough Turkish for necessary dealings with the > Ottoman Turkish authorities, until Turkish authority and Islamic rule were > slung out of Bulgaria bag and baggage in the Russo-Turkish War in the 1880's. > For more information about those events and their causes, see a history book. > Likely afterwards very many bilingual Christian Bulgarians totally rejected > all things Turkish including the language, and the Bulgarian government seems > to have systematically renamed nearly every place with a Turkish-looking > name, e.g. Hasi-ko"y -> Khaskovo, except for a few large towns such as > Kazanl#k (# = the hard-sign), and Eski Dzhumaya, which (I think) was > renamed to Dimitrovgrad in Communist times. [Ed] And in a more recent period there has been some quasi-officially sponsored action against ethnic Turks in Bulgaria, leading to almost collective emigration/fleeing to Turkish Thracia. Similar things happened (happen) in Greek Thracia, like forbidding Turkish-speaking schools and prosecuting its proponents for 'menacing the unity of the country' etc... In the Balkans, historical memory is very long, and cultural tolerance is still in its infancy. Bosnia and Serbia are only exceptional (in recent times) in the intensity of what happened. Ed. From ewb2 at cornell.edu Tue Nov 28 13:05:58 2000 From: ewb2 at cornell.edu (ewb2 at cornell.edu) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 08:05:58 -0500 Subject: Turkish (and Greek) In-Reply-To: <6DC91444E98@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: On Thu, 23 Nov 2000, Anthony Appleyard wrote: > ... Re Greeks in Anatolia, in the 1960's or 1970's I read a UK scuba diving > magazine article about Turkish sport scuba divers, and one of them was called > Triyandafilidis, which is clearly modern Greek for "son of Trinity-lover". ...which is more likely to be Modern Greek for "thirty leaves" (trianta + phylla), which now means "rose" (the flower). It's clear in the spelling of the surname in Greek letters: Triantaphyllide:s. "nt" is pronounced nd or just d. On the other hand, 'Trinity' is triada, where d is pronounced as the voiced interdental that so many contributors have been writing about. > On BBC TV (=UK TV) news from Kosovo during the recent Kosovo troubles I saw > road signs in various languages including Turkish (e.g. {U"sku"b} for > {Skopje}). Is there still an outlier of Turkish speech there, or what? There is. There are thousands of Turkish-speakers (enough to support publications and schooling) in Macedonia and (at least until the last couple of years) in Kosovo. Wayles Browne Department of Linguistics Morrill Hall 220, Cornell University Ithaca, New York 14853, U.S.A. tel. 607-255-0712 (o), 607-273-3009 (h) fax 607-255-2044 (write FOR W. BROWNE) e-mail ewb2 at cornell.edu From adahyl at cphling.dk Tue Nov 28 14:46:36 2000 From: adahyl at cphling.dk (Adam Hyllested) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 15:46:36 +0100 Subject: Turkish In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sat, 25 Nov 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Aren't the Gaugaz [sp?] an Anatolian Turkish-speaking Christian > ethnic group in Ukraine, Rumania et al.? > BTW: On maps I've seen references to Pomaks, Sanjaks & Nogays > (among others) in the Balkans. Are these Turkish groups, former > Turkish-speakers or local Muslims speaking Slavic languages? The Gagauz live mainly in southern Moldova around the city of Comrat, but there are also smaller groups in Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria. They are Orthodox by religion and speak a language closely related to Turkish, to some degree influenced by neighbouring Slavonic languages. They descend from Christian Turks given refuge by the Ottomans in the 19th century. The Pomaks are a Muslim, orginally nomadic, ethnic group living in Western Thrace (Greece). They speak a dialect of Bulgarian, or, if you like, a language closely related to Bulgarian. The Pomak research centre in Komotini publishes a newspaper (Zagalisa) in Pomak. Sandz^ak Novi Pazar is the name of a region in Southern Serbia and Northern Montenegro with a Muslim, Serbian-speaking population. The Sandz^aks define themselves as an ethnic group. The Nogays live in the Russian republic of Dagestan in North-Eastern Caucausus. They number about 75 000, and most of them speak Nogay, a Turkic language. ------------------ Adam Hyllested Editor of etymologies and language surveys Danish National Encyclopedia Student of Indo-European, Uralic and Balkan linguistics University of Copenhagen adahyl at cphling.dk From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com Tue Nov 28 19:57:26 2000 From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 14:57:26 -0500 Subject: Turkish In-Reply-To: <6DC91444E98@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: Kosovo had a Turkish-speaking minority into the 1980's. If I recall the _Encyclopaedia of Islam_ correctly, Prizren before the collapse of Yugoslavia was the only trilingual city in the Balkans, having some street signs in Serbian, Albanian, and Turkish and a Turkish population of about 30,000. What has become of these people since 1991 I have no idea. Turkish speakers in Serbia and Macedonia generally have declined in numbers since World War II through emigration to Turkey and Western Europe. I believe there are figures in _The Turkic Peoples of the World_, ed. Margaret Bainbridge, 1993. Jim Rader > Some history books seem to say that Turkish Thrace spoke largely Greek and > Bulgarian right up to the suburbs or walls of Constantinople, until a big > exchange of populations in the 1920's. > On BBC TV (=UK TV) news from Kosovo during the recent Kosovo troubles I saw > road signs in various languages including Turkish (e.g. {U"sku"b} for > {Skopje}). Is there still an outlier of Turkish speech there, or what? [Anthony Appleyard] From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com Tue Nov 28 20:37:21 2000 From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 15:37:21 -0500 Subject: Turkish In-Reply-To: Message-ID: The Gagauz are concentrated mainly in what is now Moldova, though there are small minorities in Romania and Bulgaria. Their language is quite close to Anatolian Turkish, but I believe it's lost vowel harmony at least partially and has some other peculiar features. The Pomaci (or Pomatsi, plural of Pomak) are Bulgarian-speaking Muslims living mainly in southern Bulgaria, if I recall correctly. By "Sanjaks" I assume you mean the 100,00-200,00 (?) Serbian- speaking Muslims who live in the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, a district of Serbia north of Kosovo and east of Montenegro. These people suffered persecution under the Milosevic regime; what their current status is I couldn't say. The Nogay are a Turkic-speaking people of the North Caucasus. If there are any in the Balkans, I don't know about it--Balkanologists on the list have anything to say? Jim Rader > Aren't the Gaugaz [sp?] an Anatolian Turkish-speaking Christian > ethnic group in Ukraine, Rumania et al.? > BTW: On maps I've seen references to Pomaks, Sanjaks & Nogays > (among others) in the Balkans. Are these Turkish groups, former > Turkish-speakers or local Muslims speaking Slavic languages? > Rick Mc Callister From r.piva at bluewin.ch Tue Nov 28 21:33:01 2000 From: r.piva at bluewin.ch (renato piva) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 23:33:01 +0200 Subject: Turkish Message-ID: Anthony Appleyard schrieb: > and one of them was called > Triyandafilidis, which is clearly modern Greek for "son of Trinity-lover". This is quite an odd interpretation, this name has nothing to do with the Trinity (Tri'as or Tri'ada in modern Greek). Trian'taphyllo means 'rose' (literally: '30 leaves/petals'), and the name as a whole, which you mention in Turkish orthography, means '(the one) of the rose', cf. e.g. the Italian names De Rosa or Della Rosa. (by the way: M.A. Triantaphyllidis was a very influent linguist in Pre-WWII-Greece who wrote a very detailed grammar of his language). I think that the most recent and most complete source of information in this regard (from the historical as well as from a linguistic point of view, and with large bibliographical data) is Georges Drettas, Aspects pontiques, Paris 1997. Renato Piva From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Wed Nov 29 12:12:48 2000 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 13:12:48 +0100 Subject: Turkish Message-ID: As for the Gagauz: They are generally considered as a Oghuz-Turkic speaking linguistic community, today spoken basically in the southern parts of the Moldavian Republic (in the so-called Gagauz Republic [Gagauz Yeri]) as well in the adjacent parts of Ukraine. They have immigrated into the Moldavian regions in 1806-12 - before, the Gagauz speakers settled mainly in the northeastern part of what is now Bulgaria (Deli Orman and so on), some Gagauz speakers remained on the Balkan (e.g. in the area of Novi Pazar and Varna, in Makedonia (FIY), and (perhaps) the Evros region of Northern Greece). Linguistically speaking, Gagauz clearly belongs to Western Oghuz - it participated in the Balkan Osmanic dialect continuum since at least the time of Sultan Bayasid I. However, it seems that Gagauz is based on a Kipchak Turkic substratum, perhaps spoken by Turkic Bulgarian groups in Byzantinian times (Danube-Bulgarian?) who had been christianized say between the 11th and 13th century. We may assume that the speakers switched from their Kipchak variety to the predominant Early Osmanic variety as it had shown up on the Balkan since say 1390. Nogays (Kipchak) can be spotted in the Dobrucha area esp. north of Constantia in Romania, they came to this place in the 19th century (after the Crimea war) from the eastern parts of the Crimea peninsula (due to Russian pressure). Pomaks are Bulgarian speaking muslims in Bulgaria (and now in the European parts of Turkey). Wolfgang Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Aren't the Gaugaz [sp?] an Anatolian Turkish-speaking Christian > ethnic group in Ukraine, Rumania et al.? > BTW: On maps I've seen references to Pomaks, Sanjaks & Nogays > (among others) in the Balkans. Are these Turkish groups, former > Turkish-speakers or local Muslims speaking Slavic languages? ******************** Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze Institut f?r Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft Universit?t M?nchen - Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 - D-80539 M?nchen Tel.: ++49-(0)89-2180 2486 (secretary) // ++49-(0)89-2180 5343 (office) Fax: ++49-(0)89-2180 5345 Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Web: http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ ******************** From dlwhite at texas.net Tue Nov 28 16:44:48 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 10:44:48 -0600 Subject: The Phonemic Principle, Middle Bulgarian Message-ID: I agree with what Dr. Connolly (sp?) and Mr. Friessen have said. In particular, there is no reason to believe that semantic or grammatical categorization affects phonetic implementation, which is essentially what seems to have been asserted. If we get (in a few cases) fewer phonemes by assuming that it does, we do so at the cost of complicating phonetic implementation by having it "reach back" to other levels, so that any supposed gains in simplicity ("Occam's Razor" and all that) are, as so often happens, illusory. Do inferential perfects occur in Middle Bulgarian, or are they modern? It occurred to me, as I was driving away on vacation, that perhaps the Turkic influence in question came from the Bulgarsway back, not from the Ottoman Turks. Indeed, I was half-expecting to find myself roundly berated for my ignorance-cum-arrogance when I got back. So far, so good. Maybe I (coincidentally) got it right the first time. Dr. David L. White From JoatSimeon at aol.com Tue Nov 28 07:30:34 2000 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 02:30:34 EST Subject: Celtic Germanic relationship Message-ID: In a message dated 11/27/00 11:53:49 PM Mountain Standard Time, rayhendon at satx.rr.com writes: << I am confused about the linguistic relationship, if any, between Celt and German. -- they're independent branches of Indo-European, northwestern variety. Also, Celtic and Proto-Germanic were in contact (as were Proto-Germanic and Balto-Slavic) and lexical items moved across the boundaries. Eg., the PrtGrmc word for "iron" is a Celtic loan, as are several other terms (ruler and servant, for instance) and the form of these loans indicates that they were borrowed before the first Germanic sound-shift, since it underwent that change. (PIE *t, *d, and *dh ==> *th, *t, and *d, and PIE *p, *t and *k ==> *b, *d, and *g., etc.) This is the most notable feature immediately distinguishing Germanic from the other IE languages. Since we know from archaeological sources that iron technology spread to the early Germanic areas about 700-500 BCE, this dates that change quite precisely -- it came afterwards, towards the end of the 1st millenium BCE. Before that, pre-Proto-Germanic must have been strikingly conservative, much closer to PIE. (And the ancestral Balto-Slavic.) This in turn raises interesting questions as to the possible influence of a pre-IE substrate on proto-Germanic, since the Germanic urheimat in Scandinavia and northern Germany had presumably been indo-europeanized for a very long time at that point. From sarima at friesen.net Tue Nov 28 15:50:23 2000 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 07:50:23 -0800 Subject: Celtic Germanic relationship In-Reply-To: <001001c05649$16839f60$8a8e1c18@satx.rr.com> Message-ID: >[ Moderator's comment: > The traditional Indo-European family tree (to use the model most familiar to > non-specialists) has Germanic, Celtic, and Italic as three separate > branches. > Some, but by no means all, Indo-Europeanists believe that the Italic and > Celtic branches should be considered to form a sub-unit of the tree, based > on certain morphological developments; this branch is called Italo-Celtic. > The Germanic branch shares some developments and vocabulary with Italic and > Celtic, and others with Balto-Slavic. This has recently led a few people to > posit an early separation of Germanic from the rest of the family (but from > a branch that later led to Balto-Slavic), then massive influence from Celtic > and Italic. I find this model to have some problems, not the least of which is that such massive borrowings should show up as words with different histories. English is a good case in point where we often have several different words derived from the same PIE word or root: e.g. 'head', 'chief', 'chef', 'capitol'. I would actually suggest a "reversal" of this model: an "early" branching from an Germano-Italo-Celtic base, followed by a significant Baltic influence, mostly in morphology (e.g. the case ending in '-m-' instead of '-bh-'). -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at ix.netcom.com From ibonewits at neopagan.net Tue Nov 28 07:04:17 2000 From: ibonewits at neopagan.net (Isaac Bonewits) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 02:04:17 -0500 Subject: Early Celtic/Sanscrit Mutual Comprehensibility In-Reply-To: <009001c04baa$d67529a0$d38f6395@roborr.uottawa.ca> Message-ID: I hope some of you will forgive an interested amateur for asking what may be simple questions with obvious answers "everyone" should know. On 11/11/00, Robert Orr wrote: >"MacBain's Gaelic Etymological Dictionary" is not the best source for early >Celtic in any case. Apparently it is best for providing a corpus of >Inverness-shire Gaelic for the last century. And the best source for early Celtic etymology now is? I ask because many years ago my Irish teacher (who had his Ph.D. in Linguistics) told me that "at one time" Old Irish and Sanscrit were similar enough that a speaker of one would have been able, with effort, to understand a speaker of the other. He also said that this was probably due to the "fossilization at the extremes" principle. I've gathered from the discussion of "Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate," that southern Russia/"Scythia" as *the* homeland of PIE from whence all IE languages completely originated is no longer the only academically respectable opinion. I know that some Indian linguists, archeologists, and historians insist that all the IE tongues (and related cultural paradigms) originated in India, which would make India no longer an extreme reach of linguistic migration from a center and make Ireland even more of an extreme one (from India). If there were "Pre-Proto-IE" languages whose speakers migrated into new territories and/or whose vocabulary traveled with specific technological innovations, can a correlation be made between PPIE/neolithic, PIE/bronze age, and IE/iron age cultures -- or with anything else observable? At what historical or archeological point (if any) can major nodes like Proto-Germanic or Proto-Celtic be distinguished from Proto-Indo-European? How would these alternatives to the traditional "origination from a center" theory of PIE-to-IE language travel explain the similarities in motifs and characters between the mythologies of the various IE Paleopaganisms, as (IMHO) amply demonstrated by Dumezil and his followers -- which also seem to show the "fossilization at the extremes" (Vedic/Irish/Baltic) principle in action? I would truly appreciate pointers to appropriate urls and/or reference texts, preferably in English (my Gaeilge isn't good enough yet for academic materials). Isaac Bonewits <===(returning to lurk mode) -- ******************************************************** * Isaac Bonewits, Adr.Em./ADF * * Box 372, Warwick, NY 10990 * ******************************************************** From dlwhite at texas.net Tue Nov 28 18:01:26 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 12:01:26 -0600 Subject: Motivating the Root Restrictions of PIE Message-ID: Yes, I am serious. And yes, what I posit is typologically weird, but what more normal system motivates the root restrictions? Are we to imagine that these were invented out of sheer phonological perversity? It is, obviously, a matter of the relative claims of typology versus motivation. Some reasons to think that the claims of typology are overrated have been given before. In any event, I prefer to value motivation, as long as there is no clearly understood mundane phonetic reason that the system I posit should be inherently unviable. By the way, I think my observations on the laryngeals are, upon further refection, almost completely worthless. I was trying to make something out of an assymetry that probably nothing can be made of. Dr. David L. White From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Nov 28 17:23:12 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 12:23:12 -0500 Subject: Elamite In-Reply-To: <005a01c05151$1b15fac0$1a241bd4@j5j6j5> Message-ID: >Sergent suggests Harappa might have been burushaski (he has good reasons for >it), but on the whole we don't have enough proofs: if Harappan was indeed >burushaski, we would expect a burushaski substrate in Vedic, which seems >not to >be the case (see Michael Witzel's online paper, 'substrates in old >indo-aryan') > >Guillaume Could you elaborate on these reasons? Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Nov 29 02:24:36 2000 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 21:24:36 EST Subject: Elamite/Harappan/Sergent Message-ID: I wrote: << Bernard Sergent -- a proponent of the idea that Harappan-Indus was Dravidian -- in "Genesis of India" (1997) apparently also takes the position that the isoglosses cited by McAlpin can be explained "through contact rather than common origin.">> In a message dated 11/27/2000 6:30:19 PM, xiang at free.fr writes: <> Guillaume is quite right. My notes are from someone's review in 1998 when the book was first published in French. BUT I must point out that it appears my statement regarding Sergent's position on Elamite and Dravidian being unrelated languages is 100% CORRECT -- lest we forget the point being made. <> This is in fact correct. My apologies. Part of the reason for my confusion were in the notes from the review there is the quote that Sergent admits "...the Dravidians were certainly already in the Deccan when the mature Harappan civilization started.... Sergent asserts that the Dravidians formed a pre-Harappan population in Sindh and Gujarat, and that they were overwhelmed and assimilated, not by the invading Aryans, but by the mature-Harappan population." Note that Dravidian/Harappan connection is not denied, but rather subjected to "assimilation." xiang at free.fr also writes: <> Looking at this again, I do not see how anything that Sergent is saying eliminates the possibility the written language of Harappan was Dravidian. If Semitic speakers could write in Old Sumerian, then Harapan could have written in old Dravidian. Who's to say? Sergent certainly leaves that opening, doesn't he? And, since he can only tenously point to "Burushaski" -- one of the other major "mystery" languages of the region -- he has not really advanced the issue of Harappan script very far at all. Query how, with its IE affinities, the (unknown) early form of Burushaski would exactly have showed up as a substrate in Indo-Aryan? And why it would not already have showed up at least partially in the numerous attempts to decipher Harappan as an IE language? Cf. I. Casulje, Basic Burushaski Etymologies: The Indo-European and Paleobalkanic affinities of Burushaski (1997). Regards, Steve Long From W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Wed Nov 29 12:22:13 2000 From: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 13:22:13 +0100 Subject: Lezgian and Arabic Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > BTW: I also found a curious article on Avars in F & W > stating that their descendents > are "Lezghians [who speak] a language similar to Arabic"!!! > Can anyone explain that? This is nonsense. Even the medivial Arabic sources did never claim that Lezgi(an) would be close or 'similar' to Arabic. The F&W entry is far from being understandable. Lezgian languages belong to the East Caucasian language group which as far as we can see (pace Starostin and friends) does not have any living relatives around the world... Wolfgang > Rick Mc Callister > W-1634 > Mississippi University for Women > Columbus MS 39701 -- ******************** Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze Institut f?r Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft Universit?t M?nchen - Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 - D-80539 M?nchen Tel.: ++49-(0)89-2180 2486 (secretary) // ++49-(0)89-2180 5343 (office) Fax: ++49-(0)89-2180 5345 Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Web: http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ ******************** From evenstar at mail.utexas.edu Tue Nov 28 23:15:48 2000 From: evenstar at mail.utexas.edu (Shilpi Misty Bhadra) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 17:15:48 -0600 Subject: Reconstructing Human Prehistory Message-ID: http://www.ihtmed.com/articles/1517.htm > Pushing the Limits of Prehistory > Nicholas Wade New York Times Service > Thursday, November 16, 2000 > An Archaeological Quest to the Dawn of the Human Species [ moderator snip of copyrighted material ] Shilpi Misty Bhadra University of Texas at Austin Ancient History, Classics, and Humanities (focus: Indo-European Studies) senior undergraduate evenstar at mail.utexas.edu 512-320-0229 (ph) 512-476-3367 (fax) From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Nov 28 09:41:02 2000 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 09:41:02 +0000 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) Message-ID: Stanley Friesen writes: > Does anybody have any examples of a language that *retains* /t/ vs. /th/ > finally? According to Ladefoged and Maddieson, The Sounds of the World's Languages, p. 67, Eastern Armenian has minimal pairs like these, where = t-esh and = aspirated: 'bond' 'club' 'difficult' 'high' 'phrase' 'no' 'under' 'hot' But L & M cite no examples with final /t/. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad) Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad) From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Nov 28 16:50:00 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 17:50:00 +0100 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Ablaut) In-Reply-To: <4.3.1.2.20001123072604.00b40190@getmail.friesen.net> Message-ID: On Thu, 23 Nov 2000 07:28:43 -0800, Stanley Friesen wrote: >Does anybody have any examples of a language that *retains* /t/ vs. /th/ >finally? (Cl.) Armenian -t ~ -t`. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From edsel at glo.be Tue Nov 28 10:22:44 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 11:22:44 +0100 Subject: More on dental fricatives Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Thursday, November 23, 2000 1:08 PM [snip] >> Most Spaniards I've met (from northern and central Spain) in the US >> and Latin America use laminal /s/. > I'm astonished. In my experience, northern Spaniards invariably use > apical /s/. The shushy quality of this thing is quite striking > to my ears. A French Basque friend of mine who moved south and > learned Spanish unhesitatingly identified the Spanish with his > own apical . [Ed] The systematic use of laminal s (for both s and z/soft-c) is quite characteristic for most of American Spanish, not Peninsular Spanish. Andalusian Spanish is an exception, but a more complicated one than just a matter of apical/laminal s. Catalan/Valencian provinces often show Catalan accent in pronunciation, especially in the north (of this region). >> Is this linked to social class or is it a generational thing? > In the north, in my experience, there is no variation, and apical > is universal. Don't know what happens elsewhere. I had thought the > variation was strictly geographical. Not sure how far south the > apical runs, but the Madrile?os I've met always seem to have it. > Larry Trask [Ed] That is also my experience. And educated Castilian speaking people in more southern regions tend to imitate that - often not successfully Ed. From edsel at glo.be Tue Nov 28 11:14:22 2000 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 12:14:22 +0100 Subject: Final Theta in Spanish Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Thursday, November 23, 2000 12:33 PM > David White writes: >> Should not all Latin 3rd declension nouns >> in /k/ show up with final theta in Spanish, if "lux" and "pax" do? I cannot >> at the moment think of any more, but there must have been more than 2 ... [Ed Selleslagh] e.g. falx > hoz ( -al- > o, cf. French Gaule < Gallia), radix > ra?z, rapax > rapaz (and analogous formations: loquax > locuaz). Actually one should consider the accusatives:falcem, radicem, rapacem, loquacem... On the other hand: sex > seis, not *seiz, but here the (non-extant) accusative ending doesn't come into play, so it would be simply the loss of -k-, a regular phenomenon. Other words in -z have different origins: haz < fascem, faz < faciem (this one does have a -k root) > There were, but I'm not sure they were all that numerous, and anyway > not all of them survived into modern Castilian. For example, Latin > 'leader' should have yielded Castilian *, but no such > form is recorded, and modern 'duke' is clearly borrowed > from Old French , which itself appears to be an analogical form. > Anyway, the history of final /e/-loss in Castilian is a trifle > complicated. For example, Latin yielded the expected , > well attested in medieval Castilian, but the variant seemingly > never disappeared, and modern exhibits not only the final /e/ > but also an extra /l/ which it picked up somehow. As for '12', > from , I confess I have little idea why that /e/ is still > there. > Larry Trask [Ed] 'dulce' has all the characteristics of a 'learned' later formation, i.e. after the Renaissance (like pr?ximo, fructuoso....). In other words: the -l-wasn't 'picked up', it was never lost as it should have, because it didn't undergo normal evolution: it skipped it. All Latin languages are full of that, e.g. French: Traditional: moustier/mo?tier <> modern: monast?re. It seems there is a 'need' for two syllables, maybe a lingering memory of the multisyllabic Latin origin, or just false analogy? (In S. American popular Spanish some say even 'seise' for 'seis'(cf. siete < septem)). There is a strong incentive for -e in 'doce/trece': avoid confusion with 'dos/tres', notwithstanding the s-z/c opposition, but that is absent in 'catorce, quince'... So it seems the -ce is rather the remnant of '-decim', the -d- having been lost like in 'ra?z' and many other words (and in popular speech: -ado > ao, -ada > aa > ?). No wonder, especially if z/c was originally affricated as is often thought. Ed. From mcv at wxs.nl Tue Nov 28 16:53:49 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 17:53:49 +0100 Subject: Final Theta in Spanish In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 23 Nov 2000 11:33:44 +0000, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote: >Anyway, the history of final /e/-loss in Castilian is a trifle >complicated. For example, Latin yielded the expected , >well attested in medieval Castilian, but the variant seemingly >never disappeared, and modern exhibits not only the final /e/ >but also an extra /l/ which it picked up somehow. As for '12', >from , I confess I have little idea why that /e/ is still >there. After a consonant cluster, the -e remained (once, catorce, quince), and thus by analogy doce, trece. I suppose. ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Tue Nov 28 15:57:56 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 10:57:56 -0500 Subject: Final Theta in Spanish In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >Anyway, the history of final /e/-loss in Castilian is a trifle >complicated. For example, Latin yielded the expected , >well attested in medieval Castilian, but the variant seemingly >never disappeared, and modern exhibits not only the final /e/ >but also an extra /l/ which it picked up somehow. dulce is a Latinate form >As for '12', >from , I confess I have little idea why that /e/ is still >there. I imagine because *doz & *trez would have been too close to dos & tres There was possibly also an assimilation to the final /-e/ of once, catorce & quince which kept the final /-e/ to conform to Spanish phonology >Larry Trask Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk Tue Nov 28 12:34:38 2000 From: mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk (Anthony Appleyard) Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 12:34:38 GMT Subject: Final Theta in Spanish Message-ID: "David L. White" wrote, of Spanish words in -z: > Why are these words so rare, evidently? Should not all Latin > 3rd declension nouns in /k/ show up with final theta in Spanish, > if "lux" and "pax" do? I cannot at the moment think of any more, > but there must have been more than 2 ... Why does Latin {rex} = "king" show in Spanish as {re} and not **{rez}? [ Moderator's note: The stem of Latin _rex_ is _reg-_, as seen in the accusative _regem_. --rma ] From vine at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU Thu Nov 30 02:41:15 2000 From: vine at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU (Brent Vine) Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 18:41:15 -0800 Subject: [vine@HUMnet.UCLA.EDU: Indo-Iranian position at UCLA] In-Reply-To: <200011300231.VAA01066@panix3.panix.com> Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: The position notice below was originally posted to the HISTLING mailing list. Some of you will have seen it there; the re-post is for those who did not. --rma ] >May I post a copy of this announcement on the Indo-European mailing list? > Rich Alderson > IE list owner > and moderator Yes, indeed! We'd be very grateful for that. (In case it's useful, I've pasted in a fresh copy below.) Thanks for your attention to this. - -- Brent Vine (Chair, Program in Indo-European Studies, UCLA) ****************************************************** University of California, Los Angeles The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and the Program in Indo-European Studies at UCLA announce an open-rank search to fill a position in Old Indo-Iranian language/linguistics and culture, starting July 1, 2001. The successful candidate will also be considered for an appointment to the newly endowed Musa Sabi Chair in Iranian Studies. Candidates should have substantial training in Indo-European linguistics. Teaching responsibilities will include courses in both Old and Middle Iranian (Avestan, Old Persian, Introduction to Middle Iranian) and in Classical and Vedic Sanskrit. In addition, the appointee should be able to teach undergraduate courses on topics of broad interest in Indic and Iranian religion, literature and culture, as well as graduate-level courses in Indo-European linguistics. Applicants should send a letter of introduction, curriculum vitae, samples of scholarly research, and at least three letters of recommendation to: Prof. Brent Vine Chair, Indo-Iranian Search Committee Department of Classics / Program in Indo-European Studies, UCLA 100 Dodd Hall Los Angeles, CA 90095-1417 Applications and supporting materials should be received by January 15, 2001. Applications will be reviewed until the position is filled. (Inquiries may be addressed to Brent Vine at vine at humnet.ucla.edu.) UCLA is an Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity Employer. Women and members of underrepresented minorities are encouraged to apply. From dlwhite at texas.net Thu Nov 30 04:17:09 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 22:17:09 -0600 Subject: Reference on Numbers of Saxons Message-ID: > Any theory dealing with the Saxon migrations to Britain has to deal with > the differences in linguistic results. Any theory of the development of English has to deal with the difference of result in English versus the other Germanic languages: in general, English has apparent Celticisms, which appear in the North and West, whereas the rest of Germanic in general does not. > On the continent, Germanic migrants into the Roman provinces were generally > linguistically assimilated within a few generations -- beyond some loanwords, > little trace of Gothic remains in Iberian Romance, for instance. In fact, it > was probably extinct or moribund by the time of the 8th-century Muslim > invasions. It lasted much better in the Crimea! The main difference is that Romance was high-prestige, whereas Brittonic was low-prestige. Prestige matters. > In Britain not only did the local Celtic and Romance speeches disappear, > but the Anglo-Saxon that emerged after the conversion to Christianity was > singularly lacking in both Romance and Celtic vocabulary. About 14 Celtic > loan-words in all, and no more Latin loans than the continental Germanic > of the period. The idea the grammatical influence must be accompanied by lexical influence is false, as is repeatedly noted by Thomason and Kaufman, esp p. 21. This has been pretty widely known since Jakobson or before, though apparently it has not filtered down to everybody. There is, all things being equal, simply no reason for words to be borrowed, in large numbers, from a low-prestige language into a high-prestige language. Furthermore, the number of "Celtic" loanwords in non-standard dialects of English in the northwest is about 200, which is not remarkably low. > In fact, when it emerges into the light of documentary day, Old English is a > remarkably conservative West Germanic language still mutually comprehensible > with the ancestors of Netherlandish, Frisian, and Low German, not to mention > the nascent Scandinavian tongues. Which is why English missionaries were so > important in the conversion of the continental Germans. Old English is not "remarkably conservative" for an Od Germanic language. It is fairly typical. Judging by the fact that Old Icelandic, which is contemporaneous with Middle English, is about as conservative as Old English, if anything North Germanic at the time of Old English would seem to be worthy of being termed "remarkably conservative". > And this despite the fact that we're talking about the Wessex dialect of > Old English, which emerged on the western fringe of the English-speaking zone > and which we know _was_ in contact with proto-Welsh speakers, since the laws > of Wessex recognize a separate (and legally inferior) Welsh-speaking social > group within the kingdom. The differences between OE dialects are fairly minor, as is to be expected if an elite had (in most of the country) spread itself fairly thinly over a subject population in fairly recent times, as time is measured in linguistics. > The linguistic evidence alone strongly militates against any prolonged period > of mass bilingualism in the areas of Anglo-Saxon speech. Since Anglo-Saxon > in its early phase was the speech of an illiterate people divided into a > multiplicity of small, unstable kingdoms with no standard court or chancery > language, it should have been very open to influence from any substrate. In > fact, in such situations linguistic influence occurrs without the speakers of > either language being conscious of it. It is classes that matter, not written chancery languages. That the Old Germanic languages had well-developed notions of linguistic propriety is evident from the very well-developed (or even artificial) poetic diction, complete with archaic "poetic" words. "Pre-literate" is not logically or practically equivalent to "unsophisticated" or "egalitarian". > Yet there's less Celtic influence on Old English than there is Algonquian > Indian influence on the English of New England! Indian place-names and > loan-words are more common there, despite what we know was an extremely > brusque dispossession of the previous population and very limited contact > between the incomers and the indigenous people. > The place-names tell the same story. They become common only in the western > fringes of England, which we know from historical sources remained in > British/Welsh hands until the 6th-7th centuries. And even there, they're > often misunderstood -- rivers called "river" and hills called "hill". Conquerors don't have to accept native place-names if they don't want to. The matter is quite open to fashion. > We also know that there was a very substantial drop in the population of > post-Roman Britain. Estimates for Britannia in the late Roman period -- > 4th century CE -- range as high as 3.5 million or more. > By the time of the Norman conquest (a period for which we have unusually > good historical-demographic documentation) England had about 1.5 million > people; and that was after several centuries of what's generally agreed upon > to be steady expansion. Since WWII, aerial surveys have indicated that the population of early AS Britain was quite a lot higher than it had been traditional to assert. I seriously doubt that there was any great change. Even a population of one million is high to have been composed primarily of the descendants of continental Saxons, since these can hardly have numbered more than fifty thousand. There is no evidence for any massive depoplation on the continent such as would have been required for the traditional view of the AS population's origins to be correct. It appears that only a thin costal strip was depopulated (this is confirmed by Bede), in part because it was sinking. > Other lines of evidence also testify to widespread depopulation in the > transitional Romano-British and early Anglo-Saxon periods. For example, as > late as the 11th century, London buildings were drawing on domestic sources > of long, thick, straight oak timbers, the type that can only been drawn from > closed-canopy forest at least 300 years old. > These disappear from the domestic record not long after, and only the > curved timber characteristic of coppice- and field-edge oaks is found -- at > precisely the time when population, and forest clearance, again reach the > Romano-British level. So there was still some climax forest around as of 1050. That hardly proves anything with regard to relations betweenn Anglo-Saxon and Brittonic. Here are some partial semi-formal references on people who seem to be, as we speak, scooping me on the matter of Celtic influence in English. (I did my own work in 1987, by the way.) Tristram, Hildegard C. 1999. "How Celtic is English" Tristram, Hildegard C., ed. 2000. "Celtic Englishes II" German, Gary. 2000. "Britons, Anglo-Saxons, and Scholars: 19th Century Attitudes Towards the Survival of Britons in AngloSaxon England", in "Celtic Englishes II." Venneman, Theo. 2000. "Atlantis Semitica: Structural Contact Features in Celtic and English." in "Historical Linguistics 1999: Selected Papers from th 14th International Conference on Historical Linguistics. Venneman, Theo. 2000. "English as a Celtic Language", in Celtic Englishes II. I would suggest that anyone attempting to make a serious contribution to this emerging issue submit matter for publication in the usual manner, after having read these and many other works, rather than discussing it on the IE list. That is what I am (somewhat sporadically) trying to do. And I could have sworn that this discussion was closed after I pointed out that the traditional interpretation rests fundamentally on a view of the early Germans and their supposed glory and superiority that could quite appropriately be called "Proto-Nazi". So why do I find myself typing in the same references again? Dr. David L. White [ Moderator's note: The discussion that was closed off was one in which reaction to the term "Proto-Nazi" was the point of the posting, rather than reasoned discussion of Dr. White's original claims. There is a corollary to Godwin's Rule, that when the words "Nazi" or "Hitler" are used in order to force the rule's invocation, the rule does not apply. Discussion of the linguistic and archaeological evidence for the various models of the spread of Anglo-Saxon at the expense of Celtic and Latin are on-topic for this list; further discussion of the putative reasons for 19th Century interpretations of the evidence then available belong on a list devoted to the History of Science, and will not be welcomed here. --rma ] From Tristan at mail.scm-rpg.com.au Thu Nov 30 06:33:31 2000 From: Tristan at mail.scm-rpg.com.au (Tristan Jones) Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 17:33:31 +1100 Subject: Reference on Numbers of Saxons Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Tuesday, November 28, 2000 6:14 PM > On the continent, Germanic migrants into the Roman provinces were generally > linguistically assimilated within a few generations -- beyond some loanwords, > little trace of Gothic remains in Iberian Romance, for instance. In fact, it > was probably extinct or moribund by the time of the 8th-century Muslim > invasions. It lasted much better in the Crimea! > In Britain not only did the local Celtic and Romance speeches disappear, > but the Anglo-Saxon that emerged after the conversion to Christianity was > singularly lacking in both Romance and Celtic vocabulary. About 14 Celtic > loan-words in all, and no more Latin loans than the continental Germanic > of the period. I have to agree with him, Genetic edviance tells us the English in the eastern part of England and Lowland Scotland are more related to Danes than they are to Welsh in Wales, West Country and other small bits of western England. I take caution since the genetic edviance might be showing an very anicent pattern where people in Western Fringe of Britain have migrated from Altanic coasts of France, Spain and Portgual and people in Eastern part of Britain have come across the North Sea from nearby Low Countries, Northern France, Germany and Denmark, which had been going in small and big waves for thousands of years. The Romano-British influence was pretty non-existant language wise, I do not a lot about how they affected Anglo-Saxon culture. There must have been a massive decrease in population of Romano-British from various causes in England and a large mirgation of Germanic people from across the North Sea. In the 6th century there was a massive Bubonic plague from mediterrean that just affected the Romano-British and spared the Anglo-Saxons, there is something to investgate. A good thing is to compaire how English replaced Latin and Welsh in England, againist Turkish replacing the languages Antaolia, Hungarian replacing the languages that were once in realm of what is now Hungry and Indo-Aryan languages replacing the Dravidan and Austro-Asiatic languages being spoken in Northern India around 1500BC. How much of pervious languages were preserved in new arriving language. I doubt those languages preserved as little of pervious languages than Old English did. ----------------------------------------------------- If you deny your roots, you deny yourself as a person From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Nov 30 16:36:54 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 11:36:54 -0500 Subject: Reference on Numbers of Saxons In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Are you only including words documented in written sources before the Norman conquest? Scanning Buck and Partridge, I get the impression that there were many more. Unfortunately, there's no information on attestation dates, etc. BTW: what percentage of Old English and Briton vocabulary consisted of close cognates? If there were a high percentage, would this have been a factor? [snip] >In Britain not only did the local Celtic and Romance speeches disappear, but >the Anglo-Saxon that emerged after the conversion to Christianity was >singularly lacking in both Romance and Celtic vocabulary. About 14 Celtic >loan-words in all, and no more Latin loans than the continental Germanic of >the period. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Nov 30 06:53:05 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 07:53:05 +0100 Subject: Turkish In-Reply-To: <004f01c0592d$079b6a00$4b02703e@edsel> Message-ID: On Tue, 28 Nov 2000 11:07:24 +0100, "Eduard Selleslagh" wrote: >As opposed to Bosnia-Hercegovina (Bosna-Hersek in Turkish; Hercegovina < >Hersek Novi) Isn't it rather Herceg-ov-ina (like Vojevod-ina), with < German ? ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Nov 30 14:28:06 2000 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 09:28:06 -0500 Subject: Turkish In-Reply-To: <20214262527333@m-w.com> Message-ID: On a Hammond map of European ethnic groups c. 1910 I saw Nogays in both Daghestan and also between the mouth of the Danube and Crimea [snip] >The Nogay are a Turkic-speaking people of >the North Caucasus. If there are any in the Balkans, I don't know >about it--Balkanologists on the list have anything to say? >Jim Rader [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From brent at bermls.oau.org Thu Nov 30 11:13:09 2000 From: brent at bermls.oau.org (Brent J. Ermlick) Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 06:13:09 -0500 Subject: Celtic Germanic relationship In-Reply-To: <30.d2676fc.2754b91a@aol.com>; from JoatSimeon@aol.com on Tue, Nov 28, 2000 at 02:30:34AM -0500 Message-ID: On Tue, Nov 28, 2000 at 02:30:34AM -0500, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: . . . > Eg., the PrtGrmc word for "iron" is a Celtic loan, as are several other terms > (ruler and servant, for instance) and the form of these loans indicates that > they were borrowed before the first Germanic sound-shift, since it underwent > that change. (PIE *t, *d, and *dh ==> *th, *t, and *d, and PIE *p, *t and *k > ==> *b, *d, and *g., etc.) This is the most notable feature immediately > distinguishing Germanic from the other IE languages. Do these loans provide evidence for all three consonant grades? The only words that come to mind are *i:sarn- (iron) and *ri:k- (power), which only provide evidence for PIE *g -> PGmc *k. -- Brent J. Ermlick Veritas liberabit uos brent at bermls.oau.org From dlwhite at texas.net Thu Nov 30 15:50:08 2000 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 09:50:08 -0600 Subject: Early Celtic/Sanscrit Mutual Comprehensibility Message-ID: > my Irish teacher (who had his Ph.D. in > Linguistics) told me that "at one time" Old Irish and Sanscrit were > similar enough that a speaker of one would have been able, with > effort, to understand a speaker of the other. He also said that this > was probably due to the "fossilization at the extremes" principle. Your teacher's statement is itself an example of extremes, unless "at one time" is meant to refer to something close to the time of PIE. The similarities between Celtic and Indic are more cultural than linguistic. Dr. David L. White From mcv at wxs.nl Thu Nov 30 17:15:01 2000 From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 18:15:01 +0100 Subject: Final Theta in Spanish In-Reply-To: <7559F662BFD@fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> Message-ID: On Tue, 28 Nov 2000 12:34:38 GMT, "Anthony Appleyard" wrote: > Why does Latin {rex} = "king" show in Spanish as {re} and not **{rez}? >[ Moderator's note: > The stem of Latin _rex_ is _reg-_, as seen in the accusative _regem_. > --rma ] It shows up as rey < reye < rege(m). ======================= Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl From lmfosse at elender.hu Thu Nov 30 19:41:07 2000 From: lmfosse at elender.hu (Lars Martin Fosse) Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 20:41:07 +0100 Subject: Request Message-ID: I have a question to the members of the list: Are there any studies of the syntax of action nouns in Avestan? I would also be interested in bibliographic references to such studies for Sanskrit, particularly Vedic. Furthermore, I would be grateful for bibliographic references to such studies for Greek and Latin. I am particularly interested in such phenomena as the use of genitive objects and subjects. Best regards, Lars Martin Fosse Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114, 0674 Oslo Norway Phone: +47 22 32 12 19 Mobile phone: +47 90 91 91 45 Fax 1: +47 22 32 12 19 Fax 2: +47 85 02 12 50 (InFax) Email: lmfosse at online.no From cristim at smart.ro Thu Nov 30 12:37:09 2000 From: cristim at smart.ro (Cristian Mocanu) Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 14:37:09 +0200 Subject: Turkish, Hungary, Avars etc. Message-ID: I'll try to answer here - to the best of my knowledge-several questions by several distinguished contributors. 1. The language used at the Ottoman court was Ottoman Turkish (osmanli). It co-existed there, of course, with Persian, Arabic and even Greek. Incidentally, all the correspondence of the Sultans with the Moldavian and Wallachian princes, between the 15-th and the 19-th century, that is, all the documents preserved in both Turkish and Romanian archives is in Osmanli, and not Greek, as might have been expected, if one would think of the fact that the adresses were Orthodox Christians. 2. In the regions formerly under Turkish rule, Turkish is nowadays spoken as follows: -Bulgaria: there is a large Turkish speaking minority, apart from the Bulgarian-speaking Muslim population. I wouldn't hazard mentioning a percentage here, as I do not know the results of the latest Bulgarian census. But Turks do have a daily newspaper and a sizeable political party. -Yugoslavia: there is a large Turkish minority in Kosovo, especially in the urban areas. Before the conflict, they used to have schools, publications and a daily radio broadcast. There may be scattered Turkish speakers left in Southern Serbia. -(Former Yugoslav Republic of) Macedonia: there is a sizeable Turkish minority whose situation may be compared with that of the Kosovo Turks. -Dobrudja (i.e. South Eastern Romania, between the Danube and the Black Sea Coast): there is a Turkish minority of about 10 to 15 thousand. They have primary school educatiion, one secondary school, one weekly publication. -An interesting Turkish speaking enclave was the island of Ada Kale on the Danube in the far Southwest of Romania. The Ottomans established a garrison there, made up of (mainly) Anatolians. When the Austrians took hold of the town of Orsova, the Turks were asked to leave peacefully; uinstead, they surrendered their weapons and chose to stay. This 100% Turkish community stayed on until 1967 when the island was flooded at thed construction of a huge hydro power station. It was tried to re-settle them in Turkey, however, some came back and are now scattered in several places in Romania. 3. Related to the previous point, the Gagauz were indeed Seldjukid Turks who adopted Orthodox Christianity at some point during the 14-th century. Their mainstay region now is the south of the Republic of Moldova, where they even established an autonomous region, Gagauz Yeri. They are also to be found in the Odessa region in the Ukraine and in some parts of Russia. The speakers reported in Romania are originally also from what is now the Republic of Moldova (part of Romania until 1940). Fearing Soviet repression, some fleed westwards with the withdrawing Romanian administration. To the best of my knowledge, however, there are no active speakers left among their descendants. 4. About Hungary: Dr. Fosse is absolutely right in what he writes about pre-and post-Trianon Hungary. However, I think the original question referred to the 1-st millenium A.D. If this is the period we are discussing, the accuracy of the mentioned figure (22 languages), largely depends on whether or not we consider the Slavic languages as already separated at that time (actually, 1000 years is quite a lot, isn't it?). Again to the best of my knowledge, apart from the Slavs, the following language groups were represented in the Pannonian plains (roughly post-Trianon Hungary) at some stage during the period between 300 and 1000 A.D.: -Turkic and other Altaic languages:Avaric (see below), Bulgar,Cuman, Hunic, Pechenegue. -Germanic languages: Eastern Gothic, Gepidic, Baiuvaric (, questionable) -Uralic languages:Hungarian -Romance languages: Old (or Common) Romanian (Urrumaenisch, according to the terminology used by Puscariu,1916). The actual fact of the possible co-existence of some (or most) of these languages on a small territory should not , in my opinion, be judged by comparison with some or another American state. Rather, we should think that the period we are discussing is that of the great migration of peoples:some of the above cited populations were just "passing through", others stayed for smaller or longer periods of time, some others wandered back and forth in search of better grazing fields etc. Furthermore there was no question yet of a centralized state, standardized languages etc. Concerning the linguistic situation in post-Trianon Hungary, here are the linguistic minorities recognized as such by the present Hungarian government:Armenian, Bulgarian, Croatian, German, Greek, Romanian, Romany, Serbian, Slovak, Ukrainian and Yiddish. I would've had my doubts about Bulgarian and Greek before reading these data; however, somebody introducing himself as the spokesperson for the Bulgarian minority in Hungary gave an interview for the BBC in that capacity as recently as May 2000. 5. Finally a quick word about the Avars.The F&W reference quoted by Mr. Mc. Callister is a classical instance of the confusions the glossonymic similarities can sometimes induce: the Avars known to us from early Middle Age history, were-according to all-admittedly scarce- infomation we have, a Turkic population. The Avar language that is spoken now in the Authonomous Republic of Dagestan (Russia) is part of the Caucasian language family; as such it is undoubtedly related to Lesgin or Lesgian. But it is not a Turkic language. As for Arabic, the speakers of Avar are mainly Muslim, so their language may have quite a few Arabic loanwords,but that's hardly enough to postulate any genetic relationship. 6. I have already been too long, for which I apologize, but I cannot help myself to add another example of such a confusion, an example which is intended only to bring a smile on your face. In one of the Lord's Prayer collections published by the British Bible society back in the 19-th century, a confusion between "lingua Wallica" (Welsh) and "lingua Wallachica" (Romanian) resulted in two slightly different Romanian versions of the Lord's Prayer being published in the same collection, one of which was listed under "Welsh". The Hungarian historian and Protestant theologian Samuel Koleseri came across this collection and concluded that Welsh sounded so Romanian, that necessarily the Welsh must be descendants of the Roman legions in Britain! Best regards, Cristian From sandi at ilo.org Mon Nov 27 16:32:14 2000 From: sandi at ilo.org (Gabor Sandi) Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2000 17:32:14 +0100 Subject: Don't touch my phonemes (was: minimal pairs ex: PIE e/o Message-ID: [ Moderator's note: My apologies to Mr. Sandi for the delay in posting this, which originally was sent to my personal mailbox rather than to the list. --rma ] >Subject: RE: minimal pairs are not always there Because of a house move, I haven't been able to respond before now to Robert Whiting's comments made on Nov. 6th, partially in response to me. His response, in any case, is very long (and in my view, repetitive and somewhat insulting). Therefore I shall restrict myself to a very concise answer. Robert Whiting wrote: ... Yes, well, this is what we have the IPA for. But you may have noticed that IPA is the International PHONETIC Alphabet, not the *International PHONEMIC Alphabet. You are simply confusing phonemics with phonetics. Phonemic transcription (/.../) is neither phonetically unambiguous nor necessarily phonetically accurate. Phonetic transcription ([...]) is necessarily (or at least to the best of the transcriber's ability) an accurate mapping of the pronunciation of every utterance in a language. I am aware of the difference between phonemics and phonetics. I don't like to be accused of confusion (any more than you would be), and I maintain that the following contrastive forms prove the presence of certain phonemic contrasts in English: pat - bat: /p/ vs. /b/ sinner - singer /n/ vs. /ng/ ether - either /T/ vs. /D/ On the other hand, the same phoneme occurs in each member of the following pairs of words, despite the obvious differences in pronunciation: lick - fall : both have the phoneme /l/, even though one is "clear", the other is "dark" (this is true for England - I believe that in the US, both /l/'s have a "dark" pronunciation) calm - kitten : both have /k/, even though one is velar, the other palatal pet - spin : both have /p/, even though one is aspirated, the other not So where exactly is my confusion as to the understanding of phonemic theory? [more of the same, so snip] >Therefore if there is a single pair of words distinguished by >the presence of sound A in one and sound B in the other (this is >the definition of "minimal pairs"), this should be sufficient to >establish a phonemic difference. In any dialect of English where >"either" may be pronounced /i:dh at r/ (@ stands for the schwa), the >existence of the minimal pair either/ether is then sufficient to >establish the existence of separate phonemes /dh/ and /th/. This is like saying that [x] and [?] (the ich-laut) must be separate phonemes in German because you can find "minimal pairs" with these two sounds ('Kuhchen' [ku:?en] "little cow" and 'Kuchen' [ku:xen] "cake" or 'Tauchen' [tau?en] "little rope" and 'tauchen' [tauxen] "to dive, submerge"). This is just not so. The presence of these sounds can be explained by rule (even if it isn't a phonological rule). I expect that most native speakers of German would not accept these as "minimal pairs" even if they are by your definition. Others in the newsgroup, some of them Germans, have made very good counterarguments to this, and I won't repeat them. However, [x] and [?] are beginning to go their separate ways in German, and to act like separate phonemes, just as bilabial [f] and laryngeal [h] do in Japanese (see my argument in the previous message). If you won't take my word for it, read the most recent edition of Duden's German Grammar, in which there is a very interesting discussion of exactly this issue. The main piece of evidence is from recent loanwords like Chalikose [?aliko:zE] and Chanukka [xanuka], showing that, at least before initial /a/, there is now a potential contrast, and we have a nascent phonemic contrast on our hands. And a single "minimal pair" doesn't establish separate phonemes; it establishes a contrast between two segments. If one accepts 'ether' and 'either' as a minimal pair, this proves only that [th] and [dh] contrast. It doesn't prove that [th] and/or [dh] are not allophones of /t/ and/or /d/. See below. So? The contrasts thin/tin and there/dare will take care of this argument. Or thin/sin and bathe/bays, if you want to carry the argument to the fricatives. [Snip on discussion of the interplay among phonetics, phonemics and meaning.] >You may of course not accept my approach, but I do not see the >utility of a phonemic system that cannot uniquely map the >pronunciation of every word in a language. But this is not the purpose of a phonemic system. Phonemic systems do not uniquely map the pronunciation of every word in a language. Again, you are confusing phonemics with phonetics. Phonemic analysis accounts for the different phones used in a language by assigning them to phonemes. And this is done by determining which phones contrast and which do not. But a phonemic inventory is coextensive with a phonetic inventory of a language only if there are no allophones. What on earth am I confusing? I never said that all phones must be assigned to separate phonemes. I said that, specifically, /T/ and /D/ must be assigned to separate phonemes, and I gave the evidence. They contrast. Let me give you another piece of evidence: Imagine the conversation between a nurse and an anaesthetist: Nurse: "Doctor, we are running out of gas. Shall I get ether or chloroform?" Doctor - version 1: "Ether will do" Doctor - version 2: "Either will do" (US pronunciation) The two potential answers by the doctor differ in one, and only one, phonetic feature: one has a voiceless sound (phone) in the middle of the first word, the other a voiced one. In my view, there can be no better proof of the existence of a phonemic contrast. Pronouncing the wrong allophone (say, pronouncing "aspirin" with an aspirated /p/) will not normally have the potentially deadly consequences of pronouncing the word with the wrong phoneme in the above conversation. [snip] I'm surprised that you haven't included /x/ as an English fricative. Although once present and then lost, is has surely been borrowed back in words like 'ach', 'loch' and names like 'Bach'. Actually, I'd rather include the phone [x] as the allophone of /h/ in word-final position. Of course, if you consider channukkah and chutzpah as part of English, /x/ will have to be included as a new phoneme. [snip and snip] Gabor Sandi g_sandi at hotmail.com