From ALDERSON at mathom.xkl.com Sun Aug 5 07:15:00 2001 From: ALDERSON at mathom.xkl.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Sun, 5 Aug 2001 00:15:00 -0700 Subject: [ADMIN] Network problems Message-ID: Dear Readers, My apologies for the backlog of messages on the Indo-European list, which could have the effect of chilling the discussion. The host site, for which I am the managing systems and networking adminstrator, has been disconnected from the Internet since early Wednesday morning; all of my time has been spent in getting services restored to normal. I believe that we are once again stable, and so I can devote some of my time once again to providing the Indo-European list. Rich Alderson IE list owner and moderator From acnasvers at hotmail.com Fri Aug 3 04:16:45 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2001 04:16:45 +0000 Subject: Return of the minimal pairs Message-ID: Jim Rader (16 Jul 2001) wrote: >Isn't for standard English as the name for a >garment? A pronunciation with [i] in "too big for his breeches" >would sound non-native to me.... I've never heard [i] in that expression. I suspect that became obsolete in non-rustic dialects of American English, and that "too big for his britches" was borrowed from a rustic dialect in which [I] was the normal stem-vowel. The Scottish form is given as , and the word is a double plural (from OE , pl. of 'leg-covering') in which one would expect [i] in standard ModE, had there been no inter-dialect borrowing. DGK From acnasvers at hotmail.com Fri Aug 3 09:10:08 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2001 09:10:08 +0000 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. Message-ID: Lionel Bonnetier (5 Jul 2001) wrote: >But the trickiest question was: Why did "cum" remain >a postposition while all other adpositions became >prepositions in Latin? (And why only with pronouns?) Well, this is a real head-scratcher. All I can suggest is that , , and were broadly similar in phonetic shape to other words used adverbially in similar contexts, and continued to sound right despite the general shift of adpositions to prepositions. I am thinking particularly of accusative supines used with verbs of motion: "vadunt sessum" 'they go to sit'; "vadunt mecum" 'they go with me'. Parallels like *mepro and *meab were not close enough phonetically to adverbs which might fill similar syntactic slots. If this is right, and were preserved by analogy with the shorter forms. Neither analogy nor common phonetic shape could preserve expressions like *"exercitu cum", however. We can of course say "magno cum exercitu", emphasizing the adjective, but the noun must follow . >Thanks for this survey. The same question comes here >with Attic "peri": Why did it keep the possibility of >being a postposition while no other adpositions did? I don't have a clue, since there is no phonetic argument: and can't follow their objects, even in poetry. It should be noted that postpositional in Attic prose is somewhat archaizing. When Thucydides says "seismon peri" he refers to the time of an earthquake which few of his readers could have remembered, but most of them as children had likely heard the graybeards talking about it. Thucydides achieves a similar effect with the obsolescent dual number, so it is likely that postpositional was nearly extinct in normal speech by his time. DGK From edsel at glo.be Mon Aug 6 15:03:10 2001 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2001 11:03:10 -0400 Subject: bishop In-Reply-To: <3B57E120.D18E78EE@swissonline.ch> Message-ID: At 15:43 20/07/01 +0800, you wrote: >Leo Connoly wrote: >> To which I say: The vowels are still all wrong, which renders the rest >> of it moot. >> Leo Connolly >1. Not exactly true: the I- of Istambul corresponds perfectly to the i- in >'is tin poli'. >2. Cf. anc.-gr. propolis 'bee-glue' > mid-gr. ke'ropoli > turk. dial. >girebullu: The vowels are all wrong, but the word is Greek, believe it or >not. >R. Piva [Ed Selleslagh] I thought I showed (in an earlier contribution) that it is not just a matter of vowels, but also of stressed syllables/prosody: A derivation of [istim'bolin] would place the stress on the (shifted to [u]), whule it is on the .The initial is prothetic. Even if you insist on the vowels, your argument, invoking 'girebullu', is still weak, actually irrelevant, because it only alludes to the common shift of e > i and o> u, which also means that the vowels are NOT 'wrong' (the -ro- > -re- is an effect of the tendency in Turkish to make words of not readily recognizable foreign origin conform to vocal harmony rules, i.e with the first syllable). But THE vowel problem in 'Istambul' is the . It cannot possibly be derived fron 'is tin bolin', only from 'Konstantinopolis' where the has a secondary stress. Ed. From acnasvers at hotmail.com Fri Aug 3 07:50:42 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2001 07:50:42 +0000 Subject: Genetic Descent Message-ID: >[DGK] >> I'm not sure we need to invoke substrate for the feminine suffix -issa. It >> can plausibly be regarded as an extraction from feminine ethnonyms like >> and in which the final [-k-] of the ethnic stem was >> palatalized by the feminine suffix [-ya]. [Peter Gray] >There should be evidence of timing available here. The change -ky- to -ss- >occurs after Attic speakers are out of immediate touch with Ionic speakers, >and in immediate touch with Boeotia (since Attic shares the Boeotian reflex >as -tt-, not -ss- as Ionic). That's relatively late. So are there feminine >words in -issa attested significantly earlier than this, such as in >Mycenaean? [DGK] I'm not aware of any. As for the timing, the -issa of Late Latin (< ModE -ess) comes from Hellenistic Greek, in which the Attico-Boeotian fortition of -ss- to -tt- is usually not followed. I've seen -issa referred to Macedonian, which I don't think is necessary. The Hellenistic treatment of -ss- (and the rough breathing, usually retained when resulting from *swV-, but not *sV-) probably reflects some kind of consensual phonology in which peculiarly Attic features, used by a minority of all Greek-speakers, were not generally adopted. Xenophon uses fortited velar-stem verbs (, , , etc.), , , and , but he has 'Cilician woman'. This suggests on its face that the change -ky- > -ss- occurred a second time in Attic (since, for example, earlier represents *ke:ruk-yo:). However, Xenophon does not fortite the -ss- in foreign names (, , ), and he may have felt that the same rule applied to . If this reflects general Attic practice, it seems possible that the ethnonyms in -issa escaped the fortition, being used only for foreign women (I can't think of any Greek tribes in -kes). At any rate, the extraction of -issa as a general feminine suffix is post-classical. From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Aug 1 03:53:21 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2001 23:53:21 EDT Subject: Sound changes versus sound changes Message-ID: In a message dated 7/20/2001 4:48:10 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: <<...what languages "sound like" is not a linguistic fact of any interest.>> However, despite the statement above, Prof Trask goes on to prove something with this fact that is not of any interest: <> The problem here is that Prof Trask seems to be talking about accidental or non-genetic "sound alikes" which wasn't what the prior posts were about. My post was about related sound alikes. (e.g., "How many sound changes brought us from <*wixti> to /viisi/ and how long did they take?") So, of course, Prof Trask's examples are irrelevant. Just to be clear about this. The French spoken by one French speaker "sounds like" the French spoken by another French speaker. They are using the same or very similar sounds. This is the most basic situation where words sound alike. Presumably, there was a time when the language that would become French more or less "sounded like" Latin - the presumed ancestor of French. Presumably, the sound changes that occurred - between the time when Latin was spoken and the time the daughter language French was spoken - caused those two languages to "sound less alike." Prof Trask also wrote: <> And I'd presume that neither grammar or syntax was the main reason for that incomprehensibility between previously mutually comprehensible languages or dialects. I'd presume that the main reason was a change in sound systems. Am I incorrect? Prof Trask also wrote: <> But the sound systems of related languages are precisely how languages diverge, isn't it? Don't systematic correspondences show the diverging changes in what were once unitary sounds in the ancestor? It would seem that the difference in sound that separates two related languages is precisely the degree of divergence. After all *p > f sounds more divergent than *p > p. And p sounds less like f than it sounds like p. That's a pretty clear degree of divergence. Isn't it? Regards, Steve Long From ALDERSON at mathom.xkl.com Sun Aug 5 07:15:00 2001 From: ALDERSON at mathom.xkl.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Sun, 5 Aug 2001 00:15:00 -0700 Subject: [ADMIN] Network problems Message-ID: Dear Readers, My apologies for the backlog of messages on the Indo-European list, which could have the effect of chilling the discussion. The host site, for which I am the managing systems and networking adminstrator, has been disconnected from the Internet since early Wednesday morning; all of my time has been spent in getting services restored to normal. I believe that we are once again stable, and so I can devote some of my time once again to providing the Indo-European list. Rich Alderson IE list owner and moderator From acnasvers at hotmail.com Fri Aug 3 04:16:45 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2001 04:16:45 +0000 Subject: Return of the minimal pairs Message-ID: Jim Rader (16 Jul 2001) wrote: >Isn't for standard English as the name for a >garment? A pronunciation with [i] in "too big for his breeches" >would sound non-native to me.... I've never heard [i] in that expression. I suspect that became obsolete in non-rustic dialects of American English, and that "too big for his britches" was borrowed from a rustic dialect in which [I] was the normal stem-vowel. The Scottish form is given as , and the word is a double plural (from OE , pl. of 'leg-covering') in which one would expect [i] in standard ModE, had there been no inter-dialect borrowing. DGK From acnasvers at hotmail.com Fri Aug 3 09:10:08 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2001 09:10:08 +0000 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. Message-ID: Lionel Bonnetier (5 Jul 2001) wrote: >But the trickiest question was: Why did "cum" remain >a postposition while all other adpositions became >prepositions in Latin? (And why only with pronouns?) Well, this is a real head-scratcher. All I can suggest is that , , and were broadly similar in phonetic shape to other words used adverbially in similar contexts, and continued to sound right despite the general shift of adpositions to prepositions. I am thinking particularly of accusative supines used with verbs of motion: "vadunt sessum" 'they go to sit'; "vadunt mecum" 'they go with me'. Parallels like *mepro and *meab were not close enough phonetically to adverbs which might fill similar syntactic slots. If this is right, and were preserved by analogy with the shorter forms. Neither analogy nor common phonetic shape could preserve expressions like *"exercitu cum", however. We can of course say "magno cum exercitu", emphasizing the adjective, but the noun must follow . >Thanks for this survey. The same question comes here >with Attic "peri": Why did it keep the possibility of >being a postposition while no other adpositions did? I don't have a clue, since there is no phonetic argument: and can't follow their objects, even in poetry. It should be noted that postpositional in Attic prose is somewhat archaizing. When Thucydides says "seismon peri" he refers to the time of an earthquake which few of his readers could have remembered, but most of them as children had likely heard the graybeards talking about it. Thucydides achieves a similar effect with the obsolescent dual number, so it is likely that postpositional was nearly extinct in normal speech by his time. DGK From edsel at glo.be Mon Aug 6 15:03:10 2001 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2001 11:03:10 -0400 Subject: bishop In-Reply-To: <3B57E120.D18E78EE@swissonline.ch> Message-ID: At 15:43 20/07/01 +0800, you wrote: >Leo Connoly wrote: >> To which I say: The vowels are still all wrong, which renders the rest >> of it moot. >> Leo Connolly >1. Not exactly true: the I- of Istambul corresponds perfectly to the i- in >'is tin poli'. >2. Cf. anc.-gr. propolis 'bee-glue' > mid-gr. ke'ropoli > turk. dial. >girebullu: The vowels are all wrong, but the word is Greek, believe it or >not. >R. Piva [Ed Selleslagh] I thought I showed (in an earlier contribution) that it is not just a matter of vowels, but also of stressed syllables/prosody: A derivation of [istim'bolin] would place the stress on the (shifted to [u]), whule it is on the .The initial is prothetic. Even if you insist on the vowels, your argument, invoking 'girebullu', is still weak, actually irrelevant, because it only alludes to the common shift of e > i and o> u, which also means that the vowels are NOT 'wrong' (the -ro- > -re- is an effect of the tendency in Turkish to make words of not readily recognizable foreign origin conform to vocal harmony rules, i.e with the first syllable). But THE vowel problem in 'Istambul' is the . It cannot possibly be derived fron 'is tin bolin', only from 'Konstantinopolis' where the has a secondary stress. Ed. From acnasvers at hotmail.com Fri Aug 3 07:50:42 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2001 07:50:42 +0000 Subject: Genetic Descent Message-ID: >[DGK] >> I'm not sure we need to invoke substrate for the feminine suffix -issa. It >> can plausibly be regarded as an extraction from feminine ethnonyms like >> and in which the final [-k-] of the ethnic stem was >> palatalized by the feminine suffix [-ya]. [Peter Gray] >There should be evidence of timing available here. The change -ky- to -ss- >occurs after Attic speakers are out of immediate touch with Ionic speakers, >and in immediate touch with Boeotia (since Attic shares the Boeotian reflex >as -tt-, not -ss- as Ionic). That's relatively late. So are there feminine >words in -issa attested significantly earlier than this, such as in >Mycenaean? [DGK] I'm not aware of any. As for the timing, the -issa of Late Latin (< ModE -ess) comes from Hellenistic Greek, in which the Attico-Boeotian fortition of -ss- to -tt- is usually not followed. I've seen -issa referred to Macedonian, which I don't think is necessary. The Hellenistic treatment of -ss- (and the rough breathing, usually retained when resulting from *swV-, but not *sV-) probably reflects some kind of consensual phonology in which peculiarly Attic features, used by a minority of all Greek-speakers, were not generally adopted. Xenophon uses fortited velar-stem verbs (, , , etc.), , , and , but he has 'Cilician woman'. This suggests on its face that the change -ky- > -ss- occurred a second time in Attic (since, for example, earlier represents *ke:ruk-yo:). However, Xenophon does not fortite the -ss- in foreign names (, , ), and he may have felt that the same rule applied to . If this reflects general Attic practice, it seems possible that the ethnonyms in -issa escaped the fortition, being used only for foreign women (I can't think of any Greek tribes in -kes). At any rate, the extraction of -issa as a general feminine suffix is post-classical. From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Aug 1 03:53:21 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2001 23:53:21 EDT Subject: Sound changes versus sound changes Message-ID: In a message dated 7/20/2001 4:48:10 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: <<...what languages "sound like" is not a linguistic fact of any interest.>> However, despite the statement above, Prof Trask goes on to prove something with this fact that is not of any interest: <> The problem here is that Prof Trask seems to be talking about accidental or non-genetic "sound alikes" which wasn't what the prior posts were about. My post was about related sound alikes. (e.g., "How many sound changes brought us from <*wixti> to /viisi/ and how long did they take?") So, of course, Prof Trask's examples are irrelevant. Just to be clear about this. The French spoken by one French speaker "sounds like" the French spoken by another French speaker. They are using the same or very similar sounds. This is the most basic situation where words sound alike. Presumably, there was a time when the language that would become French more or less "sounded like" Latin - the presumed ancestor of French. Presumably, the sound changes that occurred - between the time when Latin was spoken and the time the daughter language French was spoken - caused those two languages to "sound less alike." Prof Trask also wrote: <> And I'd presume that neither grammar or syntax was the main reason for that incomprehensibility between previously mutually comprehensible languages or dialects. I'd presume that the main reason was a change in sound systems. Am I incorrect? Prof Trask also wrote: <> But the sound systems of related languages are precisely how languages diverge, isn't it? Don't systematic correspondences show the diverging changes in what were once unitary sounds in the ancestor? It would seem that the difference in sound that separates two related languages is precisely the degree of divergence. After all *p > f sounds more divergent than *p > p. And p sounds less like f than it sounds like p. That's a pretty clear degree of divergence. Isn't it? Regards, Steve Long