From ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com Sun Jul 1 22:32:52 2001 From: ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 15:32:52 -0700 Subject: Mr. Long's objections Re: Handfuls of Unrelated Forms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: NOTE: I am writing to the list as moderator. On 28 Jun 2001, Steve Long wrote to complain about the rough handling he has received from me when I write as a linguist subscribed to the list. He states > In a message dated 6/28/2001 4:38:04 AM, alderson+mail at panix.com writes: > << Once again, the crucial importance of vowel length has been missed. > The words for _arrow_ and _poison_ both begin with a *long* vowel, /i:/, [ moderator snip ] > I'm sorry but this is REALLY undeserved. > 1. Let me give you an earlier post on this list where you might have brought > all this up: > In a message dated 6/27/2001 9:20:37 PM, acnasvers at hotmail.com wrote: > << the oxytone 'arrow' referred by L&S to the root of 'to > go'...>> I do not know how Mr. Long came by these dates. The two messages in question have the following headers (here repeated in full up to the point of departure from toad.xkl.com): Received: from mail1.panix.com ([166.84.0.212]) by toad.xkl.com with TCP/SMTP; Mon, 25 Jun 2001 12:14:59 -0700 (PDT) Received: from panix6.panix.com (panix6.panix.com [166.84.0.231]) by mail1.panix.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5F9584870B for ; Mon, 25 Jun 2001 15:14:07 -0400 (EDT) Received: (from alderson at localhost) by panix6.panix.com (8.8.8/8.7.1/PanixN1.0) id PAA05996; Mon, 25 Jun 2001 15:14:07 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 15:14:07 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <200106251914.PAA05996 at panix6.panix.com> X-Authentication-Warning: panix6.panix.com: alderson set sender to alderson+mail at panix.com using -f From: Rich Alderson To: Indo-European at xkl.com In-reply-to: <111.125ec83.285f8916 at aol.com> (X99Lynx at aol.com) Subject: Re: Yew Two References: <111.125ec83.285f8916 at aol.com> Sender: Indo-European mailing list Reply-To: Indo-European at xkl.com Received: from hotmail.com (f15.law7.hotmail.com [216.33.237.15]) by toad.xkl.com with TCP/SMTP; Tue, 26 Jun 2001 01:26:07 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mail pickup service by hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC; Tue, 26 Jun 2001 01:30:39 -0700 Received: from 216.165.137.44 by lw7fd.law7.hotmail.msn.com with HTTP; Tue, 26 Jun 2001 08:30:38 GMT X-Originating-IP: [216.165.137.44] From: "Douglas G Kilday" To: Indo-European at xkl.com Subject: Re: About the Yew1 Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 08:30:38 -0000 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Message-ID: X-OriginalArrivalTime: 26 Jun 2001 08:30:39.0559 (UTC) FILETIME=[47EB6D70:01C0FE1A] Sender: Indo-European mailing list Reply-To: Indo-European at xkl.com Please note the Date: and Received: headers. My response was written at noon (Pacific Daylight Time) , 25 June 2001, on panix.com, and arrived at toad.xkl.com the same day, while Mr. Kilday's was written at 1:30am (Pacific Daylight Time), 26 June 2001, on hotmail.com, and arrived at toad.xkl.com the same night. Because of the very large number of posts on numerous topics in the past few weeks, I have been grouping posts on the same topic in the outgoing queue. Thus, Mr. Kilday's message will indeed have been sent out before my own, since the two threads in which they appear are separated in time. It would appear that Mr. Long's mail system is reporting the arrival time in his mailbox as the origination time of the message, rather than the actual time of composition. As moderator of the list, there is no way I can compensate for broken software on the receiving end. Let me point out that I do not review incoming postings before writing my own comments on issues of interest to me, which I would view as unethical. Thus, even if Mr. Kilday's post had arrived before I wrote my own, I would not have known what he had to say on the subject until the message was being prepared for final posting to the list. (As will be clear from the occasional blunder on my part with regard to off-topic, potentially libelous, or other unwanted posts, if I'm pressed for time, I might not know what he had to say until I read it at my subscription address.) The other points brought up by Mr. Long are not issues of moderation, but of fact, and so will be answered in a separate post when I am wearing my linguist hat (and which will therefore come from panix.com, rather than toad.xkl.com). Rich Alderson IE list owner and moderator ------- From ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com Tue Jul 3 00:35:27 2001 From: ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 17:35:27 -0700 Subject: About the Yew1 In-Reply-To: <12.ecfb31b.286cec91@aol.com> Message-ID: > In a message dated 6/27/2001 9:20:37 PM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes: Actually, Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 08:30:38 -0000 >> The word I cited, , is an epithet of several diverse plants. As you >> suggest, the most plausible connection is with 'type of knife', >> and the epithet probably means 'having knife-like leaves', since vines and >> weeds are hardly suitable for carving. > If I came to a similar conclusion about a linguistic matter, the moderator > would bite my head off. The moderator objects to this. As moderator, I do not react to any post, no matter how contrary to my own way of thinking as a linguist, so long as it bears some passing resemblance to the general area of discussion of the list and is not simmply arrant nonsense. While I happen to think that Mr. Long is wrong in a number of his conclusions, I continue to send out his posts just as I do those I agree with. Rich Alderson IE list owner and moderator From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jul 1 01:17:23 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 21:17:23 EDT Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look Message-ID: In a message dated 6/30/2001 3:17:22 AM, alderson+mail at panix.com writes: << The one thing linguists in the field have been able to verify about language change is that the rate of change in non-literate societies is roughly the same as that in literate societies--which means that our tools are doing a good job when we date our reconstructions accordingly. Please read chapter 1 of Mary R. Haas' _The Prehistory of Languages_ (Mouton: _Janua Linguarum, Series Minor Nr. 57_, 1969; no ISBN, but the LoC card number is 76-75689) for a discussion of the kinds of predictions about the nature of non-literate language that have been made by non-linguists, and disproven by linguists. >> Will do. I will try to get my hands on a copy while I'm in NY next month. Steve Long From mclasutt at brigham.net Mon Jul 2 16:59:11 2001 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 10:59:11 -0600 Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look In-Reply-To: <12e.714796.28658a6e@aol.com> Message-ID: [[I wrote]] <> [[Steve Long wrote]] I'm sorry because I think you may have mentioned this before - but how did the separation of the Shoshoni and Comanche work? Did one separate and move away or did they both migrate to other places? The Comanche separated from the Shoshoni in central Wyoming and moved south. The Shoshoni stayed in place. [[I wrote]] << So we wind up with 75 years of extensive phonological change and then 75 years of very little phonological change in the same preliterate language....>> [[Steve Long wrote]] Actually, one can see this the other way around. It's the linguists in the field with preliterate languages that are becoming literate who are in the best position to discern a difference between what changes and at what pace in preliterate versus literate languages. The "rate of change" in unrecorded languages that were spoken thousands of years ago is obviously not subject to direct observation. The Comanche after 1872 were not "becoming literate" in Comanche. They were becoming literate in English. Comanche literacy is a very recent thing, only starting in the 1950s. Several recent sound changes in Comanche are the result of the process of language obsolescence, so post-1950's Comanche would not be relevant for this discussion. As far as the unrecorded languages "thousands of years ago", our observations of rates of change in very late prehistoric non-literary languages like Comanche, Nahuatl, etc. during the periods in which they remained non-literaty are absolutely relevant to what went on in the distant past. This is exactly what archeologists and anthropologists do in their fields--observe late prehistoric cultures in Australia, Namibia, Brazil, etc.--to understand cultural items and their use that have been found in the buried record. It's what paleontologists have been doing with dinosaurs for the last 30-some-odd years--examining the behavior and anatomy of modern animals--to understand the nature of dinosaur behavior and anatomy in order to correct the errors and misperceptions of the past two centuries. Judiciously extrapolating similar situations in the recent past into the distant past is a well-established and acceptable scientific method. Regards, Steve Long John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. Associate Professor, English Utah State University Program Director USU On-Line Linguistics http://english.usu.edu/lingnet (435) 797-2738 (voice) (435) 797-3797 (FAX) mclasutt at brigham.net From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Jul 1 19:04:06 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 20:04:06 +0100 Subject: Genetic Descent Message-ID: >>> what I am asserting is that the morphemes used in conjugation are >>> very resistant to borrowing. ... >> The highly productive English morpheme -ess ... > is <-ess> used in conjugation? Oh, you mean "conjugation" as in the verb patterns of Latin and other IE inflected languages? Then you cannot assert your statement as something true of all languages, only of those which show Latin-like conjugation. Which ultimately means IE. Which means your assertion can simply be tested empirically against the actual evidence. So it reduces to "there are few, if any, cases of verbal suffix morphemes being borrowed within IE languages." OK, I'll grant you that. Peter From connolly at memphis.edu Mon Jul 2 04:08:13 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 23:08:13 -0500 Subject: Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent) Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > I'm not an expert but to refer to <> as a subject strikes > me as patently wrong. <> is obviously an indirect object. If > modern linguists are declaring it a subject, I wanna know why. > Is it because with these constructions, the subject tends to be > inanimate? No. The problem is that to varying degrees in different languages, these Experiencers have some of the properties of subjects, even though they are morphologically objects. In Spanish and Italian, the only significant subject property is positional: they normally occupy the preverbal "subject" slot. But the syntacticians are interested in universal grammar, and in some languages the situatiin is quite different. In Icelandic, these oblique "subjects" control reflexives and can undergo "subject-to-object raising", retaining their original case in the process. Most verbs with such NPs also have a nominative NP which cannot occupy subject position or be raised; these nominatives control only verb agreement, and then not person, only for number, and optionally at that. Most (not all) ergative languages follow this pattern: with transitive verbs, the ergative NP has most of the syntactic subject properties, while the "Absolutive" (another name for nominative) NP controls only verb agreement. In Tagalog there's a 50-50 split in many senetnces, with subject properties about equally divided. So that's the reason. I understand the problem, but I disagree sharply with their conclusion: the morphological subject is the *only* subject as far as I'm concerned, and the "oblique subjects" that through their weight around in these languages are simply the ones which rank highest in the hierarchy of "deep cases" i.e. semantic roles -- the ones which in some sense "should" be the subject (and in English most typically are). We formerly had such things -- think "methinks" -- an object in preverbal position not controlling verb agreement. We have since solved our problem by making _me_ into a true subject _I_ -- with no change in meaning! Spanish might do that too some day, but no sign of its happening yet. > The verb is not passive either, however. <> is the subject > and actor. Actor? That's a technical term in Role & Reference Grammar, but the RRG folks would say here that _libros_ is an "Undergoer". After all, it isn't doing anything. From miskec4096 at hotmail.com Sun Jul 1 15:24:42 2001 From: miskec4096 at hotmail.com (Kreso Megyeral) Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 17:24:42 +0200 Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole Message-ID: >Anyway, thanks for the correction. Now I know that there are -- apparently >-- no Hungarian loans into Albanian. Most interesting. Absolutely >*everybody* who ever set foot in the Balkans seems to have conquered >Albania at some point, and I can hardly believe that the Hungarians never >did. Well, if you consider Hungarians as invaders to Balkans, then it's strange. But, except for their personal union with Croatia, they'd never had any contact with Balkans (if you consider Croatia a Balkan country, of course). Or their possession of Transilvania and Vojvodina. Apart from that, could anyone explain the etymology of previously mentioned "ul" in Albanian? Is it of IE origin? And, I would also ask Mr. Aikio for etymology of Hungarian verb (if it is of Uralic origin, of course). From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jul 1 01:10:59 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 21:10:59 EDT Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns" Message-ID: In a message dated 6/30/2001 6:13:33 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: <> In a message dated 6/30/2001 7:32:15 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: << Second, I have not proposed any rate of change.... And why do you keep accusing me darkly of making sinister claims? >> Well, then, I apologize to Larry Trask for misunderstanding his positions. I think I've lost track of who said what. I think Dr White was involved in this in some way. I know I should be accusing someone darkly of making sinister claims. I just hope it's not me. Well, anyway, sorry about that. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jul 1 02:01:42 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 22:01:42 EDT Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns" Message-ID: In a message dated 6/30/2001 5:52:51 AM, alderson+mail at panix.com writes: << So that, I think, is the pithy answer to your continued asking of why any language can't have more than one ancestor under the comparative method: The method does not address single languages, but groups of languages, and as was pointed out by Larry Trask, if we can't build a protolanguage with the comparative method, the languages in question are *JUST* *NOT* *RELATED*. >> Then let my rephrase my question. Can more than one proto-language be reconstructed from a "group" of languages? And, if so, then will those additional proto-languages show up in reconstruction if one assumes before hand that there was only one proto-language? If on the other hand the answer to the first question is no, then why not? This goes back again to the terms I quoted from Winfred Lehmann: "In using the comparative method, we contrast forms of two or more related languages to determine the precise relationship between these forms. We indicate this relationship most simply by reconstructing the forms from which they developed." (Hist Ling 3d ed, 1992 pb) p 142. I pointed out the Lehmann's use of the term "forms" rather than "languages" in the above quote. The reason was to relate it way back to the hypothetical that Dr White brought forward where the "nominal morphology, derivational or non-finite verbal morphology,... and categories" might be shared with one language, "finite verbal morphology" with another. Dr White indicated that verb morphology might have some preemptive claim over those other forms. But my point was that the presence of those diverging systematic forms would suggest more than one "proto-language" could be reconstructed at least with regard to the language that showed both forms. Regards, Steve Long From hstahlke at gw.bsu.edu Sun Jul 1 02:30:11 2001 From: hstahlke at gw.bsu.edu (Herb Stahlke) Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 21:30:11 -0500 Subject: ``mono-descent is implicit in the comparative method ...`` Message-ID: Steve, what do you recognize as evidence and how do you evaluate it? How do you tell the difference between regular sound correspondences that result from common descent and what look like regular sound correspondences that result from extensive borrowing? For example, the many Germanic/Romance h/k vs. k/k correspondences. At this point I understand that you are arguing for dual or multiple ancestry for individual languages, but you don't address how you differentiate among the various contributions and how your differentiation would differ from that of the conventional combination of comparative method and dialectology. Herb Stahlke <<< X99Lynx at aol.com 6/30 9:15p >>> In a message dated 6/27/2001 3:51:21 PM, dlwhite at texas.net writes: << By the way, since "mono-descent" is implicit in the comparative method, saying anything along the lines of "I accept the comparative method but reject mono-descent" is sort of like saying "I'll take the horse but not the legs". >> BTW, let's look at that statement: "By the way, since "mono-descent" is implicit in the comparative method,..." I have four different historical linguistics textbooks in front of me, including the admirable one written by Prof Trask. I don't see a single definition that says anything about mono-descent. I do see references to "systematic correspondence" between two languages. I don't see anything that logically demands those "systematic correspondences" be only related back to only one ancestor. What Winifred Lehmann writes is that the comparative method "contrasts forms of two or more related languages to determine the precise relationships between those forms." Either as a matter of phonology or morphology, it seems it is forms, not languages, that are being "contrasted." If you can describe why or how you think "mono-descent" is implicit in the comparative method, that might make me think what you are saying is true. At this point, you might want to take a closer look at that horse you are selling. It seems those legs are not what you would call factory options. Going back to your post of 6/22/2001 10:27:51 PM, where you responded to the hypothesis: "Situation #1: Language A shares its ENTIRE 'nominal morphology, derivational or non-finite verbal morphology,... and categories' with Language B, but it's 'finite verbal morphology' is shared with no known language. RESULT: There should be no doubt in anyone's mind that this would be universally seen as establishing a genetic relationship between A and B." You responded: <> Now, it's not the comparative method that is telling you to come to those conclusions. The comparative method in the example above presumably established that "the ENTIRE "nominal morphology, derivational or non-finite verbal morphology,... and categories" are shared with Language B, as a matter of systematic correspondence. It's your decision to doubt whether all those shared features are enough to establish a genetic relationship. The comparative method has not prompted or justified any such conclusion. It is simply supplied the data. As far as the world wide absence of mixed or borrowed finite verbal morphology: if you consider this as the best and preemptive indication of a genetic relationship, that conclusion is not "implicit in the comparative method" either. You might say that it's a conclusion you've come to because of the application of the method, but not in any way that it is built-in to the method. Not in any way. Dr White also writes: <> You don't have that quite right either. My point is that YOU can't "coherently distinguish between influence and descent." You are certainly good at assuming "mono-descent." But the example above - where you can entertain the possibility that "the ENTIRE "nominal morphology, derivational or non-finite verbal morphology,... and categories" can be shared due to "influence" - shows that you are having some problems with the difference between influence and descent yourself. In the hypothetical above, I don't believe you've given any coherent operational distinction between "influence and descent." <> Of course! After all, theoretically - it just couldn't happen. How many fingers do you see? Regards, Steve Long From dlwhite at texas.net Sun Jul 1 13:49:01 2001 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 08:49:01 -0500 Subject: "mono-descent is implicit in the comparative method ..." Message-ID: > BTW, let's look at that statement: "By the way, since "mono-descent" is > implicit in the comparative method,..." > I have four different historical linguistics textbooks in front of me, > including the admirable one written by Prof Trask. I don't see a single > definition that says anything about mono-descent. Maybe that is because I just made up the term a few days ago. "Implicit" may be a bit strong, but the comparative method as traditionally conceived and practiced has never contemplated mutli-descent. > Going back to your post of 6/22/2001 10:27:51 PM, where you responded to the > hypothesis: > "Situation #1: Language A shares its ENTIRE 'nominal morphology, > derivational or non-finite verbal morphology,... and categories' with > Language B, but it's 'finite verbal morphology' is shared with no known > language. RESULT: There should be no doubt in anyone's mind that this would > be universally seen as establishing a genetic relationship between A and B." > You responded: > < not possible, I would hope, simply to ignore in such a case the problem of > where the verbal morphology came from, as if it came out of nowhere, no > problem. If it is not traceable to Language B, we are not justified in > blithely proceeding as if it is, or ignoring it.>> > Now, it's not the comparative method that is telling you to come to those > conclusions. The comparative method does indeed tell me that such a fundamental aspect of a language as finite verbal morphology cannot be treated as non-existent merely because its origins are problematic. > The comparative method in the example above presumably established that "the > ENTIRE "nominal morphology, derivational or non-finite verbal morphology,... > and categories" are shared with Language B, as a matter of systematic > correspondence. > As far as the world wide absence of mixed or borrowed finite verbal > morphology: if you consider this as the best and preemptive indication of > a genetic relationship, that conclusion is not "implicit in the comparative > method" either. Certainly not. It is based on observation, supported after the fact by some ratiocination of a sort that Dr. Trask evidently hates ... > My point is that YOU can't "coherently distinguish between influence and > descent." Yes I can, in a way that explains why finite verbal morphology is evidenty not subject to borrowing in the same way as nominal morphology. You just say it's circular when I do, yet still refuse to answer the question of why language mixture or multi-descent, if it is really so common as you say, has not led to mixed finite verbal morphologies all over the place. It seems that your basic problem is failure (or refusal) to discriminate between descent and origin of morphmemes. Dr. David L. White From bmscott at stratos.net Mon Jul 2 13:22:40 2001 From: bmscott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 09:22:40 -0400 Subject: "mono-descent is implicit in the comparative method ..." In-Reply-To: <103.552772c.286c1869@aol.com> Message-ID: On 28 Jun 2001, at 1:19, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > BTW, let's look at that statement: "By the way, since "mono-descent" > is implicit in the comparative method,..." > I have four different historical linguistics textbooks in front of > me, including the admirable one written by Prof Trask. I don't see > a single definition that says anything about mono-descent. You shouldn't expect to find *implicit* consequences in a definition. You will, however, find an explicit statement of this consequence in Section 6.6 of Anthony Fox, _Linguistic Reconstruction: An Introduction to Theory and Method_ (Oxford: OUP, 1995): Of course, it must be acknowledged that the nature of genetic continuity, and therefore of language inheritance, is, as noted above, somewhat ambiguous. If language contact is a major factor in linguistic change, with substratum influence as a typical manifestation, then there is continuity between a language and its substratum as well as with earlier stages of the 'same' language. If, for example, features of French can be attributed to the Celtic substratum of Gaul, then Celtic, as well as Latin, can be regarded as a legitimate ancestor of French. But the Comparative Method is only able to accommodate a single source. Again, however, it is clear that this is entirely in keeping with the aims of the method: given a set of languages with a common inheritance (e.g. the Romance or Germanic languages) the method will identify only those features that belong to this inheritance, and exclude features from any other source, including the substratum. This is simply a consequence of the way in which the method works: by establishing sets of correspondences between the languages compared. You'll find there a great deal more on what the comparative method can and cannot do. You might also look at Roger Lass, _Historical Linguistics and Language Change_ (Cambridge: CUP, 1997). > I do see references to "systematic correspondence" between two > languages. I don't see anything that logically demands those > "systematic correspondences" be only related back to only one > ancestor. Are you suggesting that some of the phonological correspondences might go back to an ancestor L1, while others went back to a different ancestor L2? If so, please explain how this would work. If not, what do you mean? In a related post you write: 'If you assume only one parent where there was more than one parent, the comparative method can be used to reconstruct a language that never existed'. How? (Presumably you have something more in mind than the familiar ways in which reconstructed languages are oversimplifications and approximations.) Assuming that the situation could actually arise, it seems to me that the comparative method would either partially reconstruct one parent or, more likely, fail to reconstruct anything. Finally, are you suggesting that the comparative method could somehow be applied differently if one assumed from the beginning that the languages being compared had, say, two parents? If so, please explain how. What would one do differently? Brian M. Scott From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Jul 1 03:58:55 2001 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 23:58:55 EDT Subject: The Single Parent Question Message-ID: In a message dated 6/30/01 8:35:12 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: > This won't help you here. I won't ask if you've ever argued a science case > in Federal Court or ever did plasma analysis or worked on neural systems or > did any high-order economic analysis. You've claimed an extremely high level > of certainty with regard to the reconstruction of proto-languages. I'm > looking at the scientific validity of that claim. -- no, you aren't, because you don't have the knowledge-base to do so. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jul 2 08:51:39 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 09:51:39 +0100 Subject: The Single Parent Question In-Reply-To: <74.c5b78ec.286cc3c6@aol.com> Message-ID: --On Thursday, June 28, 2001 1:30 pm +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: [LT] > So far as I know, all I have ever claimed about the > comparative method is that it cannot produce proto-languages that never > existed. And that's just true. Do you want to challenge this? >> > Yes. OK, then -- fire away. But you are defending a position which is wildly, ludicrously false -- not an easy task. ;-) > There are perhaps a number of ways in which the comparative method might > "produce" a language or a part of a language that that never existed. > There is perhaps one way that is relevant to this discussion. > If you assume only one parent where there was more than one parent, the > comparative method can be used to reconstruct a language that never > existed. No. This is fantasy. The comparative method does not "assume" any number of parents at all. And it can no more conjure up an ancestral language that never existed than it can extract cube roots. Steve, when we attempt to apply the comparative method to some linguistic data, we *do not* "assume* in advance that we must be looking at a single parent. If there *was* a single parent, then the method will tell us about it. Otherwise, the method gives us only a nil return. Steve, where are you *getting* this stuff from? > If a language family "inherited" from more than one prehistoric parent, > the comparative method will not be able to distinguish more than one > parent - IF you assume only one parent. If you assume all > reconstructible features descended from one parent - where there were > actually multiple parents - you will reconstruct a language that never > existed. Steve, this is wildly false. This is roughly the scenario proposed for Celtic by all those archaeologists, the scenario that led to the introduction of this thread in the first place. Now, Steve, what you are claiming is the following. Two or more quite distinct languages can meet and mingle, and can as a result give rise to a variety of offspring, each daughter consisting of a different admixture of features from the original languages. Right? Now, do you know of any instance in which such a thing has happened? I don't. I have never heard of such a thing -- except as a fantasy scenario -- and I do not believe there is any known case of such a thing. And I have the gravest doubts that any such event is even possible. But suppose it is. Suppose such a thing did manage to happen. Suppose, to make it concrete, that Basque and Spanish were to interact in just such a way, and give rise to half-a-dozen languages, each consisting of a different mixture of Basque elements and Spanish elements, a couple of thousand years later. Now suppose we tried to apply the comparative method to the resulting collection of languages -- "collection", because this assembly would *not* be a family, as we use that term in linguistics. What would happen? Steve concludes that the method would, by some arcane means known only to him, automatically conjure up a single ancestral language for the whole assembly. But would it? No. It would not. Instead, the method would once again give a nil return. We could note the presence of many common elements in the languages under investigation, but we could not find the required systematic correspondences, and so we could reconstruct nothing. Therefore, we could not demonstrate common ancestry for the languages -- reasonably enough, since, in the scenario we are considering, the languages are *not* related, in the sense of 'related' which is relevant to the comparative method, where 'related' means 'descended by divergence from a single common ancestor'. For the seventeenth wearisome time, let me remind you of the case of Tlingit and Eyak-Athabaskan: a huge number of shared elements, and undoubtedly some kind of shared prehistory, but no systematic correspondences, therefore no reconstructed ancestor, and therefore no proof of common origin. I note that Steve has remained silent on this splendid example throughout the discussion. As cases like this one demonstrate beyond dispute, the comparative method cannot reconstruct ancestral languages that never existed. > How does the comparative method tell if there was more than one parent > language? It depends on the assumption one makes from the start - I > think its ability to see multiple descent is canceled out by the single > parent assumption. It will show "systematic correspondences" but has no > way of distinguishing multiple descent for those correspondences. The > comparative method is a powerful tool, but even the Hubbell can't see the > far side of the moon. And what is this last remark supposed to mean? Steve, if there there never was a single common ancestor, then there simply cannot be any systematic correspondences. Simply shoveling lumps of language A and lumps of language B into a bag and labeling the bag 'language C' does not produce any systematic correspondences. It produces only shared elements -- no more. And the comparative method cannot be applied to mere shared elements. > Without the single parent assumption, I suspect the comparative method > could also support explanations that include multiple "genetic strains." > In which case, the method would produce data that could be used to > reconstruct one or multiple parents. In which case, one of those two > reconstructions would be false. And that would be one way the > comparative method could be used to reconstruct a proto-language that > never existed. Steve, you "suspect" all sorts of wild things that have nothing to do with reality. You might as well assert that you "suspect" that the comparative method causes baldness. ;-) [LT] > < grappled with linguistic data in an effort to demonstrate common ancestry, > or to challenge someone else's efforts in this direction?>> > This won't help you here. I won't ask if you've ever argued a science > case in Federal Court or ever did plasma analysis or worked on neural > systems or did any high-order economic analysis. Ah, so the answer is "no", then. ;-) No, Steve; I haven't done any of these other exciting things. And I've also never played first base for the St. Louis Cardinals. But what on earth does any of this have to do with understanding how the comparative method works? I was trying to find out if you really knew what the comparative method is, what it does, how it works, and what can be expected of it. I'm afraid your increasingly wild assertions about it have persuaded me that you really do not know anything about the method. You seem to have some fantasyland version of the comparative method in your head, one which you have invented for yourself and which bears no resemblance to the real thing. Your fantasy method can find systematic correspondences where none exist, and it can reconstruct ancestral languages that never existed. The real McCoy can't do any of these surprising things. > You've claimed an extremely high level of certainty with regard to the > reconstruction of proto-languages. No; I haven't. I've claimed that the method cannot reconstruct an ancestral language which never existed. > I'm looking at the scientific validity of that claim. Which I have not made, though I'm happy to discuss the strengths and limitations of the method, if the moderator and the other list-members are willing. As it happens, IE provides some magnificent examples of troublesome points in reconstruction. > That demands that the process should be rational and reproducible. It is. Or do you want to deny that, too? > If you're saying I'm missing something, spell it out. Well, I apologize for my bluntness, but I really do not think that you understand what the comparative method is. If you did, you would not make these wild statements about it. > But not with the conclusions or unexplained assumptions that you have been > relying on so far. Steve, I have not been relying on any unexplained assumptions. Chapter 8 of my textbook explains in moderately great detail the assumptions upon which the method rests. Do you want to challenge any of these? > And I assume you aren't claiming any kind of unique psychic powers > in your use of the comparative method that are beyond ordinary > comprehension. Far from it, and I really do not know why you are bringing up "psychic powers". The point of the method is that it relies squarely on hard linguistic evidence, and not on fantasies or wild guesses. If the hard evidence is not there, then the method returns nothing. You keep denying this, and I can only conclude that it is you who are appealing to "powers beyond ordinary comprehension". 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 alderson+mail at panix.com Tue Jul 3 02:24:52 2001 From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 22:24:52 -0400 Subject: The Single Parent Question In-Reply-To: <74.c5b78ec.286cc3c6@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Thu, 28 Jun 2001 13:30:46 EDT, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: > In a message dated 6/27/2001 12:29:59 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: >> And what is that? So far as I know, all I have ever claimed about the >> comparative method is that it cannot produce proto-languages that never >> existed. And that's just true. Do you want to challenge this? > Yes. > There are perhaps a number of ways in which the comparative method might > "produce" a language or a part of a language that that never existed. There > is perhaps one way that is relevant to this discussion. > If you assume only one parent where there was more than one parent, the > comparative method can be used to reconstruct a language that never existed. > If a language family "inherited" from more than one prehistoric parent, the > comparative method will not be able to distinguish more than one parent - IF > you assume only one parent. If you assume all reconstructible features > descended from one parent - where there were actually multiple parents - you > will reconstruct a language that never existed. I still don't think you know how the comparative method works, but let that go. You seem to be claiming that if we found a group of languages descended from a prehistoric Michif, we could not reconstruct the two parents thereof. You are probably correct. However, from the point of view of the comparative method, these languages do *not* have two parents, but only one, the paleo-Michif. If, on the other hand, we were dealing with a larger set of languages, some descended from the left-hand parent of paleo-Michif; some, the right-parent; and some from paleo-Michif itself, we could (if the events in question were not so far in the past as to prevent our dull tools from working at all) in princi- ple work out the relations of all and sundry. Rich Alderson linguist at large From bamba at centras.lt Mon Jul 2 05:54:34 2001 From: bamba at centras.lt (Jurgis Pakerys) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 07:54:34 +0200 Subject: real proto-lang Message-ID: [Larry Trask:] > In a message dated 6/27/2001 12:29:59 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: > << And what is that? So far as I know, all I have ever claimed about the > comparative method is that it cannot produce proto-languages that never > existed. And that's just true. Do you want to challenge this? >> [Steve Long:] > Yes. > There are perhaps a number of ways in which the comparative method might > "produce" a language or a part of a language that that never existed. There > is perhaps one way that is relevant to this discussion. I hope prof. Trask didn't mean that _all_ proto-languages (produced by comparative method) really existed. I've always imagined that there's some degree of uncertainty and those proto-languages cannot be compared to the real ones. Consider the Baltic branch. We have Lithuanian and Latvian (so called Eastern Baltic) still alive, some corpus of Old Prussian (so called Western Baltic), and only bits of data on other Baltic and considered-to-be-Baltic languages. Let's say we reconstruct a proto-Baltic based on the data currently available. I think our reconstruction would be just one of a number of possibilities (but not the real proto language that existed). Just because we know nothing about Baltic languages that died out leaving no records, just becaue we can't be 100% sure about Old Prussian facts (try reconstructing Latvian using just 16th century translations from German ;), etc. Maybe I'm wrong, but it looks very hard to reconstruct a _real_ proto-language. Sometimes we're able to reconstruct only fragments of it (I'm not saying this about very well documented language families). I guess it's better to understand those proto-languages as some tools of comparative linguistics than real languages that existed at some point of time. Best regards, Jurgis Pakerys PhD student Vilnius university From philjennings at juno.com Mon Jul 2 22:33:57 2001 From: philjennings at juno.com (philjennings at juno.com) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 17:33:57 -0500 Subject: Uniformitarian Principle Message-ID: On Fri, 29 Jun 2001, Larry Trask said: > It started like this. Somebody asked whether it was possible that languages > spoken very long ago had systematically changed much more slowly than > languages have been observed to change in the last several thousand years. > I replied as follows. I said: if you can find good, hard, solid, shiny > evidence that such was the case, then fine. But, in the absence of such > evidence -- and I don't know of any -- no such assumption can be defended, > because it flagrantly violates the Uniformitarian Principle -- as it plainly > does. I was that somebody. The basic subject here is the "rate of change" of human languages, and whether that rate itself changes (accelerates / decelerates) over time, as a consequence of other factors that have changed over human history. In physics, we are pleased to know that the rate of (locational) change of falling objects increases with mass and decreases with distance, in accordance with laws described by Isaac Newton. Gravity is a constant, but it is contingent on mass and distance. Philosophically, language belongs in two places, (1) in the individual toolbox of each language speaker, and (2) in the community of those who use language to understand each other. If the rate of change of human languages is governed by laws to do with individual ears, brains, mouths, vocal cords, et cetera, and these physical attributes have not changed over thousands of years, then the rate of change of human languages can intelligently be assumed to be constant. If the rate of change of human languages is governed by laws to do with how often humans talk to others in their community, to strangers, to people with different areas of expertise, and so forth, then as society gets more complex and populations increase, the rate of change will accelerate or decelerate through time. We don't know enough about the rate of change of human languages to say either (1) or (2). It appears that a consensus has not been achieved as to how to measure rates of language change. If such a consensus could be achieved, we could use it to test hypothesis (1), hypothesis (2), and dozens of other hypotheses. Gravity is a simple thing as it's contingent on two factors. Language is so likely to be much more complex, that it's easy to see why people throw up their hands and say: "let's just assume the rate is uniform across all space and time." This assumption, however, is more an admission of defeat than a principle to be championed. Larry Trask has given us the history of Basque as an instance where the rate of language change decreased as Basque society grew increasingly engaged with a complex world. This is certainly the opposite of what I'd expected, in arguing for a gradual increase in the rate of change of languages over time, which is what I'd theorized in a prior post. However, in a contrary way, it is also evidence for hypothesis (2), substituting deceleration for acceleration. I suspect that Larry Trask would like to be armed with a hundred instances of rates of change veering one way or the other without respect to any societal factors whatever. This would be evidence that rates of change are truly random, and uniformitarianism is the best way to smooth across several millennia of random ups and downs. This is an application of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to language change. We don't know => we can't know => there are no consistent factors out there to be known. It's odd to find linguists reconciled to randomness re. rates of language change, when they delight in systems and consistency in all other areas. Also, the evidence in Larry's hundred instances is anecdotal in the absence of a consensual measuring system, and some anecdotes, however entertaining, will be wrong. The posts I make to this service are often embarrassingly ignorant. In this case I hope someone will point out to me that systematic and creditable work has been done on measuring rates of language change. I will be grateful for any citations. From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Jul 1 05:50:55 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 00:50:55 -0500 Subject: Handfuls of Unrelated Forms Message-ID: Dear Steve etal. and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 11:35 AM > In a message dated 6/27/2001 9:20:37 PM, acnasvers at hotmail.com wrote: > << the oxytone 'arrow' referred by L&S to the root of 'to > go'...>> > ( is th infinitive form of .) > So I was not the first to make this connection on this list or in print. And > so whatever sin I committed I'll promptly forward to Lidell-Scott. And > perhaps also to co-lister DGK for repeating it without your analysis. > 2. The connection of , arrow, to , go through, was hardly of much > matter to my point, which has little to do with where came from. [PCR] One of the reasons linguistics makes such little progress is that so-called "experts" are permitted tacitly by their indulgent colleagues to propose etymologies as totally naif as , 'arrow', from , 'go through'. Arrows for ancient warfare (where flesh would not be later eaten) used poison when and if available; and thus a connection with 'yew' or some other plant furnishing poison would be natural and expected. Arrows, as any child should know, rarely "go through" anything. They go *into* things. I would bet that no one can produce a word for 'arrow' in any language with the base meaning of 'that which goes through'. 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, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138) From alderson+mail at panix.com Tue Jul 3 01:56:04 2001 From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 21:56:04 -0400 Subject: Handfuls of Unrelated Forms In-Reply-To: (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Thu, 28 Jun 2001 12:35:32 EDT, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) complained: > In a message dated 6/28/2001 4:38:04 AM, alderson+mail at panix.com writes: >> Once again, the crucial importance of vowel length has been missed. >> The words for _arrow_ and _poison_ both begin with a *long* vowel, /i:/, >> while the present active participle of _ei~mi_ "go" (accent is also >> important, since this is a different verb from _eimi'_ "be") begins with a >> *short* vowel /i/. >> Further, in the accusative /i:on/ the final consonant is etymologically < >> *-m, as is obvious from a perusal of the introductory handbooks, while in >> the participle /ion/ (neuter nominative/accusative singular), /-n/ is final >> due to the Greek rule dropping final -t (cf. the stem, found in the genitive >> _iontos_). There is nothing at all to connect these forms historically; to >> claim otherwise is to return to the days of _lucus a non lucendo_ and the >> fly-foot fox. >> Steve, you have a terrible habit of grabbing handfuls of unrelated forms >> which look to you as if their semantics ought to connect them... > I'm sorry but this is REALLY undeserved. > 1. Let me give you an earlier post on this list where you might have brought > all this up: > In a message dated 6/27/2001 9:20:37 PM, acnasvers at hotmail.com wrote: Already dealt with by the moderator: This message was written, and received in the list queue, after my post. Its apparent priority is an artifact of a badly designed mail-reading program. >> the oxytone 'arrow' referred by L&S to the root of 'to >> go'... > ( is th infinitive form of .) > So I was not the first to make this connection on this list or in print. And > so whatever sin I committed I'll promptly forward to Lidell-Scott. And > perhaps also to co-lister DGK for repeating it without your analysis. Liddell and Scott may be forgiven their error, since they were not privy to the succeeding 150 years of Indo-European scholarship. You, in theory if not in practice at least, were. Mr. Kilday did not attempt to derive any etymological connection from the L&S material. He simply noted *their* connection between _i:'os_ "arrow" and the verb "to go". You, on the other hand, made the following statement in your message of Mon, 18 Jun 2001 12:40:54 EDT on the subject _Yew Two_: > One important and early word for "arrow" in Greek was (accus., .) > One important and early word for 'poison" in Greek was The connection > may have been animals with fangs or that shot venom. The word seems a bit > transparent, being a participle for (L&S- <"ibo"?), with the > sense of "pass through". (E.g., "[pelekus] eisin dia douros" (the axe goes > through the beam) Iliad 3:61.) Thus, *you* have made an unwarranted connection among three distinct roots, accepting the L&S connection of _i:'os_ "arrow" to _ei^mi_ "I will go" and extending it to _i:'os_ "poison" via "animals with fangs or that shot venom". Was the characterization I made of your etymologizing truly unwarranted? > 2. The connection of , arrow, to , go through, was hardly of much > matter to my point, which has little to do with where came from. I'm > guilty of going off on a tangent there, so I suppose I deserve it. But I > hope that won't divert anyone from attending to my real point in the original > post on this. It may not have been of much matter to you, but it's characteristic of how you go about your etymologizing. I call to mind a post you made on Tue, 15 May 2001 21:49:27 EDT, on the subject _A Note on Beavers_, in which you suggest connections of a number of words containing the phoneme /b/ in Greek to the PIE etymon *bhebhros, even going so far as to refer two verb-stem formants, the present and perfect reduplications, to a single prefix _bi-/be-_ which you think has "causal" force. As for your point, it always seems to be argumentation for the sake of saving the Anatolian homeland from the fatal blow linguistics gives it, no matter how hard you have to twist the linguistic material to do so. > 3. I don't know how L-S found a relationship between and , but > the lenghtening of the initial vowel in Greek to mark past time might have > applied in some way. Augment could have been a device to separate > arrow, neuter, nom, accus, voc [passed through?], from , passing > through, pres part, nom, accus, voc. I should also point out that there are > forms of that show an -m- ) and that there are forms of > arrow that appear not to have the long i-, , gen, dat, sing, > plu. Another point is that L-S specifically refers the meaning "go through" > to the accusative form. The "lenghtening of the initial vowel in Greek to mark past time", that is, the temporal augment, is due to contraction of vowels otherwise in hiatus, and does not apply willy-nilly to any vowels at all. The imperfect forms of _ei^mi_ actually show this phenomenon, with an initial long diphthong E:i- (written ). Initial /i/ is never lengthened in augment. Further, non-finite forms (participles and infinitives) never, *never* get the augment, whether segmental _e-_ or vocalic contraction. Greek participles and infinitives, in point of fact, do not show tense, only aspect (durative vs. punctual). The form you write _iomen_ is, if I understand it correctly, a 1st person plural subjunctive, segmented i-o-men (stem-thematic vowel-ending), and has nothing to do with the accusative ending -n < *-m, nor with the present parti- ciple formant -o-nt- seen in the participle _iO:n, iousa < *i-ont-ya, ion_. And as I have stated above, L&S can be forgiven their mid-19th Century errors; you cannot. > But how this all actually worked is something I can't answer. But, once > again, if any of it is incorrect, you should hardly vent your wrath my way as > I am hardly the first to suggest it. You are the first to suggest a connection among all three words (and a fourth, also dealt with by Mr. Kilday in the post you quoted so briefly). So you are hardly innocent of original error. > As to the comment about "unrelated forms": > Which forms are unrelated and which are not? Well, the point I've been > trying to make is that "related" forms - in the sense of "genetic" forms - > may NOT be the answer to many of the "paleolinguistic" questions being > addressed here. But the method you choose to make your point is so highly flawed as to damage your case. Let me make a literature recommendation, to show how phonologically unrelated but semantically connected forms *ought* to be studied: Calvert Watkins' _How to Kill a Dragon_, which examines a set phrase from Indo-European poesy through its many manifestations in the daughter languages. Of course, you will have to accept that the words in question mean _kill_ and _serpent_, and have done for a very long time. > Most of these "alternative" explanations deal with BORROWED forms. And I am > suggesting that a large handful of "unrelated" forms with strong semantic > identity ARE EVIDENCE of borrowing. They may not prove borrowing, but they > are probative (the difference is important.) Why are evidence? Because a > big enough handful and a more careful understanding of historical context CAN > suggest an absence of coincidence. The phonological rules are not always > clear, but I try to draw parallels where I can to other instances of > borrowing. There is a problem here: You are *assuming* "strong semantic identity" when it is not clear that any such exists. In order for the material to support your case, you have to *argue* the identity, taking account of the evidence against your interpretation and proving the superiority of the latter. And you can't pick words at random that you think *ought* to be related without carefully looking at the evidence that they are completely separate. > I do think there is a value on this list to hearing an alternative point-of- > view and a value to not dismissing it out of hand. Or jumping the gun about > connections that I did not even originate. Your point of view has not been dismissed out of hand. We have taken the time to point out to you, many times, the errors of fact you adduce as evidence for your point of view. You can either accept the corrections, to work on streng- thening your arguments with better evidence, or not. Rich Alderson linguist at large From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Jul 2 17:31:49 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 13:31:49 EDT Subject: Mr. Long's objections Re: Handfuls of Unrelated Forms Message-ID: [ moderator edited ] In a message dated 7/2/01 2:51:17 AM, ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com writes: << On 28 Jun 2001, Steve Long wrote to complain about the rough handling he has received from me when I write as a linguist subscribed to the list... I do not know how Mr. Long came by these dates. The two messages in question have the following headers (here repeated in full up to the point of departure from toad.xkl.com)... >> Actually, all I was doing was pointing out that I wasn't the only one crazy enough to repeat the ion-eimi relationship. I was NOT trying to make a federal case out of it. And I should point out that I wouldn't fault Douglas Kilday or his post for it since I probably got it from Lidell-Scott, which is what he also cited. All I was trying to do was reassure this particular moderator/member of the list that - if it is a mistake, I wasn't the first one who ever made it. As far as the rough treatment, I've consulted my doctors and they say that once again I'll live. As far as the mystery of where I got these dates from -- again to reassure the moderator and anyone on this list that I am playing fast and loose with e-mail documentation - the answer is the dates are automated. The documentation is below. Once again, there was no real criticism of moderator or any list member meant here. This was really just a bit of a defensive observation. cc: US Dept of Justice, FCC, U.N. Commission on Moderation of IE Lists and Human Rights (note this last line is in jest... :)) ------------------------- In a message dated 6/28/01 5:38:04 AM, alderson+mail at panix.com writes in a post titled "Re: Yew Two": << The words for _arrow_ and _poison_ both begin with a *long* vowel, /i:/, while the present active participle of _ei~mi_ "go" (accent is also important, since this is a different verb from _eimi'_ "be") begins with a *short* vowel /i/.... ----------------------- Headers -------------------------------- Return-Path: Received: from rly-zd01.mx.aol.com (rly-zd01.mail.aol.com [172.31.33.225]) by air-zd03.mail.aol.com (v78_r3.8) with ESMTP; Thu, 28 Jun 2001 05:38:04 -0400 Received: from toad.xkl.com (toad.xkl.com [192.94.202.40]) by rly-zd01.mx.aol.com (v79.22) with ESMTP id MAILRELAYINZD15-0628053741; Thu, 28 Jun 2001 05:37:41 -0400 Received: from mail1.panix.com ([166.84.0.212]) by toad.xkl.com with TCP/SMTP; Mon, 25 Jun 2001 12:14:59 -0700 (PDT) Received: from panix6.panix.com (panix6.panix.com [166.84.0.231]) by mail1.panix.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5F9584870B for ; Mon, 25 Jun 2001 15:14:07 -0400 (EDT) Received: (from alderson at localhost) by panix6.panix.com (8.8.8/8.7.1/PanixN1.0) id PAA05996; Mon, 25 Jun 2001 15:14:07 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 15:14:07 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <200106251914.PAA05996 at panix6.panix.com> X-Authentication-Warning: panix6.panix.com: alderson set sender to alderson+mail at panix.com using -f From: Rich Alderson To: Indo-European at xkl.com In-reply-to: <111.125ec83.285f8916 at aol.com> (X99Lynx at aol.com) Subject: Re: Yew Two References: <111.125ec83.285f8916 at aol.com> Sender: Indo-European mailing list Reply-To: Indo-European at xkl.com>> ------------------------------ In a message dated 6/27/01 10:20:37 PM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes in a post titled "Re: About the Yew1: << the oxytone 'arrow' referred by L&S to the root of 'to go'; ----------------------- Headers -------------------------------- Return-Path: Received: from rly-zc01.mx.aol.com (rly-zc01.mail.aol.com [172.31.33.1]) by air-zc02.mail.aol.com (v79.27) with ESMTP id MAILINZC22-0627222037; Wed, 27 Jun 2001 22:20:37 -0400 Received: from toad.xkl.com (toad.xkl.com [192.94.202.40]) by rly-zc01.mx.aol.com (v79.20) with ESMTP id MAILRELAYINZC19-0627222006; Wed, 27 Jun 2001 22:20:06 -0400 Received: from hotmail.com (f15.law7.hotmail.com [216.33.237.15]) by toad.xkl.com with TCP/SMTP; Tue, 26 Jun 2001 01:26:07 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mail pickup service by hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC; Tue, 26 Jun 2001 01:30:39 -0700 Received: from 216.165.137.44 by lw7fd.law7.hotmail.msn.com with HTTP; Tue, 26 Jun 2001 08:30:38 GMT X-Originating-IP: [216.165.137.44] From: "Douglas G Kilday" To: Indo-European at xkl.com Subject: Re: About the Yew1 Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 08:30:38 -0000 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Message-ID: X-OriginalArrivalTime: 26 Jun 2001 08:30:39.0559 (UTC) FILETIME=[47EB6D70:01C0FE1A] Sender: Indo-European mailing list Reply-To: Indo-European at xkl.com>> From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Jul 1 03:44:23 2001 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 23:44:23 EDT Subject: Uniformitarianism and the Arrowwood Message-ID: In a message dated 6/30/01 4:46:49 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: > You can "argue anything" you like about linguistic history that is strictly > linguistic . But the problem that's obvious is the non-linguistic elements. -- you haven't yet shown any problem. > What I've tried to show - and I think that I have shown - is that assumptions > about the early "meaning" of many of these words may easily be doubted on > closer examination. -- again, no evidence whatsoever. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Jul 1 03:54:27 2001 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 23:54:27 EDT Subject: Yew Two Message-ID: In a message dated 6/30/01 7:35:48 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: > Well, the problem is that I can't tell you when or how often the word would > have been borrowed, if in fact it was ever borrowed. -- then why are you wasting our time with an obvious piece of folk-entymology? > And the reason I like it is because I don't think that any one can say for > sure how would have been borrowed into Celtic or some part of > Celtic. -- do we have to go through the methods for identifying loan-words and the period in which they were borrowed AGAIN? > If you have a notion of what it would looked like, I'd be happy to hear it. -- since there's no evidence at all of any such loan, that would be rather futile. > In Gaelic, of course, I only had , so that's what I used. And it > looked good. -- until someone who knew the actual linguistic evolution commented. > I should say - again - that the real problem I have with *ebor as some > ancient name for yew is that the word seems to apply to a whole range of > woods and bone materials -- and your specific evidence for that _in this case_ is? What? From acnasvers at hotmail.com Sun Jul 1 09:42:35 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 09:42:35 -0000 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: Eduard Selleslagh (28 Jun 2001) wrote: >1. The very well known case of Lat. 'fagus' (Eng. beech and similar in other >Germanic, e.g. beuk in Du.) and Gr. 'phe:gss' (Dor. phagss) (Eng. oak) proves >that different trees can be meant by a name from the same IE source, even when >all the peoples involved were probably equally familiar with both species. Can >anybody suggest how this could happen? I'm sure Steve Long could explain this on the basis of trees being named after their practical use rather than by the recognition of distinct breeding populations or "species". I have never denied that this occurs. We have Lat. 'oak' and Eng. both from PIE *perkwo-, in addition to your example. My original comment about the yew and the PIE homeland (which I never thought would generate any significant commotion) depended on the yew being too distinctive in several respects to undergo name-shifting, but such a claim can be challenged, and SL's postings are multiplying like rabbits, much too rapidly for me to keep up. >The only thing beech trees and oaks (but: what kind of oak? There are widely >different types in N. and S. Europe) have in common is that they provide us >with good quality (and dense) wood for making furniture. Any child can see the >difference between a beech tree and an oak, especially by the leaves and the >'fruits'. Seeing the difference between the two types of wood requires a >little more competence, but not much. It's worth noting here that French has 'oak' < Gaul. *cassanos, not a reflex of . The Celtic word resembles Gk. 'chestnut-tree', so we may have here borrowings from Old European for 'dense wood' vel sim. If I'm not mistaken, oaks and chestnuts are classified in Fagaceae, the "beech family". >[Anecdotal info: I was born in Hoboken, a S. suburb of Antwerp, Belgium, which >was founded by the Salic Franks after the 5th. c. (date unknown). In the 10th. >c. a Latin text calls it Hobuechen, meaning 'High Beeches'. It is located on a >former heath on glacial sand deposits. On less inhabited parts of this heath >belt you can still find the odd taxus, but they are rather rare, if not >exceptional] Thanks. The name "Hoboken" (in New Jersey) puzzled me for years. >2. There was a Belgic tribe called (by J. Caesar) the Eburones. Anything to do >with ebur-, yew, bows, etc.? (I guess real ivory is to be excluded). Most likely it has to do with the yew. Catuvolcus, who killed himself with yew-poison, belonged to this tribe. Also, SW of the Seine, Caesar encountered the Eburovices (mod. top. E'vreux) whose name apparently means 'yew-winners' (i.e. those who win battles with yew-bows) and contrasts with the Lemovices 'elm-winners'. I regard *ebur- 'yew' as pre-IE (Old European), but Lat. 'ivory' as IE. Conventional wisdom takes the latter as a Hamitic loan (from Egy. <3bw> vel sim.) which fails to explain the /r/ or the other peculiarities: nom. , gen. , adj. . The long/short vowel-alternation and -r/rn- behavior could hardly come from Hamitic, and loanwords are usually normalized to common forms. This looks like an IE word which has preserved two archaisms: the gradation seen in nom. 'foot', gen. and the alternation seen in nom. 'maple', adj. . Boars have ivory, and boar-hunting has been a macho-thing for millennia, so it's not necessary to assume that PIE-speakers had access to elephant-tusks. DGK From dsalmon at salmon.org Sun Jul 1 02:23:15 2001 From: dsalmon at salmon.org (David Salmon) Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 19:23:15 -0700 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: The Gymnosperm Library of the University Bonn website says, "The species of Taxus are more geographically than morphologically separable; they were all treated by Pilger (3) as subspecies of T. baccata." They all have much the same properties, although various species prefer various locales. Their range extends from Japan to India, Iran to Europe, as well as Americas. Taxus Linnaeus 1753 http://www.botanik.uni-bonn.de/conifers/ta/ta/ T. baccata is the common European yew. Taxus baccata Linnaeus http://www.botanik.uni-bonn.de/conifers/ta/ta/baccata.htm T. sumatrana appears from the range descriptions to be the variety of yew found in India. Taxus sumatrana (Miquel) de Laubenfels 1978 http://www.botanik.uni-bonn.de/conifers/ta/ta/sumatrana.htm But Indian sources speak of also of t. baccata, sometimes described as t. wallachiana Basic information on Bhutan's Himalayan yew (Taxus baccata) http://www.fao.org/docrep/X5335e/x5335e08.htm Taxus Wallachiana http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:Q6U1WJ9iL9s:www.cites.org/CITES/eng/ctt ee/plants/10/PC10-13-3.pdf+taxus+baccata+India&hl=en [check the .pdf file avail. from google] Question: If the word for "yew" has Indo-European or PIE roots, do the Indo-Iranian or Sanskrit words for "yew" also fit this theory? (I don't know what those words are; no translation for "yew" is given in the Sanskrit online dictionaries I've consulted.) I have noticed that the discussion of IE and PIE on this list generally ignores the Indo- side of PIE and IE word analysis. Why is this? Unfamiliarity with that area? Respectfully, a lurker, David Salmon From gordonbr at microsoft.com Sun Jul 1 23:46:03 2001 From: gordonbr at microsoft.com (Gordon Brown) Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 16:46:03 -0700 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: For that matter, what about Eboriacum (isn't that the Latin for York?) -- any possible relation to *ebur-? > ---------- > From: Eduard Selleslagh[SMTP:edsel at glo.be] > Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 10:16 AM > 2. There was a Belgic tribe called (by J. Caesar) the Eburones. > Anything to do with ebur-, yew, bows, etc.? (I guess real ivory is to > be excluded). From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Jul 1 03:48:41 2001 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 23:48:41 EDT Subject: Red Deer in Anatolia Message-ID: In a message dated 6/30/01 6:15:28 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: > Actually what I mean to say - attempting to behave in a more rational way - > is that if you know of any pair of terms that *clearly contrast* the fallow > and red deer species in IE languages before Latin before @100 AD, I'd like > to see them. -- since it's you who is trying to overset the dictionaries, the burden of proof is entirely on you. Or, of course, we could slap ourselves on the forehead in sheer wonder that Steve Long has discovered something which eluded centuries of linguists. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Jul 1 05:29:05 2001 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 01:29:05 EDT Subject: The Iceman's Berries Message-ID: In a message dated 6/30/01 5:55:48 PM Mountain Daylight Time, sarima at friesen.net writes: > Unless the Hittite form belongs here, I would not reconstruct this word to > PIE. It looks more like a European word, like many other words shared only > between Slavic, Germanic and Celtic. -- I'd say a late dialect term in the north and center of the PIE world. From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Jul 1 05:30:45 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 00:30:45 -0500 Subject: The Iceman's Berries Message-ID: Dear Stanley and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stanley Friesen" Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2001 1:33 AM > At 03:10 PM 6/14/01 -0400, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >> I-- well, a word for it would be a helpful hint. >> We have *eiwo, and *taksos >> *ei-wo produces cognates in Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, and (possibly) >> Hittite. > Unless the Hittite form belongs here, I would not reconstruct this word to > PIE. It looks more like a European word, like many other words shared only > between Slavic, Germanic and Celtic. [PCR] And just how does a "European word" look? What are its identifying characteristics? 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, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138) From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Jul 1 19:09:11 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 20:09:11 +0100 Subject: European Genetics/IE Message-ID: > Dialect creolism? How would dialect creolism differ, effectively, from dialect mixing, which is a pretty normal event? A creole has the bulk of its vocabulary from one source and the grammar from another; but dialects (by definition) already share large portions of both. Peter From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Jul 3 01:58:25 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 21:58:25 EDT Subject: e-mail date and time Message-ID: [ moderator edited ] <> In a message dated 7/2/01 8:48:39 PM, ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com writes: <> The two different e-mailers on the machines I am at now automatically return the date and time that the post reached the aol mailbox, in the form you see it above. I don't see anything in the preferences that would change that. I presume that the idea is date/time of receipt. Sorry about the inconvenience. The path is documented below. < 'type of knife', and the epithet probably means 'having knife-like leaves', since vines and weeds are hardly suitable for carving.... ----------------------- Headers -------------------------------- Return-Path: Received: from rly-zc01.mx.aol.com (rly-zc01.mail.aol.com [172.31.33.1]) by air-zc02.mail.aol.com (v79.27) with ESMTP id MAILINZC22-0627222037; Wed, 27 Jun 2001 22:20:37 -0400 Received: from toad.xkl.com (toad.xkl.com [192.94.202.40]) by rly-zc01.mx.aol.com (v79.20) with ESMTP id MAILRELAYINZC19-0627222006; Wed, 27 Jun 2001 22:20:06 -0400 Received: from hotmail.com (f15.law7.hotmail.com [216.33.237.15]) by toad.xkl.com with TCP/SMTP; Tue, 26 Jun 2001 01:26:07 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mail pickup service by hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC; Tue, 26 Jun 2001 01:30:39 -0700 Received: from 216.165.137.44 by lw7fd.law7.hotmail.msn.com with HTTP; Tue, 26 Jun 2001 08:30:38 GMT X-Originating-IP: [216.165.137.44] From: "Douglas G Kilday" To: Indo-European at xkl.com Subject: Re: About the Yew1 Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 08:30:38 -0000 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Message-ID: X-OriginalArrivalTime: 26 Jun 2001 08:30:39.0559 (UTC) FILETIME=[47EB6D70:01C0FE1A] Sender: Indo-European mailing list Reply-To: Indo-European at xkl.com>> <> Sorry about that. I was just kidding. Steve Long From stevegus at aye.net Sun Jul 1 03:12:32 2001 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 23:12:32 -0400 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. Message-ID: Lionel Bonnetier wrote: >> It isn't necessarily the only instance; 'propter,' 'contra,' and >> 'versus' are often put after the noun they govern, and forms such as >> 'quapropter' became lexicalised. > Thanks. And I forgot "quiscumque" and the like, > where -cum and -que take quite different roles... I was reminded, when I replied to this, that (being a lawyer in my day job) I've occasionally wondered about the antiquity, or lack of same, of formations like "whereof," "whereas" and "therefore." I'm not that well read in Old English, but I don't recall that they are common there, if they exist at all. There are not many of these constructions in Old Norse, and those are mostly late. But a few similar constructions arose in modern Swedish, like -varigenom- and -varfo"r-. The use of "where" and "there" when "what" or "that" would seem to be expected is also somewhat peculiar, and shared between English and Swedish. Are these imitations or calques on Latin forms? -- If heaven be our country, what can earth be but a place of exile? Let us long for death and constantly meditate upon it. --- John Calvin, "Meditating on the Future Life" From jer at cphling.dk Sun Jul 1 23:21:28 2001 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 01:21:28 +0200 Subject: Word Order and verb endings In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 28 Jun 2001, Kreso Megyeral wrote: > [... W]hat is general opinion on theory that PIE had the opposition > between indefinite and definite conjugation, as Hungarian does. Some > of the linguists interpret thematic vowel in declension and > conjugation as some kind of suffixated article. The theory is proved > by the fact that there is no intransitive thematic vowel of > undisputable IE origin. Your attitudes? The thematic vowel is not used as an object or definiteness marker anywhere in IE. The testimony of IE itself is that the thematic vowel marks the subjunctive. In the nominal system, the thematic vowel is used to create adjectives. I would suppose - but cannot prove - that there is a common origin involved, in that the subjunctive was originally the verb of subordinate clauses, so that stems with the thematic vowel would be used to modify stems without it. Jens From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Jul 2 14:07:06 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 09:07:06 -0500 Subject: Word Order and verb endings (was Re: No Proto-Celtic?) Message-ID: Dear Thomas and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Thomas McFadden" Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 2:22 PM > it seems to me that explanations of this type (both the one from > Vidhyanath Rao and Patrick Ryan's response to it) are going to run > serious danger of violating some desirable version of the uniformitarian > principle. unless i misunderstand what they're arguing. [PCR] I do not immediately see the application. Why not explain the connection you see? 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, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138) From edsel at glo.be Mon Jul 2 10:51:46 2001 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 12:51:46 +0200 Subject: bishop Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2001 9:44 PM > Why do you claim, Ed, that eis te:n polin > istambul involves rules jumping > languages? Wasn't the contemporary Greek pronunciation /i:sta:mbulin/? It > would simply be taken over as a meaningless phonetic string. > Peter [Ed] I never said that: I said Konstantinópolis > Istambul was the consequence of jumping languages, and that 'eis te:n polin' was a 19th century invention (reconstruction, without any attestation) by linguists that thought that when a word is loaned by another, very different, language, the same rules as in language evolution should apply. In Byzantine (and New) Greek 'eis te:n pólin' would have been (would be) pronounced 'istimbóli(n)', with two i's and o instead of u. The Turkish accent is on 'a' (Istámbul > Ger. Stambul), which shows that the I is prothetic, while the derivation from 'eis te:n pólin' would have had the accent on the 'u' (Istambúl). Even less than half a century ago, many Classicists studying ancient Greek hardly ever bothered about the notoriously capricious (to westerners, that is) Greek accent. To the Turks, all the syllables of Konstantinopolis apparently formed a meaningless string, as I noted before. > Ed's original follows: > Konstantinopolis > Istambul, a far too complex name for the invading Turks, > who didn't understand a word of Greek. They just kept the two syllables that > caught most attention STAN-POL, plus voicing and adding an epenthetic vowel > to make it pronouncible to them. (Like 'e-special' in Spanish). I wonder if > they ever realized its true meaning (Christian emperor Constantine's city), > because otherwise they would probably have changed it. Note that the > reconstruction as a derivation from 'eis te:n polin' is a 19th c. linguist's > fable based on the mistaken idea that the same rules apply when a word jumps > between two unrelated (or perceived to be so) languages, as during the > historical evolution of the same language. > Ed. selleslagh From connolly at memphis.edu Mon Jul 2 23:01:36 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 18:01:36 -0500 Subject: bishop Message-ID: petegray wrote, in response to Ed Selleslagh: > Why do you claim, Ed, that eis te:n polin > istambul involves rules jumping > languages? Wasn't the contemporary Greek pronunciation /i:sta:mbulin/? It > would simply be taken over as a meaningless phonetic string. should already have been something like [is ti(m) bolin], as in current Greek. The vowels would be all wrong. And why on earth would the Greeks have given something meaning 'to the city' as the name of their capital? Ed is right: that etymology is a fable, but it's so bad I'd be reluctant to blame it on a linguist. It's in a class with _tip_ 'gratuity' < T(o) I(nsure) P(rompt) S(ervice), or **** < F(or) U(nlawful) C(arnal) K(nowledge). It's amazing how many people accept such things, but linguists shouldn't. Leo Connolly From oebel at cc.saga-u.ac.jp Mon Jul 2 04:36:39 2001 From: oebel at cc.saga-u.ac.jp (Oebel) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 13:36:39 +0900 Subject: German (was:Dubya and before that, minimal pairs) Message-ID: You should have asked your German colleague to say "Vase" or "Vitrine" as there you may, of course, find the "v" as in "village" whereas in most cases it is pronounced - as e.g. in "Vater" - as "f". Best regards from a German currently teaching in Japan - Guido Oebel ---------- > ^M7^Oo^Pl : Leo A. Connolly > ^H6^Pf : Indo-European at xkl.com > ^L^O^V< : Re: German (was:Dubya and before that, minimal pairs) > ^Q^W^PM^Sz^N^^ : 2001^TN6^L^N27^Sz 13:01 > Robert Whiting wrote: >> ... I had a German-speaking >> colleage who pronounced English as [w] (as in "willage"). When I >> pointed out to her that she could easily pronounce the [v] sound in >> she said, "Oh, no, German doesn't have that sound -- we use >> for [f] like in . Well, what can you say? Now if 'village' >> were written *, she would have had no trouble pronouncing it. > Sure she would have. The fact is, some Germans pronounce as > labiodental [v], while others use a bilabial fricative. When speaking > English, the latter use the bilabial fricative in lieu of the English > bilabial glide /w/ and the labiodental fricative /v/. Since this is > obviously wrong in each instance, but English has no bilabial fricative, > English speakers usually believe these Germans have said [v] instead of > /w/ and [w] instead of /v/, when in fact they said neither. Spelling > had nothing to do with her pronunciation problems. > Leo Connolly From sarima at friesen.net Mon Jul 2 05:49:20 2001 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 22:49:20 -0700 Subject: the 'Dhole' In-Reply-To: <000701c1009a$8abeacc0$b270fe8c@lucent.com> Message-ID: At 08:53 AM 6/29/01 -0400, Vidhyanath Rao wrote: >The avoidance of dense forest by wolfs may be a better explanation: ... It is interesting how few people seem to know that the older common name for that species, at least in North America, was Timber Wolf. They do not particularly avoid forests. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Jul 3 04:38:27 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2001 00:38:27 EDT Subject: the 'Dhole' Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 7/1/01 10:52:51 PM, dlwhite at texas.net writes: <> Just briefly again,... yes. Or, mostly yes. - I should have written "Wolves as a general rule and apparently especially in southern Asia are found in MORE open habitats than the dhole." I also assume we are speaking of the grey wolf, as other kinds of "wolves" may be more distant in descent than the dhole. - A quick search on the web will return many, many repetitions of the statement that "Wolves do not live in" or "are seldom found in arid deserts or tropical forests." - The basic problem with the "southern heat and humidity" idea may be that in fact the Indian Wolf, a subspecies of canis lupus, is found "south down the middle of India towards Madras and Bangalore." See a map of its range to the deep south of the subcontinent at http://www.myinternet.co.uk/wsgb/education/newsletters/archive/winter2000.htm. Also, according to the WSGB, "Wolves in India tend to prefer open habitat, usually scrubland, avoiding forested areas. This is possibly an adaptation to avoid competition with big cats such as tigers and leopards, and the Asian wild dog or dhole, although wolf populations do sometimes overlap leopard territories. [An alternative explanation is that] wolves may have initially arrived in India from the arid areas of the Middle East and naturally colonised open habitat rather than the moister forests." An analogy is also draw to the adpative behavior of the Ethiopian wolf, which inhabits relatively high, treeless ground exclusively. - Recent studies (e.g., Helen Purves and Carol Doering, Wolves and People: Assessing cumulative impacts of human disturbance on wolves in Jasper National Park, 1999) tend to show that the best indicators of wolf movement and habitat are prey biomass concentration, "least-cost paths" and avoidance of human development areas. Although tropical forests are extremely rich in prey, movement in them tends to be difficult and inefficient for the particular predation style of the wolf - as with other heavily obstructed areas such as bouldered areas, salt marshes and steeper slopes. And this "least cost" analysis would seem to be the best explanation for the otherwise ubiqutous wolf's relative absence from many dense tropical and sub-tropical forest environments. - The dhole by all accounts favors dense forests, especially tropical and sub-tropical forests. ("In the Soviet Union, the dhole inhabits alpine areas and dense forests; in India, dense forest and thick scrub jungle up to 2,100m; in Thailand, dense montane forest up to 3,000m.") Such specialized adaption could not have been recent. I didn't find any clear references to the dhole inhabiting "open steppes" or "tundra" environments; some evidence from the late Pleistocene also seems to locate the dhole in thickly forested environments (e.g., Ovodov, 1977). If there were "dholes" on the open steppes in those days, the first impression might be that they were materially and taxonomically distinct from the main branch of the species. - The best evidence we have perhaps is that the dholes's more modern environment has been determined by the natural and human-induced shrinkage of its primary environment. According to the World Conservation Union, the major factors affecting the dholes range have been (note the final reference to wolves): "In India, disease appears to be important in population regulation. In C.a. primaevus, virulent distemper, rabies, or both are thought to kill dholes periodically in Chitawan and Corbett. The prey base in these areas suggests that these should be among the best dhole habitats in this subspecies' range. Their rarity in this region may be due to natural causes, or may be the result of increased human contact (and contact with domestic dogs) leading to frequent disease introductions. 2. C. a. dukhunensis: Two forms of disturbance within reserves by local people: stealing of kills; and disturbance at den sites during the breeding season leading to den shifting and possible pup mortality. Threats in outside reserves include poisoning, resulting from conflicts with cattle grazers and depletion of natural prey (Axis axis, Cervus unicolor) by poachers (Johnsingh 1986). 3. Declines in populations for "unexplained" reasons have been documented in Kanha and the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, reasons for decline after 1920 are uniformly uncertain.... Ovsyanikov suggests that poison bait programmes aimed at elimination of wolves, Canis lupus, may have inadvertently eliminated dholes in areas in which the two species overlap." There's good reason to think that the dhole developed as a specialized adaption to dense forest environments and its distribution has not been particularly affected by the wolf - as it does not appear to be particularly affected by tigers or bears. On the other hand, the wolf's relative absence from typical dhole habitats can also be explained in much more obvious and universally applicable ways. Nothing suggests anything like the innate superiority of the wolf. Finally, I cannot find anything that attributes the distribution of the wolf being affected by heat or humidity. <> Not that it has anything to do with the wolf's range in that region, but the Mayan military class called themselves by the name of a predator in the neighborhood that is quite capable of being thought as "competition" - the jaguar. But then again, there were sabre-tooth tigers and wolves living alongside of one another in Florida @10,000 years ago. Perhaps the ocean air canceled out the humidity. Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jul 2 13:12:38 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 14:12:38 +0100 Subject: 'albeit' In-Reply-To: <001101c0fefb$675d7b80$9b70073e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: --On Tuesday, June 26, 2001 8:32 pm +0100 petegray wrote: [quoting on 'albeit'] >> "all-bite" .... the pretentiousness of Times journalists >> (more justifiably, perhaps). > The word is not pretentious at all in the educated speech of those I work > with (or in my own). I guess its "death and resurrection" is a phenomenon > not shared by all the English speaking world. I really wish some linguist had been paying attention to this word. It's been doing startling things. As recently as ten years ago, I think, 'albeit' was as dead as a doornail in English. I never encountered it at all except in texts written a long time ago. Then, something like six or seven years ago, it started to turn up with some frequency. One of my colleagues here at Sussex noted that the word was suddenly appearing in student work. And I began seeing it more and more often, in newspapers, in academic writing, and in non-fiction books. Now it seems to be everywhere, or almost everywhere. (It never besmirches my own writing, I can tell you.) Why? How? How did this decaying corpse get dragged out of its coffin and foisted back onto the language? Who did this, and why? And why have English-speakers in their tens of thousands been so eager to embrace this reanimated zombie of an expired polysyllable and to use it in preference to everyday monosyllables like 'but' and 'though'? I propose Trask's Law of Lexical Change: Never use a plain short word that everyone understands if you can use a long, silly word that many people don't understand -- possibly including you. Sorry, folks. I'm afraid that I, tedious old fart that I am, still find 'albeit' unspeakably pretentious. In my new handbook of English usage, out shortly from Penguin, I condemn the word in ringing tones and warn the reader that its use may get him suspected of belonging to a lower life-form. Well, this handbook is a little more forthright than most. 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 proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Jul 2 15:01:01 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 10:01:01 -0500 Subject: *G^EN- Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2001 2:49 PM > Pat said: >> *keubH2-, 'lie down, lay down', >> I see no reason not to derive it from Pokorny's 2. *kew-, 'bend' [PG] > Help yourself. It doesn't alter my (or any normal) understanding of PIE. [PCR] I am not sure if I am being tagged with an *abnormal* understanding of PIE by maintaining the primacy of CVC-roots. Is that your intention? But your remark also puzzles me. I thought you were objecting to my willingness to derive every non-borrowed PIE stem ultimately from a CVC-root. And as part of an objection, you cited *keubH2- as an example of a stem that was not derived from a simpler CVC-root, hence was itself a root (CVCCH), obviously not CVC! If you have no problem with deriving *keubH2- from *kew-, then what was your point in mentioning it (*keubH2-) at all? Under these circumstances, why should I care? Isolating the initial CVC-component of PIE stems allows comparison with initial CVC-segments of PAA triliteral roots. Just for the record, I would analyze *keubH2- as follows: 1) Root theme: *ke/o- (better *khe/o-), 'to close (around)'; + 2) *-w, repeated activity implying a goal = *k(h)ew-, 'close up all around' + 3) *-b, 'spot, location' = *k(h)eub-, nominal: 'closed up place'; verbal: 'make a closed up place (as by curling up in sleep)' + 4) *-H (H1 = ), stative = *k(h)eubH-, 'curled up while lying'. 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, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jul 3 22:37:34 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2001 17:37:34 -0500 Subject: *G^EN- Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2001 2:48 PM > Pat said: >> Let me clarify what I was saying. Even if we could trace all attested IE >> forms back to *g^enH1-, and no attested form could be derived from **g^en- >> ...I would still maintain that the non-attestation of **g^en- is a >> historical accident, and that **g^en- still must be reconstructed for some >> earlier date in order to provide the basis for *g^enH1-. > I reply: > This is based entirely on a theoretical assumption. Nothing wrong with > that, but not everyone is in agreement on that theory. Furthermore, it also > assumes that *g'en is CVC. In PIE terms, I would see it as CV, and the > attested root *g'enH / g'nH as the true CVC, parallel to so many PIE roots > such as *leikw / likw, *derk / drk ....etc [PCR] Well, you obviously have a liking for syllablic nasals. I guess you will think I am copping a plea by appealing to Nostratic (and PAA) again. In cognates with *CVn- roots, Nostratic (and PAA) show no signs of syllabic nasals. This suggests strongly that syllabic nasals are an IE development. Now, it appears to me that you wish to reconstruct a *g^N-, which you would consider an example of CV. Why not explain to me why you believe it is preferable to regard *g^NH- as a CVH rather than simply a zero-grade of *g^en + H-? Obviously, I reject the parallel you suggest. For me, *leikw- is a CVC (*ley-) plus root-extension *-kw. 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, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138) From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Jul 2 16:10:47 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 11:10:47 -0500 Subject: kinkajou In-Reply-To: <328191389.3202802839@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk> Message-ID: So what is the kinkajou in Spanish? Or, to be more precise, what do locals call it? Costa Ricans tend to lump cat and dog-sized wild mammals into pisotes "fast, climbing mammals", mozotes "shy, quiet nocturnal mammals" and zorros "road-kill mammals". Pisotes include coatis and other raccoon-like animals. Mozote is too ambiguous to pin down Zorro, literally "fox" in Spain, is used for possum "zorro blanco", skunk "zorro hediondo" and so on. Zorrilla is also "skunk". In various parts of South America, they use zorri/n, zorrita, etc. for "skunk". Raccoons OTOH are well known enough to have their own name, "mapache" Although dictionaries give zarigu"ey, zarigu"eya for "possum", I've never met anyone who ever used that term or had even heard it. [ moderator snip ] >My recent edition of Collins, one of the best British desk dictionaries, >not only enters 'kinkajou' but gives it two senses. Sense 1 is the Central >and South American mammal Potos flavus, also called 'honey bear' or >'potto', and related to the raccoon. Sense 2 is as another name for the >potto, an African prosimian primate, Perodicticus potto, belonging to the >loris family. Apparently kinkajous and pottos, in spite of their rather >distant relationship, resemble each other so strongly that English-speakers >have not hesitated to transfer the names in both directions. >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) Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From DFOKeefe at aol.com Mon Jul 2 21:57:01 2001 From: DFOKeefe at aol.com (DFOKeefe at aol.com) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 17:57:01 EDT Subject: Proto-Celtic - An Exploration: Celtic ICM & Q/P Words = Function IE Roots Message-ID: Dear Dr. Aikio & I.E. List, Thank you for your constructive comments, and even your disagreements. You are correct about there being no initial consonantal gradation in Fenno-Ugric, though there is apparently a similar such phenomenon in Uralic (which I will discuss later in this note). However, I am interested in the similarity of the process of consonantal gradation in Finnish-Estonian, consonantal alternation in Uralic and consonantal assimilation in Hungarian and initial consonant mutation in the Celtic languages. These somewhat similar processes are phonologically complex and not to be picked up in one or two centuries. August A. Koski and Ilona Milahyfy in A HUNGARIAN BASIC COURSE, N.Y.: Hippocrene Books, 1990 discuss consonantal assimilation on page 71, where they point out that voiced consonants (b, d, g, gy, v, z, zs) become voiceless consonants (p, t, k, ty, f, sz, s) and vice versa in certain situations. That is, if a voiced consonant proceeds an unvoiced consonant, the voiced consonant is assimilated and pronounced as unvoiced, somewhat similar to lenition. Likewise, if an unvoiced consonant precedes a voiced consonant, the unvoiced consonant is pronounced as voiced, similar to Celtic eclipsis, though d and n do not become n and ng as in Celtic. Also, on page 138, they point out that if an n comes before a p or b, it is pronounced as m and the digraph ny before k and g is pronounced as n. i also observed that possessive pronouns are placed at the end of nouns (p. 138) and also the indirect object (137). The change from voiced to unvoiced consonant of Ugric consonantal assimilation is nearly identical to that of eclipsis in Celtic. And also, Celtic languages attach pronouns to the end of prepositions. Consequently, whether speaking in terms of a Celtic - Fenno-Ugric relationship, or in terms of the nature of Celtic initial consonantal mutation, Fenno-Ugric consonantal gradation and consonantal assimilation are relevant as systematic morphological processes. Also, please note that Bjorn Collinder in AN INTRODUCTION TO THE URALIC LANGUAGES, Berkley: Univ. Cal. Press, 1965, points out that Lappish has gradation which goes through the whole vocabulary (p. 65) and also he states that "On the other hand, it is not unlikely that there was gradation in Common Uralic....." p. 72. The ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, 15th ed., 1994, Vol. 22, in an article entitled Languages of the World, p. 690, states "the Sami languages exhibit similar alternations, but the process applies to all consonants......" Presumably, this means that alternation applies to initial consonants, too. The exact development of Proto-Celtic initial consonant mutation, and Proto-Fenno-Ugric and Proto-Uralic (Samoyedic) consonantal assimilation / alternation / gradation may be difficult for us to ascertain at this time. But the fundamental shift between voiced and unvoiced consonants is a shared common feature. Based on these exceptional obvious similarities, I conclude that there was some tie-in. Our opinion that there is a strong relationship between Indo-European and Fenno-Ugric is buttressed by Professor Kalevi Wiik's own independent research. He is a distinguished professor of phonetics in Finland. He is well-supported by modern genetic data which has knocked out the isolationist linguistic claims of Basques and Fenno-Ugrics, particularly as regards the rh negative blood factor. We used Modern Irish and Modern Finnish because if the two languages were related long ago, they should show some strong similarities today, even if a few borrowed Latin words are included in either vocabulary. (I frequently get criticized for comparing the Finnish numeral three to the Irish word for pigeon on account of its 3 toes. That was the only rationale I could come up with.) Your comments that our works on Uralic are pretty much on the mark. They are tentative explorations. I will label them as such. If Celtic is related to Fenno-Ugric, and there is a reasonable possibility that it is, then it may be possible for a partial, low grade IE link to Uralic. Please note, by a partial linguistic link, I mean links limited to very basic resemblances only, with no links to grammar, conjugation, declension. A limited, but consistent connection at most. Regards, David O'Keefe Houston, Texas From DFOKeefe at aol.com Mon Jul 2 22:10:02 2001 From: DFOKeefe at aol.com (DFOKeefe at aol.com) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 18:10:02 EDT Subject: Proto-Celtic & Proto-Fenno-Ugric in Herodotus and C. Ptolemy Message-ID: Hello I.E. List, In PROTO-CELTIC - AN EXPLORATION: CELTIC ICM AND Q/P WORDS AS A FUNCTION OF IE ROOTS we mentioned a possible connection with the Fenno-Ugric languages and some of their consonantal change characteristics. Research indicates that there was some shared geographical areas in Central Europe between Celts and Hungarians in prehistoric times. I have written a very brief paper, ANCIENT AND MODERN HUNGARIAN PLACE NAMES, F.-U. CONSONANTAL ASSIMILATION / GRADATION AND A POSSIBLE CELTIC I.C.M. CONNECTION, which I have placed in Section XII. of our web site http://hometown.aol.com/dfokeefe/page1.html While this very brief paper is not meant to be profound, it does get the point over that Hungarians have been in Central Europe since very early times. They appear to have been quite close to the Celtic peoples. Consequently they could have influenced each other culturally and linguistically. Also, if the Hungarians were in Central Europe in prehistoric times, then this might better explain the settlement of the Baltic region better than assuming that the Finns and Estonians went directly up to their present areas via Central and Western Russia. I am not interested in which ethnic / linguistic group went first. It seems from Pittman and Ryan that most IE-FU people appear to be about 7,000 years old. Regards, David O'Keefe Houston, Texas From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Wed Jul 4 04:35:27 2001 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2001 07:35:27 +0300 Subject: PU trees (WAS: About the Yew1) In-Reply-To: <3FBE0C2659BC3B4EAB3536F20FA25039040EA7EB@red-msg-02.redmond.corp.microsoft.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 14 Jun 2001, Gordon Brown wrote: > Ante, can you give us some modern reflexes of these tree names, say in > Finnish, Estonia, Saami, perhaps others? PU *sïksi 'siberian pine' > Komi /susï-pu/ (/pu/ 'tree'), Khanty (Vakh-Vasjugan dialect) /Lïgøl/, Manysi (Pelymka dialect) /tëët/, Nenets /tideh/ (no cognates in more western Uralic, because the tree only grows in the speaking area of Samoyedic, Ob-Ugric & Permic) PU *d´ïxmi 'bird cherry' > Sami (North) /duopma/, (South) /foeme/, Finnish /tuomi/, Estonian /toom/, Mordvin (Erzya) /l´om/, Manysi (Pelymka) /l´ëëm/, Selkup (Taz) /c^ëm/, Kamass /lem/ etc. PU *kaxsi 'spruce' > Sami /guossa/, Finnish /kuusi/, Estonian /kuusk/, Mordvin /kuz/, Khanty (Vasjugan) /kagøt/, Nenets /xadi/ etc. PU *koxji 'birch' > Finnish /koivu/, Estonian (South) /kõiv/, Mari /kue/, Nenets /xo/, Nganasan /küø/ etc. PU ?*pic´(V)lV or ?*pic´(V)rV 'rowan' > Finnish /pihla-ja/, Estonian /pihlakas/, Mordvin /piz´ol/, Udmurt /palez´/ (metathetic), Khanty (Vakh-Vasjugan) /pec´ør/ etc. (the reflexes of this word contain phonological irregularities). For more details, please look up the words in the relevant etymological dictionaries (Uralisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, Suomen Sanojen Alkuperä, etc.) Regards, Ante Aikio From bmscott at stratos.net Fri Jul 6 01:09:54 2001 From: bmscott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 21:09:54 -0400 Subject: About the Yew1 In-Reply-To: <3FBE0C2659BC3B4EAB3536F20FA25039040EAD71@red-msg-02.redmond.corp.microsoft.com> Message-ID: On 1 Jul 2001, at 16:46, Gordon Brown wrote: > For that matter, what about Eboriacum (isn't that the Latin for > York?) -- any possible relation to *ebur-? , earlier in Ptolemy. It's been derived from a personal name that is said to be related to the 'yew' word, but Ekwall points out that it could itself just as well be directly from that word. Brian M. Scott From bronto at pobox.com Fri Jul 6 03:15:45 2001 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 20:15:45 -0700 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: Gordon Brown wrote: > For that matter, what about Eboriacum (isn't that the Latin > for York?) -- any possible relation to *ebur-? Here's Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-names: [ c 150 Ptol ...] The Brit name is held to be derived from a pers. n. (Gaul , Welsh ). But this name is supposed to be a derivative of Gaul (Ir ) `yew', and might then well be derived directly from the tree-name. Owing to popular etymology the Brit name was changed into OE , which may have been supposed to contain OE `boar'. Scandinavians at an early date came to know the name, and in their speech it became , found in Egill's Arinbjarnardra'pa of 962. A later development of this is , found in later ON sources, as in Fagrskinna. In this form the name was re-adopted by the English. -- Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/ From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Jul 6 06:34:40 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 02:34:40 EDT Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: In a message dated 7/5/2001 7:02:26 PM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes: << It's worth noting here that French has 'oak' < Gaul. *cassanos, not a reflex of . The Celtic word resembles Gk. 'chestnut-tree', But see , Grk; , Lat, cinnamon tree, any tree "with an aromatic bark"; Greek, "of ivy"; , Grk; Lat, "English ivy" or a similar plant; Cf., Lat , a larva gathered from under the bark of trees, (Pliny); Lat , a hewer of trees; , a forest in ancient Germany. Regards, Steve Long From edsel at glo.be Fri Jul 6 12:53:49 2001 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 14:53:49 +0200 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Douglas G Kilday" Sent: Sunday, July 01, 2001 11:42 AM > Eduard Selleslagh (28 Jun 2001) wrote: [snip] >> [Anecdotal info: I was born in Hoboken, a S. suburb of Antwerp, Belgium, >> which was founded by the Salic Franks after the 5th. c. (date unknown). In >> the 10th. c. a Latin text calls it Hobuechen, meaning 'High Beeches'. It is >> located on a former heath on glacial sand deposits. On less inhabited parts >> of this heath belt you can still find the odd taxus, but they are rather >> rare, if not exceptional] > Thanks. The name "Hoboken" (in New Jersey) puzzled me for years. [Ed] Lots of Peter Stuyvesant's crew members were actually Flemish, and often from Antwerp, a consequence of the mass migration to Holland at the end of the religion wars (1585 and on). [snip] > I regard *ebur- 'yew' as pre-IE (Old European), but Lat. 'ivory' as > IE. Conventional wisdom takes the latter as a Hamitic loan (from Egy. <3bw> > vel sim.) which fails to explain the /r/ or the other peculiarities: nom. > , gen. , adj. . The long/short vowel-alternation > and -r/rn- behavior could hardly come from Hamitic, and loanwords are > usually normalized to common forms. This looks like an IE word which has > preserved two archaisms: the gradation seen in nom. 'foot', gen. > and the alternation seen in nom. 'maple', adj. . > Boars have ivory, and boar-hunting has been a macho-thing for millennia, so > it's not necessary to assume that PIE-speakers had access to elephant-tusks. [Ed] I don't think there is an -r/rn alternation. In my view, the -n after the -r is an (abbreviated) adjective-forming suffix indicating origin, source etc. Cf. Slavic -no (hladno, krasno...) or even Lat./Etrusc. -na. Ed. Selleslagh From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Jul 5 16:10:52 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 12:10:52 EDT Subject: "mono-descent is implicit in the comparative method ..." Message-ID: In a message dated 7/4/01 8:26:11 AM, dlwhite at texas.net writes: << "Implicit" may be a bit strong, but the comparative method as traditionally conceived and practiced has never contemplated mutli-descent. >> An important distinction. "Implicit" seems simply inaccurate. As I understand it, the comparative method IN AND OF ITSELF contemplates neither multiple nor singular descent of 'languages'. Rather it deals with forms. Your position that finite verb forms are never 'borrowed' or 'mixed' relates - objectively and without theoretical extension - only to forms. If there were languages that was made up solely of finite verbs, the question of relatedness of these languages could be narrowly defined. But that appears not to be the case. <> Fine. Assume that 'finite verbal morphology' is present and whole-heartedly 'treated as existent' and assumed to be fundamental and therefore the preemptive indicator of descent. The real question in the hypothetical is why, given those assumptions, it is proper to label the 'nominal morphology, derivational or non-finite verbal morphology,... and categories' shared with a different language family as non-genetic. I wrote: <> Let's assume that 'finite verbal morphology' is never 'borrowed' or 'mixed' and can only be transmitted by ordinary processes from an ancestor to a daughter language. That still does not tell me or anyone why other forms cannot be descended from a completely different ancestor. Certainly, if those forms include 'nominal morphology, derivational or non-finite verbal morphology,... and categories' shared with a different language family. As a real example, Niger-Kordofanian is a "well-established language family where... there was very very little lexical evidence for this family," but "the nominal class system of the major subfamilies agree in detail as to the markers for the different classes." This prompted "Baxter and Manaster Ramer(1996), following... Schadenberg (1981)" to classify "Niger-Kordofanian as ... established purely on [nominal] morphological grounds...." Non-derivative verbal morphology apparently played no part in establishing the overall family. (from a hl post from manaster at umich.edu dated Tue, 24 Feb 1998 14:43:02 EST.) Here, noun morphology is used to establish descent. Could a suddenly discovered contra-indicating verbal morphology shared with other languges c hange the status of that noun morphology from "genetic" to "non-genetic?" The comparative analysis of those nominal forms would not have changed in the least. So it has to be theory outside the comparative method that causes the shift in status from "genetic" to "non-genetic." The systematic correspondence of the FORMS remains intact. So, again, why should the presence or absence of shared verbal morphology change the "genetic" status of other morphology in the language, or negate the possibility of more than one familial relationship? <> How is "language descent" established in any way other than by the origin of morphemes and other shared forms? The concept of language descent is entirely based on the establishing systematically corresponded forms. I don't think you have supplied a coherent explanation of how you "discriminate between descent and the origins of morphemes." But my question is specifically what theory can justify making language descent a contest between different sets of validly corresponding systematic forms - multiple morphemes with validly established multiple origins? When the comparatively proven descent of forms show different origins, why should one be "genetic" and the others "non-genetic?" You will need a completely different theoretical basis for the "mono-descent" of languages. The comparative method apparently will not support it. Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Jul 4 08:19:09 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2001 09:19:09 +0100 Subject: Borrowing of verbal morphology Message-ID: There have recently been claims on this list that verbal morphology can never be borrowed. But I note now that this claim is falsified by an example presented in the Thomason and Kaufman book which started the discussion. On pp. 215-222, T&K discuss the example of Asia Minor Greek, which has been massively influenced by Turkish -- in phonology, in morphology, in syntax, and in lexicon. There are many local varieties of Greek in Asia Minor; all have been heavily influenced by Turkish, though each shows a different array of borrowed features. On p. 219, T&K point out that some varieties of Greek have borrowed Turkish verbal inflections -- specifically personal agreement suffixes. They cite examples from Cappadocian Greek, in which the Turkish past-tense agreement suffixes <-ik> (first-plural) and <-iniz> (second-plural) have been borrowed and are attached to Greek verbs. These suffixes are taken over in invariant form, without the Turkish vowel-harmony alternants, even though Asia Minor Greek has also borrowed vowel harmony from Turkish, and applies vowel harmony to certain Greek suffixes, at least when these are added to words of Turkish origin. 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 Wed Jul 4 12:53:19 2001 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2001 07:53:19 -0500 Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns" Message-ID: > Dr White indicated that verb > morphology might have some preemptive claim over those other forms. Yes, that is my claim. Cases known (to me) are so few that sampling error (in a somewhat informal sense) is a real possibility, but it seems that borrowing of nominal morphology typically (or at least often) involves a sort of creeping infiltration, as in Rumanian or Old Lithuanian, whereas borrowing of finite verbal morphology, if it has occurred, which I doubt, would involve borrowing of the whole set. This in turn raises the possibility that such cases have been mis-conceptualized, that it is not the finite verbal morphology that has been borrowed but everything else. Admittedly this seems a bit wild at first, but the case of Anglo-Romani indicates that things of the sort, "abrupt relexification" or whatever, are within the range of possiblility. Either way, no "creeping infliltration" of finite verbal morphology is known, so it would seem that though our first instinct might be to think that nominal morphology and finite verbal morphology would "act" the same in borrowing, the truth (such as we can grasp it) appears to be that there is an unanticipated assymmetry between the two. But lest I anticpate my Parvum Opus to much, I will shut up now. Dr. David L. White From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Jul 4 16:31:33 2001 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2001 12:31:33 EDT Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns" Message-ID: In a message dated 7/4/01 5:25:34 AM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: > Then let my rephrase my question. Can more than one proto-language be > reconstructed from a "group" of languages? And, if so, then will those > additional proto-languages show up in reconstruction if one assumes before > hand that there was only one proto-language? If on the other hand the > answer to the first question is no, then why not? -- you only get a protolanguage out of the group of languages used to reconstruct if there was, in fact, a protolanguage. If the languages aren't genetically related, the method produces nothing. From alderson+mail at panix.com Fri Jul 6 00:23:03 2001 From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 20:23:03 -0400 Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns" In-Reply-To: <12f.c63d5a.286fde86@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On 30 Jun 2001, Steve Long wrote: > In a message dated [= received at AOL --rma] 6/30/2001 5:52:51 AM, > alderson+mail at panix.com writes: >> So that, I think, is the pithy answer to your continued asking of why any >> language can't have more than one ancestor under the comparative method: >> The method does not address single languages, but groups of languages, and >> as was pointed out by Larry Trask, if we can't build a protolanguage with >> the comparative method, the languages in question are *JUST* *NOT* >> *RELATED*. > Then let my rephrase my question. Can more than one proto-language be > reconstructed from a "group" of languages? No. That's what we've been telling you all along: The comparative method absolutely assumes a single parent for any group of related languages, and cannot assume anything else. > And, if so, then will those additional proto-languages show up in > reconstruction if one assumes before hand that there was only one > proto-language? The question is meaningless. > If on the other hand the answer to the first question is no, then why not? The quote you cite from Lehmann makes that clear: The reconstruction process assumes a single ancestral form for each set of forms taken from the multiple languages under discussion. > This goes back again to the terms I quoted from Winfred Lehmann: "In using > the comparative method, we contrast forms of two or more related languages to > determine the precise relationship between these forms. We indicate this > relationship most simply by reconstructing the forms from which they > developed." (Hist Ling 3d ed, 1992 pb) p 142. The total set of reconstructed forms, based on all the forms attested in the group of languages under examination, is considered to be a single language. Period. By definition. Period. > The reason was to relate it way back to the hypothetical that Dr White > brought forward where the "nominal morphology, derivational or non-finite > verbal morphology,... and categories" might be shared with one language, > "finite verbal morphology" with another. Dr White indicated that verb > morphology might have some preemptive claim over those other forms. That is between Dr. White and you. I can sympathize with his position, but am not prepared to defend it. However, be careful here, because this example is of *ONE* *SINGLE* *LANGUAGE*, and you already know that the comparative method is about *groups* of languages (and the individual forms taken therefrom). > But my point was that the presence of those diverging systematic forms would > suggest more than one "proto-language" could be reconstructed at least with > regard to the language that showed both forms. *Only* if these diverging forms can be found elsewhere within the same group of languages being examined at the time. If there are no correlates, there is no reconstruction possible, and therefore no proto-language. I repeat in full a definition I have given before in brief, from Haas' _The Prehistory of Languages_ (p. 32): A protolanguage, then, is reconstructed out of the evidence that is acquired by the careful comparison of the daughter languages and, in the beginning of the work, what is reconstructed reflects what can be discovered by working backwards in those cases where all or most of the daughter languages point ot the same conclusion. This provides the initial framework. Once this is established, the principle of analogy can be drawn upon, and by its use instances in which there are aberrations, statistically speaking, can often also be plausibly accounted for. Deductive as well as inductive hypotheses must be constructed and checked. Then when all the comparisons that can reasonably be made have been made, and when all the reconstructions that can reasonably be made have been made, the result is a PROTOTYPICAL MODEL OF THE DAUGHTER LANGUAGES, or, what we normally call a protolanguage. (The emphasis by all caps is in small caps in the original; it is what I often cite as the definition of "protolanguage".) Rich Alderson linguist at large From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Jul 5 19:47:57 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 15:47:57 EDT Subject: One Step at a Time Message-ID: In a message dated 7/5/2001 2:51:47 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: << OK, then -- fire away. But you are defending a position which is wildly, ludicrously false -- not an easy task. ;-) >> Typically, your conclusions come first. You don't have to wait for the evidence. <> Let's just start this with a basic question, to be sure you are saying what you appear to be saying. If you assume Basque and Spanish are entirely lost and unrecorded in your example above, and all that is being compared are the "half-a-dozen languages" you mention... Are you saying there will be no systematic correspondences to be found among those "half-a-dozen languages"? Steve Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jul 5 21:55:41 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 16:55:41 -0500 Subject: The Single Parent Question Message-ID: Dear Joat and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Saturday, June 30, 2001 10:58 PM > In a message dated 6/30/01 8:35:12 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com > writes: >> This won't help you here. I won't ask if you've ever argued a science case >> in Federal Court or ever did plasma analysis or worked on neural systems or >> did any high-order economic analysis. You've claimed an extremely high >> level of certainty with regard to the reconstruction of proto-languages. >> I'm looking at the scientific validity of that claim. [JS] > -- no, you aren't, because you don't have the knowledge-base to do so. [PCR] I do not subscribe to much of what Steve writes either but I do believe he is asking pertinent question. This type of snobbish response is not at all helpful. Steve is not suggesting for one moment that he has the training in IE linguistics of many on this list. He is questioning the methodology used based on his familiarity with it in other disciplines. Linguistics should be done with the same, generally recognized scientific methodology as other sciences --- whenever that is possible. I find this totally unobjectionable. 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, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138) From alderson+mail at panix.com Fri Jul 6 00:46:46 2001 From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 20:46:46 -0400 Subject: real proto-lang In-Reply-To: <003401c102bb$b4b53940$eb1d3bd4@desk> (bamba@centras.lt) Message-ID: On 2 Jul 2001, Jurgis Pakerys wrote (quoting Larry Trask from a post by Steve Long): [Larry Trask:] >> In a message dated 6/27/2001 12:29:59 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: >> << And what is that? So far as I know, all I have ever claimed about the >> comparative method is that it cannot produce proto-languages that never >> existed. And that's just true. Do you want to challenge this? >> > I hope prof. Trask didn't mean that _all_ proto-languages (produced by > comparative method) really existed. I've always imagined that there's some > degree of uncertainty and those proto-languages cannot be compared to the > real ones. [ snip ] > Maybe I'm wrong, but it looks very hard to reconstruct a _real_ > proto-language. Sometimes we're able to reconstruct only fragments of it (I'm > not saying this about very well documented language families). I guess it's > better to understand those proto-languages as some tools of comparative > linguistics than real languages that existed at some point of time. The question only arises from a misunderstanding of the term "protolanguage". A protolanguage is a construct of the comparative method which *models* the real language ancestral to the languages which go into the comparison, but it is not that actual language. Depending on the breadth of the materials from which linguists can draw in the reconstruction process, it may be very close, but it will not and cannot be the ancestral language itself. (Some writers in English have the very bad habit of referring to unattested languages ancestral to known families as "protolanguages", but this is a misuse of the term, and confusing to non-linguists and to those not well versed in the theoretical side of historical linguistics.) So if we can only reconstruct fragments of an ancestral language, our proto- language is deficient, but that does not make it wrong in what it does capture, nor does it make it a "protolanguage that never existed". The latter term would refer to the ability to create a protolanguage from, e. g., English, Nahuatl, and Xhosa, and have it stand scrutiny. Rich Alderson linguist at large From bronto at pobox.com Tue Jul 3 06:18:28 2001 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 23:18:28 -0700 Subject: diction and contradiction Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > I'm reminded of the Monte Python skit. > Eric Idle: You're not arguing. You're just being contrary. > John Cleese: [pause, thinking] No-I'm-not. >>From vol.2 pp 86-89: Man [Michael Palin]: Look this isn't an argument. Mr Vibrating [John Cleese]: Yes it is. Man: No it isn't, it's just contradiction. Mr Vibrating: No it isn't. [...] Man: Oh, look this is futile. Mr Vibrating: No it isn't. Man: I came here for a good argument. Mr Vibrating: No you didn't, you came here for an argument. Man: Well, an argument's not the same as contradiction. Mr Vibrating: [pause?] It can be. [...] Slightly closer to topic, why is Italy called in Hungarian? (I was in Urbana yesterday, popped in to the Slavic & East European department of the university library, where I once had a job; and happened to see there a Hungarian map of Europe.) -- Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/ From Georg-Bonn at t-online.de Fri Jul 6 08:27:16 2001 From: Georg-Bonn at t-online.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 10:27:16 +0200 Subject: Handfuls of Unrelated Forms In-Reply-To: <004b01c101f1$cbfebce0$fbf1fea9@swbell.net> Message-ID: Someone called "Proto-Language" wrote: >One of the reasons linguistics makes such little progress is that so-called >"experts" are permitted tacitly by their indulgent colleagues to propose >etymologies as totally naif as , 'arrow', from , 'go through'. the basic meaning of /eimi/ is "to go to or into" One of the reasons linguistics makes such little progress is that people with so little Greek are permitted to voice their irrelevant opinion in specialist fora. (FYI: Greek is the IE language with those funny letters.) -- Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn From g_sandi at hotmail.com Wed Jul 4 09:42:00 2001 From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi) Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2001 09:42:00 -0000 Subject: Rate of Change Message-ID: >To: Ed Selleslagh >Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 19:06:27 +0200 [ moderator snip ] >[Ed] >Italy had a very prestigious culture that exported ideas, art forms, etc. >rather than receiving them. It was - and still is largely - in the period of >stability that followed the rapid change after the collapse of the Roman >Empire (Maybe it didn't change that much, as it is based very much on Tuscan >regional speech that may be a lot older). The Risorgimento and Mussolini >caused mainly self-affirmation and glorification, not change. >Spanish (actually: Castilian) is possibly even more conservative than Italian: >you can still read Cervantes without any study of older forms of Castilian. >Its style is very old-fashioned, with very long Latin-style sentences, with a >lot of verbosity etc. but basically he uses modern Castilian. And even older >Castilian is not much different. I don't think that we have any real disagreement, Ed. Rates of linguistic change vary greatly, and social changes are no doubt an important contributing factor. The problem that I see is that what I see as roughly the same level of social upheaval may be associated with different rates of linguistic change, so that the predictive power of social change -> linguistic change is rather limited. The War of Roses may well be related to the Grat Vowel Shift in English, but did the Thirty Years' War, say, have the same effect on Standard German? Much of the German countryside was depopulated by the latter war, if I recall my history correctly. As for Italian vs. Spanish, I was specifically thinking of phonetic change. I think that the phonology and phonetics of Standard Italian, based on but certainly not identical to, the dialect of Florence, have remained virtually unchanged since the Middle Ages. This is not true of Spanish: you may well be able to read Cervantes in the original, but the following changes have taken place since the late Middle Ages (which was my baseline): loss of voiced fricatives (v > b, z > s, Z > S, dz > ts > T (Latin American and Andalusian s)), followed by retraction of shibillants (S > x). In morphology, the pluperfect (cantara) has lost its original function (still there in literary Portuguese) and has acquired the same function as the imperfect subjunctive (cantase). Has anything equalling these changes taken place in standard Italian? Cordially, Gabor From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu Fri Jul 6 22:34:42 2001 From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 18:34:42 -0400 Subject: Rate of Change In-Reply-To: <002101c10188$d9eaac60$3502703e@edsel> Message-ID: > In modern times we have the opposite: notwithstanding rapid cultural > change, we see a lot of convergence due to greatly improved > communications and mass media, which act as linguistic role models, > much more than any Acad�mie ever did. Here in Flanders, e.g. we see > the pretty fast breakdown of dialects, via a stage of 'intermediate' > language or seriously locally colored standard language. In the > Netherlands, by and large, this stage has already been passed. actually, sociolinguistic work of the last few decades, especially by Bill Labov and his students, has shown that this, which seems very plausible, isn't quite right. in spite of increased literacy and mass media, local dialects are continuing to develop independtly and diverge from the standard in a number of places. of course in many other places the dialects are disappearing or being brought closer to a standard language, but what seems to be crucial in causing this is not literacy and standard language media, but rather increased mobility of speakers. in one study, two immediately adjacent neighborhoods in the philadelphia suburbs were examined, one of which had been around for some time and was inhabited mainly by people who were born there or nearby, the other of which had been recently built and was inhabited by and large by famillies that had moved to the area from all over the country. the children living in the first neighborhood showed all characteristics of the philadelphia dialect, even those few whos families had actually recently arrived, and in fact they showed characteristics of changes currently in progress in the dialect that were further differentiating it from standard american english. on the other hand, the children in the new neighborhood showed markedly less of the characteristics of the philadelphia dialect in their speech, even those few whose families had been in the area for a while. so the crucial factor here is not exposure to normalizing media and education, but movement between dialect areas. now, what this means for the very different dialect situations of europe is less clear. the european dialects were of course much more diverse, and have clearly been weakened in the recent past, but it still seems that mobility would be the key. another thing to consider is that many of the extinct or near extinct dialects of Europe were, in distinction to the dialects of North American English, not mutually intelligible with the standard language of the country in which they were spoken (listen to a local dialect of Austrian or especially Swiss German). it may well be that such extreme variation can be threatened by much lower levels of mobility, because not just social interaction, but simple communication can be disturbed. just a thought. > The biggest change in English, which makes Old English > incomprehensible, has of course been Norman French. the role that the influx of Norman French played in the massive morpho-syntactic changes that occurred between old and middle english is a matter of some controversy i think, and seems often to have been overstated. vocabulary aside, there is actually some evidence that the influence of Scandinavian was of much more importance at that time. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jul 4 18:26:29 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2001 13:26:29 -0500 Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] Rubia and lluvia are not homophones because assibilated /R^/ and /z^/ are noticibly different. You hear something similar to /z^rubja/ & /z^ubja/. There are different degrees of assibilation as well as voiced and unvoiced varieties. This increases the difference between the two. I'm not sure but I think Czech also has both /z^/ and assibiliated /R^/. Someone please correct me on that. Places that are known for stronger assibilation include Guatemala, Costa Rica, Bogota, parts of Chile (I've heard it from people from both the North and South) and parts of Argentina (especially Corrientes, according to Argentines I've spoken to). Costa Rican assibilated /R^/ (except for ) tends to be voiced while Guatemalan assibilated /R^/ tends to be unvoiced. and are affricates similar to and . You occasionally see Costa Ricans saying for in Central American fiction. A weaker form of assibilation often shows up in Central and Southern Mexico, the rest of Central America and lot of the rest of South America. It's sort of in between a standard trill and Costa Rican assibilated /R^/. Even in Costa Rica, not everyone uses assibilated /R^/. My wife uses a type of retroflex /R/ similar to an emphatic North American English /r/ [as in R-r-ight!]. Costa Ricans will often use trilled /rr/ for emphasis. >Since in many varieties of Argentinian Spanish (as well as in Chile and >Uruguay), the phonetic realizations of orthographic and are also [Z], >do these examples imply that there are varieties of Spanish where lluvia >'rain' and rubia 'blonde' are homophones, pronounced as ['ZuBya]? Same for >callo 'corn (on foot)' and carro 'cart, car', both [kaZo]? >Gabor Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From edsel at glo.be Wed Jul 4 17:23:16 2001 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2001 19:23:16 +0200 Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change) Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gabor Sandi" Sent: Saturday, June 30, 2001 3:43 PM [snip] > Since in many varieties of Argentinian Spanish (as well as in Chile and > Uruguay), the phonetic realizations of orthographic and are also > [Z], do these examples imply that there are varieties of Spanish where lluvia > 'rain' and rubia 'blonde' are homophones, pronounced as ['ZuBya]? Same for > callo 'corn (on foot)' and carro 'cart, car', both [kaZo]? [Ed Selleslagh] As far as I know, the rr > Z territory (mainly (sub-)Andean Argentina, Mendoza etc.) and the y, ll > Z (or often S) (around the Mar del Plata and wide surroundings) do not really overlap, but I may be mistaken. Rick McCallister would be a better source. Anyway, among themselves, y and ll give rise to a lot of homophones, even in standard Castilian: calló/cayó (he shut up/ he fell) etc...A bit more wouldn't be all that problematic to native speakers, especially because to the trained ear there is a slight difference between Z from rr and Argentinian/Uruguayan Z from y or ll. The Z from rr often sounds like the pronuciation of someone who cannot reproduce a rolling r correctly, or as a more strongly voiced American r with a shade of Z. Ed. From bmscott at stratos.net Wed Jul 4 20:02:41 2001 From: bmscott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2001 16:02:41 -0400 Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On 30 Jun 2001, at 22:21, Gabor Sandi wrote: > But are you sure that the two Hungarian words that have pretty > much infiltrated all European languages (kocsi & husza'r, cf Eng. > coach and hussar) have not entered Albanian? Not having a proper > Albanian dictionary in my home, I cannot check up on this. For no good reason I have an old Albanian-Italian dictionary to hand. It has () 'carro, carrozza, vettura' and what appears to be a variant, () with the same gloss. I saw no obvious candidate for (). Brian M. Scott From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Jul 4 18:58:57 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2001 19:58:57 +0100 Subject: Genetic Descent Message-ID: > 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]. 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? Peter From connolly at memphis.edu Fri Jul 6 04:10:25 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 23:10:25 -0500 Subject: Genetic Descent Message-ID: Vidhyanath Rao wrote: >> Neither can we say that _gustar_ and _piacere_ are "passive". What activity >> is performed, and by whom or what? If neither the meaning nor the form is >> passive, in what sense can one say that these verbs are? > I am ignorant of the fine details. What are the etymological origins of > gustar and piacere? _piacere_ is from Latin _place:re_ 'please', which had the same syntax: item liked nominative, person who likes it dative. Pokorny, IEW 831, connects this Latin _placidus_ 'smooth, calm' and to a lot of rather semantically unlikely words in other languages. Not being a Latin etymologist, I can only say that the etymology seems unsatisfactory. but I have no better suggestion. _gustar_ comes from Latin _gusta:re_, which has many obvious cognates in other IE languages. However, _gusta:re_ was construed as an active verb meaning 'take a taste of something': Caesar vinum gustavit. NOM wine-ACC tasted 'Caesar tasted the wine.' As far as I know, this usage has been lost in Spanish, with _gustar_ adopting both the syntax and meaning of Lat. _place:re_. > I often get the impression that, as passives so often come from > resultative/stative constructions, people consider the latter to be > passives (in origin). I wonder if that is the case here. I don't quite understand the question. I don't think either comes from a passive, and unlike _gusta:re_, _place:re_ apparently always was stative. But are we discussing etymology here or people's perceptions? Leo Connolly From agkozak at socrates.Berkeley.EDU Thu Jul 5 16:39:04 2001 From: agkozak at socrates.Berkeley.EDU (A. G. Kozak) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 09:39:04 -0700 Subject: Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent) Message-ID: ----Original Message----- >From: Leo A. Connolly [SMTP:connolly at memphis.edu] >To: [SMTP:rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu];Indo-European at xkl.com >Subj: Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent) >Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2001 2:49 AM . . . >We formerly had such things -- think "methinks" -- an object in preverbal >position not controlling verb agreement. We have since solved our problem >by making _me_ into a true subject _I_ -- with no change in meaning! I can see what you're getting at, but isn't this a bit of an oversimplification? We haven't changed any object into a subject; we've simply dropped the peculiar "methinks" from the language, mostly because it looks so wrong to anyone unfamiliar with older forms of English. If anyone had remembered that "me-" is a dative and that "-thinks" is a reflex of AS. "þyncan" ("to seem") and not "þencan" ("to think"), we'd probably all still be saying it. As it is, however, "methinks" ended up being the last remnant of a verb otherwise lost in ModE., & so it was prone to be misunderstood and finally abandoned. A. G. Kozak Department of Classics University of California at Berkeley From acnasvers at hotmail.com Fri Jul 6 08:33:34 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 08:33:34 -0000 Subject: Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent) Message-ID: Leo A. Connolly (1 Jul 2001) wrote: >So that's the reason. I understand the problem, but I disagree sharply >with their conclusion: the morphological subject is the *only* subject >as far as I'm concerned, and the "oblique subjects" that through their >weight around in these languages are simply the ones which rank highest >in the hierarchy of "deep cases" i.e. semantic roles -- the ones which >in some sense "should" be the subject (and in English most typically >are). We formerly had such things -- think "methinks" -- an object in >preverbal position not controlling verb agreement. We have since solved >our problem by making _me_ into a true subject _I_ -- with no change in >meaning! Spanish might do that too some day, but no sign of its >happening yet. Don't these expressions represent distinct verbs and constructions? "I think" < OE 'I think; intend' < "methinks" < OE 'to me it seems' < Of course, the two verbs are related, since < PGmc *thunkjan is a factitive, 'to cause to be thought' = 'to seem'. Dutch has preserved the vocalic contrast between and ; Du. = "methinks". I wouldn't say that English has made "me" into "I" here. Instead, many speakers have reinterpreted "methinks" as a pseudo-archaic variant of "I think", leading to such usages as a comic-book king saying "Methinks I shall hold a jousting tournament" (incorrect since it expresses intention, not seeming). This didn't happen with the parallel "meseems", which can't be reinterpreted as "I seem". Some dictionaries (e.g. the AHD) have purged "meseems" while retaining "methinks", even though the former was still productive in late 19th-cent. poetry. DGK From rao.3 at osu.edu Thu Jul 5 14:00:05 2001 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 10:00:05 -0400 Subject: Sound changes versus sound changes Message-ID: > [Steve Long:] > The other factor is HOW "DISSIMILAR" those changes are, in the sense that you > used similar above, in "little or no similarity." We're not talking about > "unexpected" or uncommon shifts here but rather shifts that make the words > sound significantly different. In other words, a fricative to a labial > versus a fricative to another fricative. An ordinary listener might have a > better chance of finding a similarity in the latter than the former. But sound changes don't seem to work that way. Labov, in his monograph about sound changes, looked at various examples of changes in progress and came to the conclusion that changes of place are more complex than changes of effort and such things at metathesis can remain partial, limited by semantics etc. So p>f may be a smaller change than f > th. From leo at easynet.fr Thu Jul 5 21:28:14 2001 From: leo at easynet.fr (Lionel Bonnetier) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 23:28:14 +0200 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. Message-ID: Douglas G Kilday wrote: > It's much more plausible to regard -cum as the remnant of a formerly > widespread postpositive use of prepositions (sorry, I don't know how to > avoid this oxymoron). But the trickiest question was: Why did "cum" remain a postposition while all other adpositions became prepositions in Latin? (And why only with pronouns?) > This usage is preserved better in p-Italic: e.g. > Umbrian 'pro arce Fisia pro civitate > Iguvina', Oscan 'in Vibiis Beriis'. Similarly, in Epic > Greek many prepositions may follow their objects, but in Attic prose only > may do so. 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? From edsel at glo.be Fri Jul 6 13:18:02 2001 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 15:18:02 +0200 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Gustafson" Sent: Sunday, July 01, 2001 5:12 AM [ moderator snip ] > I was reminded, when I replied to this, that (being a lawyer in my day job) > I've occasionally wondered about the antiquity, or lack of same, of > formations like "whereof," "whereas" and "therefore." > I'm not that well read in Old English, but I don't recall that they are > common there, if they exist at all. There are not many of these > constructions in Old Norse, and those are mostly late. But a few similar > constructions arose in modern Swedish, like -varigenom- and -varfo"r-. The > use of "where" and "there" when "what" or "that" would seem to be expected > is also somewhat peculiar, and shared between English and Swedish. > Are these imitations or calques on Latin forms? [Ed Selleslagh] Also Dutch and German, therefore W. Germanic (and its generally acknowledged impact on Swedish, but less to none on older Scandinavian). Dutch: d/waarvoor, d/waarvan, d/waarom, etc. German: wofür/dafür, wovon/davon, warum/darum, etc. I think this is authentic West-Germanic. E.g. Dutch and German use Waarom/warum? for 'Why?' and have no other word for it that doesn't involve a postposition. Ed. From connolly at memphis.edu Fri Jul 6 19:02:51 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 14:02:51 -0500 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. Message-ID: Steve Gustafson wrote: > I was reminded, when I replied to this, that (being a lawyer in my day job) > I've occasionally wondered about the antiquity, or lack of same, of > formations like "whereof," "whereas" and "therefore." > I'm not that well read in Old English, but I don't recall that they are > common there, if they exist at all. There are not many of these > constructions in Old Norse, and those are mostly late. But a few similar > constructions arose in modern Swedish, like -varigenom- and -varfo"r-. The > use of "where" and "there" when "what" or "that" would seem to be expected > is also somewhat peculiar, and shared between English and Swedish. > Are these imitations or calques on Latin forms? not hardly. They also occur in at least German and Dutch: German womit 'with what?', damit 'with it/them', hiermit 'hereby', Du waarmee 'with what?', daarmee 'with it/them' etc. There's nothing like tis in Latin. Leo Connolly From sarima at friesen.net Fri Jul 6 02:28:31 2001 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 19:28:31 -0700 Subject: The Iceman's Berries In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 01:29 AM 7/1/01 -0400, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 6/30/01 5:55:48 PM Mountain Daylight Time, >sarima at friesen.net writes: >> Unless the Hittite form belongs here, I would not reconstruct this word to >> PIE. It looks more like a European word, like many other words shared only >> between Slavic, Germanic and Celtic. >-- I'd say a late dialect term in the north and center of the PIE world. Certainly. I have some hypotheses about the nature of many of the late dialect terms of the north (and sometimes center), but those do not at present have a very sure footing. However, I would tend to place this term in with the others of like distribution, and thus I *guess* it may have been borrowed from some pre-IE language family of the north or Europe. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From sarima at friesen.net Fri Jul 6 02:39:15 2001 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 19:39:15 -0700 Subject: The Iceman's Berries In-Reply-To: <002801c101ef$13654520$fbf1fea9@swbell.net> Message-ID: At 12:30 AM 7/1/01 -0500, proto-language wrote: >Dear Stanley and IEists: >> Unless the Hittite form belongs here, I would not reconstruct this word to >> PIE. It looks more like a European word, like many other words shared only >> between Slavic, Germanic and Celtic. >[PCR] >And just how does a "European word" look? >What are its identifying characteristics? It is shared between the northern European branches of IE, and perhaps is also found in the north-central dialects (aka Balto-Slavic). Balto-Slavic attestation is somewhat marginal here, but there are so many words shared specifically between Balto-Slavic and the other European branches that I have a hard time excluding it. Certainly Balto-Slavic appears to have been adjacent to some of the northern European dialects through most, or all, of its history, so shared innovations are not that unexpected. Since these branches are all mutually adjacent at the time of first attestation, such a limited attestation is insufficient to establish PIE antiquity for a word. Thus, there is a large class of roots in Pokorny, and elsewhere, that are only attested anciently from northern Europe and immediately adjacent areas. These form a substantial corpus of words that, while locally shared, cannot be confidently reconstructed for PIE proper. One interesting factoid about this corpus is that it includes most of the roots in Pokorny with a reconstructed *a that is not traceable to an a-coloring laryngeal. (Note, this is not an identifying characteristic, it is an observation). Now, my *hypothesis* about many of these words is that they are borrowings from a non-IE language family formerly wide-spread in northern Europe, but now extinct. I wish I could figure out how to test this idea. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From dlwhite at texas.net Fri Jul 6 13:18:51 2001 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 08:18:51 -0500 Subject: the 'Dhole' Message-ID: I really don't have time for all this, but an interested person might want to consult Grzemek. Dholes are not restrictd to any particular habitat within their range. They are found in the alpine steppes of Tibet (wolves too), for example. Wolves are found in essentially all habitats of the northern hemisphere except deserts and tropical forests (which are not necessarily dense). In northern Mexico they are restricted to (lightly) forested mountains, and do not occur in the semi-arid sub-tropical lowlands. Habitat segregation that is not characteristic of two species in general is fairly often found where there ranges overlap, and that appears to be what has happened in India. Dr. David L. White From sarima at friesen.net Fri Jul 6 13:52:34 2001 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 06:52:34 -0700 Subject: the 'Dhole' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:38 AM 7/3/01 -0400, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Just briefly again,... yes. Or, mostly yes. >- I should have written "Wolves as a general rule and apparently especially >in southern Asia are found in MORE open habitats than the dhole." This sounds like competitive exclusion, where two ecologically similar species partition the available space on the basis of *slight* differences in efficiency in different environments. >- A quick search on the web will return many, many repetitions of the >statement that "Wolves do not live in" or "are seldom found in arid deserts >or tropical forests." Arid deserts they certainly tend to avoid, probably because they require more resources than deserts readily provide. Their absence from tropical forests may be due more to competitive exclusion - there are generally more species of carnivore in rain forests to offer such competition. There is a general pattern - species tend to be limited in the direction of the harsher environment by intrinsic ability, and on the in the direction of richer environments by competitive exclusion. It shows up repeatedly in manipulation experiments. It certainly was the case with the coyote, which expanded into the former range of the wolf after we humans extirpated it in many areas. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From douglas at nb.net Fri Jul 6 14:32:58 2001 From: douglas at nb.net (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 10:32:58 -0400 Subject: kinkajou In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > So what is the kinkajou in Spanish? For Potos flavus, quick Spanish-language Web search returns several common names in Spanish: martilla cercoleto martucha cuchicuchi kinkajou kinkajú kinkayu perro de monte mico de noche marta guatuza cusumbo tutamono leoncito shosna chosna micoleón I suppose these are used respectively in different countries? It's possible some are erroneous. -- Doug Wilson From redux7 at hotmail.com Fri Jul 6 16:39:23 2001 From: redux7 at hotmail.com (eleonora litta) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 18:39:23 +0200 Subject: lupo cervino, loup-cervier.... Message-ID: Hi everyone, in a XIV century Italian manuscript I have found this animal, apparently a lynx, which would symbolise the ability to judge distances, time, speed... (the manuscript is about fighting techniques, BTW). only this animal is called lupo cervino, which in italian would mean 'deer-wolf'. At the beginning I thought it was for the lynxs fur, spotted like the deer one, then a French guy told me that in France they have this loup-cervier, which is a big lynx who hunts deers, so I reconsidered my position. They also told me in a Spanish name for the lynx being lobo cerval. I have to find out which is the truth about all this. do you know something about the ancient names for 'lynx' in the IE languages, and about their evolution? Thank you for your help Eleonora Litta From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Jul 6 17:07:04 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 13:07:04 EDT Subject: Ockham's Razor Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 6/30/2001 8:37:21 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com writes: <<-- Hesychius. >> If these kinds of details make a difference to anyone - which I am beginning to doubt - Hesychius is often dated to @ 5th Century AD and therefore considered post-Classical and "post-Roman" - maybe by as much some 700 years. S. Long From dlwhite at texas.net Fri Jul 6 13:06:29 2001 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 08:06:29 -0500 Subject: 'albeit' Message-ID: > As recently as ten years ago, I think, 'albeit' was as dead as a doornail > in English. I never encountered it at all except in texts written a long > time ago Well, it occurs in Tom Lehrer's "Fight Fiercely Harvard": ...Albeit they possess the might, nonetheless we have the will!" "Hurl that spheroid down the field", and all that. Dr. David L. White From douglas at nb.net Fri Jul 6 14:03:40 2001 From: douglas at nb.net (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 10:03:40 -0400 Subject: 'albeit' In-Reply-To: <572915.3203071958@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk> Message-ID: Reports of the death of this word once again appear to be exaggerated. The Merriam-Webster usage dictionary discusses the repeated at-least-partially-imaginary resurrection of the word, and remarks: "_albeit_ seems never to have gone out of use, though it may have faded somewhat in the later 19th century." ( Message-ID: On 2 Jul 2001, at 14:12, Larry Trask wrote: > As recently as ten years ago, I think, 'albeit' was as dead as a > doornail in English. I never encountered it at all except in > texts written a long time ago. I'm 53, and I've been using it all my life. It's true that I originally acquired it from reading and pronounced it to myself as 'all-bite', but I straightened that out before I was 12. I've always considered it a perfectly normal word in a formal register, both in writing and in speech. > Sorry, folks. I'm afraid that I, tedious old fart that I am, > still find 'albeit' unspeakably pretentious. How very odd; it would never even have occurred to me that anyone might find it so. (I shan't lose any sleep over it in any case!) Brian M. Scott From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Jul 6 15:06:34 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 16:06:34 +0100 Subject: Proto-Celtic - An Exploration: Celtic ICM & Q/P Words Function IE Roots In-Reply-To: <98.1712bf11.2872482d@aol.com> Message-ID: --On Monday, July 2, 2001 5:57 pm +0000 DFOKeefe at aol.com wrote: > Our opinion that there is a strong relationship between > Indo-European and Fenno-Ugric is buttressed by Professor Kalevi Wiik's own > independent research. He is a distinguished professor of phonetics in > Finland. He is well-supported by modern genetic data which has knocked out > the isolationist linguistic claims of Basques and Fenno-Ugrics, > particularly as regards the rh negative blood factor. Nonsense. Absolute balderdash. First, genetic data cannot conceivably establish any linguistic conclusions whatever. Second, the observations about the proportion of Rh-negative blood among the Basques are just that: observations, not "claims", and least of all "linguistic claims". Third, the linguistic isolation of Basque is just as much a fact today as it ever was. Fourth, Kalevi Wiik has not established anything at all, least of all about Basque. What he does is to draw pretty maps showing Uralic-speakers wandering all over the solar system zillions of years ago. He has built a career out of this simple party piece. The rest of this posting is too distressing to comment on. 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 proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Jul 6 22:36:01 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 17:36:01 -0500 Subject: Word Order and verb endings Message-ID: Dear Jens, Kreso, and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen" Sent: Sunday, July 01, 2001 6:21 PM > On Thu, 28 Jun 2001, Kreso Megyeral wrote: >> [... W]hat is general opinion on theory that PIE had the opposition >> between indefinite and definite conjugation, as Hungarian does. Some >> of the linguists interpret thematic vowel in declension and >> conjugation as some kind of suffixated article. The theory is proved >> by the fact that there is no intransitive thematic vowel of >> undisputable IE origin. Your attitudes? [JER] > The thematic vowel is not used as an object or definiteness marker > anywhere in IE. The testimony of IE itself is that the thematic vowel > marks the subjunctive. In the nominal system, the thematic vowel is used > to create adjectives. I would suppose - but cannot prove - that there is a > common origin involved, in that the subjunctive was originally the verb of > subordinate clauses, so that stems with the thematic vowel would be used > to modify stems without it. [PCR] I am not sure this matter is quite so easily disposed. I am wondering if Jens would agree that a stress-accent origin for the thematic vowel is as likely as considering it a suffix. I personally favor the idea that the thematic vowel is a result of stress-accent on the syllable following the root-syllable at one early stage of IE. Now, generally in IE, C'VC correlates with durative verbal notions, and CVC' with momentary verbal ideas. And, as we all know, there are complex relationships between nominal (object) definiteness and verbal aspects. Let us also recall that the "subjunctive" has been characterized as a "thematic present" (Beekes) so what the "subjunctive" came to mean is not necessarily how it started out. I do not pretend to know much about Hungarian so I will leave speculation here, for the moment. I can say that the comparison might be more than of passing interest if it can be shown that the Hungarian indefinite conjugation has uses which suggest modalities like intention or necessity; and, as a consequence, are non-declarative --- but I do not know if this is or has been historically true. 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, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138) From colkitto at sprint.ca Fri Jul 6 21:51:15 2001 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 17:51:15 -0400 Subject: bishop Message-ID: [ moderator edited] Pete Gray: > Why do you claim, Ed, that eis te:n polin > istambul involves rules jumping > languages? Wasn't the contemporary Greek pronunciation /i:sta:mbulin/? It > would simply be taken over as a meaningless phonetic string. why is this a problematic explanation? Leo A. Connolly: > should already have been something like [is ti(m) bolin], as > in current Greek. The vowels would be all wrong. And why on earth would the > Greeks have given something meaning 'to the city' as the name of their > capital? The capital was known as "i polis" the city for an extended period. The study of toponyms is littered with such cases, cf. Scottish Gaelic Gallaibh, Cataibh. > Ed is right: that etymology is a fable, but it's so bad I'd be reluctant to > blame it on a linguist. It's actually rather a good one. There's an article in Language: Tiersma, Peter. 1982. "Local and General Markedness". L 58: 832-849. whch deals precisely with such cases, where placenames or nouns denoting location locative or directonal forms become unmarked > It's in a class with _tip_ 'gratuity' < T(o) I(nsure) P(rompt) S(ervice), or > **** < F(or) U(nlawful) C(arnal) K(nowledge). No,it isn't. > It's amazing how many people accept such things, but linguists shouldn't. Yes they should. It's part of the warp and woof of linguistics, much more so than various obscurantist mathematical formulations. Robert Orr From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Jul 8 20:07:56 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 15:07:56 -0500 Subject: bishop In-Reply-To: <3B40FD51.F0CDABBE@memphis.edu> Message-ID: That's too bad, I was thinking about a future in which the Big Apple would be known to its Spanish-speaking inhabitants as <> > should already have been something like [is ti(m) >bolin], as in current Greek. The vowels would be all wrong. And why on >earth would the Greeks have given something meaning 'to the city' as the >name of their capital? Ed is right: that etymology is a fable, but it's >so bad I'd be reluctant to blame it on a linguist. It's in a class with >_tip_ 'gratuity' < T(o) I(nsure) P(rompt) S(ervice), or **** < F(or) >U(nlawful) C(arnal) K(nowledge). It's amazing how many people accept >such things, but linguists shouldn't. >Leo Connolly Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From dlwhite at texas.net Sat Jul 7 02:31:22 2001 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 21:31:22 -0500 Subject: Borrowing of verbal morphology Message-ID: > There have recently been claims on this list that verbal morphology can > never be borrowed. But I note now that this claim is falsified by an > example presented in the Thomason and Kaufman book which started the > discussion. On pp. 215-222, T&K discuss the example of Asia Minor Greek, In noted this case in my first discussion of the subject. This is a different kind of borrowing, because it involves addition of a borrowed suffix rather than replacement of a native suffix by a borrowed suffix. Megleno-Rumanian shows the same sort of thing (as Anatolian Greek). In my later postings I have been simplifying somewhat, as having to use some term that would exclude this sort of thing would be a bit awkward. I have also been rhetorically ignoring (at times) the case of Kormakiti, which again shows clear differences, for the same reason. Sorry if I confused anybody (or everybody), but this issue is nothing if not complex. Dr. David L. White From dlwhite at texas.net Sat Jul 7 02:57:11 2001 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 21:57:11 -0500 Subject: Descent vs. Influence Message-ID: I had hoped not to have to get into this, but from recent postings it seems "no such luck". It has recently been claimed that influence is or may be taken as a kind of descent. Let us look at an example of what that would mean. Rumanian has some resemblances to Latin and some resemblances to Albanian. Yet the resemblances are of fundamentally different kind. Its resemblances to Latin have to do with the descent over time of the set of arbitrary correspondences between sounds and meanings that any language must have. Its resemblances to Albanian on the other hand relate not to sound-meaning correspondences but rather to things like the distinctions made, ordering of elements, and so on. Though these are both kinds of resemblance, they are not the same kind of resemblance. Why one is called descent and the other is called influence should be fairly obvious. If influence is descent, then Rumanian is _by descent_ both a Romance and a Balkan (for lack of a better term) language. But this is nonsense. To say that influence is really a kind of descent because the two are both kinds of resemblance is like saying that apples are really oranges because the two are both kinds of fruit. No. There is simply no point in obliterating the meanings of our terms and concepts. Where there is a difference of meaning we are clearly justified in using different terms. I am distressed to find such back-sliding, even by people who should know better, on what I had thought were some clearly established points. Dr. David L. White From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Jul 7 08:38:26 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 04:38:26 EDT Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns" Message-ID: In a message dated 7/6/01 11:18:00 PM, alderson+mail at panix.com writes: << The total set of reconstructed forms, based on all the forms attested in the group of languages under examination, is considered to be a single language. Period. By definition. Period. >> Well, I'm sure if you punctuate it enough, it will surely end up being true. Actually, you put yourself in a logical bind here that I'm sure you will understand if you consider it carefully and unemotionally. The Lehmann quote very prudently avoids this equation between "forms" and "languages." ("In using the comparative method, we contrast forms of two or more related languages to determine the precise relationship between THESE FORMS. We indicate this relationship most simply by reconstructing THE FORMS from which they developed." Caps mine.) The reason this is wise is that it avoids a conclusion that the comparative method in and of does not support in the very example you described earlier. In fact, you give a clear example of where the comparative method - applied to "a larger set of languages" - will reconstruct the total set of related forms into not one, but three different languages. In a message titled "Re: The Single Parent Question" dated 7/5/01 3:21:49 PM, alderson+mail at panix.com writes: << ...if we found a group of languages descended from a prehistoric Michif, we could not reconstruct the two parents thereof. You are probably correct.... from the point of view of the comparative method, these languages do *not* have two parents, but only one, the paleo-Michif. If, on the other hand, we were dealing with a larger set of languages, some descended from the left-hand parent of paleo-Michif; some, the right-parent; and some from paleo-Michif itself, we could (if the events in question were not so far in the past as to prevent our dull tools from working at all) in principle work out the relations of all and sundry. >> Please observe carefully where you've arrived in this last paragraph. You have used the comparative method on languages linked by various systematic correspondences. And the result you forecast is that with the application of the method in this situation you will have ended up reconstructing three languages - not one. And one of those reconstructed languages will contain what you know are TWO genetically distinct sets of forms. In other words, repeating your words above: << The total set of reconstructed forms, based on all the forms attested in the group of languages under examination, is considered to be a single language.>> is not the case in the example you give. In fact, the "total set of reconstructed forms" yielded by the application of the method in the example you give MUST be three reconstructed languages. Because you CANNOT reconstruct the two ancestors accurately UNLESS you recognize that there are two distinct sets of systematic correspondences in the already reconstructed language "paleo-Mistif." This means that you are using less than "the total set of reconstructed forms" that you've already identified in "paleo-Mischif" to also reconstruct the left-handed parent. And less than the "total set" to also reconstruct the right-handed parent. The comparative method triangulates back to a single set of reconstructed forms. It does not triangulate back to a whole language. And, in the example you give, "the total set of reconstructed forms" - multiple triangulations - yields three different reconstructed languages. I understand the comparative method enough to know that you cannot count apples and end up with oranges. What in fact the method does is compare forms and find correspondences that show common descent, not whole languages or all the possible genetic aspects of a reconstructed language. In the example you give, multiple applications of the method to the same data yield multiple reconstructions, each using only a subset of the total reconstructed forms. And so the "total set of reconstructed forms" does not equal one language. The definition you give is not coherent. Of course, equating a reconstructed set of forms to a "language" does not only create a logical incoherence. If two languages share noun morphology alone (as in the Niger-Kordofanian example), it is patently absurd to call the resulting reconstructions a "language." The processes that created the correspondences do not all call for the existence of a third language, even if they do establish descent from a common form. And the comparative method establishes descent from a common set of forms, but it can say nothing else about the relationship of the remainder of those two languages. Inferences may be drawn. But that is what they are at best - inferences, not part of the method itself. If this equation of forms to a single language is by definition, a careful look at the operation as you yourself described it shows that the definition is logically faulty. And that has nothing to do with me, so personal remarks and brow-beating won't change it. Steve Long From bamba at centras.lt Sun Jul 8 22:18:31 2001 From: bamba at centras.lt (Jurgis Pakerys) Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2001 00:18:31 +0200 Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns" Message-ID: [David L. White quotes:] >> Dr White indicated that verb morphology might have some preemptive claim >> over those other forms. [David L. White responds:] > Yes, that is my claim. Cases known (to me) are so few that sampling error > (in a somewhat informal sense) is a real possibility, but it seems that > borrowing of nominal morphology typically (or at least often) involves a sort > of creeping infiltration, as in Rumanian or Old Lithuanian, [...] What are the cases of "Old Lithuanian" nominal morphology borrowing you have in mind? Do you mean the ones like allative (locative case denoting direction towards something, e.g. tevop(i) "towards the father"), adessive (... denoting proximity to something, e.g. upeip(i) "by the river"), etc.? Would you say these are examples of pattern / model borrowing from some Fennic source (as it is sometimes suggested)? (I'm sorry if I misuse "Fennic" (I have no reference at the moment), but I hope Ante Aikio will correct me and will also express his views on the subject). How would you describe "creeping infiltration" in this ("Old Lithuanian") case? How can it be compared to Rumanian? What exactly is the nominal morphology borrowing case in Rumanian? Best regards, Jurgis Pakerys PhD student Vilnius University From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Jul 7 09:03:53 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 05:03:53 EDT Subject: Handfuls of Unrelated Forms Message-ID: In a message dated 7/5/01 4:52:20 PM, proto-language at email.msn.com writes: << Arrows, as any child should know, rarely "go through" anything. They go *into* things. I would bet that no one can produce a word for 'arrow' in any language with the base meaning of 'that which goes through'.>> In a message dated 7/7/01 1:01:42 AM, Georg-Bonn at t-online.de writes: << the basic meaning of /eimi/ is "to go to or into">> I'm not sure if I'm helping here, but... I wrote: ... with the sense of "pass through". (E.g., "[pelekus] eisin dia douros" (the axe goes through the beam) Iliad 3:61.)" As a spear often "goes through" a shield in Homer or an arrow might go though a soldier's protective gear. For a notion of what the Greeks thought an arrow might do, see, e.g., . S. Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jul 7 10:25:13 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 05:25:13 -0500 Subject: Handfuls of Unrelated Forms Message-ID: Dear IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stefan Georg" Sent: Friday, July 06, 2001 3:27 AM > Someone called "Proto-Language" wrote: >> One of the reasons linguistics makes such little progress is that so-called >> "experts" are permitted tacitly by their indulgent colleagues to propose >> etymologies as totally naif as , 'arrow', from , 'go through'. [Some who used to go by Ralf-Stefan before he began to assume airs with the title Dr., wrote] > the basic meaning of /eimi/ is "to go to or into" [PCR] I doubt very sincerely whether YOU have more Greek than Liddell or Scott even though we know --- ad nauseum --- that you have a PhD. On page 198 of the abridged L&S Greek-English Lexicon, *they* say, the basic meaning of /eimi'/ is "to go"; and I greatly prefer their opinion on matters Greek to yours. The *second* example of its usage there is "khroo`s ei'sato, IT WENT THROUGH the skin". This certainly establishes the meaning "go through", which, you might have noticed if you had been following the thread, I quoted from an earlier post; I did not propose "go through" though I recognized its validity. And several other usages, like "to fly", might be similarly interpreted. [DR. STEFAN] > One of the reasons linguistics makes such little progress is that people with > so little Greek are permitted to voice their irrelevant opinion in specialist > fora. (FYI: Greek is the IE language with those funny letters.) [PCR] Well, we listened patiently to your irrelevant opinions about Uralo-Eskimo. [ Moderator's note: The reference is to a very interesting group of postings on the Nostratic mailing list, irrelevant to this newsgroup. It's been a few months since the last slanging match between these gentlemen. I am calling a halt here and now. --rma ] 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, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138) From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Jul 7 15:01:28 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 16:01:28 +0100 Subject: Handfuls of Unrelated Forms Message-ID: > One of the reasons linguistics makes such little progress is that people with > so little Greek are permitted to voice their irrelevant opinion in specialist > fora. Whoa-up there buddy! I am grateful for those who raise any linguistic questions in these fora. My Latin, Greek and Sanskrit happen to be more than passable, but it is an excellent discipline for me to have to defend or argue particular positions which perhaps I have never questioned because they are "common knowledge". I also discover the gaps in my own so-called knowledge. I am also grateful to the colleagues on this list who tolerate my stupidity when I, in turn, voice an opinion in an area where I lack the necessary specialist knowledge, but don't realise it. So all of you out there with no Greek - firstly go out and learn some, but also go on stating your opinions! Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Jul 7 06:05:36 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 07:05:36 +0100 Subject: real proto-lang Message-ID: > it's better to understand those proto-languages as some tools of comparative > linguistics than real languages that existed at some point of time. This is the "abstractionist" way of understanding reconstruction. It has also been applied to reconstructed phonemes. "Abstractionists" would claim that PIE *bh, *kw etc are simple symbols denoting the set of relationships between the reflexes of *bh, kw etc in the attested languages. Fine and dandy, but we must ask if something is lost. The abstractionist position appears (from the little I know) to be losing ground rapidly, because of the advances in our understanding of PIE based on a more realist approach, which treats our reconstruction as a real language. Firstly there is all the debate - on this list and elsewhere - about homeland, where and who and what pots and what grave customs and so on. If the reconstructed language is merely a "tool of comparative linguistics" then these questions are closed down. Secondly there are questions of how such a language would actually work. Typology comes in here, but not only typology. The "new sound" of PIE would not have arisen if *bh etc had been seen purely as an abstract tool for comparisons. So while at one level I relate to your idea, at another I think there are advantages in treating our reconstructions as if they were actual spoken human languages - even while admitting the limits of our knowledge. Peter From rao.3 at osu.edu Fri Jul 6 14:43:54 2001 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 10:43:54 -0400 Subject: Uniformitarian Principle Message-ID: wrote: > Gravity is a constant, but it is contingent on mass and distance. The first part is actually an consequence of the UP. People (Dirac?) have proposed theories in which the gravitational constant (and more recently, the cosmological constant) changes over time. It is just that such theories do not solve any pressing problem. From bmscott at stratos.net Sat Jul 7 11:50:55 2001 From: bmscott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 07:50:55 -0400 Subject: About the Yew1 In-Reply-To: <28.17b44c65.2876b600@aol.com> Message-ID: On 6 Jul 2001, at 2:34, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > But see , Grk; , Lat, cinnamon tree, > any tree "with an aromatic bark"; Greek, "of ivy"; > , Grk; Lat, "English ivy" or a similar plant; Cf., > Lat , a larva gathered from under the bark of trees, > (Pliny); Lat , a hewer of trees; , a forest > in ancient Germany. I am reminded of Nennius, who had 'made a heap of all that [he] could find', but being both an amateur and a relative beginner, I have a few questions about just how much of a heap it is. At the risk of exposing my ignorance, isn't Lat from something like *, with */dt/ > */ss/ and thence to /s/ after the diphthong? The root then is (from PIE */keH2id-/, I take it). is OHG 796. E. Schwarz takes the /k-/ to be a Celtic substitution for Gmc /x-/ in an underlying */xaisi/ 'beech'. Buck also identifies MLat (and OLG ) as containing a 'beech' stem . Does this appear outside of Gmc (apart from borrowings like Fr )? For that matter, does it appear elsewhere in Gmc? Finally, I note that Gk () has an Attic variant (); does this imply an older form with /-kj-/ or perhaps /-tj-/? Brian M. Scott From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jul 7 20:43:23 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 15:43:23 -0500 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: Dear Eduard and Douglas and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Douglas G Kilday" Sent: Sunday, July 01, 2001 4:42 AM > Eduard Selleslagh (28 Jun 2001) wrote: >> 1. The very well known case of Lat. 'fagus' (Eng. beech and similar in other >> Germanic, e.g. beuk in Du.) and Gr. 'phe:gss' (Dor. phagss) (Eng. oak) >> proves that different trees can be meant by a name from the same IE source, >> even when all the peoples involved were probably equally familiar with both >> species. Can anybody suggest how this could happen? > I'm sure Steve Long could explain this on the basis of trees being named > after their practical use rather than by the recognition of distinct > breeding populations or "species". I have never denied that this occurs. [PCR] I think we will find that, in the absence of borrowing, all trees will have been named primarily for their principal uses, secondarily for some characteristic of appearance. It is probably obvious to most by now that, if a tree is named for its use, another group that prefers another tree for the same use, may well transfer the use-determined name to its preferred substitute. [DGK] > We have Lat. 'oak' and Eng. both from PIE *perkwo-, in > addition to your example. My original comment about the yew and the PIE > homeland (which I never thought would generate any significant commotion) > depended on the yew being too distinctive in several respects to undergo > name-shifting, but such a claim can be challenged, and SL's postings are > multiplying like rabbits, much too rapidly for me to keep up. >> The only thing beech trees and oaks (but: what kind of oak? There are widely >> different types in N. and S. Europe) have in common is that they provide us >> with good quality (and dense) wood for making furniture. Any child can see >> the difference between a beech tree and an oak, especially by the leaves and >> the 'fruits'. Seeing the difference between the two types of wood requires a >> little more competence, but not much. > It's worth noting here that French has 'oak' < Gaul. *cassanos, not > a reflex of . The Celtic word resembles Gk. > 'chestnut-tree', so we may have here borrowings from Old European for 'dense > wood' vel sim. If I'm not mistaken, oaks and chestnuts are classified in > Fagaceae, the "beech family". [PCR] To me, it is fairly straightforward, that one name for 'oak' was originated, contrary to the usual methods I indicated above, by the idea that oaks attract lightning; accordingly, we should expect that *perkwu-s could have been applied to any tree by IE-speakers that caught their fancy as the special province of the lightning-god. If IE-speakers valued a particular oak as a place of assembly and judgment, as, for instance, the ancient Hessians did at Gaesmere, they might have called an oak with a name derived from *k^as-, 'direct'. But oaks have had a useful history of providing edible nuts as well. A group of IE speakers, for whom this was the more important aspect of an oak, probably called it *aig-, which I would speculate meant 'point-ball' = 'acorn'. As is well-known, this term later was used for 'horse chestnut'. Thus, though theoretically possible, I think it is hazardous in the extreme to draw far-reaching conclusions about IE orgins from tree or plant names since these terms varied in reference according to the cultural preferences of the IE-speakers employing them. [DGK] > I regard *ebur- 'yew' as pre-IE (Old European), but Lat. 'ivory' as > IE. Conventional wisdom takes the latter as a Hamitic loan (from Egy. <3bw> > vel sim.) which fails to explain the /r/ or the other peculiarities: nom. > , gen. , adj. . The long/short vowel-alternation > and -r/rn- behavior could hardly come from Hamitic, and loanwords are > usually normalized to common forms. This looks like an IE word which has > preserved two archaisms: the gradation seen in nom. 'foot', gen. > and the alternation seen in nom. 'maple', adj. . > Boars have ivory, and boar-hunting has been a macho-thing for millennia, so > it's not necessary to assume that PIE-speakers had access to elephant-tusks. [PCR] I guess there is no one on the list that would care to pursue this but I am convinced that the proper transliteration is Egyptian **jjbw rather than 3bw for both 'elephant' and 'ivory'. This would correspond to IE **aibh-, the basis of Old Indian ibha-H, 'elephant'. I would analyze this as **H(1)ai-, 'point-like, tusk' + -*bh-, formative of animal names. I am not writing *H(2) because I believe the *a is derived from a reduction of *a: not colored by a particular "laryngeal", a theory which is inherently flawed, based as it is on a total misunderstanding of the facts of Semitic phonology. Obviously, a term with a basic meaning like this could easily be applied to both elephants and wild swine but for swine, the probability is that it is derived from **H(1)e-, 'tooth' + *-bh-. The matter of the misperceived *r/*n alternation has already been addressed in another post. But, speaking of the final -*r of forms related to 'ivory', I have found that it is a frequent final component of IE color-terms; and I believe it probably should be interpreted as such here, i.e. 'tusk-animal-colored' = 'ivory'. As for *pe:s-, it is hard to believe that the long vowel is anything more than a reflex of the elided final consonant, i.e. compensatory lengthening. Though we frequently think of spears as being made of ash (probably derived from *o/o:s-, and meaning simply 'bone-hard'[?]), perhaps some kind of yew had some function connected with swine. A possibility, that *ebur- is composed of *H(1)ebh- + one of the various *wer- roots, might be entertained. And yes, I am aware of the discrepancy between *b and *bh. 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, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138) From bronto at pobox.com Sun Jul 8 02:26:21 2001 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 19:26:21 -0700 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > But see , Grk; , Lat, cinnamon tree, any tree > "with an aromatic bark"; . . . Lat , a hewer of trees; `to strike, beat, cut, kill' > , a forest in ancient Germany. `bluish grey' -- Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/ From acnasvers at hotmail.com Wed Jul 11 10:28:03 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 10:28:03 -0000 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: Steve Long (28 Jun 2001) wrote: >I don't think so. Your [DGK's] first post was probably right. I seriously >doubt that you'll find a single reference to yews or any other tree as >in all of Classical Greek. Even your own Dioscorides cited = yew "as >a Latin word" according to L-S. The best evidence is that the Greeks used >"smilax" for the yew when it was appropriate. Other words may have been >applied, by Greeks using the yew for other purposes, when appropriate. As was >probably the case in Celtic, Germanic and Slavic, the more modern yew words >probably stood for a variety of trees and wood uses among the Greeks. Well, score one for yew, Steve. I can't find any attestation of 'yew' in Classical Attic, so I must retract my rash claim that it was the "regular Greek word". However, when Dioscorides says "Ro:maioi ... taxoum" it doesn't mean the cognate was unknown in Greek. Oddly enough, in fact, the 6th-cent. "Dioscurides Latinus" uses the Greek acc. form , not . "The best evidence is that words were applied when appropriate." I can't disagree with that, but inspection of the attested Attic words for 'yew' suggests that platitudes can be transcended. Cratinus (died 419 BCE) has , as does Theophrastus (371-287). Plato employs , while and belong to later Attic. Plato's usage is highly significant, as he otherwise shows a fondness for archaisms like and . The stem mi:l- cannot be a reduction of smi:l-. As for the ending, the forms in -os appear to be used consistently for 'yew', but not the forms with the "Aegean" ending -ax. Therefore, as a working hypothesis, I take as the regular Attic for 'yew', and (which lacks IE etyma according to Watkins) as an "Aegean" term meaning 'having sharp leaves' related to 'type of knife'. The form (found in Callimachus, 3rd cent. BCE, and later) is either a contamination or a pseudo-archaism. I'm not sure whether is a contamination; it might be a legitimate "Aegean" word. Anyhow, it's now up to you to show that ever "stood for a variety of trees and wood uses among the Greeks". >There's actually strong evidence of the importance of vines (the bindweed is a >vine) to the ancient woodworking and carving trades. Pins, plugs, bindings >and wickerwork all often used vines as basic material. Convolvulus >particularly has a thick curling trunk that made it a favorite for carving the >kinds of spiral implement handles often associated with the Celts. In fact, >the vine patterns so often used to border large carved bowls that its been >suggested they might have been a relict of the use of vines as bindings to >hold the staves on more basic bowls and barrels. This leads to the common >practice of carving vines on kraters as evidenced,e.g., in Flavius Josephus' >descriptions of the ornaments on large ceremonial bowls (smilaxi kissou kai >petalois ampelo:n eskiasto philotechno:s entetoreumeno:n.) It's not >impossible, btw, that the yew would have been one of the woods preferred for >such carvings - if one recalls the advantage of the yew as a bow material was >its bendability and ability to be steamed into a curved shape despite being >carved or turned. Are you a heavy smoker, doodler, or finger-drummer, Steve? Your elaborate defense of as 'suitable for carving', and your obsession with the purported naming of trees on the basis of manual use, suggest a thorough-going digital fixation. Now, I'm not trying to attack your personality, but in doing etymology I think you should pay more attention to empirical work, and less attention to the presumed linguistic behavior of a nation of Steve Longs. >Hacking away at anything that doesn't show direct descent from *PIE - even >though those connections clearly make better sense in terms of the material, >textual and historical evidence - really demands much more crude >generalization. Rather than even considering whether the supposed *PIE >phonology might not apply here, we are assured instead, against the obvious >practices of the cultures involved, the intricacy of attested ancient >terminology and 30 better candidates - that the yew was "the berry tree" - >can't get more crudely generalizing than that. And it's quite a piece of >carving that somehow turns that crude generalization into a serious etymology. It's not a particularly intricate piece of carving. A PIE root *eiw-/oiw- could yield *eiwom/oiwom 'small round fruit, berry', *eiwos/oiwos 'berry-tree', and *eiwa:/oiwa: 'cluster of berries'. From *oiwa: could come Lat. orig. 'cluster of berries or grapes', once in Vergil 'cluster of bees', later 'single grape'. Observe the parallel decollectivization in Fr. < Lat. . As for northern PIE-speakers moving west into yew-country and applying the generic *eiwos to a specific new type of berry-tree, when there were other berry-trees around, this sort of thing happens all the time. Consider Eng. , originally the generic term for 'beast', like Ger. . Or Amer. Eng. 'maize', originally 'grain'. Or Afrikaans 'gnu', orig. 'wild beast' (duh!). In short, my etymological proposal involves nothing out of the ordinary. I can't pretend to be able to "prove" it, and there are other proposals for "yew" on the table. But I don't see that anything is gained by quibbling over arrowwoods or "modern scientific classification" vs. ancient usage. If things were as chaotic as you suggest, it would be impossible to reconstruct _any_ PIE dendronyms. But we do have several (by consensus; you are of course free to be a dissident). DGK From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jul 7 13:17:30 2001 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 06:17:30 -0700 Subject: Rate of Change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 06:34 PM 7/6/01 -0400, Thomas McFadden wrote: >actually, sociolinguistic work of the last few decades, especially by Bill >Labov and his students, has shown that this, which seems very plausible, >isn't quite right. in spite of increased literacy and mass media, local >dialects are continuing to develop independtly and diverge from the >standard in a number of places. of course in many other places the >dialects are disappearing or being brought closer to a standard language, >but what seems to be crucial in causing this is not literacy and standard >language media, but rather increased mobility of speakers. in one study, >two immediately adjacent neighborhoods in the philadelphia suburbs were >examined, These results are similar to ones seen in England, in this case comparing a new town (post-WW II, I think) with an established town in the same geographic area. The new town had a homogeneous dialect, similar that spoken on BBC. Or at least that is what I remember, though I heard of it some years ago. (I think the new town's dialect may even have had some unique combination of features - but I do not remember clearly). >> The biggest change in English, which makes Old English >> incomprehensible, has of course been Norman French. >the role that the influx of Norman French played in the massive >morpho-syntactic changes that occurred between old and middle english is >a matter of some controversy i think, and seems often to have been >overstated. vocabulary aside, there is actually some evidence that the >influence of Scandinavian was of much more importance at that time. I have seen several sources that claim that the main phonetic and general grammatical changes had *already* taken place by the Norman invasion. The main reason this is not more obvious is that, as is often the case, spelling remained conventional, and followed the old pronunciations. In particular, post-tonic syllables were greatly reduced, with loss of most distinctions. Thus most inflectional endings were already reduced to either /-e/ or -en/. This loss of inflectional distinctions necessarily made word order more important in establishing meaning. This covers the main differences between Old and Middle English. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From edsel at glo.be Sat Jul 7 20:09:03 2001 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 22:09:03 +0200 Subject: Rate of Change Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gabor Sandi" Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2001 11:42 AM >> To: Ed Selleslagh >> Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 19:06:27 +0200 > [ moderator snip ] >> [Ed] >> Italy had a very prestigious culture that exported ideas, art forms, etc. >> rather than receiving them. It was - and still is largely - in the period of >> stability that followed the rapid change after the collapse of the Roman >> Empire (Maybe it didn't change that much, as it is based very much on Tuscan >> regional speech that may be a lot older). The Risorgimento and Mussolini >> caused mainly self-affirmation and glorification, not change. >> Spanish (actually: Castilian) is possibly even more conservative than >> Italian: you can still read Cervantes without any study of older forms of >> Castilian. Its style is very old-fashioned, with very long Latin-style >> sentences, with a lot of verbosity etc. but basically he uses modern >> Castilian. And even older Castilian is not much different. > I don't think that we have any real disagreement, Ed. Rates of linguistic > change vary greatly, and social changes are no doubt an important > contributing factor. The problem that I see is that what I see as roughly > the same level of social upheaval may be associated with different rates of > linguistic change, so that the predictive power of social change -> > linguistic change is rather limited. The War of Roses may well be related to > the Grat Vowel Shift in English, but did the Thirty Years' War, say, have > the same effect on Standard German? Much of the German countryside was > depopulated by the latter war, if I recall my history correctly. [Ed] Yes. What I said in this message (in the part left out by the moderator) is that there are more factors that influence (rate of) change, sometimes cancelling out or reinforcing social-political upheaval: various inputs, one output (=rate of change), to speak in terms of system dynamics. [ Moderator's note: My apologies if trimming of massive quoting did violence to anyone's position on the argument. Too often, entire messages are quoted for a single comment on one paragraph, so the editorial hand is heavy on such postings. --rma ] > As for Italian vs. Spanish, I was specifically thinking of phonetic change. > I think that the phonology and phonetics of Standard Italian, based on but > certainly not identical to, the dialect of Florence, have remained virtually > unchanged since the Middle Ages. This is not true of Spanish: you may well > be able to read Cervantes in the original, but the following changes have > taken place since the late Middle Ages (which was my baseline): loss of > voiced fricatives (v > b, z > s, Z > S, dz > ts > T (Latin American and > Andalusian s)), followed by retraction of shibillants (S > x). In > morphology, the pluperfect (cantara) has lost its original function (still > there in literary Portuguese) and has acquired the same function as the > imperfect subjunctive (cantase). Has anything equalling these changes taken > place in standard Italian? [Ed] You're right of course about the evolution of Spanish pronunciation, but that didn't seriously affect the language nor its intelligibility to people from different times or places. And there is a lot of regional variation, as I mentioned in another message: e.g. in some contexts a somewhat bilabial v is still used (My Peruvian wife says 'Avraham Lincoln' while she finds it difficult to pronounce v in isolation), in Latin America written letter z/c is pronounced exactly the same as written s, etc... The Spanish pluperfect / imperfect subjunctive matter is a bit more complicated: in certain (many) cases they are indeed interchangeable, but in others not: e.g. you can say 'Quisiera una Coca Cola' but not 'Quisiese...'. Some people consider 'cantase' more "past" than 'cantara' e.g. in conditional or subordinate clauses 'Si lo hubiese sabido, no te lo hubiera/habría dicho' vs. 'si lo supiera, no te lo diría' , or 'le dije que no cantara' vs. 'le había dicho que no cantase', but uses vary and many do not make this distinction (I don't know what the Real Academia says, or used to say before they nominated South Americans like Vargas Llosa). I'm much less knowledgeable in Italian, but as an outside observer I see a much less complex use of perfect subjunctives etc., not as much 'simplification' as in French though, where this has become very archaic ('si je l'eûs su...') or fallen in disuse except in standard expressions ('ne fût-ce que...' = if it were only...). I guess Italian will become more like French in maybe 100 years or so. Who knows... Thanks for your comments. Ed. Selleslagh From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Jul 7 15:14:34 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 16:14:34 +0100 Subject: Rate of Change Message-ID: > Has anything equalling these changes taken place in standard Italian? A possible example is the increasing disuse of the simple past in favour of the composite perfect, as in French and southern German. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Jul 7 15:12:04 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 16:12:04 +0100 Subject: Rate of Change Message-ID: >> we see a lot of convergence due to greatly improved communications ..... >> breakdown of dialects, ... locally colored standard language. > but what seems to be crucial in causing this is not literacy and standard > language media, but rather increased mobility of speakers. The example of Swiss German provokes a response from me. In nearby Bavaria, there is frequent use of a "locally coloured standard", and different versions of dialect and coloured or uncoloured standard are used in different linguistic contexts. The standard language is not felt to be alien, merely socially inappropriate in certain contexts. Across the border in Switzerland, however, the standard language is felt to be alien, and is both resisted and resented as a medium of speech, although it is the norm for printed language. The local dialects are strongly fragmented, and sometimes not easily mutually comprehensible. Lack of mobility in a mountainous terrain is clearly part of the cause, but attitudes are also a powerful factor. Some German Swiss would rather speak English to other German speakers than sully their lips with the "bookish" standard language. Peter From edsel at glo.be Mon Jul 9 20:44:53 2001 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2001 22:44:53 +0200 Subject: Rate of Change Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Thomas McFadden" Sent: Saturday, July 07, 2001 12:34 AM >> In modern times we have the opposite: notwithstanding rapid cultural >> change, we see a lot of convergence due to greatly improved >> communications and mass media, which act as linguistic role models, >> much more than any Académie ever did. Here in Flanders, e.g. we see >> the pretty fast breakdown of dialects, via a stage of 'intermediate' >> language or seriously locally colored standard language. In the >> Netherlands, by and large, this stage has already been passed. [snip] > so the crucial factor here is not exposure to normalizing media > and education, but movement between dialect areas. now, what this means > for the very different dialect situations of europe is less clear. the > european dialects were of course much more diverse, and have clearly been > weakened in the recent past, but it still seems that mobility would be the > key. another thing to consider is that many of the extinct or near > extinct dialects of Europe were, in distinction to the dialects of North > American English, not mutually intelligible with the standard language of > the country in which they were spoken (listen to a local dialect of > Austrian or especially Swiss German). it may well be that such extreme > variation can be threatened by much lower levels of mobility, because not > just social interaction, but simple communication can be disturbed. just > a thought. [Ed] What you call American dialects would be considered to be locally colored pronunciation, or different registers, by Europeans who live in language areas where dialects are still in dayly use. Actual dialects are usually a lot more different, even with partly different vocabulary and some grammatical features (like 'strong' instead of 'weak' conjugation of some verbs, remnants of declension or a different declension...), different phonology (e.g. Cockney glottal stops...), etc. Many European dialects could just as well be called 'closely related languages'. Extreme African-American English might come close. It's that kind of 'real' dialects I envisioned. The unifying role of TV and radio (and school and administration) in places like Flanders or S. Italy is absolutely clear: e.g. words from the standard language that are not used in the various dialect areas concerned, are introduced in everyday language and tend to crowd out local terms, while pronunciation slowly changes in the direction of these models. Having said that, I generally agree with your reasoning. >> The biggest change in English, which makes Old English incomprehensible, has >> of course been Norman French. > the role that the influx of Norman French played in the massive > morpho-syntactic changes that occurred between old and middle english is > a matter of some controversy i think, and seems often to have been > overstated. vocabulary aside, there is actually some evidence that the > influence of Scandinavian was of much more importance at that time. [Ed] That's REALLY hard to tell, because one of the bases of English (Anglian) already had some N. Germanic traits, and the Scandinavians may only have enhanced it, to the detriment of the Saxon component. The syntactic changes I can think of (in a few minutes) are clearly not Germanic: they concern word order. But I'm not a specialist. Ed. Selleslagh From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jul 12 20:12:02 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2001 15:12:02 -0500 Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change) In-Reply-To: <003801c104b8$47a0d220$4101703e@edsel> Message-ID: I haven't been to the Southern Cone but most northern and northwest Argentines I've met don't have quite the same sound for as porten~os I've met. The NW Argentines I've met had an Andean accent and those from Mendoza I've met sounded like chilenos --and indeed, I've been told that a very large percentage are. And assibilated /R/ is common among chilenos. While some porten~os I've met have a slight degree of assibilation, it's nowhere near as strong as that you often hear in Costa Rica. As Ed says, the Latin American assibilated /R/ sounds like an American /R/ with a shade of /Z/ --perhaps like an American trying to say /R/ with the mouth completely closed. There are various publications that claim that assibilated /R/ also exists in and around Navarra BUT everyone I've ever met who has ever been there says it's not the case. >As far as I know, the rr > Z territory (mainly (sub-)Andean Argentina, Mendoza >etc.) and the y, ll > Z (or often S) (around the Mar del Plata and wide >surroundings) do not really overlap, but I may be mistaken. Rick McCallister >would be a better source. >Anyway, among themselves, y and ll give rise to a lot of homophones, even in >standard Castilian: calló/cayó (he shut up/ he fell) etc...A bit more >wouldn't be all that problematic to native speakers, especially because to the >trained ear there is a slight difference between Z from rr and >Argentinian/Uruguayan Z from y or ll. The Z from rr often sounds like the >pronuciation of someone who cannot reproduce a rolling r correctly, or as a >more strongly voiced American r with a shade of Z. >Ed. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu Sat Jul 7 13:58:02 2001 From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 08:58:02 -0500 Subject: Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent) In-Reply-To: <001201c10571$02b2cc40$9361e5a9@reshall.berkeley.edu> Message-ID: >----Original Message----- >>From: Leo A. Connolly [SMTP:connolly at memphis.edu] >>Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2001 2:49 AM >. . . >>We formerly had such things -- think "methinks" -- an object in preverbal >>position not controlling verb agreement. We have since solved our problem >>by making _me_ into a true subject _I_ -- with no change in meaning! >I can see what you're getting at, but isn't this a bit of an >oversimplification? We haven't changed any object into a subject; we've >simply dropped the peculiar "methinks" from the language, mostly because it >looks so wrong to anyone unfamiliar with older forms of English. If anyone >had remembered that "me-" is a dative and that "-thinks" is a reflex of AS. >"þyncan" ("to seem") and not "þencan" ("to think"), we'd probably all >still be saying it. As it is, however, "methinks" ended up being the last >remnant of a verb otherwise lost in ModE., & so it was prone to be >misunderstood and finally abandoned. >A. G. Kozak >Department of Classics >University of California at Berkeley Some linguists think that the OE 'me thinks' (see also Shakespearean 'me seems') represents a more general pattern also found in Classical Latin constructions such as 'me pudet' ('me shames'). If so, the shift from 'me thinks' to 'I think' is not an isolated change but an example of a more general change in which a class of (impersonal) verbs regularized a pattern from elsewhere in the grammar, the pattern of taking nominative case subjects with subject-verb agreement. Before it was lost, of course, it had become a relic form that may well have been prone to misunderstanding. Its relic status, however, marks it as precious data for what the earlier linguistic system was like and the 'me' > 'I' change as indicative of a more general change in the linguistic system. Carol Justus Linguistics Research Center University of Texas at Austin From connolly at memphis.edu Sat Jul 7 16:19:46 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 11:19:46 -0500 Subject: Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent) Message-ID: "A. G. Kozak" wrote: > ----Original Message----- >> From: Leo A. Connolly [SMTP:connolly at memphis.edu] >> Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2001 2:49 AM > . . . >> We formerly had such things -- think "methinks" -- an object in preverbal >> position not controlling verb agreement. We have since solved our problem >> by making _me_ into a true subject _I_ -- with no change in meaning! > I can see what you're getting at, but isn't this a bit of an > oversimplification? We haven't changed any object into a subject; we've > simply dropped the peculiar "methinks" from the language, mostly because it > looks so wrong to anyone unfamiliar with older forms of English. If anyone > had remembered that "me-" is a dative and that "-thinks" is a reflex of AS. > "þyncan" ("to seem") and not "þencan" ("to think"), we'd probably all > still be saying it. As it is, however, "methinks" ended up being the last > remnant of a verb otherwise lost in ModE., & so it was prone to be > misunderstood and finally abandoned. This verb (which, BTW, came out as "flyncan" on my Mac, since the codes for thorn and edh on a PC represent ligatures fl fi on the Mac) is far from unique. _like_ underwent the same change: the experiencer used to be a dative object, but was then made subject. OE also had _me hyngrede_ 'I hungered', _swa: gesae:lde iu_ "thus happened to you", _hu: hyre gespe:ow_ 'how her succeeded'. _Methinks_ is the last remnant of a once proud class of verbs that still survives in German: _mich dünkt_ 'methinks', _mir scheint_ 'seems to me', _mich hungert_ 'me hungers', _mich dürstet_ 'me thirsts'. But was _Tyncean_ actually abandoned? I don't think so. If anything, _Tencean_ 'cogitate' was, which (had it survived) would have yielded modern *thenk or *thench, depending on whether the 3.sg. or 1.sg. was generalized (cf. _seek_ beside compound _beseech_). Methinks that _Tyncean_ survived, acquiring the meaning (and grammar) of extinct *thenk/ch. Leo Connolly From connolly at memphis.edu Sat Jul 7 17:50:14 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 12:50:14 -0500 Subject: Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent) Message-ID: conerning _I think_ and _methinks_ Douglas G Kilday wrote: > Don't these expressions represent distinct verbs and constructions? > "I think" < OE 'I think; intend' < > "methinks" < OE 'to me it seems' < > Of course, the two verbs are related, since < PGmc *thunkjan is a > factitive, 'to cause to be thought' = 'to seem'. Dutch has preserved the > vocalic contrast between and ; Du. = > "methinks". I'm repeating myself here, since I just replied in similar vein to another mesage, but nevertheless: Yes, they are originally separate constructions and verbs, but OE _Tencean_ seems to have become extinct, its function being assumed by _think_ < _Tyncean_. But I stick with my interpretation nonetheless, since it parallels the development seen in _me TyrstT_ > _I thirst_, _me hyngerT_ > _I hunger_, _me liketh_ > _I like_, where there was no parallel verb with a personal experiencer subject. As for _meseems_ (which sounds eminently plausible, though I cannot remember encountering it), it took the other path toward resolving the problem: put the object in object position and insert a dummy subject _it_ in preverbal position. I really can't say that either of these solutions is better than the other, only that both occurred. Leo Connolly From edsel at glo.be Sat Jul 7 20:35:02 2001 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 22:35:02 +0200 Subject: Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent) Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "A. G. Kozak" Sent: Thursday, July 05, 2001 6:39 PM > ----Original Message----- >> From: Leo A. Connolly [SMTP:connolly at memphis.edu] >> Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2001 2:49 AM > . . . >> We formerly had such things -- think "methinks" -- an object in preverbal >> position not controlling verb agreement. We have since solved our problem >> by making _me_ into a true subject _I_ -- with no change in meaning! > I can see what you're getting at, but isn't this a bit of an > oversimplification? We haven't changed any object into a subject; we've > simply dropped the peculiar "methinks" from the language, mostly because it > looks so wrong to anyone unfamiliar with older forms of English. If anyone > had remembered that "me-" is a dative and that "-thinks" is a reflex of AS. > "þyncan" ("to seem") and not "þencan" ("to think"), we'd probably all > still be saying it. As it is, however, "methinks" ended up being the last > remnant of a verb otherwise lost in ModE., & so it was prone to be > misunderstood and finally abandoned. > A. G. Kozak [Ed Selleslagh] You may be interested in learning that in Dutch this expression still exists (mainly in Flanders): "me dunkt" instead of "denk ik" (or "ik denk" (I think) according to the place in the sentence). Curiously enough, most dictionaries seem to believe that "dunken" is a variant of "denken" (to think), probably misled (mizzled??? :-)) by the erroneous interpretation of the noun "eigendunk" (=exaggerated self-esteem, self-conceit) as "thought about oneself" instead of "that what seems to oneself". This interpretation looks pretty old, as in texts from several centuries ago you can find a past tense "me docht" ("***methought"), using the conjugation of "denken". BTW, the verb "dunken" is lost in Dutch. Ed. From edsel at glo.be Sat Jul 7 20:41:49 2001 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 22:41:49 +0200 Subject: Genetic Descent Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Leo A. Connolly" Sent: Friday, July 06, 2001 6:10 AM > _gustar_ comes from Latin _gusta:re_, which has many obvious cognates in > other IE languages. However, _gusta:re_ was construed as an active verb > meaning 'take a taste of something': > Caesar vinum gustavit. > NOM wine-ACC tasted > 'Caesar tasted the wine.' > As far as I know, this usage has been lost in Spanish, with _gustar_ > adopting both the syntax and meaning of Lat. _place:re_. [snip] > Leo Connolly [Ed Selleslagh] In French, 'goûter' still reflects Latin 'gustare', 'to taste'. Portuguese uses 'gustar' in the same semantic sense as Spanish, but the construction is still that of Lat. 'gustare': no indirect object. Ed. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jul 12 20:19:17 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2001 15:19:17 -0500 Subject: Genetic Descent In-Reply-To: <3B453A31.715CEE27@memphis.edu> Message-ID: gustar can mean "to taste" but it's rarely used that way I've only come across that usage in literary Spanish Velázquez gives the primary meaning as "to taste", secondary "to perceive by taste" >_gustar_ comes from Latin _gusta:re_, which has many obvious cognates in >other IE languages. However, _gusta:re_ was construed as an active verb >meaning 'take a taste of something': > Caesar vinum gustavit. > NOM wine-ACC tasted > 'Caesar tasted the wine.' >As far as I know, this usage has been lost in Spanish, with _gustar_ >adopting both the syntax and meaning of Lat. _place:re_. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rao.3 at osu.edu Tue Jul 10 21:29:45 2001 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 17:29:45 -0400 Subject: Anglo-Romani (Long, was Re: Genetic Descent) Message-ID: I had asked, regarding Anglo-Romani as 'relexicalized English', how the lexicon was preserved? I think that I need to be more detailed as to what I was asking. I also took some time to try to get information on the language of English Gypsies, and thought the results might be of interest to some. Before getting to that, I will touch on a different point I had mentioned, that of syntactic influence. The paper about Konkan Saraswat Brahmans I had mentioned is Nadkarni, Biligualism and syntactic change in Konkani, Langauge 51(1975) pp. 672--683. The inherited distinction between relative pronouns are being supplanted by interrogative pronouns. [In the dialect of Marathi spoken around Madurai, Tamil Nadu, this process is complete.] The conclusion the author comes to is that when two languages are in contact, with all speakers of one (say A for definiteness) are >early< bilinguals but most speakers of B are monolingual, and speakers of A continue to speak A, influence will go from B to A and not in the reverse. I.e., the direction of influence is determined by the patterns of social contact and not what language is spoken at home. Secondly, it seems that in cases where language is used for self-identification, it is easier for syntax to be borrowed than (core) vocabulary or morphemes. In fact, sprachbund phenomena are much more about syntactic convergence than others. Yet we do not consider a sprachbund to form a new family. Also, think about modern IA langauges. Only pieces of Vedic inflection surviving are the oblique (from the genetive) and some bits of the be auxiliary. The peterite is from the -ta form which was a stative >adjective<, while other forms come from various auxiliaries. This wholescale change in morphology is never taken as affecting the getetic affiliations of ModIA. Why should it be different in cases where the syntax has been affected profoundly by external influence and not internal development? So it seems that the situations like Laha vs. Malay are exceptional in being complete replacement of syntax, rather than in the process itself. Now 'morphology', interpreted as 'how to form the words that go into the various slots recignized by the synchronic syntax' is dependent on syntax, it will be affected by this process, but that should not be relevant to genetic classification. Turning now to Anglo-Romani: H. W. Hatting wrote, in a message dated May 16, 2001 > Let me put in some information I recollect from a seminar on Romani > 1. English gypsies were speaking a version of Romani with *Romani* > grammar when they immigrated into England; > 2. Gradually, they started to use English among themselves [...] > 3. Nowadays, English Romani (with Romani lexicon and English > morphology) [...] > English Romani goes farther than most other secret languages (like > German "Rotwelsch" or Russsian "blat", in which the basic function > words (pronouns, conjunctions, auxiliaries etc.) are normally from > the "base" language which provides the morphology) [...] I interpreted this, when combined with the use of "relexification", to mean that auxiliaries, their conjugation, endings etc continued from Stage 1 to Stage 3 (with only the categories common to English and Romani being found) while the speakers in the intermediate stage were completely ignorant of Romani grammar. That I found, and still find, incredible. My question as to how the lexicon was preserved was about bridging the first and third stages. My lack of precision unfortunately misled JoatSimeon at aol.com who addressed only how Stage 3 can continue indefinitely, something that is not at all surprising. Some browsing in the library (which I should have done sooner) suggests that the intermediate stage was more complicated. "The dialect of English Gypsies" by Smart and Crofton (1875, reprinted by Gale Research, 1968, Detroit) talks about two "dialects", termed there "Deep Romanes" and "Shallow Romanes" or the "vulgar dialect". The former seems to preserve quite a bit of East European Romani morphemes (S&C refer to "the Turkish" dialect, presumably the Romani of Gypsies in (the European parts of?) the then Ottoman Empire), though there were losses of categories not found in English. The latter dialect seems closer to Blat etc than Hatting suggested. Here is the beginning of a story "How Petalengo went to Heaven" retold in both dialects: [Parts enclosed in angle brackets '<>' are English morphemes, italicized in print. Acute accent mark on vowels is denoted by a slash '/' preceding the vowel. In each sentence the old dialect version is given first, the new second. Smart and Croft do not provide a translation, only a reference to Hone's "Everyday book", 1857ed, vol. 1, p447. Our library does not have this edition and I couldn't locate this story in there, because I didn't know that 'Petalengro' means 'Smith'/blacksmith.] Mandi pookerova toot sar Petalengro I tell-nonpast you how P. Mandi<'ll> pooker tooti Petalengro ghi/as kater mi Doovelesko keri. go-past to God-possesive house jal adr/e mi Doovel' kair. [Notes: Doovel (God) is always prefixed with mi (my). Keri is adverb from kair.] Yek divvus mi Doovel vi/as adr/e bitto gav. One day God come-past to small-masc town. Yek divvus mi Doovel wel adr/e bitti gav Kek nan/ei kitchema sas ad/oi. emphatic neg inn be-past III there latch kekeno(?) kitchema od/oi find-past NEG (?) inn there Yov ghi/as adr/e Petalengro kair. He went to P-poss house jal adr/e Petalengro kair Yov sootada/s odoi sor doova raati. He sleep-past III there all that night sooter od/oi sor doova raati. This is striking. The "old" (archaizing?) dialect uses the inherited inflections, but still slips into 'Petalengro' (because -engro is already a poss. suffix? (turned into an adjective formant)). The "new" dialect uses English particles, verb endings (another story, labeled as being in "the new dialect" has "sas dik" for 'was looking') etc, but on occasion retains pronouns (I person always, II seemingly more often than III) and occasionally auxiliaries. Even Wester Boswell, the chief informant, considered both by other gypsies of the time and the authors as having good control of Romani, would slip into the new forms from time to time, and then correct himself. On the other hand, he seemed to have preserved curious archaisms: Prohibitions were with 'maw', given as 'maa' in the vocabulary, [e.g., "thou shalt not kill" is translated as "maw toot maur"], negations with forms of 'kek' without or without 'na', occasionally the latter by itself. Others seem to vary between this and the other extreme of the "new dialect": The comments in Smith and Crofton suggest that the extent of the use of inherited pronouns and the be-auxillary varied quite a bit. [See "sas diking" above. A story in a slightly later source (Leland) quoted by G. Pierce starts "Mandy su:ttod I was pirraben lang o tute" [the ending d on su:ttod, the words I and was, and probably lang (=along), o (=of) and en (=ing') are English ], with 'was' instead of 'sas'. Another story in S&C goes " chooro dinilo jookel sas peer ... Dikt/as ... Yov piriv ... adr/e /o paani. ..." Note the mixing of dikt/as, an inherited peterite, with the English -ed of pirived, and the articles '/o' (from Greek) and 'the'. Compounds can also lead to 'mixed' words, sometimes in strange ways: In the translation of Lord's Prayer, 'forgive' is "del"! [del = give, cf Mod IA 'de-'] An interesting point here is that when asked for the Romani word for something, when it had been lost, people would try to come up with some periphrase: Thus "how do you ask for a spade?" elicited "Lel kova chin hev adr/e o poov", literally 'Get the thing for cutting a hole in the ground". Sometimes, different persons would give different periphrase. For 'frog', the responses where "tikeni koli jal adr/e paani, lel drab avr/i" [little thing that goes into the water and takes the poison out] and "O stor-herengro bengesko koli ta jal adr/e o paani so piova" [the four legged diabolic thing that swims in the water which I drink] (this by Wester Boswell). It seems that the inherited word for frog 'jamba'/'jomba' had come to mean toad, though it was considered to be a form of 'jumper'. Thus far the evidence seems to point to language death. The "new dialect" is what those without adequate control of the ancestral language spoke, not a "relexification". This is underlined by the fact that extent of the use of English function words varied from person to person, with older persons having more control. The only references about 20th c. Anglo-Romani that I found in our library are G. Price(ed) "Languages in Britain & Ireland" and Kenrick, Romani English, in International J Sociology Lang, 19(1979) pp. 111--120. The former seems to be based on the latter for the most part. I could not find texts in contemporary Anglo-Romani. So I don't know if it should be considered as an arrested form of the "new dialect", or if attempts had been made to remove the English function words and endings. [Apparently, some literate Gypsies have consulted books to increase their vocabulary.] But what I read suggests that the inherited inflection is not used. In any case, contemporary Anglo-Romani looks like a case of arrested language death or a resurrected language. I am not sure if "relexification" is a suitable word to use, at least in the sense I understand it. After all, I have never heard anyone call Sanskrit of drama dialog as 'Prakrit relexified with Sanskrit' though in syntax the two are much closer than either is to Sanskrit of Panini/early upanishads. Even in morphology, there is variation in the amount of Prakrit influence when we look at the puraanas or Buddhist texts. Long compounds of medieval Sanskrit are often attempts of reconcile MIA syntax and rhythm to Panini's morphological rules. It should be noted that Kenrick who proposed that Anglo-Romani be considered a register of English (and thus the name Romani English) still endorsed a view similar to the above about the historical origin of Anglo-Romani. He just says that considering Anglo-Romani to be a register of Romani clarifies the current socio-linguistic aspects. This should not affect how we view its history. Obviously, dying languages and language shifts in progress are going to cause fuzzy-wuzzy type problems for genetic classification, just as sound changes in progress won't conform to the rules used in historical linguistics. If the process is arrested by "schooling" (of formal or informal types), as seems to have happened in Anglo-Romani, this can continue indefinitely. We should not throw out the rules due such exceptional cases, nor should we attempt to forcibly fit the cases to the rules without extensive investigation of the history. From Georg-Bonn at t-online.de Sat Jul 7 08:52:20 2001 From: Georg-Bonn at t-online.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 10:52:20 +0200 Subject: diction and contradiction In-Reply-To: <3B4163B4.579E685E@pobox.com> Message-ID: >Slightly closer to topic, why is Italy called in >Hungarian? (I was in Urbana yesterday, popped in to the Slavic & East >European department of the university library, where I once had a job; >and happened to see there a Hungarian map of Europe.) -/orsz:ag/ is "country, state", purely Hungarian; /olasz/ is immediately from Slavic, derived from the etymon behind forms like /Vlach/ othl. (also found in W/Valachia, and the earlier German designation for everything Romance (a/o Celtic), /Welsch/, OHG /wal(a)hisc/, also engl. /Welsh/;). The ultimate origine may be the Celtic (?) ethnonym given in Latin sources as /Volcae/. StG -- Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn From g_sandi at hotmail.com Sat Jul 7 10:57:39 2001 From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 10:57:39 -0000 Subject: Italy in Hungarian (was: diction and contradiction) Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From miskec4096 at hotmail.com Sat Jul 7 15:31:46 2001 From: miskec4096 at hotmail.com (Kreso Megyeral) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 17:31:46 +0200 Subject: diction and contradiction Message-ID: Anton S. wrote: >Slightly closer to topic, why is Italy called in Hungarian? >(I was in Urbana yesterday, popped in to the Slavic & East European department >of the university library, where I once had a job; and happened to see there a >Hungarian map of Europe.) The name is compound from olasz (Italian), and orszag (land, country). The word olasz itself comes from Valachus (cf. also olah "Romanian Valachian"). Similar thing occurs in Polish, where they use the word W3och for Italian, and W3ochy for Italy. The reason is probably that language of Valachians seemed close to that of Italians. Moreover, in Croatia, the former Romance (or late Latin) speaking population of Dalmatia is called Vlasi (sg. Vlah). Actually, it seems that all the speakers of the east Romance languages bear that common name. From hans.alscher at noel.gv.at Mon Jul 9 06:14:10 2001 From: hans.alscher at noel.gv.at (Mag. Hans-Joachim Alscher) Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2001 08:14:10 +0200 Subject: diction and contradiction Message-ID: Anton Sherwood schrieb: > Slightly closer to topic, why is Italy called in > Hungarian? (I was in Urbana yesterday, popped in to the Slavic & East > European department of the university library, where I once had a job; > and happened to see there a Hungarian map of Europe.) > -- > Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/ Olasz-ország means welsch-land (cf. olasz-riszling = German Welsch-Riesling, a sort of white wine, cf. also Rhein-Riesling). Hungarian "olasz" / German "welsch" is used for Romanian people, in this case for Italians. Cf. Wales and Welsh, Wallonen (in Belgium), Wallis (in Switzerland), Walachei (in Romania) and so on. The name of the Celtic tribe "Volc-i" = Germanic "walh-" was first used as name for Celtic people and later transferred to Romanian people. -- Best regards, Hans-Joachim Alscher From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Jul 11 05:42:57 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 01:42:57 EDT Subject: diction and contradiction Message-ID: In a message dated 7/7/01 12:41:14 AM, bronto at pobox.com writes: << Slightly closer to topic, why is Italy called in Hungarian? (I was in Urbana yesterday, popped in to the Slavic & East European department of the university library, where I once had a job; and happened to see there a Hungarian map of Europe.)>> I think you'll find a bit of a discussion that mentions this in the archives, involving also the Volcae, Welsh, Walloons, Walha, Valsk, Wolochs, Vlachs, Wallachia, Blacorum and maybe even Gaul. The name has had many applications over the years across Europe. My notes have the following explanation: "The Slavic word of the 10th century, , was, in its plural form: , borrowed into the Hungarian with the sense of 'neo-Latin/neo-Roman, Frank,' in the form . In the period of Arpad, this was the Hungarian name for any neo-Latin people, including the Franks (cf., Latin 'Frankavilla' > Hungarian 'Olaszi'), and it is also at present the Hungarian word for 'Italian.'" Regards, Steve Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jul 7 15:34:15 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 10:34:15 -0500 Subject: The Iceman's Berries Message-ID: Dear Stanley and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stanley Friesen" Sent: Thursday, July 05, 2001 9:39 PM [ moderator snip ] >>> Unless the Hittite form belongs here, I would not reconstruct this word to >>> PIE. It looks more like a European word, like many other words shared only >>> between Slavic, Germanic and Celtic. >> [PCR] >> And just how does a "European word" look? >> What are its identifying characteristics? > It is shared between the northern European branches of IE, and perhaps is > also found in the north-central dialects (aka Balto-Slavic). Balto-Slavic > attestation is somewhat marginal here, but there are so many words shared > specifically between Balto-Slavic and the other European branches that I > have a hard time excluding it. Certainly Balto-Slavic appears to have been > adjacent to some of the northern European dialects through most, or all, of > its history, so shared innovations are not that unexpected. Since these > branches are all mutually adjacent at the time of first attestation, such a > limited attestation is insufficient to establish PIE antiquity for a word. > Thus, there is a large class of roots in Pokorny, and elsewhere, that are > only attested anciently from northern Europe and immediately adjacent > areas. These form a substantial corpus of words that, while locally > shared, cannot be confidently reconstructed for PIE proper. One > interesting factoid about this corpus is that it includes most of the roots > in Pokorny with a reconstructed *a that is not traceable to an a-coloring > laryngeal. (Note, this is not an identifying characteristic, it is an > observation). > Now, my *hypothesis* about many of these words is that they are borrowings > from a non-IE language family formerly wide-spread in northern Europe, but > now extinct. I wish I could figure out how to test this idea. [PCR] This problem in general in one with which I am quite familiar. Though I, of course, acknowledge loanwords, I frequently find the the reasons for identifying them are less than totally convincing. Now you did mention IE roots with *a that are reconstructed without a "laryngeal". I would be curious to know one or two of these. I was under the impression that "laryngealists" allowed no *a without postulating a "laryngeal" to account for it. On the other hand, I believe that a small number of IE *p, *t, and k*, began life as *ph, *th, and *kh (and perhaps *[n]k in *kar- and *kaka-), and, in the process of losing aspiration (or nasality), lengthened and preserved the proto-IE (or Nostratic) vowel quality, which, when *a, became first *a: during the period of the introduction of Ablaut, then simply *a since this was sufficient to differentiate it from *e/o roots with the same form. 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, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138) From edsel at glo.be Sat Jul 7 21:10:26 2001 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 23:10:26 +0200 Subject: The Iceman's Berries Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stanley Friesen" Sent: Friday, July 06, 2001 4:39 AM [snip] > Thus, there is a large class of roots in Pokorny, and elsewhere, that are > only attested anciently from northern Europe and immediately adjacent > areas. These form a substantial corpus of words that, while locally > shared, cannot be confidently reconstructed for PIE proper. One > interesting factoid about this corpus is that it includes most of the roots > in Pokorny with a reconstructed *a that is not traceable to an a-coloring > laryngeal. (Note, this is not an identifying characteristic, it is an > observation). > Now, my *hypothesis* about many of these words is that they are borrowings > from a non-IE language family formerly wide-spread in northern Europe, but > now extinct. I wish I could figure out how to test this idea. [Ed Selleslagh] Try Basque. You never know. But that's tricky: often, initial consonants have disappeared, in other cases initial consonants may mask ancient initial vowels (like the old verb-prefix e-: jaten < e-aten), so you have to go back to reconstructed Proto-Basque forms. And many roots are actually of IE origin (Latin, Gaulish, Romance...) Maybe people like L. Trask could help. Ed. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jul 12 20:22:38 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2001 15:22:38 -0500 Subject: The Iceman's Berries In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010705192845.00b21340@getmail.friesen.net> Message-ID: Could you elaborate more and give examples? [snip] >>And just how does a "European word" look? [snip] > One interesting factoid about this corpus is that it includes most of the >roots in Pokorny with a reconstructed *a that is not traceable to an >a-coloring laryngeal. (Note, this is not an identifying characteristic, it is >an observation). >Now, my *hypothesis* about many of these words is that they are borrowings >from a non-IE language family formerly wide-spread in northern Europe, but >now extinct. I wish I could figure out how to test this idea. >-------------- >May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jul 7 22:51:04 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 17:51:04 -0500 Subject: Fw: *G^EN- Message-ID: Dear Stanley and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stanley Friesen" Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2001 1:26 AM [SF] > Some, certainly, All I said was that it is not a *rule* that all roots > must be CVC, and thus not all CVC(V)C forms are extended roots. [PCR] And, asking you the same question, I thought I asked Peter: what are a few examples of IE roots which cannot be referred to CVC bases? > Now, for the latter I would normally require extensions with different > places of articulation. I consider that much of the variation of the -k~-g > sort is due to inter-dialect borrowing, not to originally different > (extended) roots. That is, root final consonants that differ only in > voicing or aspiration, and are associated with virtually identical meanings > are probably best treated as being post-PIE variants of one form. [PCR] I have never read this before, and am sceptical. How about a few examples? >> [SFp] >>> I find it better to just take PIE roots as they come, without trying to >>> force them into some preconceived mold. >> [PCRp] >> You assume what you attempt to argue. >> It is the form of a PIE root which is the question here. [SF] > I meant that I would reconstruct only those root forms that are multiply > attested, at least for PIE. (The issue of an earlier stage is a separate > matter). [PCR] What might some examples be? 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, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138) From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Jul 7 14:50:00 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 15:50:00 +0100 Subject: *G^EN- Message-ID: >Now, it appears to me that you wish to reconstruct a *g^N-, Balderdash! Haven't I argued all along there is no such thing? The root is *g'enH, albeit with forms from *g'nH. (I put that word in just for Larry!) Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Jul 7 14:46:45 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 15:46:45 +0100 Subject: *G^EN- Message-ID: >> *keubH2-, 'lie down, lay down', >> I see no reason not to derive it from Pokorny's 2. *kew-, 'bend' Isolating >>the initial CVC-component of PIE stems allows comparison with initial >>CVC-segments of PAA triliteral roots. Yes, I understand why you wish to derive PIE *keubH from **kew. It is always tedious to rehearse arguments. My examples were of roots with final -CH, of which there are plenty. For theoretical reasons, you wish to reduce all of these to CVC roots. You may or may not be right, but the fact that your reason for doing it is theoretical, and not based on PIE evidence, is why I suggest (too dismissively, and I'm sorry for that), that the theory is actually irrelevant to PIE data. I also suspect that PIE data will not affect your belief, so I didn't pursue the argument further. Incidentally you have still not responded to my interpretation of PIE, where I suggest that it is the -u- in *keubH which is the essential vowel, not the -e-. If you want connections with PAA, then the triliteral root *K-U-B is surely a better guess than the biconsonantal *K-e-W. Peter From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jul 7 23:12:05 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 18:12:05 -0500 Subject: lupo cervino, loup-cervier.... Message-ID: Dear Eleanora and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "eleonora litta" Sent: Friday, July 06, 2001 11:39 AM > Hi everyone, > in a XIV century Italian manuscript I have found this animal, apparently a > lynx, which would symbolise the ability to judge distances, time, speed... > (the manuscript is about fighting techniques, BTW). only this animal is > called lupo cervino, which in italian would mean 'deer-wolf'. At the > beginning I thought it was for the lynxs fur, spotted like the deer one, > then a French guy told me that in France they have this loup-cervier, which > is a big lynx who hunts deers, so I reconsidered my position. They also told > me in a Spanish name for the lynx being lobo cerval. > I have to find out which is the truth about all this. do you know something > about the ancient names for 'lynx' in the IE languages, and about their > evolution? > Thank you for your help [PCR] Warning you in advance that this will be the view of an extreme minority, but I believe the name is a compound derived from two elements: *le/ou-, 'antelope', but also 'jumping' + *(n)ka-, 'feline'. It thus shares the same initial element as *le/o(u)-, 'antelope' + *wa:-, 'wolf, predator' = 'lion'. Quote me at your own risk? 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, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138) From douglas at nb.net Sun Jul 8 13:39:20 2001 From: douglas at nb.net (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 09:39:20 -0400 Subject: lupo cervino, loup-cervier.... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Note that we have a reflex in modern English: "serval", applied to an African wild cat (Felis serval) -- the name < French < Portuguese "lobo cerval" = "deerlike wolf" (Latin "cervalis" = "deerlike" < "cervus" = "deer"). Italian "cervino" = "cervato" = "deerlike", apparently. From the "Dictionnaire de L'Académie française" (1694): "Loup-cervier. s. m. Animal sauvage qui tient du chat & du leopard." "Loup-cervier" and "lobo cerval" apparently are currently applied to the Canadian lynx (Lynx canadensis) and also to the Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus). I think the "deer" reference is to the spots, probably, offhand. The interpretation as "deer-hunting" seems likely to be retrospective and spurious, to my casual eye. I deny any expertise, however. "Lobo cerval" = "gato cerval" in Spanish and Portuguese apparently. There is also French "chat-cervier". -- Doug Wilson From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Jul 8 21:06:11 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 16:06:11 -0500 Subject: lupo cervino, loup-cervier.... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I remember reading somewhere that English serval, a type of small wild cat, was from Spanish or Portuguese cerval. Cerval does mean "having to do with deer". But the servals I've seen at the zoo were smaller than lynxes >Hi everyone, >in a XIV century Italian manuscript I have found this animal, apparently a >lynx, which would symbolise the ability to judge distances, time, speed... >(the manuscript is about fighting techniques, BTW). only this animal is >called lupo cervino, which in italian would mean 'deer-wolf'. At the >beginning I thought it was for the lynxs fur, spotted like the deer one, >then a French guy told me that in France they have this loup-cervier, which >is a big lynx who hunts deers, so I reconsidered my position. They also told >me in a Spanish name for the lynx being lobo cerval. >I have to find out which is the truth about all this. do you know something >about the ancient names for 'lynx' in the IE languages, and about their >evolution? >Thank you for your help >Eleonora Litta Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From connolly at memphis.edu Sun Jul 8 01:42:09 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 20:42:09 -0500 Subject: 'albeit' Message-ID: "Douglas G. Wilson" wrote: > Reports of the death of this word once again appear to be exaggerated. > The Merriam-Webster usage dictionary discusses the repeated > at-least-partially-imaginary resurrection of the word, and remarks: > "_albeit_ seems never to have gone out of use, though it may have faded > somewhat in the later 19th century." ( Also: "it has ... considerably increased in use since the 1930s ...." > ( Copperud and Gowers/Fowler are cited as remarking on the word's supposed > resurrection, 1965-1980. ( Citations are given including Churchill (1937), Nabokov (1941), Frost > (1942), Santayana (1944), etc., etc., up to 1985 (in my 1989 edition). > My own perception is that "albeit" was ordinary in 1960's writing and is > ordinary now. I admit that it has a sort of "old-fashioned" flavor, though > ... perhaps this is a misperception of a register distinction? I agree. It *is* a fairly ordinary word and always has been, as far as I can tell. Leo Connolly From stevegus at aye.net Sun Jul 8 01:47:47 2001 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 21:47:47 -0400 Subject: 'albeit' Message-ID: Brian M. Scott wrote: > I'm 53, and I've been using it all my life. It's true that I originally > acquired it from reading and pronounced it to myself as 'all-bite', but I > straightened that out before I was 12. I've always considered it a > perfectly normal word in a formal register, both in writing and in > speech. The revival of "albeit" is less peculiar than the even stranger revival of "anent," which says nothing that "about" doesn't cover. I first thought it was an archaism used as a joke, but it seems to have crept back into apparently serious contexts, and now is more common than I suspect it ever was in the past. From stevegus at aye.net Sun Jul 8 02:03:27 2001 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 22:03:27 -0400 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. Message-ID: Eduard Selleslagh wrote: << Also Dutch and German, therefore W. Germanic (and its generally acknowledged impact on Swedish, but less to none on older Scandinavian). Dutch: d/waarvoor, d/waarvan, d/waarom, etc. German: wof|r/daf|r, wovon/davon, warum/darum, etc. I think this is authentic West-Germanic. E.g. Dutch and German use Waarom/warum? for 'Why?' and have no other word for it that doesn't involve a postposition. >> I checked the Oxford dictionary, and it seems that the where- forms of these words are attested in 1200-1300's at the earliest. The there- forms of these words are somewhat earlier, and a few attested in the period labelled Old English. Few seem to be of the earliest inherited stock, though whether this is because they were lately developed, or simply never used often, is something I can't say. "Therefore" seems to be the oldest of the bunch, and it strikes me as still the commonest. They seem to have always been somewhat rare, and somewhat formal. Now, of course, they are used mostly in King James styled prose, or legal documents. According to Alister McGrath's recent book on Bible translations ["In the Beginning"], the word "thereof" was used frequently by Tyndale and his successors largely because his version of Early Modern English was uncertain as to whether the genitive of "it" should be "his" or "its." "Its" occurs but once in the King James Bible (Lev. 25:5). Using "thereof" sidestepped the difficulty. Once this word became common, its sister words also peppered the Biblical style, and became a mark of a particularly lofty register in English, appropriated by lawyers and scriveners for their purposes, and securing these words a limited but persistent place. -- When as Man's life, the light of human lust In socket of his early lanthorne burnes, That all this glory unto ashes must, And generation to corruption turnes; Then fond desires that onely feare their end, Doe vainely wish for life, but to amend. --- Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Jul 7 14:31:20 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 15:31:20 +0100 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. Message-ID: >"whereof," "whereas" and "therefore." > Are these imitations or calques on Latin forms? Note the interesting survival of one of these forms in the Word spell-checker, which offers you both "therefore" and "therefor". The latter (at least in the English I know) can only mean "for it". They don't reflect Latin forms at all, but they are clearly seen in modern German. In that language in general: Preposition + [some case of "it"] --> da (= "there") + preposition Preposition + [some case of "which"] --> wo (= "where") + preposition In both cases haitus between vowels is avoided by inserting "r". For example: from it (von-) = davon = da-von = therefrom for it (fuer) = dafuer = da-fuer = therefor (not "therefore") on it (auf) = darauf = da-r-auf = thereon from which = wovon = wherefrom for which = wofuer = wherefor on which = worauf = wo-r-auf = whereon. These are very regular in German. There are survivals of this construction in English in words such as "whereupon" and "whys and wherefors" Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jul 10 19:12:18 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 20:12:18 +0100 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. Message-ID: > The same question comes here > with Attic "peri": Why did it keep the possibility of > being a postposition while no other adpositions did? Any two-syllable preposition can occur after its noun, except ana, dia, and amphi. The position is highly marked, and the occurrence rare, but examples do occur. Sometimes the preposition is used adverbially; sometimes it is a case of tmesis, sometimes a genuine post-position. In all these cases, the accent appears on the initial syllable. You are right in this respect, that in prose the only examples we have are with peri. Peter From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Jul 8 02:26:07 2001 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 22:26:07 EDT Subject: One Step at a Time Message-ID: In a message dated 7/6/01 9:40:25 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: > Are you saying there will be no systematic correspondences to be found among > those "half-a-dozen languages"? -- the languages in question will be descended from _either_ Spanish _or_ Basque, and the reconstruction will give you either Spanish, or Basque. It will also show up a variety of borrowed items not traceable to the proto-language; rather like the large non-IE element in the Proto-Germanic lexicon. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Jul 8 14:35:43 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 15:35:43 +0100 Subject: One Step at a Time In-Reply-To: Message-ID: --On Thursday, July 5, 2001 3:47 pm +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: [LT] > << OK, then -- fire away. But you are defending a position which is > wildly, ludicrously false -- not an easy task. ;-) >> > Typically, your conclusions come first. You don't have to wait for the > evidence. No. The (snipped) position which Steve wants to defend is that the comparative method can produce proto-languages which never existed. This position is false. Everybody in linguistics knows it's false and understands why it's false. It's only Steve who fails to realize this, and who continues to maintain that a blatant falsehood can be true. [LT] > < number of parents at all. Steve, when we attempt to apply the > comparative method to some linguistic data, we *do not* "assume* in > advance that we must be looking at a single parent.... If there *was* a > single parent, then the method will tell us about it. Otherwise, the > method gives us only a nil return... [LT on Steve's scenario] > Now suppose we tried to apply the comparative method to the resulting > collection of languages -- "collection", because this assembly would > *not* be a family, as we use that term in linguistics. [SL - The > conclusion comes first, of course.] No, Steve. Will you please stop it? In linguistics, a family of languages is, *by definition*, a group of languages which are descended by divergence from a single common ancestor. Languages which are so related constitute a family. Languages which are not so related do not constitute a family. English and French do not constitute a family merely because almost the entire abstract vocabulary of English is borrowed from French. Hebrew and Yiddish do not constitute a family merely because they are both spoken by Jews. Japanese and Chinese do not constitute a family merely because they are both written in Chinese characters. There are all sorts of interesting ways in which languages can be related, but descent by divergence from a single common ancestor is the only one that makes the languages in question a family. [LT] > What would happen? > Suppose,... that Basque and Spanish were to interact in just such a way, > and give rise to half-a-dozen languages, each consisting of a different > mixture of Basque elements and Spanish elements, a couple of thousand > years later...., the method would once again give a nil return. We could > note the presence of many common elements in the languages under > investigation, but we could not find the required systematic > correspondences, and so we could reconstruct nothing. >> > Let's just start this with a basic question, to be sure you are saying > what you appear to be saying. > If you assume Basque and Spanish are entirely lost and unrecorded in your > example above, and all that is being compared are the "half-a-dozen > languages" you mention... Yes; exactly. > Are you saying there will be no systematic correspondences to be found > among those "half-a-dozen languages"? Yes; that's what I'm saying. Or, to be more precise, there will be no systematic correspondences pointing to a common ancestor. There will be all sorts of seemingly common elements, seemingly connected in strange and puzzling ways, but those common elements will not pattern in the way that we call 'systematic correspondences'. If we try to apply the comparative method to the data, we will get some exceedingly strange results, but we will not get any proto-language at all. We cannot possibly get a proto-language, because there wasn't one. In any case, I regard this scenario as academic in the extreme. There is no known case of a whole collection of mixed languages arising by contact between speakers of two languages, with different mixtures being settled on by different groups of bilingual speakers. And I know of no reason to suppose that such a scenario is even possible, let alone plausible. Steve, why are you so exercised about a scenario which never happens? Anyway, let me try once more. Descent by divergence works as follows. A single language P is spoken in some community. Over time, P breaks up into what are at first regional dialects but which eventually diverge into quite distinct languages, the daughter languages of P. When (as usual) P is not recorded, but some of the daughter languages are, we can apply the comparative method to these daughters, find systematic correspondences, work backwards, and reconstruct the unrecorded ancestor P in some reasonable degree of detail (not in every detail, of course). In other words, the comparative method is a tool for rewinding divergence from a single common ancestor. It does this extremely well, but note: this is the *only* thing the comparative method does, or can do. It cannot do anything else. If the languages being examined are not in fact descended by divergence from a single common ancestor, then the comparative method is helpless: it can do nothing, and it can produce no result. In particular, the method cannot conjure up an ancestral language which never existed. Steve, I wish you would get this undoubted fact into your head. Note in particular that the comparative method deals only with the consequences of divergence. It has nothing to say about convergence, and it cannot be applied to instances of convergence -- which is precisely what Steve is trying to do. The comparative method can rewind divergence, but it cannot rewind convergence. 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 Sun Jul 8 02:27:56 2001 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 22:27:56 EDT Subject: The Single Parent Question Message-ID: In a message dated 7/6/01 10:00:42 PM Mountain Daylight Time, proto-language at email.msn.com writes: > Linguistics should be done with the same, generally recognized scientific > methodology as other sciences --- whenever that is possible. -- linguistics is not an experimental science. It does not use the same methodology as experimental sciences such as physics. It is a _descriptive_ science. We have to work with a limited body of data, rather like the fossil-hunters. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Jul 8 14:54:17 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 15:54:17 +0100 Subject: The Single Parent Question In-Reply-To: <001201c1059d$3c721b80$61564341@swbell.net> Message-ID: --On Thursday, July 5, 2001 4:55 pm -0500 proto-language wrote: [Steve Long] >>> This won't help you here. I won't ask if you've ever argued a science >>> case in Federal Court or ever did plasma analysis or worked on neural >>> systems or did any high-order economic analysis. You've claimed an >>> extremely high level of certainty with regard to the reconstruction of >>> proto-languages. I'm looking at the scientific validity of that claim. > [Joat Simeon] >> -- no, you aren't, because you don't have the knowledge-base to do so. > [PCR] > I do not subscribe to much of what Steve writes either but I do believe > he is asking pertinent question. > This type of snobbish response is not at all helpful. Steve is not > suggesting for one moment that he has the training in IE linguistics of > many on this list. He is questioning the methodology used based on his > familiarity with it in other disciplines. First, the methodology of comparative linguistics is not used in any other discipline, and certainly not in physics, computing or economics. Therefore Steve cannot possibly have any "familiarity" with it in other disciplines. Second, Joat is quite right in his response. This is not snobbishness: it's just the plain truth. Steve has no right to question our methodology, because he has no experience of it, and apparently no understanding of it. The sole basis for Steve's objections appears to be that he doesn't like our conclusions. Historical linguistics is a serious scholarly discipline, and the comparative method is one of its most important tools. Neither historical linguistics nor the comparative method can be learned in three minutes, and neither can be explained so completely in an e-mail posting that an absolute beginner can at once understand it fully. Learning to do historical linguistics takes years of study and practice, and so, for that matter, does learning to use the comparative method. Every historical linguist has paid his dues here: we have all put in the hundreds and thousands of hours learning our craft, studying other people's efforts, trying things out ourselves, making mistakes, finding out what works and what doesn't, learning to distinguish good work from bad, and generally acquiring professional competence. As Alexander the Great's tutor might have said, there is no royal road to historical linguistics. If Steve Long, or anybody else, doesn't like our conclusions, then he is free to challenge them, but only if he's first paid his dues. He can't just sit there in complete ignorance of our field, make blatantly false and ridiculous statements, and then complain because nobody takes him seriously. If he suspects we're wrong about something, then the onus is on him to demonstrate our error. But he can only do this if he first learns enough about our field to speak with authority. There exist any number of textbooks and popular books which attempt to outline the practice of historical linguistics generally and of the comparative method in particular. All of these presentations are necessarily somewhat simplified, and a reader who has mastered their content still cannot call himself a historical linguist. > Linguistics should be done with the same, generally recognized scientific > methodology as other sciences --- whenever that is possible. It is. Look. Would Steve Long, or anyone else, consider it perfectly in order to contradict the most basic conclusions of specialists in, say, particle physics, or the history of western music, or the archaeology of the Near East, on the basis of zero knowledge and experience of the field, just because he didn't like those conclusions? And why should linguistics be any different? 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 g_sandi at hotmail.com Sun Jul 8 09:37:59 2001 From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 09:37:59 -0000 Subject: Word Order and verb endings Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From miskec4096 at hotmail.com Sun Jul 8 14:22:36 2001 From: miskec4096 at hotmail.com (Kreso Megyeral) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 16:22:36 +0200 Subject: Word Order and verb endings Message-ID: >I can say that the comparison might be more than of passing interest if it can >be shown that the Hungarian indefinite conjugation has uses which suggest >modalities like intention or necessity; and, as a consequence, are >non-declarative --- but I do not know if this is or has been historically >true. No, Hungarian makes the difference between the two conjugations solely according to whether the direct object is defined or not. It's actually the way the definiteness of object is indicated on the verb, which is purely redundant, since there are other ways to express it, such as definite article. In meaning, there is perfectly no difference, especially if you translate it to a language that has no category of lexicalised definiteness, such as my native Croatian. The endings in Hungarian definite conjugation agree (at least in singular) more or less with the possessive suffixes added to nouns. Thus: Latok egy fizt. - I see a boy. (indefinite) Latom a fizt. - I see the boy. (definite) But, in similar way: Latom a fizmat. - I see my boy (or "my son"). The theory actually proposes that in the definite conjugation the speaker feels somehow more connected to the action, thus the second sentence can be translated as "My looking at/of the boy." So, if we propose that for some reason the thematic vowel had some meaning of definiteness (such as postponed article), than we can vaguely make connection to forms in Hungarian, or even to those in Caucasian languages, as well as in Kartvelian. Also, I saw later that I made a mistake in my previous message when I wrote: "...there is no thematic VOWEL of an indisputable IE origin." I meant, no thematic VERB, of course. The whole cathegory of definite conjugation in Hungarian is interesting, since it's limited only to Ugric. If Mr. Aikio could give some more exact data on the development of the cathegory, I would be very grateful. From colkitto at sprint.ca Sun Jul 8 15:02:13 2001 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 11:02:13 -0400 Subject: Word Order and verb endings Message-ID: On Thu, 28 Jun 2001, Kreso Megyeral wrote: > [... W]hat is general opinion on theory that PIE had the opposition > between indefinite and definite conjugation, as Hungarian does. Some > of the linguists interpret thematic vowel in declension and > conjugation as some kind of suffixated article. The theory is proved > by the fact that there is no intransitive thematic vowel of > undisputable IE origin. Your attitudes? There's an article by Kortlandt in JIES 1983 or 1984 addressing this iusse. He refers to earlier work by Knobloch (1950's) making this very suggestion. Robert Orr From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu Mon Jul 9 00:13:34 2001 From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 20:13:34 -0400 Subject: Word Order and verb endings (was Re: No Proto-Celtic?) In-Reply-To: <001801c10300$481fa000$b6474241@swbell.net> Message-ID: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Thomas McFadden" > Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 2:22 PM >> it seems to me that explanations of this type (both the one from >> Vidhyanath Rao and Patrick Ryan's response to it) are going to run >> serious danger of violating some desirable version of the uniformitarian >> principle. unless i misunderstand what they're arguing. > [PCR] > I do not immediately see the application. Why not explain the connection you > see? > Pat the remark was based on a misunderstanding on my part of what Vidhhyanath Rao was arguing for. unfortunately i deleted the messages i was originally talking about, so i couldn't go back and re-read your suggestion, but i was concerned that a language was being postulated that made no morpho-syntactic distinction between finite verbs and nouns. since all attested languages do make that distinction (in a variety of very interesting and very different ways), it would violate the UP to argue for an unattested language that didn't. like i said, i don't have your posting on the topic anymore, so i don't know if you were actually suggesting something of the sort, or if i just misunderstood, as i did with V.R.'s posting. Tom [ Moderator's note: It is always possible to check the archives of this list which are kindly maintained for us by the good folk at the LINGUIST List: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/indo-european.html Just a reminder for those who may have forgotten the archives exist. -- rma ] From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Mon Jul 9 21:30:15 2001 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi) Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 00:30:15 +0300 Subject: Sound changes versus sound changes In-Reply-To: <6d.1624b343.286ed358@aol.com> Message-ID: [Steve Long] These examples also bring us back to the original topic. How many sound changes brought us from <*wixti> to /viisi/ and how long did they take? (I don't know what dates you feel comfortable with for last unity of PU.) [A.A.] The first question can hardly be given a satisfactory answer. The *path* of change was, according to the current knowledge of Uralic historical phonology, *wixti > *wiiti > *viiti > *viic´i > /viisi/. But it's difficult or impossible to say how many sound changes are involved in gradual developments like the Proto-Finnic change *ti > *c´i > ?*s´i > si. Counting only changes that affected phonological oppositions, there were only three changes (this excludes also *w > *v). As for the second question, they probably took something like 8000 years (but these isolated examples of course tell us nothing about "the rate of change", whatever that is, in Finnic/Uralic). [S.L.] Now, <*wixti> to /yuq/ appears to either involve "more" sound changes or changes that were more radical, in the sense that /yuq/ appears to diverge more from /wixti/ than /viisi/ does. [A.A.] Yes - the path was PU *wixti > *wixtø > *wiøtø > *wüøtø > [Proto-Samoyedic] *wüøt > *wüøq > *wüq > *w'uq > /yuq/. [S.L.] If I'm right about that (and I'm not sure I am), then there are two possible factors that would be at work in evaluating "rate of change." One is HOW MANY TIMES particular words in a language undergo phonological change. There could be a good number of shifts that in the end don't necessarily travel that far from the original. Think of first person singulars in IE, if that's a good example. [A.A.] At least of earlier in this discussion, the issue was the "rate of change" in a *language*, not in the phonological manifestations of some individual lexical items. Are you suggesting that the rate of language change could be measured by counting sound changes in individual words? And what "particular words" are you referring to? [S.L.] The other factor is HOW "DISSIMILAR" those changes are, in the sense that you used similar above, in "little or no similarity." We're not talking about "unexpected" or uncommon shifts here but rather shifts that make the words sound significantly different. In other words, a fricative to a labial versus a fricative to another fricative. An ordinary listener might have a better chance of finding a similarity in the latter than the former. [A.A.] I must ask: a similarity to what? My point, as far as there was one, was that /viisi/, /öt/ and /yuq/ do not resemble each other at all. [S.L.] (snip) <> And these two examples bring up a related matter. If "every language has its own phonological system," then it might make sense to suggest that every language has its own path of phonological change. The amount of "dissimilarity" might not be a matter of time but also of the quality of the changes. A single change may end up being more "dissimilar" than a whole long series of modest changes. [A.A.] Yes, I of course agree - e.g., a change *w > *v obviously creates less dissimilarity between cognates than a change *w > *q. But sound changes are still cumulative, and thus a longer time produces more dissimilarity on average. [S.L.] The Hungarian example also brings to mind the question of how much certain changes seem just plain immeasurable. [A.A.] It is naturally impossible to "measure" dissimilarity, because the degree of observed dissimilarity is dependent on subjective matters. Counting sound changes is usually impossible in practice, because we face the problem of what should be counted as a sound change. Moreover, all changes cannot be reconstructed. Note that counting sound changes in *individual* word-forms is irrelevant, if the "rate of change" of the *language* is to be measured. [S.L.] (snip) And perhaps the phonological gap is a truer measure, if there is any reliable measure at all. [A.A.] Ok, please tell me what exactly do you want to measure - The "rate of change" of a language, or some subsystem or part of it, such as the phonological system or the lexeme for 'five'? How could the level of phonological divergence in individual cognate items be used as a measure of the rate of language change *in general*? [S.L.] But I want to point out that there are equally members of that family that appear not to have changed much at all. In fact, the high convergence percentages theorized by Dixon were meant to account for the large amount of commonality between many of those languages. As I understand it, those who disagree with him about the degree of convergence have argued instead for a high degree of conservatism in those Pama-Nyungan languages. And that does not mean that those languages did not change or even change a lot. It's rather that as much as they did change, they never change much. [A.A.] Larry already pointed out that it was *individual words* that had not changed much, not entire languages. And examples of this type are easy to find: e.g., because of the unusually conservative nature of the Finnish vowel system, some Proto-Uralic words are reflected in Finnish in an identical form, e.g. Finn. kala 'fish' < PU *kala. But the fact remains that Finnish, as a whole, is as different from Proto-Uralic as Spanish is from Proto-Indo-European. [S.L.] And, perhaps, even if some IE languages show a certain amount of "similarity" in sound systems, it in no ways means they did not change for 3000 years before attestation. It may be that they changed often, but through all those changes they never changed that much. [A.A.] Usually, we happen to know fairly exactly how those languages changed before attestation, thanks to the comparative method. So that doesn't seem to leave much room for this kind of speculation. Regards, Ante Aikio From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Jul 11 07:05:09 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 03:05:09 EDT Subject: Sound changes versus sound changes Message-ID: I wrote: > The other factor is HOW "DISSIMILAR" those changes are, in the sense that you > used similar above, in "little or no similarity." We're not talking about > "unexpected" or uncommon shifts here but rather shifts that make the words > sound significantly different. In other words, a fricative to a labial > versus a fricative to another fricative. An ordinary listener might have a > better chance of finding a similarity in the latter than the former. In a message dated 7/7/01 7:23:32 AM, rao.3 at osu.edu writes: << But sound changes don't seem to work that way. Labov, in his monograph about sound changes, looked at various examples of changes in progress and came to the conclusion that changes of place are more complex than changes of effort and such things at metathesis can remain partial, limited by semantics etc. So p>f may be a smaller change than f > th. >> Well, even if there are "paths of change", there still is the matter of how "dissimilar" a listener perceives one sound change or set of changes to be versus another. Take, for example, where a dialect adopts a change that moves it towards unintelligability in the ears of speakers of another dialect of the same language. Some changes are going to make words harder to recognize than others. And that would be a measure of "dissimilarity" that doesn't have to do with the speaker, but rather with the listener. (On Hatteras Island, some words spoken by locals are understandable even though they are spoken differently. But some words are spoken so differently that it is difficult to guess what they are equivalent to in New York speech. Expectation does not feel like a good explanation for this. It seems to be more a matter of the degree of difference in sounds.) I would imagine that some paths that are "natural" may produce more "dissimilarity" in the ears of the listener than other natural paths. With regard to the same Labov work - I think - Benji Ward wrote something interesting in connection with his comments on t > h that I posted earlier. And this has to do with Labov's apparent approach to the "unusual or unexpected" sound change (as opposed to the "dissimilar" ones I'm talking about here.) He wrote: "In this context, Labov's (1994) book on paths of changes in vowel systems implicitly dismisses such a question by illustrating the various routes that vocalic chain shifts can take, e.g., whether the highest back vowel fronts or whether it diphthongises and heads for /aw/... No explanation for alternative paths is given, and the principles given imply that asking why one path occurs more commonly than another is devoid of linguistic interest. This is not yet obvious for "unusual sound changes", but these seem to be changes in consonants, not vowels, so the implications of Labov's study may be more restricted...." In this connection, it's pertinent to ask how dissimilar do Latin, Greek and Sanskrit "sound?" Not as a matter of morphology or divergence from a proto-language, but measured against each other in terms of intelligibility. In other words, how far away from Latin does Greek "sound" as opposed to Sanskrit? And is it proper to measure the difference in sounds based on "changes of effort" or degree of unintelligibility? On this list mutual comprehension is commonly used as an argument for a certain rate of change in IE languages. Can rate of change be correlated to relative intelligibility? Regards, Steve Long From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Jul 8 21:17:51 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 16:17:51 -0500 Subject: Michif In-Reply-To: <002f01c10164$7407a520$b32363d1@texas.net> Message-ID: How does Michif compare to Chinook jargon? Many years ago I saw a small book on Chinook Jargon that explained that the grammar was radically different from Chinook and that the vocabulary was largely derived from French --somewhere around 40% if I remember correctly. From what remember, French derived nouns included the feminine article <>. I have no idea how reliable the book was, but what I gather both the grammar and vocabulary seemed to be a compromise between French, Chinook and various other NW Native American languages. I don't think Chinook Jargon was used as anything other than a trade language but I may be mistaken >> Now, whether we regard Michif as a language with two direct ancestors, or as >> a language with no direct ancestors at all, is a matter of taste and >> definition. > > Or as a form of Cree that has borrowed all its nouns and nominal >morphology from French. Since 1) borrowing of all open class words, and 2) >borrowing of nominal morphology, are both independently attested, the >possibility (actually definition) cannot be excluded. Such a development of >Cree, critically dependent on another language for the maintanence of mutual >comprehensibility across generations, is clearly of a different sort than >what is usually encountered, but it appears no one at this point is denying >that the same sort of thing has happened in English with Anglo-Romani. In >other words, all the things it would take to make Michif a form of Cree are >known from other cases. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Jul 8 21:00:04 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 16:00:04 -0500 Subject: kinkajou In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20010706101930.00a594b0@nb.net> Message-ID: There is a tremendous variety of folk-names for local flora, fauna and food in Latin American Spanish. My wife says she's heard <> in Costa Rica, literally "night monkey". I've seen references to <> "monkey lion" in Central American literature Re the others Marta, of course, is a pine marten or sable Guatuza in Costa Rica is an agouti --a large rodent that looks like a muskrat with golden fur and was called "beef" when I went in Tikal. I think it's it's a squirrel in some other places in Central America In various places, Cuchicuchi is a slang word that means something like "hanky-panky", "buddy-buddy", "snuggling up", "acting repentent when scolded", "sucking up", etc. >> So what is the kinkajou in Spanish? >For Potos flavus, quick Spanish-language Web search returns several common >names in Spanish: >martilla >cercoleto >martucha >cuchicuchi >kinkajou >kinkajú >kinkayu >perro de monte >mico de noche >marta >guatuza >cusumbo >tutamono >leoncito >shosna >chosna >micoleón >I suppose these are used respectively in different countries? It's possible >some are erroneous. >-- Doug Wilson Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Jul 10 04:54:16 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 00:54:16 EDT Subject: the 'Dhole' Message-ID: In a message dated 7/7/01 5:23:23 PM, dlwhite at texas.net writes: << I really don't have time for all this, but an interested person might want to consult Grzemek. >> Better yet, consult "Grzimek's" (1990). <> It's rather understood the other way around. Natural habitat determines range. Dholes apparently frequent dense woodland or thick scrub and are relatively rare elsewhere. Sightings reported by the WCU over the last twelve years do not mention any steppes regions. In India and Indonesia, for the most part, dholes frequent tropical and sub-tropical forests where wolves are not expected to be found. Venkataraman, A.B., Arumogum and Sukumar, R. The foraging ecology of the dhole (Cuon alpinus) packs. Ethology 104:671-684. (1995) Venkataraman, A. Do dholes (Cuon alpinus) live in packs in response to competition with or predation by large cats? Current Science 11:934-36. (1995) Karanth, K.U. and Sunquist, M.E., Prey selection by tiger, leopard and dhole in tropical forests., J. Anim. Ecol. 64:439-450. (1995) WCU re sightings north of India; "Soviet Union: Very rare. Occasional sightings in the following regions: southwestern Primorje; Priamurje; far southeast Russia; Amur river region; and in Tian-Shan. Dramatic decline in records in Primode after 1920. No reliable information is available on the situation at Tuva, Altai, or in Kazakhstan in last 25 years.... China: Occurs very sparsely in the forested mountains of western Sichuan, southern Gansu, eastern Qinghai and eastern Tibet (Schaller). " As to the Indian wolf, it is clearly genetically, morphologically and behaviourally a distinct subspecies (Canis lupus pallipes.) "DNA evidence for Clade B... suggests that the ancestor of the wolf had arisen" in the Western Hemisphere and migrated to the Eastern Hemisphere, "to the European Continent through the Asian Continent," with the Indian or Iranian wolf evolving as a relict population. In fact, "the report on skeletal anatomy, the dingo, C. familialis dingo, closely resembles the Indian wolf and the pariah dogs of Southeast Asia. It is probable that the dingo is a direct descendant of dogs that were originally domesticated from tamed Indian wolves (C. l. pallipes) (Corbett, 1985)." (Kaoru Tsuda, Yoshiaki Kikkawa, Hiromichi Yonekawa and Yuichi Tanabe, Extensive interbreeding occurred among multiple matriarchal ancestors during the domestication of dogs: Evidence from inter- and intraspecies polymorphisms in the D-loop region of mitochondrial DNA between dogs and wolves (1997)) Perhaps all this might have some impact linguistically. S. Long From acnasvers at hotmail.com Tue Jul 10 09:19:07 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 09:19:07 -0000 Subject: Return of the minimal pairs Message-ID: Eduard Selleslagh (15 Jun 2001) wrote: [DGK, 8 Jun 2001] >> It's noteworthy here that Varro reports as a rustic pronunciation of >> : "rustici etiam quoque viam veham appellant, et vellam non villam" >> (R.R. I.2.14). >[Ed] >That's really interesting. Were those 'rustici' making the link with >'vehere/vehiculum'? (in which case it would be an archaism, true or false). I'm not sure, but I suspect the post-tonic intervocalic /h/ was a requirement of the rustic dialect, not a popular archaism. David Salmon (5 Jun 2001) has described the /h/ in as "simply a Southernism, necessary to the drawl". Similarly, appears to be the drawled form of from the affirmative adverb . In Latin, non-etymological /h/ occurs also in for 'made of brass, etc.', the cognomen Ahala ( 'wing'), and for 'mindless'. The forms with /h/ could all be drawled rusticisms. Umbrian has for the river , so the presumed rustic drawl might be a relic of p-Italic substrate in rustic Latin, like the /f:h/ alternation. >The e/i vacillation is very common, in many IE dialects, but also in the rest >of the world, e.g. among Quechua housemaids in Peru: they always speak about >'me premo' (mi primo, 'my cousin', a eufemism for their lover) when speaking >Spanish. They also interchange o/u, like in 'me pichu' (mi pecho), another >common thing anywhere. I don't know anything about the phonology of Quechua, so I can only guess that these vacillations probably represent the misfit in sound-ranges between vowels in Quechua and Peruvian Spanish. What Varro noted was a different phenomenon involving closed syllables in native speech. I suspect what he meant by "vellam non villam" was that the "rustici" used an open [I] in closed tonic syllables where "urbani" and "suburbani" had a closed [i]. A parallel is provided by the American English rusticisms "britches" for and "crick" for . DGK From g_sandi at hotmail.com Sun Jul 8 10:53:18 2001 From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 10:53:18 -0000 Subject: Proto-Celtic & Proto-Fenno-Ugric in Herodotus and C. Ptolemy Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Mon Jul 9 21:28:36 2001 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi) Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 00:28:36 +0300 Subject: Proto-Celtic - An Exploration: Celtic ICM & Q/P Words Function IE Roots In-Reply-To: <21664048.3203424394@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk> Message-ID: [Larry Trask:] Fourth, Kalevi Wiik has not established anything at all, least of all about Basque. What he does is to draw pretty maps showing Uralic-speakers wandering all over the solar system zillions of years ago. He has built a career out of this simple party piece. [A.A.] I would like to add that I completely agree with Larry's view on the quality of Kalevi Wiik's research in comparative linguistics. This is the view shared by almost all Uralists, and other specialists acquainted with Wiik's theories. Wiik's claims have been rejected for good reasons, as he has not been able to produce a single piece of evidence in support of his views that has been able to stand scrutiny. (Despite of this, he has actively publicized his wild speculations as a linguistic breakthrough outside the field, and still continues to do so - which, I think, should be considered unforgivable.) Wiik's ideas have been thoroughly criticized by researchers such as e.g. Juha Janhunen, Johanna Laakso, Eve Mikone, Jorma Koivulehto, Asko Parpola, Petri Kallio, Cornelius Hasselblatt etc. As for mr. O'Keefe's reply to my posting, my reaction to it is that it contains too many misunderstandings and factual errors (concerning e.g. the so-called consonant gradation in Uralic) to warrant any thorough commentary. So I only comment the following passage: [David O'Keefe:] The ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, 15th ed., 1994,Vol. 22, in an article entitled Languages of the World, p. 690, states "the Sami languages exhibit similar alternations, but the process applies to all consonants......" Presumably, this means that alternation applies to initial consonants, too. [A.A.] Regrettably, this demonstrates all too well why no one should mistake to consider Encyclopaedia Britannica a sufficient source of data on Samic (or, indeed, any language) for the purpose of linguistic research. To me, a native speaker of Sami, a suggestion of "initial consonant gradation" related to the Celtic initial mutations sounds as reasonable as if someone claimed on the list that English is polysynthetic and thus related to Eskimo. What was meant in the quoted passage is that the process applies to all consonants in the phoneme inventory, not to all the actual occurences of the phonemes. Moreover, "initial consonant gradation" is a theoretical impossibility. The term "consonant gradation" refers to a very specific type of morphophonological phenomenon, which is, or historically was, conditioned by either 1) the phonological structure of a following unstressed syllable (whether it was *CV or CVC; the so-called radical gradation), or 2) the prosodic structure of the word (whether the consonant occurs on the border of a syllable with secondary stress and an unstressed syllable, or on the border of two unstressed syllables; the so-called suffixal gradation). There is no way that consonant gradation could ever occur in initial position. Regards, Ante Aikio From ibonewits at neopagan.net Fri Jul 13 05:25:08 2001 From: ibonewits at neopagan.net (Isaac Bonewits) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 01:25:08 -0400 Subject: 'albeit' In-Reply-To: <3B45C4FB.16799.EFFD0FF@localhost> Message-ID: Gentlemen and Ladies, I must insert a small, albeit pretentious, note into this discussion that I, too, have used this word in writing and speech for forty years, usually in formal or academic circumstances. I suspect that it's a verbal pattern I picked up from British academic writers of the 1950s and 1960s (most of whom would have learned it in the 1920s and 1930s). Nonetheless, most of my American speaking readers and audiences don't seem to have any trouble understanding me when I use it. Perhaps the most tenacious of linguistic fossils are to be found in the communications of academic and literary fossils, before they die off and allow new paradigms to bloom... cheers, Isaac Bonewits -- ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^ "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and ^ ^ proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone ^ ^ gets busy on the proof." -- Galbraith's Law ^ ^ Isaac Bonewits, Adr.Em./ADF ^ ^ Box 372, Warwick, NY 10990 ^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ From connolly at memphis.edu Sat Jul 14 02:10:54 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 21:10:54 -0500 Subject: 'albeit' Message-ID: > Brian M. Scott wrote: >> I'm 53, and I've been using it all my life. It's true that I originally >> acquired it from reading and pronounced it to myself as 'all-bite', but I >> straightened that out before I was 12. I've always considered it a >> perfectly normal word in a formal register, both in writing and in >> speech. Steve Gustafson wrote: > The revival of "albeit" is less peculiar than the even stranger revival of > "anent," which says nothing that "about" doesn't cover. I first thought it > was an archaism used as a joke, but it seems to have crept back into > apparently serious contexts, and now is more common than I suspect it ever > was in the past. I know that Fowler mentions the "revival" of _anent_, but since I (a native english speaker with four university degrees) do not know what it means, I hesitate to say that it's actually been revived. Surely I'm not along on the list here? Leo Connolly From Georg-Bonn at t-online.de Fri Jul 13 09:37:54 2001 From: Georg-Bonn at t-online.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 11:37:54 +0200 Subject: Handfuls of Unrelated Forms In-Reply-To: <003201c10784$b2ba0ee0$c38b01d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: Of course my posting was more than silly (especially since the Greek I displayed in it was somewhat less than spotless - serves me well!). It is just that, every now and then, I feel hard pressed to resist starting what our list-owner calls a slanging match with youknowwho. Knowing that I'm at best making a fool out of myself, I promise not to react to such postings any more. My relation to Mr. Ryan deteriorated seriously when he posted unauthorized (mis-)quotes from private exchanges on the sister-list which were directed at undermining my reputation (and had nothing whatsoever to do with linguistics). Ignoring this would have been the best policy, but I went so far as to try to persuade our moderator to remove PR from the lists, which he - for good and respectable reasons - could not accept (but I have no problems to confess that I did try). Since then, I have been refraining from reacting to PRs postings (with this - puerile - exception). My apologies to everyone who is not exactly interested in this kind of stuff (arguably the majority). StG >> One of the reasons linguistics makes such little progress is that people >> with so little Greek are permitted to voice their irrelevant opinion in >> specialist fora. >Whoa-up there buddy! >I am grateful for those who raise any linguistic questions in these fora. >My Latin, Greek and Sanskrit happen to be more than passable, but it is an >excellent discipline for me to have to defend or argue particular positions >which perhaps I have never questioned because they are "common knowledge". >I also discover the gaps in my own so-called knowledge. >I am also grateful to the colleagues on this list who tolerate my stupidity >when I, in turn, voice an opinion in an area where I lack the necessary >specialist knowledge, but don't realise it. >So all of you out there with no Greek - firstly go out and learn some, but >also go on stating your opinions! >Peter -- Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn ------- From miskec4096 at hotmail.com Sun Jul 15 14:38:12 2001 From: miskec4096 at hotmail.com (Kreso Megyeral) Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 16:38:12 +0200 Subject: 'albeit' Message-ID: I'm not sure whether it would be so important for the discussion, but it's exactly today that I found in the Lonely planet's (!) Scandinavian and Baltic Europe travel guide the following sentence: This fast-track towards the west has left critics talking about Estonia having sold its soul and continuing its historical tradition of foreign dominance, ALBEIT in a sweeter package. Presuming Lonely planet's guides are not made exclusively for English speakers and that this one is published in 1999, it is again one of proofs of it being quite alive word in English nowadays. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Jul 13 07:26:19 2001 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 03:26:19 EDT Subject: real proto-lang Message-ID: In a message dated 7/13/01 1:23:06 AM Mountain Daylight Time, petegray at btinternet.com writes: > So while at one level I relate to your idea, at another I think there are > advantages in treating our reconstructions as if they were actual spoken > human languages - even while admitting the limits of our knowledge. -- I think it would be more accurate to say that they're probably very like the language as it was actually spoken. That's about as much as we can say; on the other hand, we can say that much. After all, on numerous occasions the discovery of recorded earlier forms has conformed closely to reconstructions made earlier -- the laryngeals in Hittite come to mind, or many of the archaic forms of Mycenaean Greek. From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Mon Jul 16 14:02:41 2001 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 17:02:41 +0300 Subject: real proto-lang In-Reply-To: <000201c106cb$bd957160$db11073e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Sat, 7 Jul 2001, petegray wrote: > This is the "abstractionist" way of understanding reconstruction. It has > also been applied to reconstructed phonemes. "Abstractionists" would claim > that PIE *bh, *kw etc are simple symbols denoting the set of relationships > between the reflexes of *bh, kw etc in the attested languages. > Fine and dandy, but we must ask if something is lost. The abstractionist > position appears (from the little I know) to be losing ground rapidly, > because of the advances in our understanding of PIE based on a more realist > approach, which treats our reconstruction as a real language. > Firstly there is all the debate - on this list and elsewhere - about > homeland, where and who and what pots and what grave customs and so on. If > the reconstructed language is merely a "tool of comparative linguistics" > then these questions are closed down. > Secondly there are questions of how such a language would actually work. > Typology comes in here, but not only typology. The "new sound" of PIE > would not have arisen if *bh etc had been seen purely as an abstract tool > for comparisons. > So while at one level I relate to your idea, at another I think there are > advantages in treating our reconstructions as if they were actual spoken > human languages - even while admitting the limits of our knowledge. I don't think the two positions discussed here really contradict each other. Cannot one say that the "abstractionist position" is merely the result of the application of the method, whereas everything beyond this is an *interpretation* of this result? Regards, Ante Aikio From dlwhite at texas.net Fri Jul 13 12:24:53 2001 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 07:24:53 -0500 Subject: Old Lithuanian Message-ID: > What are the cases of "Old Lithuanian" nominal morphology borrowing you have > in mind? Do you mean the ones like allative (locative case denoting > direction towards something, e.g. tevop(i) "towards the father"), adessive > (... denoting proximity to something, e.g. upeip(i) "by the river"), etc.? No. These appear to be abstract modeling, not borrowing. The cases I have in mind (I am too lazy/busy to look them up) involve final /-n/ which it has been alledged was actually borrowed from Fennic, as part of the process of creating the new category, whatever it was .... It's in TK somewhere. > Would you say these are examples of pattern / model borrowing from some > Fennic source (as it is sometimes suggested)? Yes. I have heard that Latvian has a lot more of that sort of thing than does Lithuanian, but I do not know. > How would you describe "creeping infiltration" in this ("Old Lithuanian") > case? Perhaps "marginal infiltration" would be better. I mean where a part, typically small, of a language's morphology is borrowed from a foreign source. I used "creeping" because my guess is that over time, if the two languages remain in extensive contact, the proportion could well go up. But I have no actual examples where this is known. (In the case of Baltic, the shift over to this from some sort of Fennic probably did not take that long.) > How can it be compared to Rumanian? What exactly is the nominal > morphology borrowing case in Rumanian? Rumanian has borrowed the feminine vocative of Bulgarian. For better or worse, the vocative in Rumanian is obslescent, so we are losing our example here. But the Bulgarian element thus introduced is marginal. Dr. David . White From alderson+mail at panix.com Fri Jul 13 22:49:53 2001 From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 18:49:53 -0400 Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns" In-Reply-To: (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Sat, 7 Jul 2001 04:38:26 EDT, Steve Long wrote: > In a message dated 7/6/01 11:18:00 PM, alderson+mail at panix.com writes: >> The total set of reconstructed forms, based on all the forms attested in >> the group of languages under examination, is considered to be a single >> language. Period. By definition. Period. > Well, I'm sure if you punctuate it enough, it will surely end up being true. Not a matter of truth by punctuation, but of emphasizing the nature of the definition. No exceptions, no averments. > Actually, you put yourself in a logical bind here that I'm sure you will > understand if you consider it carefully and unemotionally. Actually, it occurred to me that you might take this line of argument or one very like it after I wrote the message to which you are responding. > The Lehmann quote very prudently avoids this equation between "forms" and > "languages." ("In using the comparative method, we contrast forms of two or > more related languages to determine the precise relationship between THESE > FORMS. We indicate this relationship most simply by reconstructing THE FORMS > from which they developed." Caps mine.) > The reason this is wise is that it avoids a conclusion that the comparative > method in and of does not support in the very example you described earlier. > In fact, you give a clear example of where the comparative method - applied > to "a larger set of languages" - will reconstruct the total set of related > forms into not one, but three different languages. Not, of course, in the general case. > In a message titled "Re: The Single Parent Question" dated 7/5/01 3:21:49 PM, > alderson+mail at panix.com writes: >> ...if we found a group of languages descended from a prehistoric Michif, we >> could not reconstruct the two parents thereof. You are probably correct.... >> from the point of view of the comparative method, these languages do *not* >> have two parents, but only one, the paleo-Michif. >> If, on the other hand, we were dealing with a larger set of languages, some >> descended from the left-hand parent of paleo-Michif; some, the right-parent; >> and some from paleo-Michif itself, we could (if the events in question were >> not so far in the past as to prevent our dull tools from working at all) in >> principle work out the relations of all and sundry. > Please observe carefully where you've arrived in this last paragraph. You > have used the comparative method on languages linked by various systematic > correspondences. And the result you forecast is that with the application of > the method in this situation you will have ended up reconstructing three > languages - not one. And one of those reconstructed languages will contain > what you know are TWO genetically distinct sets of forms. Please observe very carefully how I arrived at the conclusion in which you take so much joy: A very special occurrence, to wit, absolute language mixture, with recognizable descendants of both parents of this special creole available for comparison. I stated that *IN* *THAT* *CASE*, and in that case only, we could proceed back from the mixed language. Otherwise, we could only reconstruct back as far as the one language in question. > In other words, repeating your words above: << The total set of reconstructed > forms, based on all the forms attested in the group of languages under > examination, is considered to be a single language.>> is not the case in the > example you give. You've misunderstood. >From the point of view of the descendants of the mixed language, and them only, there is only a single parent. You have missed the entire point of the exercise, which is that the kind of thing you want to be commonplace is only possible in a very specific instance, one that is so extremely rare as to make professional linguists disagree on its reality. > In fact, the "total set of reconstructed forms" yielded by the application of > the method in the example you give MUST be three reconstructed languages. > Because you CANNOT reconstruct the two ancestors accurately UNLESS you > recognize that there are two distinct sets of systematic correspondences in > the already reconstructed language "paleo-Mistif." This means that you are > using less than "the total set of reconstructed forms" that you've already > identified in "paleo-Mischif" to also reconstruct the left-handed parent. > And less than the "total set" to also reconstruct the right-handed parent. Wrong. Go back and read the thought experiment again. The only way to recog- nize the mixed nature of the one protolanguage is to have reconstructed the two contributor languages based on their other unmixed descendants. Without that, you have no business looking for multiple parents. > The comparative method triangulates back to a single set of reconstructed > forms. It does not triangulate back to a whole language. And, in the > example you give, "the total set of reconstructed forms" - multiple > triangulations - yields three different reconstructed languages. Not at the same chronological level it doesn't. The three reconstructions must proceed from different sets of forms drawn from different languages, or it all falls apart. > I understand the comparative method enough to know that you cannot count > apples and end up with oranges. What in fact the method does is compare > forms and find correspondences that show common descent, not whole languages > or all the possible genetic aspects of a reconstructed language. In the > example you give, multiple applications of the method to the same data yield > multiple reconstructions, each using only a subset of the total reconstructed > forms. And so the "total set of reconstructed forms" does not equal one > language. The definition you give is not coherent. There is no "multiple applications of the method to the same data" in this example. The only possible way to connect the three protolanguages that are reconstructed is an after-the-fact examination of the reconstructions, not an _a priori_ decision that they will turn up if you just hold your mouth right. > Of course, equating a reconstructed set of forms to a "language" does not > only create a logical incoherence. If two languages share noun morphology > alone (as in the Niger-Kordofanian example), it is patently absurd to call > the resulting reconstructions a "language." The processes that created the > correspondences do not all call for the existence of a third language, even > if they do establish descent from a common form. And the comparative method > establishes descent from a common set of forms, but it can say nothing else > about the relationship of the remainder of those two languages. Inferences > may be drawn. But that is what they are at best - inferences, not part of > the method itself. This only holds true if the "forms" in question are drawn only from a single subsystem of the languages under consideration, which is an extremely limited and limiting thing to do. Suppose that you are only, for whatever reason, going to deal with "nouns", and one of the languages from which you are drawing forms for comparison has developed a very strong set of denominative verbs, but otherwise lost most of its inherited nouns due to influence from an areally influential language. You will lose the data from this language by restricting yourself artificially. > If this equation of forms to a single language is by definition, a careful > look at the operation as you yourself described it shows that the definition > is logically faulty. And that has nothing to do with me, so personal remarks > and brow-beating won't change it. The logic seems to me to hold. All of the logic. Rich Alderson From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jul 17 16:12:12 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 17:12:12 +0100 Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns" In-Reply-To: <12f.c63d5a.286fde86@aol.com> Message-ID: --On Saturday, June 30, 2001 10:01 pm +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > Then let my rephrase my question. Can more than one proto-language be > reconstructed from a "group" of languages? No. > And, if so, then will those > additional proto-languages show up in reconstruction if one assumes before > hand that there was only one proto-language? It makes no difference what one assumes in advance. Comparative reconstruction will return either one proto-language or no proto-language. It can't do anything else. > If on the other hand the > answer to the first question is no, then why not? Because the comparative method is a tool for identifying descent by divergence from a single common ancestor. It doesn't do anything else, and it can't do anything else. It is not a piece of magic which can give us a video of any piece of prehistory we happen to be interested in. When I was a kid, I used to read a comic book featuring the exploits of Prince Ibis. Prince Ibis owned a magical gadget called the Ibistick, which could project any desired piece of history onto a blank wall, as though the whole thing had been videoed. If we had an equivalent in linguistics, we would be delighted. Unfortunately, we do not, and the comparative method in particular is not an Ibistick. It does what it does, and its magic does not extend any further. It does not recover any arbitrary piece of history at all: all it does is to tell us whether a single common ancestor can be recovered or not. 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 proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Jul 13 19:05:22 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 14:05:22 -0500 Subject: Lehmann's Syllabicity Message-ID: Dear IEists: There are a number of IEists who do not subscribe to Lehmann's theory of "syllabicity", which he originated to explain the unusual fact that most IE roots display a front-back vowel (also, potentially no vowel) contrast, which indicates morphosemantic differences only --- not lexicosemantic ones. Unusual because in the great majority of languages around the world, varying root-vowels indicate lexical rather than morphological differences (Semitic sharing this peculiarity though perhaps not its parent PAA). Without attempting to promote Lehmann's theory (at this time), I would first like to learn what list-members consider to be the better alternatives for an explanation of this phenomenon. Let us assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that some unspecified language earlier than but ancestral to IE had a structure in which differences of vowel-quality signaled lexical differences: *men- /= *man- /= *mon-. This is certainly justifiable on typological grounds. First, I would like to know how list-members believe these lexical differences were maintained in IE. 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, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138) From bronto at pobox.com Fri Jul 13 16:23:59 2001 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 09:23:59 -0700 Subject: Italy in Hungarian (was: diction and contradiction) Message-ID: Thanks! Gabor Sandi wrote: > ... Lengyelorsza'g (Poland), ... And why Lengyel? -- Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/ From g_sandi at hotmail.com Sat Jul 14 16:42:07 2001 From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi) Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 16:42:07 -0000 Subject: Italy in Hungarian (was: diction and contradiction) Message-ID: [ moderator edited ] > Thanks! > Gabor Sandi wrote: >> ... Lengyelorsza'g (Poland), ... > And why Lengyel? > -- > Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- Let me quote Schenker, A.M.: The Dawn of Slavic (Yale U.P., 1995), p.51: The most intriguing [problem involving Slavic tribes in Poland] is the identity and location of the Lendites (Lenditi). This ethnic appellation, which does not appear in Polish sources, seems to be derived from the root *le> d (e> represents e with a hook under it) 'untilled land'. Judging by the use of of tribal names containing this root in non-Polish sources, Lendites may refer to the Poles, cf. Lithuanian le'nkas, Hungarian lengyel, East Slavic ljax6 (6 is the "back jer"), all meaning "Pole". Also containing this root are Slavic tribal terms lenzane^noi and lenzeni'nois found in chapters 9 and 37, respectively, of Constantine Porphyrogenitus' De adminstrando imperio. The former refers to a tribe aettled in the basin of the Dnieper, while the latter appears to be located somewhere on the southern border of Rus'. Comment by GS: And I suppose the first name of that well-known Pole, Lech Walesa, has the same etymology. Gabor Sandi From miskec4096 at hotmail.com Fri Jul 13 17:41:05 2001 From: miskec4096 at hotmail.com (Kreso Megyeral) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 19:41:05 +0200 Subject: Italy in Hungarian (was: diction and contradiction) Message-ID: [ moderator edited ] Gabor Sandi wrote: "It should be noted that Hungarian names of countries outside Europe never seem to use "orsza'g", even -ia is not essential, so that we have, for example: Ki'na, Japa'n." Of course, if you consider Armenia (�rminyorszag) a part of Europe. Also, one, rather rarely encountered, ending is "f�ld" (lit. "ground"), coming historically from German, now a usual word in Hungarian, which sometimes stands for "-land" if it's not a European country. Thus Thaif�ld, Szvazif�ld. From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jul 14 01:31:10 2001 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 18:31:10 -0700 Subject: The Iceman's Berries In-Reply-To: <008601c10729$fd2071a0$c602703e@edsel> Message-ID: At 11:10 PM 7/7/01 +0200, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Stanley Friesen" >Sent: Friday, July 06, 2001 4:39 AM >> Now, my *hypothesis* about many of these words is that they are borrowings >> from a non-IE language family formerly wide-spread in northern Europe, but >> now extinct. I wish I could figure out how to test this idea. >[Ed Selleslagh] >Try Basque. You never know. But that's tricky: often, initial consonants have >disappeared, in other cases initial consonants may mask ancient initial vowels >(like the old verb-prefix e-: jaten < e-aten), so you have to go back to >reconstructed Proto-Basque forms. And many roots are actually of IE origin >(Latin, Gaulish, Romance...) So far as I have been able to tell, there are few good candidates source words in Basque for these roots. Most Basque cognates seem to be fairly well established as borrowings the other direction. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jul 14 02:21:59 2001 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 19:21:59 -0700 Subject: The Iceman's Berries In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 03:22 PM 7/12/01 -0500, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Could you elaborate more and give examples? Well, a few random examples from Pokorny would be possible. [Translation from German mine] *bhleig-, bhli:g- (156) 'glitter' extension of *bhlei-, same meaning, see also *bhleiq-. OE. bli:can, "glitter", Old Saxon bli:kan "glitter" OHD bli:hhan strong verb, "bleich werden" ... OE bla:c, OHD bleih "pale, pallid"; OHD nleihha "whitefish", ... Lit. blizgu`,-e'ti "glisten, glitter", bly's^kiu, blys^ke'ti "twinkle, gleam" ... Lettish blaiskums "spot" ... Russian & OCS ble^ski "luster, sheen" ... Note that while the unextended form. *bhlei is found in most branches, this particular extended form is restricted to northern Europe. (In addition, the alternate extended form, *bhleiq- is a good example of the -g/-k alternation that I think is due to early inter-dialect borrowing, and it also is restricted to Germanic and Balto-Slavic). 2. *dhabh (233) "properly joined, fit, suitable"; *dhabh-ro-s same meaning. Arm darbin "smith" (*dhabhr-ino-). Lat. faber, fabri: "craftsman, artist", adj. "artistic, skilled", ... Goth. ga-daban "happen, occur, come to pass", Perf. gado:b, Adj. gado:f ist "it is fitting", ... OCS dobri, "agathos, kalos", dobji, doblji "aristos, dokimos", ... Lith. daba` "property, quality", dabi`nti "adorn", dabnu`s "graceful" and so on. Note, this one is not, in some ways, as good, as it has an Armenian reflex. However that is quite late, and Armenian is known to have been heavily influenced by other languages, including Latin. It is also a root that it is hard to put an a-coloring laryngeal in, as you get the rather difficult sequence **dhH2ebh, or even **dhH2bh. 3. dhen- (249) "strike, thrust". Only in extended forms (almost exclusively Germanic) d-extension: ON detta strong verb "fall down heavy and hard", ... E. Fris. duns "fall, decline", ... Engl dint "hit, thrust" Alb. g-dhent "chopped wood, ..." ... Gutteral extension: ON danga "beat (up), pound" ... This one is actually pretty weak all around, and may well be a simple proto-Germanic coinage. Anyway, that is enough to give a general flavor. Once upon a time I did some statistics on shared words between the branches, and came up with lots of sharing between the northern European branches and between Germanic and Balto-Slavic. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Jul 13 20:24:57 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 15:24:57 -0500 Subject: *G^EN- Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Saturday, July 07, 2001 9:46 AM [pPCR] >>> *keubH2-, 'lie down, lay down', >>> I see no reason not to derive it from Pokorny's 2. *kew-, 'bend'. Isolating >>> the initial CVC-component of PIE stems allows comparison with initial >>> CVC-segments of PAA triliteral roots. [PG] > Yes, I understand why you wish to derive PIE *keubH from **kew. > It is always tedious to rehearse arguments. My examples were of roots with > final -CH, of which there are plenty. For theoretical reasons, you wish to > reduce all of these to CVC roots. You may or may not be right, but the fact > that your reason for doing it is theoretical, and not based on PIE evidence, > is why I suggest (too dismissively, and I'm sorry for that), that the theory > is actually irrelevant to PIE data. I also suspect that PIE data will not > affect your belief, so I didn't pursue the argument further. [PCR] It is the evidence which has bolstered my support for this method of analysis. If form and semantics have no bearing on possible connections, then comparative work is frivolous. I have indicated but will reiterate that I do not consider *keubH- a CVC root + H. I consider it a CVC (*kew-) root plus *b AND *H. [PG] > Incidentally you have still not responded to my interpretation of PIE, where > I suggest that it is the -u- in *keubH which is the essential vowel, not > the -e-. If you want connections with PAA, then the triliteral root *K-U-B > is surely a better guess than the biconsonantal *K-e-W. [PCR] Not in my opinion. As I have already explained, it is CVC roots that are most readily comparable between PIE and PAA. If I am correct in suggesting that the root *kew- should be properly **khew-, the expected Arabic reflex would be gh-w. We find in Arabic gh-w-g, 'bend the body, incline towards the ground'; gh-w-S, 'dive'; gh-w-T, 'be bent (wood) [?inghâTa]; gh-w-y, 'cause to be bent towards'; and other which I will not include because the connection is less obvious but probably still valid. [ Moderator's note: This is irrelevant to the Indo-European list unless and until a genetic relationship between Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic can be demonstrated. --rma ] I assume your *K-U-B was a simple typing error because there are no roots of this form (*K-W-B is, of course, possible). 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, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Jul 13 21:59:56 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 16:59:56 -0500 Subject: *G^EN- Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Saturday, July 07, 2001 9:50 AM >> Now, it appears to me that you wish to reconstruct a *g^N-, > Balderdash! Haven't I argued all along there is no such thing? The root > is *g'enH, albeit with forms from *g'nH. [ moderator snip ] [PCR] Albeit it be maintained that that is what you argued, nevertheless, meseems it was capable of being interpreted thusly. 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, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138) From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jul 14 02:56:25 2001 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 19:56:25 -0700 Subject: Fw: *G^EN- In-Reply-To: <003001c10737$4e7d1320$fbf1fea9@swbell.net> Message-ID: At 05:51 PM 7/7/01 -0500, proto-language wrote: >Dear Stanley and IEists: >> Now, for the latter I would normally require extensions with different >> places of articulation. I consider that much of the variation of the -k~-g >> sort is due to inter-dialect borrowing, not to originally different >> (extended) roots. That is, root final consonants that differ only in >> voicing or aspiration, and are associated with virtually identical meanings >> are probably best treated as being post-PIE variants of one form. >[PCR] >I have never read this before, and am sceptical. How about a few examples? Interestingly, I just gave one example in my previous post. And I just found a few where Pokorny seems to almost handle it that way: *(s)keup-, *(s)keub(h)- (956) *slenk-, sleng- (961) *(s)meukh-, *(s)meug-, *(s)meugh- (971) Ah, here is a good one: 1. *(s)teu- with consonantal extensions "thrust, strike". A. *(s)teu-k-: Gr. tykos "hammer, chisel; battle-axe", tykizo "worked stone", ... OIr. toll "hollow" and "hole", Welsh twll "perforation", Breton toull "hole". ... Lett. tukste^t "knock", tauce^t "grind with a mortar and pestle" ... OIsl. styggr "angry, unfriendly", ... B. *(s)teu-g- OInd tuja'ti, tunja'ti, tunakti "presses, thrusts" ... MIr. tu:ag fem. "axe" and "arch", later stu:ag, tu:agaim "strike with an axe", ... Probably Lith. stu`ngis "stump", stu`kti "soar into the heights" ... Swed. stuka "overcome, subdue" ... ... OHG, MHG stoc, -ckes "rod, staff, tree branch", ... OE stocc "rod, branch, stump" ... [and so on for several more paragraphs]. >> I meant that I would reconstruct only those root forms that are multiply >> attested, at least for PIE. (The issue of an earlier stage is a separate >> matter). >[PCR] >What might some examples be? Oh, the majority of the roots in Pokorny :-) -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From connolly at memphis.edu Sat Jul 14 01:48:50 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 20:48:50 -0500 Subject: bishop Message-ID: Leo A. Connolly wrote: >> should already have been something like [is ti(m) bolin], >> as in current Greek. The vowels would be all wrong. And why on earth would >> the Greeks have given something meaning 'to the city' as the name of their >> capital? colkitto at sprint.ca wrote: > The capital was known as "i polis" the city for an extended period. > The study of toponyms is littered with such cases, cf. Scottish Gaelic > Gallaibh, Cataibh. (and much more good stuff) To which I say: The vowels are still all wrong, which renders the rest of it moot. Leo Connolly From connolly at memphis.edu Sat Jul 14 01:55:35 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 20:55:35 -0500 Subject: Descent vs. Influence Message-ID: "David L. White" wrote: > It has recently been claimed that influence is or may be taken as a > kind of descent. Let us look at an example of what that would mean. > Rumanian has some resemblances to Latin and some resemblances to > Albanian. Yet the resemblances are of fundamentally different kind. Its > resemblances to Latin have to do with the descent over time of the set of > arbitrary correspondences between sounds and meanings that any language must > have. Its resemblances to Albanian on the other hand relate not to > sound-meaning correspondences but rather to things like the distinctions > made, ordering of elements, and so on. Though these are both kinds of > resemblance, they are not the same kind of resemblance. Why one is called > descent and the other is called influence should be fairly obvious. If > influence is descent, then Rumanian is _by descent_ both a Romance and a > Balkan (for lack of a better term) language. But this is nonsense. To say > that influence is really a kind of descent because the two are both kinds of > resemblance is like saying that apples are really oranges because the two > are both kinds of fruit. No. There is simply no point in obliterating the > meanings of our terms and concepts. Where there is a difference of meaning > we are clearly justified in using different terms. I am reminded of the debate over the relative importance of nature and nurture in human development. Surely both are important, but everyone would agree that are utterly different processes. My biological child is by nature always my child, even if I leave all the nurturing to other people. While a nanny or day-care person may nurture him, that is influence, not descent. So too with language, and I'm as amazed as David White that anyone should confuse the two. Leo Connolly From stevegus at aye.net Sat Jul 14 04:43:09 2001 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 00:43:09 -0400 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. Message-ID: Peter Gray wrote: > In both cases haitus between vowels is avoided by inserting "r". I think you're on to something. I am now convinced, of course, that these are WGmc in origin rather than Latin calques. The curious and otherwise unattested caseforms in where- and there- had me confused. Since none of these inverted forms seem to have been attested until Early Middle English at the earliest, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the written English forms in where- and there- represent a writer's interpretation of a dialect already losing -r in these contexts, or as you note, an epenthetic /r/ between vowels. This seems at least to explain the shapes of the related compounds in German. Now **hwafor and **thefor may not have been possible in Old English, since they probably would regularly yield the harder to analyse **hwavor and **thevor. The introduction of a consonant may have been as needful in early Middle English as it was in German in these contexts. -- When as Man's life, the light of human lust In socket of his early lanthorne burnes, That all this glory unto ashes must, And generation to corruption turnes; Then fond desires that onely feare their end, Doe vainely wish for life, but to amend. --- Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke From edsel at glo.be Sat Jul 14 09:48:20 2001 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 11:48:20 +0200 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Saturday, July 07, 2001 4:31 PM >> "whereof," "whereas" and "therefore." >> Are these imitations or calques on Latin forms? [snip] > Preposition + [some case of "it"] --> da (= "there") + preposition > Preposition + [some case of "which"] --> wo (= "where") + preposition > In both cases haitus between vowels is avoided by inserting "r". [snip] > on it (auf) = darauf = da-r-auf = thereon [snip] > on which = worauf = wo-r-auf = whereon. > Peter [Ed Selleslagh] I have my doubts about the -r- as hiatus filling: in Dutch, the -r is always present, just like in English.. Ger. wo = Du. waar Ger. da = Du. daar So, I think it is the absence of -r- in German that requires an explanation. Ed. From alrivera at southern.edu Sat Jul 14 06:44:37 2001 From: alrivera at southern.edu (Muke Tever) Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 02:44:37 -0400 Subject: One Step at a Time Message-ID: >===== Original Message From Larry Trask ===== >> Are you saying there will be no systematic correspondences to be found >> among those "half-a-dozen languages"? >Yes; that's what I'm saying. Or, to be more precise, there will be no >systematic correspondences pointing to a common ancestor. There will be >all sorts of seemingly common elements, seemingly connected in strange and >puzzling ways, but those common elements will not pattern in the way that >we call 'systematic correspondences'. If we try to apply the comparative >method to the data, we will get some exceedingly strange results, but we >will not get any proto-language at all. We cannot possibly get a >proto-language, because there wasn't one. Suppose the parent of a "half-a-dozen languages" was a language that had two different classes of verbs: those from a language X that conjugated one way and those from a language Y that conjugated another way. (I think there was a Greek dialect of Arabic that had a feature like this mentioned on the list earlier?) The child languages would either: - retain this odd feature and both classes - reduce to one class, analogizing or dropping the forms of the other - lose both classes (Even in those that followed the latter two paths, irregularities--relics of the proto-system--might still survive.) Why shouldn't the comparative method be able to reconstruct the verbs into a "class 1" and "class 2" based on the evidence of the daughter languages, similar to the way that, say, gender of PIE words is reconstructed? Why shouldn't the comparative method be able to take these two classes, and discover that "class 1" forms correspond regularly to cognate forms in language X and its relatives, and that "class 2" forms correspond regularly to cognate forms in language Y and its relatives? If X, Y, and relatives didn't survive, other clues might lead to disparate input hypotheses. Of course, Ockham's Razor might cause these to be disregarded unless there are other clues, such as differing input phonologies("Why can 'class 1' verbs have *[?] or *[H9] in them, while 'class 2' verbs never do so?"). It may be implausible for such a language and resulting family to arise, but I don't see how the comparative method wouldn't be able to handle it should such a situation appear. *Muke! From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Jul 15 14:42:58 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 15:42:58 +0100 Subject: One Step at a Time In-Reply-To: <3B361343@webmail.southern.edu> Message-ID: --On Saturday, July 14, 2001 2:44 am -0400 Muke Tever wrote: > Suppose the parent of a "half-a-dozen languages" was a language that had > two different classes of verbs: those from a language X that conjugated > one way and those from a language Y that conjugated another way. (I > think there was a Greek dialect of Arabic that had a feature like this > mentioned on the list earlier?) > The child languages would either: > - retain this odd feature and both classes > - reduce to one class, analogizing or dropping the forms of the other > - lose both classes > (Even in those that followed the latter two paths, irregularities--relics > of the proto-system--might still survive.) > Why shouldn't the comparative method be able to reconstruct the verbs > into a "class 1" and "class 2" based on the evidence of the daughter > languages, similar to the way that, say, gender of PIE words is > reconstructed? > Why shouldn't the comparative method be able to take these two classes, > and discover that "class 1" forms correspond regularly to cognate forms > in language X and its relatives, and that "class 2" forms correspond > regularly to cognate forms in language Y and its relatives? OK. First of all, what is being asked about here is something entirely different from what Steve Long has been talking about. What Muke is asking about is a *single* language, with two classes of verbs, which gives rise to some daughters. If this happens, then there is no obstacle in principle. The comparative method will be able to reconstruct the ancestral language and its two classes of verbs -- providing only that sufficient evidence survives. Recall the familiar limitation on reconstruction: we cannot reconstruct a feature of the ancestral language which has disappeared without trace in all attested daughters. However, if the ancestral language contained two classes of verbs, and enough evidence of those two classes survives in the daughters, then we can reconstruct the original two. For this purpose, it makes no difference how the ancestral language itself came into existence, or how it acquired its characteristics. The comparative method has nothing to say about the origin of a proto-language, unless there are yet further languages that can be compared with it normally. > If X, Y, and relatives didn't survive, other clues might lead to > disparate input hypotheses. Of course, Ockham's Razor might cause these > to be disregarded unless there are other clues, such as differing input > phonologies("Why can 'class 1' verbs have *[?] or *[H9] in them, while > 'class 2' verbs never do so?"). > It may be implausible for such a language and resulting family to arise, > but I don't see how the comparative method wouldn't be able to handle it > should such a situation appear. Indeed. The method would have no difficulty in principle. But this is not the kind of thing that Steve Long keeps asking about. He is asking about a hypothetical cases in which there is no ancestral language, and an assembly of languages is constructed by selecting varying chunks of two languages. 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 Sun Jul 15 03:51:51 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 23:51:51 EDT Subject: Step Two Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: <> I replied: <> In a message dated 7/13/01 11:46:41 PM, Larry Trask replied: <> So, just to be sure of what you are saying here: In your hypothetical you say " Basque and Spanish were to interact ... and give rise to half-a-dozen languages, each consisting of a different mixture of Basque elements and Spanish elements..." Let's say one of the "elements" you mention is Spanish finite verbal morphology. Let's say that this element is present in four of your half-dozen languages. Let's also say that this finite verbal morphology is identical in all four languages. (Once again, neither Basque nor Spanish is recorded by your hypothesis, so we are actually describing just four languages with the same verbal morphology.) I take it that you are saying that the presence of identical verbal morphology in these four languages would not constitute "systematic correspondence." Or, in your newer phrasing, that the presence of identical verbal morphology in these four languages would not constitute "systematic correspondence pointing to a common ancestor." Is this accurate as to what you are saying? Regards, Steve Long From acnasvers at hotmail.com Sat Jul 14 08:36:11 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 08:36:11 -0000 Subject: Uniformitarian Principle Message-ID: >[Phil Jennings] >> Gravity is a constant, but it is contingent on mass and distance. [Vidhyanath Rao] >The first part is actually an consequence of the UP. People (Dirac?) >have proposed theories in which the gravitational constant (and more >recently, the cosmological constant) changes over time. It is just that >such theories do not solve any pressing problem. [DGK] If memory serves, Dirac's proposal of G decreasing with the age of the universe was part of his Large Number Hypothesis (LNH), which to him was one possible solution to the "pressing problem" of ratios among various physical quantities (e.g. strength of gravity vs. electromagnetism). Theoretical physicists are seldom concerned with "practical" matters (deadlier weapons, better surveillance, etc.) though they may be called upon to contribute, like Archimedes or Oppenheimer. The real difficulty with theories of variable G is measuring its ancient values. One early proposal involved dinosaur tracks, but as there was no accurate way to determine the mass of the dinosaurs, no firm conclusions could be drawn. In my own ambitious youth, I considered careful measurements of oscillatory ripple-marks in ancient sandstones, of which I had some Middle Proterozoic specimens (dated to 1.6-1.7 billion years old). "You need to figure out how to put a flume onto a centrifuge", said a professor. The problem of determining how ripple-marks would vary under a slight (~1%) change in G exceeded my ability, and there are other undetermined factors with ancient ripples (depth of water, amount of suspended material, degree of adhesion of aggregate) which would swamp the effect of G. Hence the answer to "Is G a constant?" is a hearty "Non liquet". What has this to do with linguistics? The way I was schooled, the Uniformitarian Principle in geology states simply "The present is the key to the past". This does _not_ exclude variable G, catastrophic flooding, extinctions caused by asteroids, etc. It means that we do not posit physical forces in the past which do not operate today. Several list-members have invoked a linguistic UP, usually without any clear statement, and not always consistently. Larry Trask has been the staunchest advocate of the UP on this list, yet he has attacked the principle of net lexical stasis, apparently believing that the inventory of contentives in a language grows continuously (as claimed by Robert Whiting). Now, if the UP and LT's view of lexical growth are both correct, the alleged present inflationary situation has _always_ characterized languages, all of which are therefore, in principle, traceable back to a single word. (So was that word /N/, /?@N/, /tik/, or /bekos/? Never mind ... rhetorical question.) For the purposes of this list, I would suggest a statement of the UP roughly as follows: "The history and prehistory of languages used by anatomically modern humans involve no fundamental processes not occurring today." This leaves rather vague the matter of what "fundamental processes" are, like "physical forces" in geology. Specific examples of results might well be unique, so the UP is _not_ equivalent to the rather crude synchronic typological arguments often encountered in reconstructive debates. It deals with dynamics, not statics. An example to which the UP might be applied is the proposal that pre-PIE had ergative-absolutive case-marking. If the proponents can give clear examples of E-A languages turning into nominative-accusative languages during historical times, and in the process today, then the proposal is credible. If OTOH the record, and current behavior, show that E-A case-marking tends to develop out of N-A structure, then the ergative pre-PIE hypothesis is in trouble. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Jul 14 16:53:44 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 11:53:44 -0500 Subject: Return of the minimal pairs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] Runa, I've been told, had a three vowel system and, as I've been told, there has been a great degree of mutual influence between some Runa dialects and and local forms of Andean Spanish. In addition, in many regions of Latin America --especially in rural areas, there is confusion between unstressed /i/ & /e/ as well as between unstressed /o/ & /u/. My personal guess is that is mainly due to Portuguese or transitional forms of western Ibero-Romance. Rural Mexicans and Mexican-Americans are especially noted for this, even though, according to Luis Cabrera's Diccionario de aztequismos, Nahuatl has a 5-vowel sysem exactly like standard Spanish. Something analogous to "vellam non villam" occurs among rural Costa Ricans, who often pronounce closed syllable /e/ more like /ei/ as in /ereyDja, ere:Dja/ for the toponym /ereDja/ >>The e/i vacillation is very common, in many IE dialects, but also in the rest >>of the world, e.g. among Quechua housemaids in Peru: they always speak about >>'me premo' (mi primo, 'my cousin', a eufemism for their lover) when speaking >>Spanish. They also interchange o/u, like in 'me pichu' (mi pecho), another >>common thing anywhere. >I don't know anything about the phonology of Quechua, so I can only guess >that these vacillations probably represent the misfit in sound-ranges >between vowels in Quechua and Peruvian Spanish. What Varro noted was a >different phenomenon involving closed syllables in native speech. I suspect >what he meant by "vellam non villam" was that the "rustici" used an open [I] >in closed tonic syllables where "urbani" and "suburbani" had a closed [i]. A >parallel is provided by the American English rusticisms "britches" for > and "crick" for . >DGK Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com Mon Jul 16 14:43:52 2001 From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader) Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 10:43:52 -0400 Subject: Return of the minimal pairs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: 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.... Jim Rader > I don't know anything about the phonology of Quechua, so I can only guess > that these vacillations probably represent the misfit in sound-ranges > between vowels in Quechua and Peruvian Spanish. What Varro noted was a > different phenomenon involving closed syllables in native speech. I > suspect what he meant by "vellam non villam" was that the "rustici" used > an open [I] in closed tonic syllables where "urbani" and "suburbani" had a > closed [i]. A parallel is provided by the American English rusticisms > "britches" for and "crick" for . > DGK From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com Mon Jul 16 14:31:17 2001 From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader) Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 10:31:17 -0400 Subject: Word Order and verb endings In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > [Kreso Megyeral:] > The whole cathegory of definite conjugation in Hungarian is interesting, > since it's limited only to Ugric. If Mr. Aikio could give some more exact > data on the development of the cathegory, I would be very grateful. I'm not a Uralicist, but doesn't Mordva (not Ugric) have definite/indefinite conjugations, along with a fairly complete system of marking 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person objects on the verb? In Hungarian, as I recall, agreement beyond definiteness/indefiniteness is only possible with 1st sg. subject and 2nd sg. object, e.g., , "I see you." Jim Rader From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Jul 14 18:06:54 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 13:06:54 -0500 Subject: Anglo-Romani (Long, was Re: Genetic Descent) In-Reply-To: <000301c10987$b036c960$4f70fe8c@lucent.com> Message-ID: By coincidence, when this e-mail came in, I was looking at Carlos Clavería's "Estudios sobre los gitanismos del español". There is a linguistic phenomenon in Spanish-speaking countries called calo/, which can mean "Romany, Hispano-Romani, Gypsy Spanish, thieves' argot, Andalusian slang, Mexican slang, Mexican-American slang, etc." Curiously enough, it's also called germani/a, since it also is said to include elements supposedly brought back by veterans of the Dutch Wars of the 16th century. A great deal of Spanish and Latin American slang is supposedly derived from calo/. The big problem is the actual origin of the lexicon. Just as Ibero-Romance linguistic historians tend to assign a Basque origin to every anciently-attested Ibero-Romance word of unknown origin. there is tendency to assign a Romany origin to just about every word of unknown origin that pops up in Andalusia and or in Peninsular popular Spanish after about 1500 or so. Most of what I've seen on Calo/ has been done by literary scholars rather than linguists and generally involves trying to hook up a word in Calo/ with something found in a dictionary of Romany or Sanskrit. There doesn't always seem to be much consistency (or precision) as to WHICH cal/o the investigators are talking about. And there don't seem to be many examples of complete sentences in what I've found, just discussions of discrete lexical items.. The result includes items such as Spanish guita, English geeta "money" --which I've seen claimed as of Romany origin by Hispanic scholars and as of Yiddish origin by at least one English-language source. I'm ignorant as to which, if either, is correct. I've even seen Spanish ganso "effeminate", which corresponds to American-English gunsel (which appears in the Maltese Falcon), as Romany when it's of Germanic origin. From what I've seen (which is not a whole lot), Calo/ goes a bit beyond relexification by perceiving nouns, verbs and adjectives as having interchangeable stems and differing only by morphological endings. Verbs seem to be formed by adding 1st conjugation (-ar) endings to any noun, often with an intensive -elar variant. In slang calo/ this is expanded, often humorously. to Spanish lexical items, e.g. <> "see you later (lit. 'we see one another')" < vidrio "glass (the material)". [snip] >Secondly, it seems that in cases where language is used for >self-identification, it is easier for syntax to be borrowed than (core) >vocabulary or morphemes. In fact, sprachbund phenomena are much more >about syntactic convergence than others. Yet we do not consider a >sprachbund to form a new family. This seems to be the case for what I've seen of calo/ >Turning now to Anglo-Romani: >H. W. Hatting wrote, in a message dated May 16, 2001 >> Let me put in some information I recollect from a seminar on Romani >> 1. English gypsies were speaking a version of Romani with *Romani* >> grammar when they immigrated into England; >> 2. Gradually, they started to use English among themselves [...] >> 3. Nowadays, English Romani (with Romani lexicon and English >> morphology) [...] >> English Romani goes farther than most other secret languages (like >> German "Rotwelsch" or Russsian "blat", in which the basic function >> words (pronouns, conjunctions, auxiliaries etc.) are normally from >> the "base" language which provides the morphology) [...] Yes, calo/ uses <> for Spanish <> "that (relative pronoun)" >Some browsing in the library (which I should have done sooner) suggests >that the intermediate stage was more complicated. "The dialect of >English Gypsies" by Smart and Crofton (1875, reprinted by Gale >Research, 1968, Detroit) talks about two "dialects", termed there "Deep >Romanes" and "Shallow Romanes" or the "vulgar dialect". The former >seems to preserve quite a bit of East European Romani morphemes (S&C >refer to "the Turkish" dialect, presumably the Romani of Gypsies in >(the European parts of?) the then Ottoman Empire), though there were >losses of categories not found in English. The latter dialect seems >closer to Blat etc than Hatting suggested. Here is the beginning of a >story "How Petalengo went to Heaven" retold in both dialects: [snip] > Mandi pookerova toot sar Petalengro > I tell-nonpast you how P. > Mandi<'ll> pooker tooti Petalengro see calo/ menda, mangue, man "I, me"; men "person", manu/s "man" > ghi/as kater mi Doovelesko keri. > go-past to God-possesive house > jal adr/e mi Doovel' kair. >[Notes: Doovel (God) is always prefixed with mi (my). Keri is adverb >from kair.] see calo/ devel, undevel, ondebel "god" >"O stor-herengro >bengesko koli ta jal adr/e o paani so piova" [the four legged >diabolic thing that swims in the water which I drink] (this by Wester >Boswell). see Calo/ mengue, bengue, beng "devil" Clavería says it's from Sanskrit vyanga "limbless, maimed, cripple, toad, frog" >It seems that the inherited word for frog 'jamba'/'jomba' had >come to mean toad, though it was considered to be a form of 'jumper'. So, Professor Rao, I'd appreciate it if you'd take a look at calo/ Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From hwhatting at hotmail.com Mon Jul 16 15:47:12 2001 From: hwhatting at hotmail.com (Hans-Werner Hatting) Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 17:47:12 +0200 Subject: Anglo-Romani (Long, was Re: Genetic Descent) Message-ID: Dear list members, I've been away on business fo quite a while. Some interesting discussions seem to be going on, but I post only on this one (for now), as it concerns some earlier input by me. On Tue, 10 Jul 2001 17:29:45 -0400 Vidyanath Rao wrote: >I had asked, regarding Anglo-Romani as 'relexicalized English', how the >lexicon was preserved? I think that I need to be more detailed as to what I >was asking. I also took some time to try to get information on the language >of English Gypsies, and thought the results might be of interest to some. (snip) >H. W. Hatting wrote, in a message dated May 16, 2001 > > Let me put in some information I recollect from a seminar on Romani > 1. >English gypsies were speaking a version of Romani with *Romani* > grammar >when they immigrated into England; > 2. Gradually, they started to use >English among themselves [...] > 3. Nowadays, English Romani (with Romani >lexicon and English > morphology) [...] > English Romani goes farther than >most other secret languages (like > German "Rotwelsch" or Russsian "blat", >in which the basic function > words (pronouns, conjunctions, auxiliaries >etc.) are normally from > the "base" language which provides the >morphology) [...] >I interpreted this, when combined with the use of "relexification", to mean >that auxiliaries, their conjugation, endings etc continued from Stage 1 to >Stage 3 (with only the categories common to English and Romani being found) >while the speakers in the intermediate stage were completely ignorant of >Romani grammar. That I found, and still find, incredible. My question as to >how the lexicon was preserved was about bridging the first and third >stages. (snip) >Thus far the evidence seems to point to language death. The "new dialect" >is what those without adequate control of the ancestral language spoke, not >a "relexification". This is underlined by the fact that extent of the use >of English function words varied from person to person, with older persons >having more control. (snip) >In any case, contemporary Anglo-Romani looks like a case of arrested >language death or a resurrected language. I am not sure if "relexification" >is a suitable word to use, at least in the sense I understand it. After >all, I have never heard anyone call Sanskrit of drama dialog as 'Prakrit >relexified with Sanskrit' though in syntax the two are much closer than >either is to Sanskrit of Panini/early upanishads. Even in morphology, there >is variation in the amount of Prakrit influence when we look at the >puraanas or Buddhist texts. Long compounds of medieval Sanskrit are often >attempts of reconcile MIA syntax and rhythm to Panini's morphological >rules. >It should be noted that Kenrick who proposed that Anglo-Romani be >considered a register of English (and thus the name Romani English) still >endorsed a view similar to the above about the historical origin of >Anglo-Romani. This was the view which was conveyed to me at the time I did my (very limited) studies of Romani. >This should not affect how we view its history. Obviously, dying languages >and language shifts in progress are going to cause fuzzy-wuzzy type >problems for genetic classification, just as sound changes in progress >won't conform to the rules used in historical linguistics. If the process >is arrested by "schooling" (of formal or informal types), as seems to have >happened in Anglo-Romani, this can continue indefinitely. We should not >throw out the rules due such exceptional cases, nor should we attempt to >forcibly fit the cases to the rules without extensive investigation of the >history. Well, I'm certainly no expert on Angloe Romani (or any other variant of Romani). The central question for me would be: is Anglo-Romani *now* (a) a different language influenced to a big extent by English lexicon and grammar or (b) a group-language variant of English using lexicon from a non-English source? V. Rao has clearly shown that Romani went through a stage of strong English influence in the past. For me, the question to answer in order to classify Romani as (a) or (b) is whether there is an uninterrupted chain of "Romani-as-a-first-language" speakers which leads to the speakers of "old" Anglo-Romani to its speakers today (which means (a)), or whether the chain was broken, and Anglo-Romani became a dead language, learnt by its speakers when being initiated into the Romani community by elder people, so that a typical Anglo-Romani speaker would be first language English, and uses the Romani vocabulary only in cases when he/she wants to underline his/her affiliation to the Romani community and/or exclude outsiders (which means (b)). The last view was the one I got from what I learnt about Anglo-Romani, but I may be wrong. For the time being, I would propose the following distictions to bring a little order into the world of "fuzzy-wuzzy" ;-) 1. Full-blown Romani (the "old dialect"): certainly an independent, non-English language (despite some loanwords, loan-suffixes, and loan-syntax) , genetically IA; 2. Dying Romani: a language heavily influenced by English, but still being taught to children as a first language, would still be classified as genetically IA. The question is, to what extent does what is recorded as "new dialect" reflect such a stage of development, and to what extent it is simply the result of an attempt of Romanis raised in English to acquire and use the language of their elders? 3. Romani as a group-language used by English-as-first-language speakers as secret group language - a register of English, as would be any other group language substituting (say) Russian or Latin vocabulary for English. And there may be 4. Romani English - a variety of English Romani children might be raised with, being basically English, but containing lots of Romani words - the difference to (3) being that it is learnt as a first language, and that no systematical attempt is made to substitute Romani words for English. In summa, for me the dividing line is whether the language is acquired by children as a first language *and* the question of the independence of morphology. If (1) there is no un-borrowed core of morphology any more *and* (2) the transmission chain as a first language has been interupted, then a language ceases to be genetically independent of the language it has borrowed the morphology from and becomes a variety of it. From what I know, and V. Rao has shown, (1) is true for Anglo-Romani; whether (2) is true, has to be explored. Best regards, Hans-Werner Hatting From bronto at pobox.com Sun Jul 15 03:50:24 2001 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 20:50:24 -0700 Subject: fruit of the vine Message-ID: Douglas G Kilday wrote: > . . . Lat. orig. 'cluster of berries or grapes' . . . > later 'single grape'. Observe the parallel decollectivization > in Fr. < Lat. . And, in turn, Eng. < Fr. `bunch (of grapes)'. -- Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/ From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jul 14 22:15:58 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 17:15:58 -0500 Subject: The Single Parent Question Message-ID: Dear Larry and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Sunday, July 08, 2001 9:54 AM [ moderator snip ] [LT] > First, the methodology of comparative linguistics is not used in any other > discipline, and certainly not in physics, computing or economics. > Therefore Steve cannot possibly have any "familiarity" with it in other > disciplines. > Second, Joat is quite right in his response. This is not snobbishness: > it's just the plain truth. Steve has no right to question our methodology, > because he has no experience of it, and apparently no understanding of it. > The sole basis for Steve's objections appears to be that he doesn't like > our conclusions. [PCR] I do not wish to get into a prolonged discussion of this issue because, frankly, we all have better fish to fry. However . . . Albeit I certainly agree with much that you write, I continue to think it is a mistake to pretend that linguistic methodology is so unique. Any science that looks at different expressions of anything, and attempts to reason backwards to what the parent expression might be, is analogous to linguistics --- in my opinion. Moreover, I continue to believe that in many of his questions, Steve is questioning the quality of the logic employed not the data or actual methodology. It is obvious that you disagree. So shall we simply agree to disagree? 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, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138) From acnasvers at hotmail.com Sun Jul 15 05:41:16 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 05:41:16 -0000 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: Gordon Brown (1 Jul 2001) wrote: >For that matter, what about Eboriacum (isn't that the Latin for York?) >-- any possible relation to *ebur-? Yes. The second element is probably a Celtic collective, so the meaning of the toponym is 'abundance of yews' vel sim. Several places were called Eburodunum 'yew-fortress': modern Embrun (Hautes-Alpes), Yverdon-les-Bains (Switzerland), Bruenn/Brno (Moravia). Also there were Eburobriga 'yew-hill' (mod. Avrolles) and Eburomagus 'yew-field' (mod. Bram). DGK From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Jul 14 17:58:22 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 18:58:22 +0100 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: >> 1. The very well known case of Lat. 'fagus' (Eng. beech and similar in other >> Germanic, e.g. beuk in Du.) and Gr. 'phe:gss' (Dor. phagss) (Eng. oak) >> proves that different trees can be meant by a name from the same IE source, >> even when all the peoples involved were probably equally familiar with both >> species. Can anybody suggest how this could happen? It is worth acknowledging that it happens today. When I first moved from NZ to England, I had difficulties because no one in this country spoke English quite the way I did. Oh, the embarrassment of trying to ask for things in shops when no one knows your word for the object, and you don't know theirs! This happens also with common plants, birds, trees and such. Some are roughly the same, just enough to make you think they all might be, but then whammy! You realise that while you've been talking about one thing, everyone else has been understanding something very different. I am finally getting used to "slip roads" and "buns" (that was a very interesting conversation!) but beech trees still remain a muddle in my head. So the phenomenon is not just ancient. Peter From acnasvers at hotmail.com Thu Jul 19 06:27:39 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 06:27:39 +0000 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: [DGK] >> Conventional wisdom takes [Lat. ] as a Hamitic loan (from Egy. <3bw> >> vel sim.) which fails to explain the /r/ or the other peculiarities: nom. >> , gen. , adj. . The long/short vowel-alternation >> and -r/rn- behavior could hardly come from Hamitic, and loanwords are >> usually normalized to common forms. This looks like an IE word which has >> preserved two archaisms: the gradation seen in nom. 'foot', gen. >> and the alternation seen in nom. 'maple', adj. . >[Ed] >I don't think there is an -r/rn alternation. In my view, the -n after the -r >is an (abbreviated) adjective-forming suffix indicating origin, source etc. >Cf. Slavic -no (hladno, krasno...) or even Lat./Etrusc. -na. [DGK] You're right; this isn't really an "alternation", but the attachment of an adjectival suffix directly to a neuter stem, as seen also in Lat. 'brazen' < *ayes-neos. My views were poorly worded, and Patrick Ryan seems to think I was referring to -r/n- alternation, which is an entirely different matter. Nevertheless I think Lat. 'ivory' shows enough IE behavior to be considered a native IE word, whether or not it has cognates in I-Ir or other branches. Regarding PCR's objection that the long vowel in Lat. 'foot' arose by compensative lengthening from *peds instead of gradation: Palmer gives this as an example of gradation. Apart from this crude appeal to authority, we may note 'one-handled sacrificial vessel', gen. , which shows that Latin d-stems did _not_ regularly undergo compensation of *-ds in the nom. sg. From acnasvers at hotmail.com Sun Jul 15 09:46:30 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 09:46:30 -0000 Subject: The Single *PIE Village Theory Message-ID: Steve Long (28 Jun 2001) wrote: >What's interesting in this and the quote above [from DGK's postings] is the >notion that *PIE is >being located in a single village. >Is this the current thinking on the geographic distribution of *PIE during >the time it was *PIE (as against Pre-PIE or PIE in the process of breaking >up)? >Does anyone on the list have a problem with this view? Mallory talks about >the territorial size needed for PIE but I seem to remember it was a bit >larger than one village. I don't believe I stated or implied that my examples of the "same tribe" or "village like Mayberry" were intended to represent the entire PIE-speaking population at any time. They were directed at one of your earlier comments to the effect that "what you and I call trees in the next valley" might be different. The expression "next valley" indicates that "you" and "I" in your comment belong to the same immediate community, not to different tribes from opposite ends of PIE-land. >In any case, my problem with this, with regard to the history of the yew word >is simple. What happens when the village/tribe splits up and a part moves to >a new location, not far away, and there are yew trees there? They still speak >the same language, but now some of them have the yew (and yew word) and some >don't? Does this mean that the next extension out of the original village >could discover the yew on its own and give it even another name? And so >forth? So that by the time we hit the first 20 IE speaking villages, most >coming from the yewless core, we could have twenty different names for the >yew? This is an extreme case of what I originally argued: that PIE-speakers were unfamiliar with Taxus baccata, so there were several "discoveries" of the tree by successive migrations from the yewless core into western Europe, yielding the observed pattern of diversity in names. Again, I don't recall saying that these migrations were undertaken by single villages; they were more likely Magyar-style eruptions. >I think that what would happen - as the yew proved useful for different >purposes - is that trade words would develop that traveled not with the >language but with the products and processes. So even after *PIE split up, >there would still be new common words to be shared by the newly distinct >languages, perhaps even before the particular sound changes that occurred >later in the yew word(s). I don't disagree. In fact, PIE-speakers may well have had a word denoting 'yew-wood' or 'bow-wood' obtained by trade, and quite possibly this was *takso-. But the sight of living yew-trees would have been a novelty for the migrants, demanding a new word. For northern groups, this was *eiwo-, which I regard as IE 'berry-tree', competing in the west with pre-IE *ebur-. Greek has (unless you have found an objection); I don't know whether it's IE or not. Latin for the _tree_ may represent supersession of an earlier *axus 'yew-tree' by a derivative of the inherited word for 'yew-wood' (cf. West Romance reflexes of Lat. , not , for 'oak-tree'). The form *axus is continued by Mod. Venetic , Swiss Fr. , with accreted article in Tusc. , Lomb. & Piem. . >In fact, the functionality of language demands a little more than connecting a >word to a tree, since that is plainly not how language works at this level. >The members of a pre-literate village share names and give names on an >as-needed basis and functionality may give different names to the same object >or the same name to different objects as is necessary. To do otherwise would >be dysfunctional. Specialists only need to know specialized knowledge such as >specific tree terms and to have it otherwise would be a misallocation of >resources. If we all had to learn the exact meaning of all plant and >plant-related words in English, we'd spend many years doing nothing else. It wouldn't take many years to learn _common_ phytonyms, which is what this whole discussion is about, and you know it. On the one hand you argue for the communality of words through trade, on the other for a chaotic lexical situation at the village-level. I'll tell you what. If you can show me a recognized PIE tree with a European naming pattern comparable to that of Taxus baccata, I'll publicly admit that my efforts to use yews for the IE homeland problem were in vain. DGK From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Jul 15 14:46:11 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 15:46:11 +0100 Subject: Michif In-Reply-To: Message-ID: --On Sunday, July 8, 2001 4:17 pm -0500 Rick Mc Callister wrote: > How does Michif compare to Chinook jargon? Well, for one thing, Michif is a mother tongue, while Chinook Jargon never was. > I don't think Chinook Jargon was used as anything other than a > trade language but I may be mistaken I believe that is right. 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 parkvall at ling.su.se Tue Jul 17 09:03:39 2001 From: parkvall at ling.su.se (Mikael Parkvall) Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 11:03:39 +0200 Subject: Michif In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick McCallister wrote: >How does Michif compare to Chinook jargon? For me as a pidginist/creolist, the difference is huge. Although both laymen and linguists usually equate "mixed language" with "pidgin" or "creole", I would say that they have little to do with one another, except in that both are possible (but rare) products of language contact. Michif is a "mixed" or "intertwined" language par excellence. NPs from French, and VPs (minus the NPs) from Cree. Neither component has undergone any significant simplification, so that Michif nouns, for instance, have two lexically inherent genders -- both the masculine/feminie of French, and the animate/inanimate of Cree. It also has obviate marking, front rounded vowels, and other crosslinguistically marked stuff. A pidgin or a creole, on the other hand, is characterised by reduction/simplification, if you ask me (though this is no longer a politically correct view in creolistics, which no longer recognises any difference between the development of, say, Tok Pisin from English, and the development of, say, French from Latin (sic)). A pidgin or a creole need not necessarily be very mixed in any sense. Chinook Jargon is a pretty good case of a pidgin. Though most of the lexicon is from Chinook, most of the quirks of the lexifier's grammar have been lost. Anyone who has ever looked at Amerindian languages of this area (the Pacific Northwest) must have noticed how fearsomely inflected they are. And yet, Chinook Jargon was as nicely analytic as can be. >Many years ago I saw a small book on Chinook Jargon that explained >that the grammar was radically different from Chinook and that the >vocabulary was largely derived from French --somewhere around 40% if I >remember correctly. From what remember, French derived nouns included the >feminine article <>. Different samples of CJ have different lexical composition, depending on where, when and by whom it was spoken. In particular, the English part of its lexicon increased as the languages died. Roughly speaking, the CJ lexicon was around 50% Chinook, 20% French, 20% English and 5%+ Nootka. Some of the French nouns, but not all, include incorporation of . >I don't think Chinook Jargon was used as anything other than a >trade language but I may be mistaken This is basically correct, though it did nativise in one place, namely the Grand Ronde reservation in Oregon. /MP * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Mikael Parkvall Institutionen för lingvistik Stockholms Universitet SE-10691 STOCKHOLM +46 (0)8 16 14 41, +46 (0)8 656 68 24 (home) Fax: +46 (0)8 15 53 89 parkvall at ling.su.se Creolist Archives: http://www.ling.su.se/Creole From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jul 17 16:48:09 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 17:48:09 +0100 Subject: Sound changes versus sound changes In-Reply-To: <6d.1624b343.286ed358@aol.com> Message-ID: --On Saturday, June 30, 2001 3:01 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > I saw somewhere a tongue-in-cheek piece where it was predicted that by > 2020 the whole French language would be reduced to one single sound - > "en" - but that French would continue to be written as it is now. The > truth behind the humor captures what some think is the extreme nature of > the French phonological system. There is nothing "extreme" about French phonology, which in fact is rather unremarkable by world standards. It is merely that French is rather more different in pronunciation from Proto-Romance than are most Romance languages. > Despite how well the developments that > produced French can be traced and the underlying morphology is IE, the > cumulative phonological system seems worlds apart from for example > German. The objective contrast between hearing French and hearing German > simply does not suggest a close relationship. Or perhaps any > relationship at all. This is hardly surprising. French and German are not very closely related. Their last common ancestor was probably PIE, spoken at least 6000 years ago. Anyway, what languages "sound like" is not a linguistic fact of any interest. Spanish and French are rather closely related, but they sound very little like each other. The Spanish of northern Spain sounds very much like modern Greek -- a speaker who knows neither can easily confuse these two -- yet Spanish and Greek are only very distantly related. And Spanish sounds quite a lot like Basque, yet these two are not related at all. Spanish is exceedingly closely related to Portuguese, but the two languages do not sound similar: to my ears, Portuguese sounds more like Russian than it sounds like Spanish. And Galician is so closely related to Portuguese that some linguists prefer to regard the two as dialects of a single language -- yet Galician sounds far more like Spanish than it does like Portuguese. The staccato Spanish of northern Spain doesn't sound all that much like the drawled Spanish of rural Mexico -- or, for that matter, like the rhythmically different Spanish of southern Spain. To a non-speaker of English, I imagine that the English of Brooklyn and the English of Glasgow -- not to mention the English of Mississippi -- sound like wholly different languages. The Greek of Cyprus sounds far more like Turkish than it sounds like mainland Greek. The first time I heard Cypriot Greek spoken, I was convinced I was listening to Turkish, and I was bewildered because I couldn't understand any of it (I used to work in Turkey). > If morphology, grammar and syntax are the least likely things to be > borrowed (a la DLW's finite verbs) Dubious. > then perhaps they are the least likely to change, Clearly not so. > and therefore are the features that least reflect accurately > rates or degrees of change. Sorry; this makes no sense. If the grammar of a language changes dramatically, then the language has changed greatly, and we cannot pretend otherwise merely because the pronunciation hasn't changed much. > And perhaps the phonological gap is a truer > measure, if there is any reliable measure at all. There is no acceptable metric for determining degree of change. But it is certainly out of the question to assign phonological change arbitrarily greater weight than any other kind of change. [on Pama-Nyungan] > But I want to point out that there are equally members of that family that > appear not to have changed much at all. I don't think so. Most Pama-Nyungan languages have not undergone the exceptionally dramatic phonological changes called 'initial-dropping', but they have still undergone plenty of change. It is true that Proto-Pama-Nyungan * 'dog' survives as 'dog' in modern Yidiny. But then it is also true that PIE * 'nephew' survives as 'nephew' in modern Romanian. However, we should not conclude that Romanian is practically unchanged from PIE: it isn't. > In fact, the high convergence > percentages theorized by Dixon were meant to account for the large amount > of commonality between many of those languages. As I understand it, > those who disagree with him about the degree of convergence have argued > instead for a high degree of conservatism in those Pama-Nyungan > languages. And that does not mean that those languages did not change or > even change a lot. It's rather that as much as they did change, they > never change much. Well, there are certain typological characteristics which have proved to be stable in most Pama-Nyungan languages other than those undergoing initial-dropping. But P-N languages have still undergone a very significant degree of change. Neighboring P-N languages are typically not mutually comprehensible at all. > And, perhaps, even if some IE languages show a certain amount of > "similarity" in sound systems, it in no ways means they did not change > for 3000 years before attestation. It may be that they changed often, > but through all those changes they never changed that much. Similarity in sound systems is not a good metric for degree of divergence. 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 Sat Jul 14 08:45:42 2001 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 04:45:42 EDT Subject: Proto-Celtic & Proto-Fenno-Ugric in Herodotus and C. Ptolemy Message-ID: In a message dated 7/14/01 2:00:28 AM Mountain Daylight Time, g_sandi at hotmail.com writes: > Research indicates that there was some shared geographical areas in Central > Europe -- well, if you're referring to Magyars when you say "Hungarian", it would be extremely difficult for them to cross paths with the prehistoric Celts, since the Magyars didn't arrive in Europe until the 9th century CE. There were certainly Celts in what later became Hungary, but the inhabitants at the time were Thracian, Sarmatian, and later Germanic and Slavic. The area was largely Slav-speaking when the Magyars showed up in the 800's CE. There is clear evidence of PIE contact with proto-Ugrian, and of course later contacts between Indo-Iranian, Slavic, Baltic, and Germanic and various F-U languages, but the Celts are about as unlikely a candidate as you could find for such interaction, since they were a south-central European group and their extension eastwards in historic times didn't come anywhere near the F-U speakers of their time. From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Jul 15 06:16:39 2001 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 09:16:39 +0300 Subject: Omniscience [was Re: German (was:Dubya and before that, minimal pairs)] In-Reply-To: <3B395A88.CE56139@memphis.edu> Message-ID: On Tue, 26 Jun 2001, Leo A. Connolly wrote: > Robert Whiting wrote: >> ... I had a German-speaking >> colleage who pronounced English as [w] (as in "willage"). When I >> pointed out to her that she could easily pronounce the [v] sound in >> she said, "Oh, no, German doesn't have that sound -- we use >> for [f] like in . Well, what can you say? Now if 'village' >> were written *, she would have had no trouble pronouncing it. > Sure she would have. The fact is, some Germans pronounce as > labiodental [v], while others use a bilabial fricative. When speaking > English, the latter use the bilabial fricative in lieu of the English > bilabial glide /w/ and the labiodental fricative /v/. Since this is > obviously wrong in each instance, but English has no bilabial fricative, > English speakers usually believe these Germans have said [v] instead of > /w/ and [w] instead of /v/, when in fact they said neither. Spelling > had nothing to do with her pronunciation problems. My only problem with this scenario is how do it know? How does this highly intelligent sound know that when it appears in English it has to sound like [v] but when it appears in English it has to sound like [w]? And if this sound is that smart, won't it eventually take over the world? It has already made my Austrian colleague into a German. But it is good to know that it is possible to pronounce so apodictically about the speech habits of someone that one has never met or conversed with. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Jul 17 17:28:19 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 13:28:19 EDT Subject: Thresholds of Comprehensibility Message-ID: In a message dated 7/14/01 2:12:22 AM, anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi writes: << At least of earlier in this discussion, the issue was the "rate of change" in a *language*, not in the phonological manifestations of some individual lexical items. Are you suggesting that the rate of language change could be measured by counting sound changes in individual words? And what "particular words" are you referring to? >> This happens. In the course of these discussions, things switch around so much, I end up on the other side of the fence. My position all along has been that "linguistic rate of change" (the words are Larry Trask's) is not a coherent concept and therefore deserves no scientific "uniformity through time" status. And that therefore it says nothing scientifically about the timeline of IE Language. My offer of how a statistical rate of change might go was not so much to advocate one, but hopefully describe how such an analysis might go - to be scientifically valid. Whether it's feasible or not is another matter. Your post appears to be saying, on the other hand, two different things. On one hand you write: <> (Caps are mine.) Then on the other hand you write: <<"rate of change" in a *language*, not in the phonological manifestations of some individual lexical items... Note that counting sound changes in *individual* word-forms is irrelevant, if the "rate of change" of the *language* is to be measured...>> Hopefully, you see the problem in this. You appear to be saying that you DON'T know what rate of change in a language is, but you are SURE that it cannot be measured by changes in individual sounds or words. Now, I don't know whether the latter is true or not. I think that one would have to do some real measuring among recorded languages to know the answer to that. But it is not logical to eliminate such a way of defining "rate of change in a language", when you say you have no definition of those terms yourself. <> BUT "key indicators" are established fact in statistical science. Yes, you can measure and predict the movement of whole systems based on certain "parts" of that system. The way you arrive at what these indicators are is not essentially theoretical. It is empirical. You do before and after's on existing systems until you find those elements which best correlate with the changes of the system as a whole. (This is the way, for example, we calculate the age of planetary bodies through the measurement of isotopic half-lives.) Then you extend those measures to unattested systems. The same applies to the "what is a sound change" question. For these purposes, relevant sound change definition comes from what actually would work best in terms of producing an accurate outcome with regard to time of change in recorded languages. There may in fact be no averageable correlation between time and particular sound changes. But that is not something you decide based on theory. That is something you would test, before you come to that conclusion. So, going back to my point, I think you've reached conclusions that are way ahead of what you can say on a simple logical basis. You wrote: <> I think this is wrong. What I was suggesting was that "dissimilarity" can be measured on an objective basis. (Or as objective as human subjects can be measured - which is objective enough.) One definition of dissimilarity that can obviously be measured is the point at which changes cross over into incomprehensibility. And this would apply to sounds, grammar and even syntax. And though the measure is binary (yes or no), binary data can carry enormous meaning when viewed cumulatively, across a language system. < *v obviously creates less dissimilarity between cognates than a change *w > *q.>> A good question to ask yourself is why you agree. Is it because of the difference in wave patterns on an oscilloscope? Or is it because of the musculature it takes to make those sounds? Is it just "how different" they sound? Or how different they sound to the people who actually live with the language? I'd suggest that you consider that the real test of difference might be in the ears of mathematically averaged listeners. If listeners expect w > q, perhaps w > v might be more "dissimilar." (Benji Ward - who I keep going back to - noted that there is an important difference between how a sound change originates/developes versus how it spreads. If w > q were somehow spreading fashionably, then w > v might sound odd indeed. In the ears of statistically sampled listeners.) Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Jul 19 21:04:47 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 17:04:47 EDT Subject: Descent vs. Influence Message-ID: In a message dated 7/13/2001 12:28:10 AM, dlwhite at texas.net writes: << Rumanian has some resemblances to Latin and some resemblances to Albanian. Yet the resemblances are of fundamentally different kind. Its resemblances to Latin have to do with the descent over time of the set of arbitrary correspondences between sounds and meanings that any language must have. Its resemblances to Albanian on the other hand relate not to sound-meaning correspondences but rather to things like the distinctions made, ordering of elements, and so on. >> So, is that what you consider the difference between descent and influence? - sound-meaning correspondences = descent distinctions made, ordering of elements and so on = influence So where one finds systematic "sound-meaning correspondence", are those forms indicative of "descent?" I just want to be sure that is what you are saying. <> Well, so far, you haven't defined the difference EXCEPT as a conclusion. Unless you consider the above a definition of descent. Lets' ask the question again. When "resemblances" show systematic correspondence, how does one distinguish the difference again? <> It's all a matter of POV. Consider the perspective that it might be front-sliding. Regards, Steve Long From acnasvers at hotmail.com Fri Jul 20 09:47:29 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 09:47:29 +0000 Subject: Uniformitarian Principle Message-ID: Phil Jennings (2 Jul 2001) wrote: >The basic subject here is the "rate of change" of human languages, and >whether that rate itself changes (accelerates / decelerates) over time, as >a consequence of other factors that have changed over human history. In >physics, we are pleased to know that the rate of (locational) change of >falling objects increases with mass and decreases with distance, in >accordance with laws described by Isaac Newton. Gravity is a constant, >but it is contingent on mass and distance. This is a rather severe mangling of Newtonian mechanics, and in fact contradicts Galileo's observation that gravitational acceleration is independent of the falling object's mass, which Newton neatly explains. Next time, consult an introductory textbook of calculus-based physics. >Philosophically, language belongs in two places, (1) in the individual >toolbox of each language speaker, and (2) in the community of those who >use language to understand each other. If the rate of change of human >languages is governed by laws to do with individual ears, brains, mouths, >vocal cords, et cetera, and these physical attributes have not changed >over thousands of years, then the rate of change of human languages can >intelligently be assumed to be constant. That wouldn't be a very intelligent assumption. Nature is full of discontinuous processes like earthquakes, landslides, and lightning bolts which do _not_ involve any change in physical laws. >If the rate of change of human languages is governed by laws to do with how >often humans talk to others in their community, to strangers, to people with >different areas of expertise, and so forth, then as society gets more complex >and populations increase, the rate of change will accelerate or decelerate >through time. It has been tacitly assumed that a _single_ rate of change is valid. Language has many aspects, and there is no _a priori_ reason to suppose that the rates of change of all subsystems of a given language are functions of a single parameter. Nor is there an _a priori_ reason to assume or imply that rates of change should accelerate or decelerate smoothly. >Larry Trask has given us the history of Basque as an instance where the >rate of language change decreased as Basque society grew increasingly >engaged with a complex world. This is certainly the opposite of what I'd >expected, in arguing for a gradual increase in the rate of change of >languages over time, which is what I'd theorized in a prior post. >However, in a contrary way, it is also evidence for hypothesis (2), >substituting deceleration for acceleration. I suspect that Larry Trask >would like to be armed with a hundred instances of rates of change >veering one way or the other without respect to any societal factors >whatever. This would be evidence that rates of change are truly random, >and uniformitarianism is the best way to smooth across several millennia >of random ups and downs. No, that would merely be evidence that rates of linguistic change are independent of societal factors. It wouldn't tell us that the rates are truly random (i.e. independent of _all_ factors). Larry Trask's example of Basque, John McLaughlin's example of Comanche, and the well-known Great Vowel Shift of Middle English have two things in common. They involve systematic shifting of phonemes over a finite interval (50-100 years) and no apparent correlation with external (non-linguistic) factors. This type of systematic articulatory shift gives quantifiable rates of change, since the average position of the relevant articulatory organ for each phoneme actually moves some slight distance per decade in the standard speaker's head. These shifts also appear to be practically decoupled from other ongoing _linguistic_ phenomena like syntactic shifts and lexical turnover. Hence they provide a good opportunity for adapting a physical model to one particular class of linguistic changes. It is qualitatively clear that the rates of change in the phonemic shifts mentioned are strongly non-uniform: the episodes of rapid shifting have definite beginnings and endings. Someone has used the term "punctuated equilibria" from the Eldridge-Gould model of speciation, which in my opinion doesn't belong here. Analogies between evolutionary biology and linguistic change are very poor, not least because language is inherently incapable of reaching equilibrium. Instead, phonemic shifting suggests classic stick-slip behavior, or Reid's elastic-rebound theory of earthquakes. In a given language, certain phonemes are under "stress" to change position, but are held in place by "static friction". At low values of "stress", the "force" tending to move the phonemes is balanced by an opposing "frictional force". At some higher value of "stress", this "static frictional force" is overcome and movement begins. Its indefinite acceleration is prevented by "dynamic frictional force". As the phonemes move, the "stress" is reduced until its "force" is overcome by the opposing "dynamic frictional force", bringing things to a halt, back into the regime of "static frictional force". I used the annoying quotation marks because the actual quantities in phonemic shifts are only _analogous_ to the mechanical ones whose names I have borrowed. Nevertheless the linguistic quantities are real and, in principle at least, measurable. Instead of trying to beat professional comparativists at their own game, this is the sort of thing Steve Long should be doing, since his voice has been the loudest in calling for the quantification of historical linguistics. >This is an application of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to language >change. We don't know => we can't know => there are no consistent factors >out there to be known. It's odd to find linguists reconciled to >randomness re. rates of language change, when they delight in systems and >consistency in all other areas. This mumbo-jumbo is no application of Heisenberg's principle. Consult a junior-level or senior-level modern-physics textbook, not watered-down popular Sunday-supplement hogwash. >Also, the evidence in Larry's hundred instances is anecdotal in the >absence of a consensual measuring system, and some anecdotes, however >entertaining, will be wrong. Well, I hope the examples of systematic phonemic shifts offer at least a starting point for an objective measuring system. If it turns out possible to deal with simple phonemic shifts this way, then similar applications of physical models _may_ work for some of the other aspects of historical linguistics. DGK From r.piva at swissonline.ch Fri Jul 20 07:43:26 2001 From: r.piva at swissonline.ch (Renato Piva) Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 15:43:26 +0800 Subject: bishop Message-ID: 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 From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Wed Jul 25 16:36:34 2001 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 19:36:34 +0300 Subject: bishop In-Reply-To: <013a01c0f5b2$d394c4e0$b402703e@edsel> Message-ID: [Sorry for all the quoted material (and even doubly quoted). It was the only way I could see to tie the whole thing together.] On Fri, 15 Jun 2001, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: > 4. We also have cattus > gat(t)o, and in a very different context, but > under the same constraints I believe, Konstantinopolis > Istambul, a > far too complex name for the invading Turks, who didn't understand a > word of Greek. They just kept the two syllables that caught most > attention STAN-POL, plus voicing and adding an epenthetic vowel to > make it pronouncible to them. (Like 'e-special' in Spanish). I wonder > if they ever realized its true meaning (Christian emperor > Constantine's city), because otherwise they would probably have > changed it. Note that the reconstruction as a derivation from 'eis > te:n polin' is a 19th c. linguist's fable based on the mistaken idea > that the same rules apply when a word jumps between two unrelated (or > perceived to be so) languages, as during the historical evolution of > the same language. Then, on Tue, 26 Jun 2001 petegray wrote: > Why do you claim, Ed, that eis te:n polin > istambul involves rules > jumping languages? Wasn't the contemporary Greek pronunciation > /i:sta:mbulin/? It would simply be taken over as a meaningless > phonetic string. And on Mon, 2 Jul 2001 12:51:46 +0200 Eduard Selleslagh replied: > I never said that: I said Konstantinópolis > Istambul was the > consequence of jumping languages, and that 'eis te:n polin' was a 19th > century invention (reconstruction, without any attestation) by > linguists that thought that when a word is loaned by another, very > different, language, the same rules as in language evolution should > apply. > In Byzantine (and New) Greek 'eis te:n pólin' would have been (would > be) pronounced 'istimbóli(n)', with two i's and o instead of u. The > Turkish accent is on 'a' (Istámbul > Ger. Stambul), which shows that > the I is prothetic, while the derivation from 'eis te:n pólin' would > have had the accent on the 'u' (Istambúl). Even less than half a > century ago, many Classicists studying ancient Greek hardly ever > bothered about the notoriously capricious (to westerners, that is) > Greek accent. To the Turks, all the syllables of Konstantinopolis > apparently formed a meaningless string, as I noted before. And on Mon, 2 Jul 2001 Leo A. Connolly wrote: > petegray wrote, in response to Ed Selleslagh: >> Why do you claim, Ed, that eis te:n polin > istambul involves rules >> jumping > languages? Wasn't the contemporary Greek pronunciation >> /i:sta:mbulin/? It would simply be taken over as a meaningless >> phonetic string. > should already have been something like [is ti(m) > bolin], as in current Greek. The vowels would be all wrong. And why > on earth would the Greeks have given something meaning 'to the city' > as the name of their capital? Ed is right: that etymology is a fable, > but it's so bad I'd be reluctant to blame it on a linguist. It's in a > class with _tip_ 'gratuity' < T(o) I(nsure) P(rompt) S(ervice), or > **** < F(or) U(nlawful) C(arnal) K(nowledge). It's amazing how many > people accept such things, but linguists shouldn't. And finally, on Fri, 6 Jul 2001 colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) wrote: > Pete Gray: >> Why do you claim, Ed, that eis te:n polin > istambul involves rules >> jumping languages? Wasn't the contemporary Greek pronunciation >> /i:sta:mbulin/? It would simply be taken over as a meaningless >> phonetic string. > why is this a problematic explanation? Because it is unlikely to have happened. Not that it is impossible as a theoretical concept, but the outcome is wrong. Failure to perceive the semantic content of a string of foreign phonemes in place names (especially if it isn't known to the local inhabitants) is such a commonplace that that it is the most common (and likely) explanation of why place names generally aren't translated into other languages, simply transcribed and phonetically adjusted. Pentti Aalto once told me a story about a lake in Karelia which the locals called simply 'järvi' "the lake". Then the Russians came and asked "what is the name of the lake?" They were told, and so the name in Russian became Ozero Järvi ("Lake Lake"). Then the Germans came and asked what the name of the lake was and were told and so the German name of the lake became Ozerojärvisee ("Lake Lake Lake"). I don't know if the story is true or not, but Pentti Aalto told a good story. However, if one looks at the old British survey maps of Iraq, one finds a number of oft repeated names of tells such as Tell Mabarif ("I don't know") and Tell Shu'ismo ("what's its name"). The surveyors asked the locals for the names of the tells and simply recorded their answers. And I rather think that that is how the Turks came to call the city Istanbul. But not by wreaking havoc on a putative 'eis te:n pólin'. > Leo A. Connolly: >> should already have been something like [is ti(m) >> bolin], as in current Greek. The vowels would be all wrong. And why >> on earth would the Greeks have given something meaning 'to the city' >> as the name of their capital? > The capital was known as "i polis" the city for an extended period. But "i polis" doesn't look very much like Stambul (or even Istanbul) at all. > The study of toponyms is littered with such cases, cf. Scottish Gaelic > Gallaibh, Cataibh. My Gaelic isn't very good. Do these mean "into the city"? >> Ed is right: that etymology is a fable, but it's so bad I'd be >> reluctant to blame it on a linguist. > It's actually rather a good one. There's an article in Language: > Tiersma, Peter. 1982. "Local and General Markedness". L 58: 832-849. > whch deals precisely with such cases, where placenames or nouns > denoting location locative or directonal forms become unmarked Yes, and the ancient Assyrians always referred to Assur as 'a:lum' "the city", but nobody else did. There is simply no need to derive Istanbul from any form of Greek 'polis' other than its original one: Konstantinopolis. Anything else is an Occam's Razor violation. It is extremely common cross-linguistically for place names, especially long ones (over about three syllables) to become shortened by processes that have nothing to do with regular sound changes in the language involved. It is a sort of way of accommodating a natural tendency (frequently used forms tend to be easy to articulate). It is also in keeping with a general tendency to associate the unmarked form with the most common function. Such processes can involve the simplification of clusters, the elision of one or more syllables or syllable segments from the beginning, the end, or out of the middle or a combination of any of these. When we observe such developments as: Bethlehem --> Bedlam Alabama --> 'Bama Birmingham --> Brum Kürfürstendamm --> Ku'damm Worcester --> Wooster Magdalene --> Maudlin (pronunciation only) Mississippi --> Missisip Missouri --> Mizzou Lancaster --> Lancs Lugdunum --> Lyon Neapolis --> Napoli Philadelphia --> Philly Indianapolis --> Indy etc,, etc., etc. it makes it easy to see how Istanbul could have gotten the way it is. Regardless of how these transformations may have come about, if San Francisco can become Frisco, I can see no reason to doubt that Konstantinopolis could have become StaNbul or StaNboli (N for [m] or [n] depending phonotactics of the language involved) in the common speech of the time (however it may have been written). Thus German has Stambul and Turkish has Istanbul with the normal prothetic vowel used to resolve initial consonantal clusters (cf. Smyrna --> Izmir, etc.). My conclusion would be that Konstantinopolis > Stambul/Istanbul has nothing to do with jumping languages or with any putative derivation from 'eis te:n pólin'. And I would doubt that it was the Turks who took the two most prominent syllables of an unanalyzable phonetic string for the name of the city. I expect that that happened long before the Turks got there. The Turks probably just took the current unmarked form, Stamboli (or the like) and adapted it to their own phonology. >> It's in a class with _tip_ 'gratuity' < T(o) I(nsure) P(rompt) >> S(ervice), or **** < F(or) U(nlawful) C(arnal) K(nowledge). > No,it isn't. Not quite. The difference is that these examples are really just jokes, a form of word play. I once wrote several joke papers for a friend (a shortschrift, so to speak) that abounded in entities such as the Sam Houston Institute of Technology and the Free University of Central Kentucky. On the other hand, 'eis te:n pólin' as the derivation of Istanbul looks more like what I would classify as a (semi-)learnéd folk etymology. Done by someone who could recognize the similarity of the Greek words to Istanbul, but who was unaware of the phonological difficulties, and especially unaware of the fact that there is no need to account for the prothetic vowel of Istanbul with a Greek form. That is the one thing about Istanbul that is unmistakably Turkish. And if you don't need this, then the whole thing just falls apart. I would tend to blame it on a philologist familiar with Greek but not Turkish rather than a linguist. >> It's amazing how many people accept such things, but linguists >> shouldn't. > Yes they should. It's part of the warp and woof of linguistics, much > more so than various obscurantist mathematical formulations. Linguists should take cognizance of them, but not be taken in by them. Word play can provide important insights into how speakers view the underlying structure of their language. Finally, I would like to comment on a remark by Ed: > I wonder if they ever realized its true meaning (Christian emperor > Constantine's city), because otherwise they would probably have > changed it. Istanbul was often referred to by the Turks as Islambul. One particularly finds this on Ottoman coins struck there. Obviously the -bul element was recognized as "city." The Turks weren't stupid even if they didn't speak an Indo-European language. :) Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From jer at cphling.dk Fri Jul 20 15:50:27 2001 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 17:50:27 +0200 Subject: Lehmann's Syllabicity In-Reply-To: <002f01c10bce$c6bf9f60$19444241@swbell.net> Message-ID: On Fri, 13 Jul 2001, proto-language [i.e., Pat Ryan - JER] wrote: > [...] > Let us assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that some unspecified > language earlier than but ancestral to IE had a structure in which > differences of vowel-quality signaled lexical differences: *men- /= *man- /= > *mon-. This is certainly justifiable on typological grounds. > First, I would like to know how list-members believe these lexical > differences were maintained in IE. In Indo-Iranian where this actually happened, the various sources just merged. I see no objection to the view that the widely monotonous vocalism of PIE has passed through a comparable collapse. The actual event of merger apparently antedates the protolanguage quite a bit, for there has been at least time to create - or borrow and retain - words with other vocalisms than /e/. It would also be reasonable to suppose that the many vocalic alternations (ablaut "grades") depart from an already-collapsed unitary /e/ than from a retained diversity of vowel timbres that just ended up parallel even after the mergers. This pushes unitary /e/ back into pre-ablaut pre-PIE and leaves ample time for later developments that blurr the picture a bit. One may also note that the IE ablaut types can even be detected on the sole basis of a single IE language as, say, Greek which is certainly not contemporaneous with the protolanguage. Jens From connolly at memphis.edu Sat Jul 21 03:48:44 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 22:48:44 -0500 Subject: Lehmann's Syllabicity Message-ID: Pat Ryan wrote: > There are a number of IEists who do not subscribe to Lehmann's theory of > "syllabicity", I don't, of course, but I think we've through that already. > which he originated to explain the unusual fact that most IE > roots display a front-back vowel (also, potentially no vowel) contrast, which > indicates morphosemantic differences only --- not lexicosemantic ones. > Unusual because in the great majority of languages around the world, varying > root-vowels indicate lexical rather than morphological differences (Semitic > sharing this peculiarity though perhaps not its parent PAA). ....... > Let us assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that some unspecified > language earlier than but ancestral to IE had a structure in which > differences of vowel-quality signaled lexical differences: *men- /= *man- > /= *mon-. This is certainly justifiable on typological grounds. I have absolutely no evidence for what I'm about to say, so please: it is mere speculation -- Gedankenlinguistik, wenn man's so nennen will. It is the merest possibility and for that reason not worth flaming in a refutation. 1. The proposed men- *man- *mon- opposition is somewhat weird in that it has three non-high vowels: where are *min- and *mun-? 2. This suggests that an original distinction was restructured when /e/ and /o/ were used to signal certain morphological categories. They could replace each other as required. They could also be added to /i/ and /u/, producing the diphthongal ablaut series we know and love. 3. It is well known that [a] is at least extremely rare in indisputably IE roots, except in proximity to an "a-coloring laryngeal". There has recently been a discussion on this list proposing that non-laryngeal [a] in Northern European forms means that these are not PIE in origin. This could mean either that (a) an earlier *man- merged with something else (*men- and/or *mon-) in most environments, or (b) that there was no earlier /man-/. Since four-vowel, a-less systems exist, neither possibility seeems better than the other. > First, I would like to know how list-members believe these lexical > differences were maintained in IE. My speculations suggest that many such lexical differences were precisely *not* maintanied. They entail that the root types /men-/ and /mon-/ (and /man-/, if it existed), merged as what we might call /men-/ or even /mVn-/. And if the analysis was /wVn-/ (/V/ a non-high vowel with features to be added by morphology), extension of the morphological e:o ablaut to stems with original /i u/ would be readily understandable. Two final comments: 1. These speculations apply independent of whether PIE was a descendant of Proto-Nostratic or even Proto-World. They are triggered by internal IED phenomena. 2. Again, they are *SPECULATIONS*. Please don't pounce too hard on such a tempting target. Regards Leo Connolly From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Jul 20 16:33:27 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 17:33:27 +0100 Subject: Lehmann's Syllabicity Message-ID: >... the unusual fact that most IE >roots display a front-back vowel (also, potentially no vowel) contrast, >which indicates morphosemantic differences only --- not lexicosemantic >ones. The word "vowel" needs defining here! Woul you count a sequence "eu" as the same as, or different from, the vowel "e"? If (as I believe we must) we count it as different, then your problem disappears. Ignoring the e/o/zero ablaut, PIE shows: e eu ei er el em en eH 1 -2 -3 - etc All of these carry lexicosemantic differences. Even if we don't like the sequences er, el, em, en as diphthongs, we must still recognise the zero grades as vocalic elements - vowels - with lexicosemantic significance. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Jul 20 16:49:35 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 17:49:35 +0100 Subject: Lehmann's Syllabicity Message-ID: >the unusual fact that most IE >roots display a front-back vowel (also, potentially no vowel) contrast, >which indicates morphosemantic differences only --- not lexicosemantic >ones. ... >I would first like to learn what list-members consider to be the better >alternatives for an explanation of this phenomenon. A similar case can be made for Sanskrit, where we do have some information about its origin. Sanskrit can (almost) be described as a one-vowel language in the same way as PIE almost can - we had this suggestion about a year ago on the list, I believe. In Sanskrit it is due to the collapse of original short *e, *a and *o into the single vowel . There are sufficient traces of both *e and *o for us to be sure that it is not a continuation of a one-vowel system from PIE, but is properly derived from a situation with at least a three-way distinction. We might therefore wonder if the so-called PIE one-vowel system is due to collapse from an earlier situation. This is what is argued by the Nostraticists. Kaiser & Shevoroshkin suggest a complete collapse of short vowels in "West Nostratic" while they are kept separate in Uralic and Altaic and Dravidian. Bomhard's view (1996) is rather more complicated, and therefore more nuanced. In essence he avoids the idea of vowel collapse, but does allow certain diphtongs and simple vowels to merge into a PIE system from which IE could develop through further changes. We must also add in here two theories that affect vowels: Firstly, that a < *eH pushed and original **a to *e in some IE dialects. Secondly, that an original **ka, **ke, **ko collapsed inot the ke, k'e, kwe we see in PIE. Peter From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Jul 20 20:37:47 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 15:37:47 -0500 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: Dear Douglas and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Douglas G Kilday" Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2001 1:27 AM >> [Ed] >> I don't think there is an -r/rn alternation. In my view, the -n after the -r >> is an (abbreviated) adjective-forming suffix indicating origin, source etc. >> Cf. Slavic -no (hladno, krasno...) or even Lat./Etrusc. -na. > [DGK] > You're right; this isn't really an "alternation", but the attachment of an > adjectival suffix directly to a neuter stem, as seen also in Lat. > 'brazen' < *ayes-neos. My views were poorly worded, and Patrick Ryan seems > to think I was referring to -r/n- alternation, which is an entirely > different matter. Nevertheless I think Lat. 'ivory' shows enough IE > behavior to be considered a native IE word, whether or not it has cognates > in I-Ir or other branches. > Regarding PCR's objection that the long vowel in Lat. 'foot' arose by > compensative lengthening from *peds instead of gradation: Palmer gives this > as an example of gradation. Apart from this crude appeal to authority, we > may note 'one-handled sacrificial vessel', gen. , which > shows that Latin d-stems did _not_ regularly undergo compensation of *-ds in > the nom. sg. [PCR] I perhaps worded my reply poorly. I did *not* think you were acknowledging a *r/*n alternation. I was merely describing what I thought might have been the impression you were quite well correcting. The example you give, capis, seems to me to be different. if R = root vowel, it is CRCid-. pe:s, of course, would be CRd-. This could, of course, be a Dehnstufe but does not the absence of /d/ make one question that a bit. Furthermore, gradation is normally associated with syntactic or grammatical usages. What function would the Dehnstufe serve here? 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, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Jul 20 21:43:21 2001 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 17:43:21 EDT Subject: Sound changes versus sound changes Message-ID: In a message dated 7/20/01 2:48:10 PM Mountain Daylight Time, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: > There is nothing "extreme" about French phonology, which in fact is rather > unremarkable by world standards. It is merely that French is rather more > different in pronunciation from Proto-Romance than are most Romance > languages. -- rather like English vs. a vs. the other Germanic languages, perhaps. From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jul 21 00:33:54 2001 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 17:33:54 -0700 Subject: The Single Parent Question In-Reply-To: <00c101c10cb2$8f71dac0$e1474241@swbell.net> Message-ID: At 05:15 PM 7/14/01 -0500, proto-language wrote: >Albeit I certainly agree with much that you write, I continue to think it is a >mistake to pretend that linguistic methodology is so unique. Any science that >looks at different expressions of anything, and attempts to reason backwards >to what the parent expression might be, is analogous to linguistics --- in my >opinion. In particular, the methods of evolutionary biology are quite similar. Some are even, for all practical purposes, the same. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Jul 21 08:36:25 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 04:36:25 EDT Subject: The Single *PIE Village Theory Message-ID: In a message dated 7/20/2001 3:32:45 PM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes: << I'll tell you what. If you can show me a recognized PIE tree with a European naming pattern comparable to that of Taxus baccata, I'll publicly admit that my efforts to use yews for the IE homeland problem were in vain. >> I was doing a quick look at the IE box and of course Doug Kilday's post made me look and now I have to answer at least this part. First of all, the arrowwood example - which you dismissed - is how I must understand the ordinary behavior of tree-naming on a local level - before science, trade or dictionarians intervene. All our historical experience with "common names" for trees and plants is that they are highly local and irregular. I cannot with any integrity accept the idea that most *PIEists even knew the name for a yew tree or most other trees. And that is because when we look at pre-lierate societies we see that such comprehensive distinguishing between flora is limited to a specialized group within the group, if it is anyone's job at all. So, if I were to look for the source of the names of the yew, it would not be *PIE speakers. It would be linguistic communities that would have some real vested interest in finding a common name for the yew among themselves. These would be people who made a living out of trees and wood - especially those along the intergroup supply chain who were trading wood in a manner that what tree the wood came from would make a difference. We have evidence that stone and metal workers were specialists at a very early date. We have evidence of trade in worked goods ranging several hundred miles and that evidence extends from Cro-Magnon to the mesolithic obsidian cutters of the Italian coast - even the Iceman's arrow points were from a site 300 miles from his home. Workers in wood, bone, tusk and antler would have looked to extend their markets beyond a few local customers - the other trades were doing it. This means they needed to identify the raw materials they needed to tree-cutters and describe the wood they used to traders and customers. And the primary "name" standardizers would be those who moved goods from market to market, buying and selling raw materials and finished products. That is the primary way I see a standard name coming about, reconciling the highly observable inconsistency of local names - and that would include early IE speakers. Scientific botany is comparatively recent - its an anachronism. The spread of a religion might also standardize the names of some sacred trees or wood. But the need to spec wood for trade all the way back to trees would be the first likely candidate for any tree name that spans beyond local villages. If this has any possible connection with "a recognized PIE tree with a European naming pattern," then I might be able to answer your question. Regards, Steve Long From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Jul 20 16:56:21 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 17:56:21 +0100 Subject: real proto-lang Message-ID: > Cannot one say that the "abstractionist position" is merely the > result of the application of the method, whereas everything beyond this > is an *interpretation* of this result? I would make the abstractionist position even thinner. It is not the final result of application of the method, but merely a description of the attested state of affairs. I think it is application of the method which moves beyond mere description to posit an original sound or root. Thus saying that the symbol *bh is a code for the correspondences in attested IE languages is mere description plus label; whereas positing an actual sound *bh is application of the method. Interpretation comes in when we then try to make sense of that sound, and say either that PIE needed to have *ph as well, or that the sound we write *bh was breathy voice, or allophonically aspirated, or a fricative or whatever. There are thus (for me) three stages, and the refusal to move from the first to the second seems an unnecessary limitation on what we can claim to know. Peter From jer at cphling.dk Sat Jul 21 15:22:56 2001 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 17:22:56 +0200 Subject: real proto-lang In-Reply-To: <000201c106cb$bd957160$db11073e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Sat, 7 Jul 2001, petegray wrote: > [...] > So [...] I think there are > advantages in treating our reconstructions as if they were actual spoken > human languages - even while admitting the limits of our knowledge. You're so right. We would not understand developments like {kw} > p or {gw} > b if we did not care about the phonetic substance; these changes are natural, i.e. small, because the elements concerned remain labialized stop at all stages. We wouldn't even understand a conditioned change like that of word-final *-m going to -n if we were not permitted to draw on our knowledge about the phonetic substance that tells us that the element is still a nasal consonant, even after the change. We would no doubt have to deal with suggestions like *deiwos > Eng. God for which there may just conceivable be parallels which we just don't bother to look for because we know it would be silly. If actual pronunciation counted for nothing such suggestions would have to be taken just as seriously as *nu: > Eng. now, at least until they had been properly checked. Since we do not normally do that, we do indeed work on the assumption that PIE and all the intermediate stages between it and the attested daughter languages were real and actually spoken languages. And that's what has taken us where we are. Jens From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Jul 21 07:33:18 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 08:33:18 +0100 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. Message-ID: da-von, da-r-auf etc > I have my doubts about the -r- as hiatus filling: in Dutch, the -r is always > present, just like in English.. > Ger. wo = Du. waar > Ger. da = Du. daar > So, I think it is the absence of -r- in German that requires an explanation. > Ed. Good thinking! I checked the etymology of da- and wo- in German, and you're absolutely right. Da was originally dar. Wo is less clear, but it appears to have been war (with a not o) - certainly that's how it appears in Gothic. So the -r- is a survival. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Jul 21 09:24:45 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 10:24:45 +0100 Subject: One Step at a Time Message-ID: > Suppose the parent of a "half-a-dozen languages" was a language that had > two different classes of verbs: those from a language X that conjugated one > way and those from a language Y that conjugated another way. ... To some extent this has happened within IE, with athematic verbs showing change in accent and vowel grade in certain forms, and thematic verbs which have a stable root. The former are well represented in Sanskrit, and the latter in Latin and Greek - though the separation is not as neat and complete as in your hypothetical situation. The comparative method here recognises the value of "relic" forms. Greek has been particularly useful in this respect. Although almost all its verbs are thematic like most in Latin, it preserves a good handful of relics which are in line with athematic verbs in Sanskrit. We might perhaps have found the route to reconstruction less clear without Greek, but we ought to have been able to reconstruction the PIE situation nonetheless. Peter From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jul 22 19:31:41 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2001 15:31:41 EDT Subject: One Step at a Time Message-ID: In a message dated 7/20/2001 8:29:01 AM, alrivera at southern.edu writes: << Suppose the parent of a "half-a-dozen languages" was a language that had two different classes of verbs: those from a language X that conjugated one way and those from a language Y that conjugated another way. (I think there was a Greek dialect of Arabic that had a feature like this mentioned on the list earlier?)>> In a message dated 7/20/2001 9:05:14 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk replied: <> Then why did Muke write "those from a language X that conjugated one way and those from a language Y that conjugated another way?" The point I believe of the hypothetical was two lines of genetic descent. And the key here is the assumption that there is only one ancestor language somewhere along the line. That assumption is NOT justified by the comparative method, which yields only ancestor forms. The idea that there has to be one "parent" somewhere comes from a different theory. If two languages can each contribute genetically distinct classes of verbs to one "daughter" language, then they can each contribute those classes to multiple "daughter" languages. There does not have to be a single language intervening, only original unitary ancestor forms coming from different earlier languages. << The comparative method has nothing to say about the origin of a proto-language, unless there are yet further languages that can be compared with it normally.>> But that's not true, for a number of reasons. One is that the "further languages" may be forced into a single parent based on a particular method of family tree construction. In fact, when the comparative method has "nothing to say" about the origin of certain forms, the tree model has often taken over and assigned those forms to the parent in any case. So that Prof Trask's "further language" will actually not be recognized as evidence of "the origins of the proto-language." If some of the "daughter" languages don't have one or the other verb classes, the assumption is often that those cases were "lost." All you need is three or four IE languages with both verb cases to assume that *PIE had both. So those "further languages" - which might only have had one class and point to multiple ancestry - may be of no consequence. (I once counted in Ringe's sample grid of IE "nodes" that nearly a third of all the individual forms he used to construct his tree were marked "lost" - meaning that they were not attested but were assumed to be in *PIE. I'm not positive but I think that if this assumption were not made Ringe may have gotten a very different result. I'm pretty sure that "parsimony" - the best match for the data - would have created a tree that looked more like a street map of lower Manhattan than the neat Christmas fir he got. And this even despite Ringe's strict screening for only genetic etymologies that were "certain.") What is interesting again here is that Prof Trask assumes that the "further languages" he mentions come later in the analysis. This is again the cart before the horse. Unless one knows the conclusions ahead of time, there should be no different treatment between the original set and the "further languages." They don't come in afterwards - logically they are part of the original analysis. In that case, when the "further languages" are included right from the start, multiple ancestors - according to Prof Trask - could be identified. But not, of course, if a single parent is expected. Once a single parent is assumed, all indications of multiple ancestry are considered innovations, borrowing, lost, etc. It is the assumption of single parentage that turns "other" genetic strains into non-genetic forms. This is the circular effect that can erase the possibility of multple ancestors, even if it is there. But the comparative method itself might possibly support EITHER conclusion. Regards, Steve Long From bronto at pobox.com Sun Jul 22 05:04:47 2001 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 22:04:47 -0700 Subject: Genetic Descent Message-ID: (dlwhite) >>>> what I am asserting is that the morphemes used in conjugation >>>> are very resistant to borrowing. ... (petegray) >>> The highly productive English morpheme -ess ... (bronto) >> is <-ess> used in conjugation? (petegray) > Oh, you mean "conjugation" as in the verb patterns of Latin and > other IE inflected languages? I dunno how dlwhite means it, but I understand `conjugation' to have something to do with inflection of verbs for person, number, tense and mood, none of which applies to a noun-suffix. (At least in languages with which I am acquainted. Are there languages in which one would normally say, for example, that Henri d'Orleans is the king-subjunctive of France?) > Then you cannot assert your statement > as something true of all languages, only of those which show > Latin-like conjugation. Which ultimately means IE. . . . What do you call it when Hebrew or Swahili verbs are inflected for person etc? -- Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/ From acnasvers at hotmail.com Wed Jul 25 09:49:09 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 09:49:09 +0000 Subject: Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent) Message-ID: Leo A. Connolly (7 Jul 2001) wrote: >Yes, they are originally separate constructions and verbs, but OE >_Tencean_ seems to have become extinct, its function being assumed by >_think_ < _Tyncean_. But I stick with my interpretation nonetheless, >since it parallels the development seen in _me TyrstT_ > _I thirst_, _me >hyngerT_ > _I hunger_, _me liketh_ > _I like_, where there was no >parallel verb with a personal experiencer subject. As for _meseems_ >(which sounds eminently plausible, though I cannot remember encountering >it), it took the other path toward resolving the problem: put the object >in object position and insert a dummy subject _it_ in preverbal >position. I really can't say that either of these solutions is better >than the other, only that both occurred. Yes, the vowels indicate that there must have been confusion of 'to think' with 'to seem' in Middle English, with the latter form eventually usurping the meaning of the former. Chaucer sometimes has the latter in the sense of the former, and the preterits are both : the distinction between OE 'thought' and 'seemed' has been obliterated. Instead of the Fillmorian analysis, I would draw a parallel with the use of for by some speakers of current English. Again the factitive has displaced the simple verb in the present. This is particularly common in the impersonal intransitive, e.g. "That doesn't set well with me.". However, since is much more common than was, and occurs widely in compounds, it seems unlikely that will ever completely displace . I must also question the Fillmorian view of "hunger" and "thirst". Chaucer has both a personal 'to have thirst' and an impersonal 'to cause thirst', the latter presumably from a PGmc factitive in *-jan which has fallen together in form with the simple verb. Likewise I posit *hungran 'to have hunger' beside the factitive *hungrjan > OE 'to cause hunger'. Instead of the brutally abrupt syntactic shift required by the Fillmorian scenario, we have paired constructions (personal simple, impersonal factitive) going back to Proto-Germanic of which one type gradually becomes extinct after the severe phonetic and morphologic restructuring of Middle English. Indeed Funk & Wagnalls (1903) give "hunger" [archaic] 'to make hungry; famish; starve' and "thirst out" 'cause to be thirsty; affect with thirst'. The factitives survived (as productive verbs, not isolates like "methinks") into obsolete Modern English, so they can hardly have been victims of abrupt Fillmorian shift in ME. As for "like", Whitehall gives the sense development as 'to be of like form' > 'be like' > 'be suited to' > 'be pleasing to'. "Me liketh" is an example of the fourth sense, which is now archaic in most dialects (but recall the 7-Up slogan "You like it; it likes you"). "I like" is a specialization of the third sense "I am suited to". It cannot plausibly be regarded as derived from the fourth sense by Fillmorian shift. The replacement of "meseems" by "it seems to me" and the perfectly acceptable variant "to me it seems" clarifies the matter. It has nothing to do with "case-grammar analysis" or any alleged thirsting by speakers to stick the "experiencer" in front of the sentence, since that didn't happen here (in fact, the "experiencer" was booted out of initial position). Instead, the radical restructuring of ME resulted in the obsolescence of certain sentence-frames. DGK From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jul 22 19:06:57 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2001 15:06:57 EDT Subject: Comprehensibility: sound vs grammar Message-ID: In a message dated 7/20/2001 4:48:10 PM, PROF TRASK WRITES: <> And so is there any way of objectively measuring degree of divergence? I WROTE: <> PROF TRASK REPLIED: <> Typical disparaging and groundless overstatement. First of all, you slip right into your usual conclusions - "changed greatly." Secondly, no one said a change in grammar doesn't change a language. My point was that morphology and grammar may PERHAPS least accurately reflect rates of degrees of change. What is the basis of your criticism here? What's your measure of change here? How do you measure change so that you can say a language changes "greatly" when a grammar changes "dramatically?" How do you measure any of that? Absolute statements. Conclusions with no objective basis. Ill-defined terms. The usual. The only reference I see to any measure you can offer is: <> Here you say that comprehensibility is some evidence of the degree of change. But does change in grammar have anywhere as much impact on comprehensibility as phonology? My statement was a PERHAPS. You act as if you have some special information that says otherwise and somehow clearly makes my statement "not make any sense." Do you have any proof of this, one way or the other? Or is this just another overstated impression of yours? Steve Long From mclasutt at brigham.net Wed Jul 25 22:43:32 2001 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 16:43:32 -0600 Subject: Michif In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [Rick Mc Callister wrote] How does Michif compare to Chinook jargon? Many years ago I saw a small book on Chinook Jargon that explained that the grammar was radically different from Chinook and that the vocabulary was largely derived from French --somewhere around 40% if I remember correctly. From what remember, French derived nouns included the feminine article <>. I have no idea how reliable the book was, but what I gather both the grammar and vocabulary seemed to be a compromise between French, Chinook and various other NW Native American languages. I don't think Chinook Jargon was used as anything other than a trade language but I may be mistaken [I respond] Michif, unlike Chinook Jargon, became a mixed language or creole (depending on your politics) rather quickly. It didn't linger as a trade language (pidgin) for very long. Chinook Jargon never became any community's mother tongue. Unlike Chinook Jargon, which reduced the complex morphology of Northwest Coast languages to a common and manageable subset with only very basic communicative power, Michif retained the complexity of the Cree verbal system, making very few (if any) compromises to French verb morphology. Michif retained from its Cree parent the ability to discuss complex issues needed in a mother tongue community. Chinook Jargon never rose above a strictly practically-oriented trade jargon. John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. Associate Professor, English Utah State University Program Director USU On-Line Linguistics http://english.usu.edu/lingnet (435) 797-2738 (voice) (435) 797-3797 (FAX) mclasutt at brigham.net From connolly at memphis.edu Sat Jul 21 04:34:13 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 23:34:13 -0500 Subject: Omniscience [was Re: German (was:Dubya and before that, minimalpairs)] Message-ID: >> Robert Whiting wrote: >>> ... I had a German-speaking >>> colleage who pronounced English as [w] (as in "willage"). When I >>> pointed out to her that she could easily pronounce the [v] sound in >>> she said, "Oh, no, German doesn't have that sound -- we use >>> for [f] like in . Well, what can you say? Now if 'village' >>> were written *, she would have had no trouble pronouncing it. Leo Connolly replied: >> Sure she would have. The fact is, some Germans pronounce as >> labiodental [v], while others use a bilabial fricative. When speaking >> English, the latter use the bilabial fricative in lieu of the English >> bilabial glide /w/ and the labiodental fricative /v/. Since this is >> obviously wrong in each instance, but English has no bilabial fricative, >> English speakers usually believe these Germans have said [v] instead of >> /w/ and [w] instead of /v/, when in fact they said neither. Spelling >> had nothing to do with her pronunciation problems. Robert Whiting rejoined: > My only problem with this scenario is how do it know? How does this > highly intelligent sound know that when it appears in English > it has to sound like [v] but when it appears in English it > has to sound like [w]? And if this sound is that smart, won't it > eventually take over the world? It has already made my Austrian > colleague into a German. But it is good to know that it is possible > to pronounce so apodictically about the speech habits of someone that > one has never met or conversed with. Several comments: 1. "It" (the sound, I presume) doesn't have to know anything. 2. Many millions of German speakers realize /v/ (written or, in foreign words, ) as a voiced bilabial fricative. These speakers then lack the voiced labiodental fricative, even though they have a voiceless labiodental /f/ written or . I know of no German speakers who realize German /v/ as [w], or who have a prevocalic [w] of any sort in their language. 3. Germans who possess [v] can, of course, handle initial English /v/ just fine with no special effort. Those who use the bilabial fricative cannot. And neither group does well with English /w/; without extensive practice, they produce [v] or the bilabial fricative for that one too. 4. My remark concerns how *English speakers* interpret the initial bilabial fricative. Since it's lacking in English, it is *always* wrong in an English word. Any many other scholars have noted that English speakers think that these folk perversely pronounce with [w] and with [v], when in fact they use the bilabial fricative for both. I repeat: this is not my analysis, but since I've observed the phenomenon myself, and have convinced a few people who had claimed that their spouses did it backwards in English to listen a bit more closely, whereupon they found that (mirabile dictu) I was right, I think it at least highly that your colleague talks as I said -- since millions of German speakers (probably half the country) use the bilabial fricative. 5. It did no good for you to point out that she could easily pronounce [v] in village, since she obviously could do nothing of the sort. She was probably, like most German speakers, utterly unaware of the irrelevant difference in place of articulation, just as they won't notice the irrelevant lack of aspiration in many South Germans' pronunciation of German /p t/. Your description suggests that she interpreted your comment as referring to the *letter* , which most commonly does stand for /f/. That she was aware of. Check her out again if you can. Otherwise, check the literature on bilabial fricatives in German. Regards leo Connolly From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Jul 21 17:02:48 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 12:02:48 -0500 Subject: Proto-Celtic & Proto-Fenno-Ugric in Herodotus and C. Ptolemy In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I suppose there are some legitimate, main-stream works on toponyms and personal names, etc. found in Herodotus, Ptolemy et al. Could someone list some book-length works? >In a message dated 7/14/01 2:00:28 AM Mountain Daylight Time, >g_sandi at hotmail.com writes: >> Research indicates that there was some shared geographical areas in Central >> Europe [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From dsalmon at salmon.org Mon Jul 23 22:44:10 2001 From: dsalmon at salmon.org (David Salmon) Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 15:44:10 -0700 Subject: 'albeit' Message-ID: I use this word regularly, both orally and in writing. Did not know it was missing or would have spoken up sooner. I think its use is not uncommon in the legal profession (of which I am a member), which is not averse to obsolete words and which has a particular need of words that make logical distinctions, such as "therefore," "however," "moreover," "but," and others. Funny, I've always thought of myself as simply having a larger than average vocabulary, a feature which also is the pride of the English language, and of Shakespeare. I do not think I violate its rules of good usage by employing it. "Trask's Law" is merely "Trask's Preference." By his rubric, the best communicator would be one who uses simple, everyday words, lest others fail to understand. The smaller and more au courant the vocabulary, the better, and certainly one must not use words he doesn't use. Actually, although ideas are often best expressed simply and clearly (when possible), I've always found that the use of uncommon words in the midst of otherwise simple speech or writing improves an argument, cements a point, if used with care and restraint. I've also never found others to have much problem understanding me. Trask's assumption that the masses are ignorant of the word "albeit" is elitist. :-) David currently of California From GthomGt at cs.com Thu Jul 26 14:53:47 2001 From: GthomGt at cs.com (GthomGt at cs.com) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 10:53:47 EDT Subject: Quotation in IE Message-ID: Dear List, I am presently working on a paper that deals, in part, with an anomolous use of the Sanskrit quotative particle *iti* in the Rgveda. Examiniation of the origins and development of the Sanskrit quotative has played a significant role in studies of India as a linguistic area, since Kuiper's claim that the Sanskrit developments indicate a very early influence of Dravidian syntax on quotation in the RV, and Hock's detailed, skeptical, response. I am looking for references to recent literature on the subject of quotation in IE, in particular in the use of specific lexica to mark reported speech, as opposed to reported speech with zero marking. I am also interested in your comments on the following observations: Compare Spanish `Si' [`Yes'] from Latin `Sic' [thus]. Also, consider the Latin forms ita, immo, etiam [all preserving the same pronominal stem i- -- ultimately deictic -- that we find in íti], as well as Latin sic itself [also sometimes `Yes']. Similarly, compare French `Oui', German`Ja' and English `Yes' itself, all preserving the same . Likewise Russian `Tak' = `So, thus, like that, well, yes.' In short, the semantic shift from `Thus' to`Yes' seems to have been a common one, as we can see also in the Sanskrit affirmatives tathA and om. I would also welcome comments on English quotatives "like" and "yes." Of course, acknowledgement of any and all help will be made in the paper when it is published. Thanks in advance, George Thompson From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Jul 27 10:49:49 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 11:49:49 +0100 Subject: 'albeit' In-Reply-To: <009a01c113c9$2fce7ba0$0100a8c0@Davod.rcn> Message-ID: My little posting on 'albeit' a couple of weeks ago has attracted quite a number of responses -- so many that I've lost track now, and I'm afraid I can't thank all the respondents by name, as I would normally do. For this I apologize. A very few respondents agree with me that the word has been resuscitated from near-extinction. Most, though, take issue, and report that they have used the word, or at least encountered it, without interruption for several decades. This disproportion doesn't surprise me, since members of the second group are more likely to reply to my assertion. It's interesting that some people report that the word has never gone out of use for them. Still, I insist that the word was seldom used in a very wide variety of contexts for a long time, before becoming far more prominent a few years ago. I strongly suspect that I could in principle document this by searching a corpus of texts published around twenty years ago, but I'm afraid I'm not going to make the effort. I have one further point to report. Just yesterday, I was looking at something written by one of my research students -- a native speaker of British English -- and I noticed that she had written "all be it". She is a woman in her forties, well educated and a senior teacher, and her English is generally excellent. So I have to assume that she had picked this up from hearing it spoken, and not from seeing it written, since her error is exactly the opposite of the "all-bite" pronunciation reported by a couple of correspondents. This example, I think, is consistent with my view that the word was until recently little used. There are just three particular points about 'albeit' I'd like to reply to. One respondent reports that he makes a semantic distinction between 'albeit' on the one hand and 'but' or 'though' on the other, in that 'albeit' means something like 'though, admittedly'. This is certainly news to me, and I'm curious to know whether anyone else does the same. Another queries my declaration that 'albeit' is pretentious. Well, I'm afraid I find it so. I am confident that I'm not alone here, but I haven't so far troubled to conduct a survey of my colleagues. Maybe one day I will, though perhaps such a survey really should have been carried out a few years ago, before the word became so prominent. For me, the word is right up there with 'aforementioned' as a piece of modern standard English. ;-) Another respondent drew attention to the use of 'albeit' as a subordinator, as in this example: "The Basques are suspicious of outsiders, albeit they are wonderfully hospitable once they get to know you." The respondent found this use much less acceptable than the other use of the word, and I agree: I don't regard this as English at all, even though I have begun to encounter examples of it in writing, and even though OED2 confirms that it was once English. A final comment on my facetious "law". I really do believe that very many people are eager to avoid plain words in favor of fancy ones, and that they are constantly looking for new fancy words, which they then go ahead and use even if they don't understand the words they have chosen. My forthcoming usage handbook lists piles of these. Just a few examples: 'utilize' for 'use' 'fortuitous' for 'lucky' 'author' for 'write' 'parent' for 'bring up' 'adequate' for 'enough' 'purchase' for 'buy' 'educator' for 'teacher' 'physician' for 'doctor' 'ruination' for 'ruin' I begin to think that this tendency may be an important force in language change, but I don't think we have an established name for it. Is there one? All I can think of are 'hyperurbanism' and 'inkhornism', but neither term seems to be right. Anyway, I'd like to thank all those who took the trouble to reply, and I'm sorry I can't list them all by name. 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 naddy at mips.inka.de Sat Jul 28 14:48:03 2001 From: naddy at mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber) Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2001 14:48:03 +0000 Subject: Omniscience Message-ID: Leo A. Connolly wrote: > 2. Many millions of German speakers realize /v/ (written or, in > foreign words, > ) as a voiced bilabial fricative. These speakers then lack the > voiced labiodental fricative, even though they have a voiceless > labiodental /f/ written or . I know of no German speakers who > realize German /v/ as [w], or who have a prevocalic [w] of any sort in > their language. > 3. Germans who possess [v] can, of course, handle initial English /v/ > just fine with no special effort. Those who use the bilabial fricative > cannot. And neither group does well with English /w/; without extensive > practice, they produce [v] or the bilabial fricative for that one too. I would like to add some personal facts to the debate: (a) When speaking English, I also suffer from substituting /w/ for /v/ at least sometimes. People have made fun of me about this and pointed out that I was saying e.g. "wideo" instead of "video". (b) I do NOT realize /v/ as a bilabial in my native German, I use plain [v]. (c) Although [w] doesn't exist in my native speech, I think I've learned it without much trouble. I have no problem distinguishing /v/ and /w/ in English. So how come I end up with confusing /w/ and /v/ in my pronunciation? (Nobody has ever told me that I substitute /v/ for /w/, but I suppose it happens, too.) There are many Germanic cognate words that have /v/ in German and /w/ in English, e.g. the question words/relative pronouns and various words such as, well, "word", "water", etc. I suspect this leads straightforward to overcompensation. On the other hand, there are many Latin-derived cognates that have /v/ in both languages. If a single phoneme must be mapped to two different phonemes in cognate words, it shouldn't come as a surprise that much confusion results. -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy at mips.inka.de From bronto at pobox.com Fri Jul 27 06:37:58 2001 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 23:37:58 -0700 Subject: Uniformitarian Principle Message-ID: > Phil Jennings (2 Jul 2001) wrote: >> . . . In physics, we are pleased to know that the rate of >> (locational) change of falling objects increases with mass >> and decreases with distance, in accordance with laws described >> by Isaac Newton. Gravity is a constant, but it is contingent >> on mass and distance. Douglas G Kilday wrote: > This is a rather severe mangling of Newtonian mechanics, and > in fact contradicts Galileo's observation that gravitational > acceleration is independent of the falling object's mass, > which Newton neatly explains. Next time, consult an introductory > textbook of calculus-based physics. I think you'll find that the mass of the attracting body is not entirely irrelevant. -- Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/ From parkvall at ling.su.se Thu Jul 26 13:40:29 2001 From: parkvall at ling.su.se (Mikael Parkvall) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 15:40:29 +0200 Subject: Michif In-Reply-To: Message-ID: John McLaughlin wrote: >Michif retained the complexity of the Cree verbal >system, making very few (if any) compromises to French verb morphology. There aren't really any _compromises_, but one interesting aspect of Michif (as if there were any uninteresting ones!) is that the few French verbs that there are in the language (including "avoir" and "être") basically retain French, rather than Cree, flexional paradigms. And let's not forget that most Michif speakers do not speak neither French nor Cree. >Chinook Jargon never rose above a strictly practically-oriented trade jargon. This is almost correct, but I apparently need to repeat what I wrote the other week -- it did nativise! In the Grand Ronde reservation of Oregon, Chinook Jargon was used as a home language and a mother tongue, though, admittedly, usually not people's _only_ mother tongue. /MP * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Mikael Parkvall Institutionen för lingvistik Stockholms Universitet SE-10691 STOCKHOLM +46 (0)8 16 14 41, +46 (0)8 656 68 24 (home) Fax: +46 (0)8 15 53 89 parkvall at ling.su.se Creolist Archives: http://www.ling.su.se/Creole From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu Thu Jul 26 20:06:40 2001 From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 16:06:40 -0400 Subject: Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > As for "like", Whitehall gives the sense development as 'to be of like form' > > 'be like' > 'be suited to' > 'be pleasing to'. "Me liketh" is an example > of the fourth sense, which is now archaic in most dialects (but recall the > 7-Up slogan "You like it; it likes you"). "I like" is a specialization of > the third sense "I am suited to". It cannot plausibly be regarded as derived > from the fourth sense by Fillmorian shift. is the third sense attested at the relevant time? i ask simply because i had always assumed the story was correct that had the modern usage deriving out of the fourth sense after the collapse of the case system in ME. but it would be very interesting if it could be shown that what you say is correct. From connolly at memphis.edu Thu Jul 26 22:16:27 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 17:16:27 -0500 Subject: Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent) Message-ID: Responding to my comment on the elimination of "dative subjects" in English, Douglas G Kilday wrote: > Instead of the Fillmorian analysis, I would draw a parallel with the use of > for by some speakers of current English. Again the factitive has > displaced the simple verb in the present. This is particularly common in the > impersonal intransitive, e.g. "That doesn't set well with me.". However, > since is much more common than was, and occurs widely in > compounds, it seems unlikely that will ever completely displace . I can't think of any compounds of _sit_, though _set_ has them. No matter, the example isn't quite parallel. Although _Tencean_ was formed in the matter of factitives, the same formative was also (if I remember correctly) used for inchoatives, or for something else anyway. We cannot therefore conclude that _Tencean_ was ever in reality factitive. So if we're talking replacement here, we must still ask why we have the vocalism of one with the syntax of the other. > I must also question the Fillmorian view of "hunger" and "thirst". Chaucer > has both a personal 'to have thirst' and an impersonal > 'to cause thirst', the latter presumably from a PGmc factitive in *-jan > which has fallen together in form with the simple verb. The OED shows no signs of either a factitive or an inchoative. The normal OE usage is with accusative of person and genitive of thing, or merely dative of person. The OED lists a few OE examples with a personal subject, but they are in fact ambiguous. The first unambiguous personal subjects occur in the 14th century, indicating that a replacement process (which you may call Fillmorean if you like, though there is no need to) had begin. > Likewise I posit > *hungran 'to have hunger' beside the factitive *hungrjan > OE 'to > cause hunger'. No problem with a verb form containing -j-, but what indicates that it was ever factitive -- and if so, why the person who is made to hunger would have been the subject? That's exactly what we should not expect: "The smell of sauerkraut made me hungry", not vice versa! > Instead of the brutally abrupt syntactic shift required by > the Fillmorian scenario, Brutal? The *only* shift is that a dative has been replaced by a nominative, bringing a verb into line with the majority that always had nominative subjects. How is this brutal? And while Fillmore's system works particularly well in explaining it, it is by no means necessary. We need only note DAT > NOM. That's it! > As for "like", Whitehall gives the sense development as 'to be of like form' > > 'be like' > 'be suited to' > 'be pleasing to'. "Me liketh" is an example > of the fourth sense, which is now archaic in most dialects (but recall the > 7-Up slogan "You like it; it likes you"). "I like" is a specialization of > the third sense "I am suited to". Nego. Semantically, that could be true, if OE _li:cian_ had a personal "liker" as subject. But it doesn't; we don't find that until the 14th century, according to the OED. > It cannot plausibly be regarded as derived > from the fourth sense by Fillmorian shift. Really, why not? It's in line with the other examples and doesn't require Fillmore in particular. > The replacement of "meseems" by "it seems to me" and the perfectly > acceptable variant "to me it seems" clarifies the matter. It has nothing to > do with "case-grammar analysis" or any alleged thirsting by speakers to > stick the "experiencer" in front of the sentence, since that didn't happen > here (in fact, the "experiencer" was booted out of initial position). > Instead, the radical restructuring of ME resulted in the obsolescence of > certain sentence-frames. Well, yes: it was booted out of initial position as part of a restructuring. But isn't that what I'd been saying? Fillmore helps us understand why, but if don't like Case Grammar, try considering the facts without any particular system in mind. You will find that many Germanic verbs which once had a sentient person expressed as dative or accusative, but which nonetheless tended to put that person in preverbal position, now use the nominative instead. Such datives are found in so many languages that an appeal to dubious Germanic causatives will never explain the phenomenon. Please explain to my why German _gefallen_ and Latin _place:re_ -- both statives with no hint of causative formation -- do the same thing. The answer cannot be found within Germanic, but must say something about universal grammar. You must reach the same conclusion, Case Grammar or no. Leo Connolly From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Jul 27 07:18:14 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 08:18:14 +0100 Subject: Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent) Message-ID: > ...confusion of > 'to think' with > I would draw a parallel with the use of for ..it seems unlikely > that will ever completely displace . Another example is "lay" and "lie". "Lay" has already replaced "lie" for many speakers. peter From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu Thu Jul 26 19:52:31 2001 From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 15:52:31 -0400 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. In-Reply-To: <005001c11218$37965a40$e433073e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Sat, 21 Jul 2001, petegray wrote: > Good thinking! I checked the etymology of da- and wo- in German, and > you're absolutely right. Da was originally dar. Wo is less clear, but it > appears to have been war (with a not o) - certainly that's how it appears in > Gothic. So the -r- is a survival. > Peter you actually don't have to go very far back to find signs of this. in somewhat older writing you'll find plenty of spellings like darnach, although i don't recall ever seeing someting like wornach. of course this may well be an etymologizing spelling. in any case it's easy to understand why the -r would have been retained intervocalically but lost finally, although i don't think the loss of final -r can be connected with the modern German vocalization of coda r, since i seem to recall seeing r-less spellings of these words in MHG, when coda r was still presumably pronounced as r. incidentally, da is commonly (usually?) spelled do in MHG, i.e. it looks like it rhymed with wo, as expected based on the other Gmc. languages. someone on the list who knows more about the history of German might be able to say something about how the two ended up NOT rhyming in NHG. i have a suspicion that it might reflect some sort of dialect difference (wo from he south, da from the center?). does anybody happen to know whether they rhyme in modern dialects, e.g. Bavarian and Alemannic? Tom From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu Thu Jul 26 20:18:57 2001 From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 16:18:57 -0400 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. In-Reply-To: <005001c11218$37965a40$e433073e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: and there's the additional obvious example that i forgot to mention: warum contains the a spelling (and pronunciation), another indication that something fishy is going on with the vowels in these words in NHG, for which the most obvious explanation would be dialect mixture in the standard language. On Sat, 21 Jul 2001, petegray wrote: > da-von, da-r-auf etc >> I have my doubts about the -r- as hiatus filling: in Dutch, the -r is always >> present, just like in English.. >> Ger. wo = Du. waar >> Ger. da = Du. daar >> So, I think it is the absence of -r- in German that requires an explanation. >> Ed. > Good thinking! I checked the etymology of da- and wo- in German, and > you're absolutely right. Da was originally dar. Wo is less clear, but it > appears to have been war (with a not o) - certainly that's how it appears in > Gothic. So the -r- is a survival. > Peter From sarima at friesen.net Thu Jul 26 13:58:18 2001 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 06:58:18 -0700 Subject: bishop In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 07:36 PM 7/25/01 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: >Because it is unlikely to have happened. Not that it is impossible as a >theoretical concept, but the outcome is wrong. >... >Pentti Aalto once told me a story about a lake in Karelia which the locals >called simply 'järvi' "the lake". Then the Russians came and asked "what >is the name of the lake?" They were told, and so the name in Russian >became Ozero Järvi ("Lake Lake"). Then the Germans came and asked what >the name of the lake was and were told and so the German name of the lake >became Ozerojärvisee ("Lake Lake Lake"). I don't know if the story is >true or not, but Pentti Aalto told a good story. Once, while researching the history of England, I ran across a hill whose name meant Hill Hill Hill, or was that Hill Hill Hill Hill. So it certainly happens. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Jul 26 07:34:56 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 08:34:56 +0100 Subject: bishop Message-ID: >Ozerojdrvisee ("Lake Lake Lake"). There are many such examples, world wide, (e.g. in England, the river Avon) but I've never met a three-fold one before. Thanks! >> should already have been something like [is ti(m) >> bolin], as in current Greek. The vowels would be all wrong. In the light of Renato's post, giving the evidence of =polis to Turkish -bul in a different word, the only vowel that is wrong is the central one, which we know was pronounced /A/ in that area in classical times. Is there any evidence of dialect variation within the later Koine? >> And why >> on earth would the Greeks have given something meaning 'to the city' >> as the name of their capital? To the three replies (immediately below) we should add Rome - the Romans said said "the City" and expected everyone to know what they meant. So that's not a problem. (a)> The capital was known as "i polis" the city for an extended period. (b)> The study of toponyms is littered with such cases, cf. Scottish Gaelic > Gallaibh, Cataibh. (c)> Yes, and the ancient Assyrians always referred to Assur as 'a:lum' "the city", but nobody else did. >There is simply no need to derive Istanbul from any form of Greek 'polis' >other than its original one: Konstantinopolis. Anything else is an >Occam's Razor violation. It would be, if we were inventing the use of "city" for Konstnatinopolis. But we aren't. >...'eis te:n pslin' as the derivation of Istanbul .....the phonological >difficulties, Only one, the central vowel. >there is no need to account for the prothetic vowel of Istanbul with a >Greek form. I believe that in modern Greek "to the" is simply /sti:n/ < /i:s ti:n/. So "to the city" would have been /sti:mbul/ at some stage. Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jul 26 20:30:53 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 15:30:53 -0500 Subject: bishop In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > Mississippi --> Missisip That's only in movies and song by "furrners". Down here it's "M'sippi" [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From connolly at memphis.edu Thu Jul 26 21:22:00 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 16:22:00 -0500 Subject: bishop Message-ID: > Leo Connoly wrote: >> To which I say: The vowels are still all wrong, which renders the rest >> of it moot. Renato Piva wrote: > 1. Not exactly true: the I- of Istambul corresponds perfectly to the i- in > 'is tin poli'. True -- but this is the leasdt significant of the Greek syllables. > 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. Isn't the Middle Greek word is itself somewhat problematic? Some of its vowels and consonants are wrong. But never mind that. If we must choose between two etymologies for istanbul, we should choose the one with the better phonetic fit, barring some sort of other evidence favoring the poorer fit. And the better fit is, I think, to derive it from Konstantinopolis. Since this is also preferable semantgically, involving the actual name rather than a debatable circumlocution, it seems the obvious choice. Or am I missing some actual *evidence* pointing to eis te:n polin? Leo Connolly From bronto at pobox.com Mon Jul 30 15:23:08 2001 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2001 08:23:08 -0700 Subject: Stamboul (was: bishop) Message-ID: Robert Whiting wrote: > Regardless of how these transformations may have come about, > if San Francisco can become Frisco, Does anyone really call it that, though? Around here it's "the City". -- Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/ From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Thu Jul 26 11:16:58 2001 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 14:16:58 +0300 Subject: real proto-lang In-Reply-To: <003c01c111b4$b7694700$e00a073e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Fri, 20 Jul 2001, petegray wrote: > I would make the abstractionist position even thinner. It is not the final > result of application of the method, but merely a description of the > attested state of affairs. I think it is application of the method which > moves beyond mere description to posit an original sound or root. > Thus saying that the symbol *bh is a code for the correspondences in > attested IE languages is mere description plus label; whereas positing an > actual sound *bh is application of the method. I don't think I can fully agree with you here: it seems that the abstractionist position cannot be merely "a description of the attested state of affairs", because it involves etymological claims (X and Y are cognate etc.). No sound correspondences can be established even in the abstractionist framework through mere description; this is, of course, what the method is for. > Interpretation comes in > when we then try to make sense of that sound, and say either that PIE needed > to have *ph as well, or that the sound we write *bh was breathy voice, or > allophonically aspirated, or a fricative or whatever. > There are thus (for me) three stages, and the refusal to move from the first > to the second seems an unnecessary limitation on what we can claim to know. Of course, I agree. I don't think any serious comparativist would really refuse to move beyond the first stage; but the question is rather what the comparative method does. It seems to me that the method, in the strict sense, is only applicable in the first stage and everything beyond that has actually nothing to do with the method itself but merely with the result. ----- A concrete example also comes into mind here. In 1981, several problematic correspondences (concerning e.g. the origin of long vowels in Finnic, and certain words showing a lengthened vowel before intervocalic *k in Samic) between the various branches of Uralic were solved by Juha Janhunen. The exact details are not relevant here, but the solution involved positing a new Proto-Uralic consonant, which has not been preserved unchanged in any branch. The consonant was symbolized with *x by Janhunen, as its exact phonetic nature is unknown. (The paper appeared in Journal de la Société Finno-Ougrienne 77, but it is in Finnish.) I'm sure you wouldn't consider this explanation merely a description of the attested state of affairs, because no phonetic value was suggested for *x? regards, Ante Aikio From alderson+mail at panix.com Thu Jul 26 19:11:50 2001 From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 15:11:50 -0400 Subject: real proto-lang In-Reply-To: (message from Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen on Sat, 21 Jul 2001 17:22:56 +0200 (MET DST)) Message-ID: On 21 Jul 2001, Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: > we do indeed work on the assumption that PIE and all the intermediate stages > between it and the attested daughter languages were real and actually spoken > languages. The only quibble I have with this statement is the inclusion of the "P" in "PIE". I try always to make the distinction between "IE" (the real language ancestral to all the attested daughter languages) and "PIE" (our reconstruction of that language), because the latter is almost certainly not a synchronically real language due to complete loss of lexicon (including bound morphemes) over time. (It is for this reason that I find myself irritated at times by those non-linguists who write as if they think there is a *diachronic* distinction to be made between "IE" and "PIE".) This, rather than the more extreme "abstractionist" reading of the results of the comparative method, is what I intended to get across in my responses to the original poster. Rich Alderson linguist at large From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Thu Jul 26 15:07:47 2001 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 18:07:47 +0300 Subject: Hist Ling, a Primer: Part 1 (was Re: The Single Parent Question) In-Reply-To: <74.c5b78ec.286cc3c6@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 28 Jun 2001 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 6/27/2001 12:29:59 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk >writes: << And what is that? So far as I know, all I have ever >claimed about the comparative method is that it cannot produce >proto-languages that never existed. And that's just true. Do >you want to challenge this? >> >Yes. >There are perhaps a number of ways in which the comparative >method might "produce" a language or a part of a language that >that never existed. There is perhaps one way that is relevant to >this discussion. >If you assume only one parent where there was more than one >parent, the comparative method can be used to reconstruct a >language that never existed. This is rather like saying that if you assume that the world is flat then you can walk to the edge and jump off. >If a language family "inherited" from more than one prehistoric >parent, the comparative method will not be able to distinguish >more than one parent - IF you assume only one parent. If you >assume all reconstructible features descended from one parent - >where there were actually multiple parents - you will reconstruct >a language that never existed. Such a statement shows a complete lack of comprehension of what the term "genetic relationship" means. Very simply, languages that are genetically related were once the same language. That is all there is to it. Thus genetically related languages do not "inherit" from more than one language. They only inherit from the common parent (i.e., the language that these languages were once identical to). Thus English and German are genetically related because they were once the same language (Proto-Germanic) and French and Spanish are genetically related because they were once the same language (Latin). On a different level, English and Spanish are genetically related because they were once the same language (Proto-Indo-European). Interestingly enough, Sir William Jones, who is usually credited with being the first to recognize the Indo-European unity and the founder of comparative linguistics, hit the nail pretty much on the head back in 1786 when he said: The Sanskrit language, whatever may be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both within the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed that no philologer could examine them all, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the Old Persian might be added to the same family. Here it all is, tied up in a neat ribbon. These words, delivered as a address to the Bengal Asiatic Society, are often quoted in introductory texts on comparative linguistics or on Indo-European studies and constitute the creation story of the discipline. Sir William pretty much got it right the first time. It took about a century to work out the details, but his observations have stood the test of time. That is why his words are so often quoted. He even left room for the influence of other languages ("blended with a very different idiom"), but you will notice that he didn't say 'sprung from several common sources'. But you cannot show any such thing as a "language family that 'inherited' from more than one prehistoric parent" because a language family is by definition a group of languages that were once the same language (cf. David Crystal _The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language_ [2nd edition, 1997], p. 427, s.v. "family": "A set of languages that derive from a common ancestor (parent) language..."). It is not possible for a group of languages to have once been two different languages (at least not without the intervening stage of a single language). It may be possible that the parent language was a meld of two or more different languages, but if it was, then this is what the comparative method will reconstruct. This is what the comparative method does. It tells you (if used competently) what the parent of the daughter languages looked like (just before the parent split). It doesn't tell you how the parent language got that way because it can't. That is the job of internal reconstruction, or, if other proto-languages are available for comparison, the comparative method taken to the next higher level. Now a language can be influenced by any number of languages through borrowing or convergence, but that does not make any of these languages a parent of that language. If it did, the parents of English would include Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Etruscan, Finnish, Hungarian, Malay, Mayan, Nahuatl, Sumerian, Swahili, Kaffir, Algonkian, Hawaiian, and hundreds if not thousands of other languages from which English with its capacity for swallowing foreign words whole has appropriated words for its own use. Similarly, it could be said that most of the world's 6000 (give or take a few thousand) or so languages have English as a parent if they have at least one English loanword (such as 'hamburger', 'television' or some form of 'automobile'). Carrying this reductio ad absurdum a step further, English has been heavily influenced by Latin in its lexicon, morphology, and syntax. Basque has also been heavily influenced by Latin. According to you this makes Latin a parent of both English and Basque. The next logical claim is that English and Basque must be related because they share a common parent. But to get back to the romance languages (the daughters of Latin), French and Spanish were once the same language (Latin). We can tell this by using the comparative method, which gives reconstructions of many, many lexical, morphological, and syntactic features of the parent. Since the parent is an attested language (Latin) we can check the forms against the reconstruction (proto-romance) to verify the effectiveness of the method. Let's say, for the purposes of discussion, that we can account for the differences between French and Spanish by the influence of different substratum languages (let's say *Gaulish for French and *Iberian for Spanish without committing to either the truth of the claim or of the nature of the hypothetical substratum languages). According to Steve's view this means that French now has two parents (Latin and *Gaulish) and so does Spanish (Latin and *Iberian). If we use the comparative method on French and Spanish does it reveal these second "parents"? No, it still reconstructs Latin forms because that is what is common to the two languages. Using the comparative method on French and Spanish *cannot* reconstruct *Gaulish and/or *Iberian because they are not common to the two languages being compared. The comparative method will only reconstruct what is common to the languages being compared (incidentally, I am using "languages being compared" as shorthand for "comparing forms from the languages being compared"). Okay, if that doesn't work let's say that French and Spanish both have the same substratum language and then compare them. That way both the parent and the substratum language will be common to both languages. But wait a minute -- we were accounting for the differences between French and Spanish by different substratum languages. If they both have the same substratum then we don't have different languages. There is no way to tell the difference between French and Spanish. We just have *Spench or *Franish or some such thing and nothing to use the comparative method on. Okay then, let's compare *Spench with some other romance language, say Italian. In this case since Italian is in the ancestral homeland, we can do without a substratum language, thus creating that great rarity (in Steve's view), a language with only one parent. When we reconstruct the parent of Italian and Spench what do we get? -- Latin again, because that is the only language common to both. So we see Steve's dream of being able to reconstruct multiple parents using the comparative method constantly receding before us, much as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow constantly recedes as we walk toward the rainbow. Aw, shucks. >How does the comparative method tell if there was more than one >parent language? It doesn't because there is no such thing. A mixed languages is just that. One language cannot be "genetically related." You can't use the comparative method on a language like Michif because there is nothing to compare it to. It's like asking "which weighs more, a pound of feathers?" If you have daughters of a mixed language, using the comparative method on them will reconstruct the parent language, mixed or not (and since every language is mixed to some extent, the concept has no particular significance). That's what the comparative method does. It reconstructs the probable form of the parent of genetically related languages. You can't use the comparative method on a parent language and its daughter because that's not what the comparative method does (besides, in most cases you don't have the parent until you reconstruct it from the daughters using the comparative method). The comparative method reconstructs the probable ancestor of two or more now different forms that were once the same form (in one language). It provides a possible solution to the many-from-one situation. It can do nothing about a one-from-many situation. But using the comparative method is not like solving an equation for the volume of a sphere as you seem to think. Using the comparative method requires judgment, common sense, training, and experience. You don't just plug in the data, push a button and come back later and see what the proto-language looks like. The results have to be interpreted based on the linguist's knowledge of the kinds of things that are possible in terms of sound changes and other types of linguistic developments. To do this the linguist has to be familiar with as many different languages and their histories as possible and with typological classification and its ramifications. >It depends on the assumption one makes from the start - I think >its ability to see multiple descent is canceled out by the single >parent assumption. It will show "systematic correspondences" but >has no way of distinguishing multiple descent for those >correspondences. No, what the comparative method does is identify the features of the parent language that are still present in its daughters. "Single parent" is not an assumption of the comparative method. It is the definition of genetically related languages in historical linguistics. The assumption that makes the comparative method work is that sound change (within a language) is regular. Irregular sound changes block the comparative method. Now there are some situations in which the comparative method could point to erroneous conclusions, but none of them have anything to do with "the single parent assumption." One such situation is where two or more daughter languages have independently undergone identical innovations. Features shared by daughter languages are likely to be reconstructed for the proto-language simply because it is more likely for some feature to have arisen only once and have been transmitted to the daughters than for it to have arisen independently in the daughters. But as Steve himself has pointed out some time ago, unlikely things do happen. Here typology of changes comes into play. If the change is a typologically common one, say palatalizaion of velars before front vowels or s > h > 0, then it is less unlikely for it to have arisen independently. On the other hand, if the change is typologically unusual or complex, like Grimm's Law, or depends on other changes that must have taken place in the proto-language, like Verner's Law, then the change can safely be reconstructed for the proto-language. Another situation that plays merry hell with the comparative method is changes in the proto-language that reverse themselves in one or more daughters. Such an event is rare, but not unheard of. It makes it very difficult to say what belongs to the proto-language and what doesn't. Yet another situation that causes glitches in the reconstruction of a proto-language, and that appears to be closest to what you are proposing as a method of reconstructing a nonexistent proto-language, is when two (or more) daughter languages are influenced in exactly the same way by another language. Under these circumstances, the common features from this source could be reconstructed for the proto-language when in fact the proto-language never heard of them. If the influencing language (or a descendent of it) is attested, it may be possible to identify these features and attribute them to their proper source, but if the influencing language has become extinct without leaving a trace (except for its influence on the languages we are investigating) then this influence may not be recognized for what it is. But in any case, if it is attributed incorrectly to the proto-language, it is likely to appear as an anomaly of some kind. The fact that these situations could arise show that the comparative method is not foolproof. But then no method is foolproof (Murphy's Law). Nor can a method be made foolproof. If someone devises a better method, someone else will devise a better fool. But these potential pitfalls do not invalidate the comparative method. They simply show that those who would use the comparative method need to be aware of them so that they can evaluate how much confidence can be placed in a given reconstruction. And this is where experience and training come in. >The comparative method is a powerful tool, And powerful tools require training and experience to operate. >but even the Hubbell can't see the far side of the moon. Which is why we assume that the far side of the moon is, grosso modo, not much different from the side that we can see. But until you know the answer to "how do we know that the moon is not made of green cheese?", you won't be able to come to grips with the concept of historical linguistics. >Without the single parent assumption, I suspect the comparative >method could also support explanations that include multiple >"genetic strains." Which shows how misplaced your suspicions are. You seem to be under a considerable genetic strain yourself. :) But just to show you that "the single parent assumption" doesn't have to be abandoned in order to do historical linguistic or even to uncover different "genetic strains," let's look at an actual example. By using the comparative method on English, German, Dutch, the Scandinavian languages, Gothic, etc., it is possible to reconstruct Proto-Germanic in considerable detail. The comparative method will filter out the extensive French, Latin, and Greek influence on English because it is not shared systematically by the sister languages. What we get from this is a reconstruction of the Proto-Germanic language just before it split into its daughters. Now we can take this back a step farther by using the comparative method on Proto-Germanic and its sister languages, Proto-Italic, Proto-Balto-Slavic, Proto-Indo-Iranian, etc. This gives us yet another proto-language, which we call Proto-Indo-European. Now it turns out that a number of features that we can reconstruct for Proto-Germanic, we can't reconstruct for PIE, which means that they are not found in the sister languages. This suggests that Proto-Germanic had been influenced by some other language or languages before it split into its daughters and that its sister languages were not subjected to this influence. To account for this, we propose that this influence took place between the time that Germanic split from PIE and before it split into its own daughters, a stage of the development that we refer to as pre-Proto-Germanic or sometimes simply as pre-Germanic. In order to account for the large number of features of Proto-Germanic that can't be traced back to PIE we hypothesize that there was a substratum language that heavily influenced Germanic during the pre-Germanic phase (so that Proto-Germanic is "blended with a very different idiom"). Unfortunately, unless this substratum language is actually attested, it is very difficult to say (scientifically) anything very specific about this hypothetical substrate language because: a) We can never be entirely sure whether something that appears in Proto-Germanic is an internal development or is to be attributed to the substratum. b) There is no way to reconstruct the substratum language because there is nothing to compare. The comparative method works (scientifically) because it uses two or more forms to triangulate on the original form. Proposing an origin for a single form is simply speculative because there are too many possible origins. So one can suggest that the unaccounted for (by inheritance) features of Proto-Germanic are the result of influence from some other language (which is not unreasonable because inter-language influence is a normal thing), but there is no way to prove it, and even worse, there is no way to disprove it. But the comparative method can detect this possible influence if there is enough data. It just can't say much of anything else about it. That has to come from other sources. >In which case, the method would produce data that could be used >to reconstruct one or multiple parents. In which case, one of >those two reconstructions would be false. And that would be one >way the comparative method could be used to reconstruct a >proto-language that never existed. Which is as good a way as any of saying that you don't know what the comparative method is, how it works, what the inputs are and what comes out of it. The comparative method doesn't produce data -- data is the input to the comparative method. Data is something that exists in nature. Interpretations of data are different from data. Interpretations of data involve judgment, common sense, training and experience. Interpretations of data are hermeneutics. That is why comparative linguistics is a hermeneutic discipline. Now the output of the comparative method is data in the sense that it can be used in further applications of the method to reconstruct a higher level proto-language. But there is a qualitative difference between this kind of datum and a naturally occurring one. That is why linguists (and philologists) put an asterisk (*) in front of reconstructed forms -- to show that they are not naturally occurring data. The asterisk means: caution -- this is a reconstructed datum that is not actually attested but was arrived at by interpretation of other data. ><you ever grappled with linguistic data in an effort to >demonstrate common ancestry, or to challenge someone else's >efforts in this direction?>> >This won't help you here. I won't ask if you've ever argued a >science case in Federal Court or ever did plasma analysis or >worked on neural systems or did any high-order economic analysis. The difference is that Larry is not trying to tell you how to do any of those things or telling you that you are doing them wrong. What he is telling you is that everything that you have said indicates that you don't understand the methodology of comparative linguistics. And the fact that you may have done the things you say and perhaps even done them right doesn't mean that you know anything about how to do comparative linguistics. What he is telling you is that using the methods of comparative linguistics competently requires training and experience and he is asking you what your qualifications are for critiqueing the methodology. Your answer seems to be that you don't need any. >You've claimed an extremely high level of certainty with regard >to the reconstruction of proto-languages. I'm looking at the >scientific validity of that claim. No you're not. You are just making it clear that you don't understand either the terminology or the methodology involved in that claim. You are making it clear that you have only one concept of science: predictability based on precise measurements. You are making it clear that you do not realize that sometimes science is merely explanatory without being able to make accurate or detailed predictions. You are making it clear that you have no grasp of the concept of epistemology. You seem to be under the impression that all sciences have the same methods and reach their conclusions in the same way as the sciences that you are familiar with and therefore the methods of physics should be used in linguistics. But this is not so. Physics gets its cachet from very precise measurements of universal properties or characteristics of the real world. Its plausibility stems from the fact that these constants are the same wherever or whenever they are measured and can be used to predict the actions of a physical body when subjected to certain forces in a cause and effect relationship. But comparative linguistics does not get its plausibility from precise measurements of universal constants or from predictions of cause and effect relationships. It gets its plausibility from the fact that the pieces of a correct linguistic solution must all be interlocking. This is why regular sound correspondences and pattern matching are so important in historical/comparative linguistics. Parts of the solution must be brought into uniformity with other parts of the solution (pattern matching). If the patterns of regular sound correspondences don't match throughout the reconstruction, then the reconstruction is wrong in one or more details. Historical linguistics is hermeneutic; it is a science of interpretation, of ideas and rationality, not of universal constants and causality. >That demands that the process should be rational and >reproducible. If you're saying I'm missing something, spell it >out. Okay, try this: LANGUAGES THAT ARE GENETICALLY RELATED WERE ONCE THE SAME LANGUAGE. And what in the world is rational and reproducible about high-order economic analyses? Economic analysis is as chaotic as language change. Incidentally, chaotic here is a technical term. It does not have its free meaning of "in a state of utter confusion." It refers to systems that are unusually sensitive to variations in their initial conditions or are affected by a large number of independent variables. Such systems may show patterns, even classic patterns that develop quite often, but predicting the outcome of these patterns in a particular instance usually doesn't work because the classic development of the pattern can be upset by a wide range of more or less unpredictable and unrelated variables. It is like trying to predict the weather. You can keep all the statistics you want. You can have a record of the temperature and amount of rainfall on July 4th for the past hundred years. But none of these statistics will tell you on July 3rd whether it's going to rain on your parade the next day or not (unless perhaps you are having your 4th of July parade in Riyadh). >But not with the conclusions or unexplained assumptions >that you have been relying on so far. And I assume you aren't >claiming any kind of unique psychic powers in your use of the >comparative method that are beyond ordinary comprehension. I really don't think the idea of genetically related languages is beyond your comprehension despite your claim that it is. But it is obviously beyond your limited concept of "science." Of course, it is quite possible that the aforementioned judgment, common sense, and linguistic experience are psychic powers that are beyond your comprehension. But just in case you haven't gotten it yet: LANGUAGES THAT ARE GENETICALLY RELATED WERE ONCE THE SAME LANGUAGE. This is the basic assumption of historical/comparative linguistics. This has been true for over 200 years -- from Jones' 1786 "sprung from some common source" to Anttila's 1989 "'Related' is a technical term ... meaning that the items were once identical" (p. 300). If you can just keep this in mind, you won't get hung up on the 50 parent problem. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Thu Jul 26 15:11:23 2001 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 18:11:23 +0300 Subject: Science? (was Re: The Single Parent Question) In-Reply-To: <001201c1059d$3c721b80$61564341@swbell.net> Message-ID: On Thu, 5 Jul 2001 proto-language wrote: >From: >Sent: Saturday, June 30, 2001 10:58 PM >>In a message dated 6/30/01 8:35:12 PM Mountain Daylight Time, >>X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >>>This won't help you here. I won't ask if you've ever argued a >>>science case in Federal Court or ever did plasma analysis or >>>worked on neural systems or did any high-order economic analysis. >>>You've claimed an extremely high level of certainty with regard >>>to the reconstruction of proto-languages. I'm looking at the >>>scientific validity of that claim. >[JS] >> -- no, you aren't, because you don't have the knowledge-base >>to do so. >[PCR] >I do not subscribe to much of what Steve writes either but I do >believe he is asking pertinent question. But he is not asking a question. He is making a claim. He is claiming that he is competent to judge the scientific validity of comparative linguistics without having to know anything about comparative linguistics either with respect to the data or to the means of evaluating and interpreting the data. >This type of snobbish response is not at all helpful. If it could convince Steve that he is trying to play ice hockey with the equipment used in baseball, it would be very helpful indeed. But since it won't, it is not particularly helpful except to people who aren't Steve. But is no more unhelpful than hubristic pronouncements that the conclusions reached by a discipline are incorrect without knowing how those conclusions were reached. What is unhelpful is to claim that these conclusions are wrong, not because they are not supported by the data, but because they were not reached by the methods that are used in other disciplines. The only reasons that can be accepted for the conclusions being wrong is that they are not supported by the data or that there is another conclusion that is better supported by the data. To do this requires familiarity with both the data and the methodology by which the conclusions were reached. Pointing out this simple fact is neither snobbish nor unhelpful. >Steve is not suggesting for one moment that he has the training >in IE linguistics of many on this list. Of course he isn't. What he is suggesting is that he doesn't need that training in order to accomplish the same thing that people with this training have and that despite their training and his lack of it, he has done it right and they have done it wrong. In short, he is suggesting that all that training in comparative linguistics is a waste of time, that anyone who can tie his own shoes can do comparative linguistics. >He is questioning the methodology used based on his familiarity >with it in other disciplines. But he hasn't mentioned any disciplines that use the same methodology. He is choosing disciplines that don't use the same methodology or that that have different types of data from comparative linguistics. He is trying to use the tools that he is familiar with to do a job that they weren't designed for. He is trying to drill a hole with a crosscut saw because he only has or knows how to use a crosscut saw. Furthermore, he is telling people who know how to use a brace and bit that they can't use it for drilling holes because he doesn't know how to use it. It is simply a non sequitur. He is comparing things that are not comparable. If he wants to compare comparative linguistics with a comparable science, let him talk about dactylography -- about how one goes about comparing fingerprints to see if they are the same. His claim is that one can't do science without accurate measurements. He is apparently unaware that the definition of science says nothing about making measurements. In effect, he is saying that the only way to tell the difference between a square and a triangle is to measure the perimeter and compute the area and then calculate the ratio of one to the other, or, if one has a different kind of measuring device, by measuring the interior angles and adding them up. When people tell him that actually you can tell the difference between a square and a triangle by comparing the shapes, he says "shapes? -- you can't measure shapes! -- what kind of science is that?" When he says that the conclusions of comparative linguistics can't be believed because they aren't produced with the methodology used in physics or chemistry or molecular biology while at the same time making it obvious that he has no idea what the methodology used in comparative linguistics is, he is simply paraphrasing the old dodge about lack of qualifications not being a bar to making decisions. He is saying "I don't know anything about comparative linguistics, but I know what I like." In short, he is not being objective about comparative linguists; apparently he can't be because he doesn't seem to understand what the objects of comparative linguistics are. He confuses terminology at the most basic levels, using terms like language and language family interchangeably. His only valid conclusion is that the objects of comparative linguistics are not the objects of physics. What he can't seem to grasp is that that does not make the manipulation of the objects of comparative linguistics any less scientific than the manipulation of the objects of physics. Sometimes it is possible to say (scientifically) whether two objects are the same or different without having to (or even being able to) measure them. >Linguistics should be done with the same, generally recognized >scientific methodology as other sciences --- whenever that is >possible. It is recognizing when it is possible that is the trick. Besides, Linguistics *is* done with the same scientific methodology that is applicable to other sciences: Data are analyzed to arrive at theories that have explanatory power, that have a test for inadequacy, and that can be confirmed or disconfirmed by additional data. That is scientific methodology. Scientific methodology says nothing about a requirement for quantification or accurate measurements of physical properties. Differences in how this methodology are applied are usually dictated by the nature of the data or the goals of the discipline. Where the data are easily quantifiable and/or measurable, quantification and measurement may become an integral part of the methodology, but where not, not. Within the parameters of the disciplines, it is as objective a statement to say that Spanish and French are genetically related languages or that Greek 'hippos' and Latin 'equus' are cognates as it is to say that the base of natural logarithms is 2.71828+. But one cannot tell how objective a statement about genetically related languages or cognates is if one does not know what genetically related languages or cognates are. Please don't mistake what I am saying here. I am not saying that methodology can't be criticized. You have heard me say often enough that Meritt Ruhlen's methodology is inadequate to discover what he claims that it does. What I am saying is that methodology must be judged in relation to the data it is used on and the conclusions it reaches based on that data. Methodology cannot be faulted because it is not the same as the methodology used in another discipline where the data types or the goals of the discipline may be different. And it cannot be faulted because one does not like the conclusions that it produces. In the final analysis conclusions are believable only because of the evidence and the argumentation that produce them. If the evidence doesn't warrant the conclusions or if the argumentation is full of gaps and inconsistencies, that is what makes the conclusions suspect, not the fact that they weren't produced with equations using universal constants or by a megabuck machine with micrometric precision. >I find this totally unobjectionable. Unobjectionable in principle, but objectionable in malpractice. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Thu Jul 26 15:15:20 2001 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 18:15:20 +0300 Subject: Hist Ling, a Primer: Part 2 (was Re: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns") In-Reply-To: <6e.c0bd599.2865a684@aol.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 23 Jun 2001 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 6/22/2001 12:44:17 AM, hstahlke at gw.bsu.edu writes: ><< There's an almost trivial sense in which Steve has to be >right, but I think he's taken his case beyond that point. Having >worked on Niger-Congo languages, especially those of the eastern >half of West Africa, I've been faced with the question of where >to begin.... As Bill Welmers used to say, "You get to the point >where you know that these language can't be unrelated." Of >course, he would also add that you then start using the >comparative method to work out the relationships and make sure >they're there. We're dealing with different orders of >hypothesis. Using some careful lexicostatistics gives you a >reasonable hypothesis, but then applying the comparative method >takes you to a much stronger one. As I said, this is an almost >trivially obvious point. >> [For Herb]: When Steve is right, it is almost always in a trivial sense. Being able to distinguish the trivial from the significant seems to be one of his major problems. Of course, it isn't always easy, and it is exacerbated when one doesn't understand the discipline or its terminology. It is almost impossible to tell what is significant if one does not understand the parameters. >Well, of course, my question was, at that point, did you ever >consider the hypothesis that the language had two ancestral >language groups to whom it "can't be unrelated." Not the same thing at all. Herb is talking about "these languages" as a putative language family. "The language" is not a language family. A language family is descended from a single language. That is the definition of a language family.<-- In case you don't recognize it, that mark is a "period." It means that is the end of the thought. In other words a language family is a group of languages that are descended from a single language PERIOD. Saying "think of a language family with two parents" is like offering a mathematical proof and saying "now divide by 0." It just is not part of the system. Division by 0 is not defined. A language family with two parents is not defined. Of course you could say "let's define a language family as having two or more parents," but then you aren't doing comparative linguistics any more. You're doing a gedankenexperiment much like saying "assume there is no gravitational attraction at the earth's surface." You can only do this as a thought exercise because such a thing does not exist. It is like constructing a point at infinity so you can see what happens when all the parallel lines in the universe meet (ans: it gets very crowded) or like saying "what if three points define a line? -- we only get our picture of geometry by assuming that two points define a line but how do we know that that's right?" >But, in any case, believe me, what you've described is not >trivial at all when you're dealing with some very 20-20 hindsight >style explanations. Larry Trask's explanation of why languages >can't have more than one genetic ancestor typically offer the >conclusions as if they were explanations. On the contrary. You are making the same mistake again. Larry hasn't been talking about individual languages and he hasn't said that "languages" can't have more than one ancestor. He has been talking about language families. You are the one who has been talking about language families as if they were languages. Now a language can have as many parents as you want it to. If you think that every language that has contributed something to English is a parent of English, then English has at least several hundred parents. But this is not the way that comparative linguists consider language development or the way that they define genetic links. A language is not a language family. A language can be influenced by any number of other languages, related or not. You can think of these influencing languages as parents of that language if it gives you a warm glow or helps you sleep through the night. But a language family has only one parent because that is the definition of a language family. >In another post I tried to ask why one "systematic >correspondence" - which would alone have been considered enough >to establish a "genetic' relationship - should be considered >non-genetic because of the presence of another "more genetic" >systematic correspondence. >I was obviously referring to a situation where both "genetic" and >"non-genetic" elements both create what would ordinarily be >called "patterns." (The kind of patterns you might see even if, >for example, the hypothesis you described in your post about >relatedness ended up being wrong.) [Or the kind of patterns you might see if you'd been smoking some really weird stuff.] >Here's Larry Trask's reply. Note that below "miscellaneous >common elements" aren't patterns. Only genetic patterns have >"patterns." >In a message dated 6/22/2001 10:44:59 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: ><elements: instead, as always, we rely entirely on patterns.... >It is patterns that demonstrate common ancestry, not the presence >of any number of miscellaneous common elements.... >We do not recognize genetic links on the basis of miscellaneous >elements: instead, as always, we rely entirely on patterns.... >It is patterns that demonstrate common ancestry, not the presence >of any number of miscellaneous common elements... >And Albanian is not Greek, Romance, Slavic, Hungarian or Turkic, >even though elements of these origins greatly outnumber the >inherited elements.... >It is a distinct branch of IE, because this is the only >conclusion permitted by the patterns we observe.... >Patterns, patterns, patterns.>> >There may be an explanation for the one only parent rule. But >this cannot be it. You are so fixed on the word "patterns" that you don't seem to be able to see the key phrases in what Larry is saying. These are "genetic links" and "common ancestry." These both refer to the same basic premise: Genetically related languages were once the same language. This is simply the definition of genetic relationship in comparative linguistics. "Genetic links" thus refers to the correspondences between languages that were once the same language. "Common ancestry" refers to the same thing. That two or more forms in two or more languages were once the same form in a single language. That's what genetically related (or "cognate") means. Let me repeat that in case you didn't get it: LANGUAGES THAT ARE GENETICALLY RELATED WERE ONCE THE SAME LANGUAGE. This is the explanation of what you call the "one parent rule." >As you were kind enough to concede, you have to see patterns >BEFORE you even apply the comparative method. Heck, borrowing >creates patterns. "Patterns" therefore CANNOT explain the >difference between genetic and non-genetic relationships. Sure they can. You just have to be able to tell the difference. Admittedly, it's not always easy, but the more information you have, the easier it gets. And one of the things about doing linguistic reconstructions is that you use all the information you can get. But saying that because inheritance and borrowing both produce patterns you can't tell the difference between them is just another of your famous non sequiturs. It is like saying that you can't tell the difference between plaids and polka dots because they are both patterns. And this is what you call science. I can visualize you dressed in plaid trousers, a polka dot shirt, a paisley tie, and a striped blazer and claiming that it is a well coordinated outfit because "hey, man, like they're all patterns and like, y'know, all patterns are the same." Believe it or not, not all patterns are the same. It is possible to tell the difference between different types of patterns. And believe it or not, some people can actually tell the difference between different plaid patterns without a spectrometer. Quite simply, the patterns that inherited words form are (usually) different from the patterns that borrowed words form. Inherited words have always been in the language (that's what inherited means). Borrowed words have been in the language for less time than inherited words. Thus borrowed words have followed a different path to get where they are than inherited words have and hence create different patterns. For example, PIE *p comes into Germanic as /f/ but into Greek and Latin as /p/. Thus in English it is easy to tell inherited Germanic "flat" (ON 'flatr', OS 'flat', OHG 'flaz') from 'plate', 'platter', 'platen', 'platypus', etc borrowed from Latin or Greek. Of course, the fact that both Greek and Latin have the same reflex of PIE *p means that it is harder to tell inherited Latin words with /p/ from Greek loans, but this doesn't affect the reconstruction of either Proto-Germanic or PIE, only of Proto-Italic. But it does point out that it is not always easy, or in some instances even possible, to distinguish borrowing from inheritance. Sometimes the patterns aren't different enough to allow a decision to be made. But this is, in general, an exception rather than a rule. And I can't think of another discipline (that isn't based on "first principles" such as mathematics is) where there don't arise decisions that are too close to call one way or the other on the basis of the available data. Frequently even borrowings of the same word or root will pattern in different ways depending on when the borrowing took place. In French, Latin ([k]) before [a] developed first into [C] ([tS]) and later into [S]. Because of these changes, it is often possible, from the patterns which the borrowings form, to tell when words with the same root from the Latin-French continuum came into English. Thus 'cant', 'chant' 'chanteuse' (the inherited cognate is 'hen', another regular correspondence); 'candle', 'chandler', 'chandelier', etc. Indeed, the differences in patterning even allow us to recognize borrowings from closely related languages (or even dialects): Native word: shirt rear 'em yard fox borrowing: skirt raise them garden vixen On the other hand, borrowings from unrelated languages often stand out on the basis of their completely un-native patterns: bwana kangaroo okapi quetzalcoatl kinkajou So Larry is quite right. The secret to comparative linguistics (which you seem to consider some sort of mystical psychic process) is: "Patterns, patterns, patterns." The moral of the story? -- If you aren't good at pattern recognition, don't take up comparative linguistics. But even more important, if you haven't got the patience to work through all the patterns to see if they are regular or specious, or whether they result from inheritance or borrowing, don't even think about comparative linguistics. But there is nothing wrong with noticing correspondences or even patterns before applying the comparative method. This is known as a heuristic device. A heuristic is something that gives you an indication of where to look for something (sometimes called a "clue" for those who seem to operate without them and don't recognize the concept). The thing about heuristics is that they don't tell you if what you notice is significant or not. This is why one then applies the comparative method -- the comparative method will tell you whether what you have noticed is just a flash in the pan or is solid gold. But the fact that you can notice patterns before applying the comparative method does not mean that the comparative method cannot (or CANNOT if your caps lock is stuck) tell the difference between inherited and borrowed forms. That's just one of those little logical hiccups that you have from time to time that surface as non sequiturs. It may be true sometimes that you can't tell the difference between inheritance and borrowing, but not as a general rule. To illustrate the points that you have raised (about being able to see patterns without using the comparative method and about whether it is possible to tell the difference between inherited and borrowed material) I have a couple of small assignments for you of the type that I often set for students. I could just tell you the answers as examples, but since linguistic arguments just seem to roll off your back, it might mean more to you if you work them out for yourself. I really do think that it is difficult to see how this stuff works if you don't do some of it yourself. 1) Greek 'theos' "god" and Latin 'deus' "god" are identical in meaning and quite similar in form. Are these two words in fact cognates? What is the most plausible explanation for their similarity? Finally, how do we know? 2) There are two words in English that are more or less a fixed pair: 'salt' and 'pepper'. Both of these words appear in a similar form in almost all IE languages. One of them is inherited from PIE and one of them is a loanword in practically every IE language. Which one is which and how do we know? Now you don't have to answer these, but then I will know that you aren't really the self-appointed watchdog of proper scientific method as you claim, but are just kvetching about the methodology of comparative linguistics because you don't like its conclusions. If you do answer them, then I will give you some more complex ones. Incidentally, "are they cognates?" in question 1 means "were they once the same word (in the same language)?" I mention this because at one time you thought that cognates were words that had the same meaning. Although you seem not to be using the word that way at this particular moment, you do have a tendency to recidivism. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Thu Jul 26 15:19:08 2001 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 18:19:08 +0300 Subject: Language is made up of independent parts? (was Re: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole) In-Reply-To: <26.1736db1d.2865a8a5@aol.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 23 Jun 2001 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 6/22/2001 10:44:59 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk >writes: [SL] >>> Words and morphs are not like biological cells. Each word or >>>piece of morphology does not contain a hologram of the entire >>>language in its DNA. We cannot clone an entire language out of a >>>single word or verb morphology. A language is made up of many >>>totally independent parts. Why should the "genetics" of one part >>>affect the "genetics" of another part. "A language is made up of many totally independent parts." This is your first mistake (in this posting). A language is a fully integrated system. All the parts are interdependent. You just think that language is made up of individual, "totally independent," parts because the interactions between the parts are so complex and operate on so many different levels that linguists (or others) break language into individual parts in order to make it possible to study language without having to deal with the incredible complexity of the overall system. This is called reductionism. It is a way to study complex systems by separating out what are apparently subsystems and studying these subsystems in isolation. Thus you get works entitled "the phonology of X", "the morphology of X", "the syntax of X", etc. where "X" is your favorite dialect, language, language family, and so on. The problem with this is that specialists in the various subsystems sometimes forget that their particular speciality is not the entire system and treat it as if it were. Those who are easily led astray are, of course, led astray by this and think that the subsystems are "totally independent." Then you get claims of a hierarchical structure in language where the various levels cannot affect each other. Thus "morphology can't affect phonology" or "syntax can't affect morphology." The existence and common use of terms like "morphophonemic" or "morphophonetic" and "morpho-syntactical" make such claims a priori unlikely. But spoken language is a system for expressing meaning through sounds. Therefore meaning and sound have to be interrelated. Saying that they are not is just a way of avoiding the complexity of the reality. It may be possible to study phonology, morphology, and syntax separately (if that's how you want to break up language into parts), but you can't use just one of them to communicate meaning because that's not the way language works. Language may be studied as independent subsystems, but it works as one single fully integrated system. Another reason for separating languages into these levels is that that seems to be the way that children learn language. First sounds (phonology), then words (morphology), and finally how to put words together to make grammatically correct sentences (syntax). Thus there seems to be some natural progression from level to level in L1 (first language) acquisition. But children haven't learned the language until they have mastered all three and integrated them into one system. Here is what Anttila 1989 has to say on the subject (p. 320), albeit in a slightly different context: All levels of grammar are intimately tied together, and we have seen that various grammatical facts can condition sound change. There cannot be syntax without sound in the actual functioning of the language. Thus the best target for genetic classification still remains the middle of language. ... To ensure that we do not float too high, our units of comparison have to be anchored to the lower levels by sound correspondences. So "A language is made up of many totally independent parts" is simply a false premise. [LT] >><>not apply the term to individual elements within a language. We >>can no more ask whether the English word 'pity' is genetic or not >>than we can ask whether it is green and squishy.>> >Well, that's fine. And I know a guy who refuses to call his >mother "mom". But at least he has an explanation for it. And is his explanation objective or subjective? I once saw a guy pitch a no-hitter and still lose the game, but what does either one have to do with the subject? It's just another of your non sequiturs. >Is there a more "pithy" answer to why there can only be one >genetic ancestor than this one? Yes. Genetically related languages were once the same language. Since it is not possible for two languages to be the same language without actually being the same language, there can be only one genetic ancestor for genetically related languages. QED. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Thu Jul 26 15:22:08 2001 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 18:22:08 +0300 Subject: If books are common, telephones must be rare (was Re: Rate of Change) In-Reply-To: <12f.9b813c.286ad667@aol.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 27 Jun 2001 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >I wrote: ><similarity, that might work. But "pita" and "father" clearly do >have some prima facie structural similarities.>> Especially if you come from certain areas of New York City where is realized as [t] and have a non-rhotic phonology that realizes both final -a and -er as [@] (schwa). >In a message dated 6/26/2001 11:40:28 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com writes: >><< -- well, you're wrong there. >>Consider the following words, all cognates and all meaning >>"horse" and all derived from *ekuos >>jor >>eoh >>'sp >>yuk >> >No I think I'm right. No surprise here. >Consider the following words, not apparently cognates and ALL >meaning "horse:" >caballos >ko:n >so qui li >marka >umma >nag >lo: >zaldi >mustang >hippos >The words in my list make the words in your list all look pretty >close, in comparison. As I said, it is a matter of degree. This is a fairly spectacular non sequitur even by your usual standards. The part of your original claim that you have wisely snipped (without indication) from your original post was: I would suspect that "found" cognates that truly have no recognizable resemblances are rare. This is what JoatSimeon at aol.com was replying to and now you claim that the fact that unrelated words often have no recognizable resemblances proves that cognates that have no recognizable resemblances are rare. As I say, a non sequitur of truly epic proportions. It is much the same as saying that looking at alligators and butterflies proves that related species that are not similar are rare. >And that's the problem with subjective evaluations. They lack >objective measure. No, that's the problem with letting jockeys bet on horse races; or a judge bet on the outcome of a case he is hearing. They can decide who is going to win. But the only subjective evaluation is yours. Your list of words has no standard by which it can be measured. All the words in the first list were once the same word (that's what "cognate" means. None of the words in your list were. Therefore it is possible to measure the distance between the words in the first list and their ancestor but it is not possible to measure the difference between the words in your list because there is nothing that they are all related to. But you are claiming that because your list is subjective, then the first list must be also. Just another non sequitur. Whenever you have two interrelated binary choices there are four possible outcomes. If the binary choices are related and unrelated and similar and dissimilar then you can have: 1 related and similar 2 related and dissimilar 3 unrelated and similar 4 unrelated and dissimilar You are saying that because 4 is common, then, a priori, 2 must be rare. This is practically the definition of a non sequitur. >That's why a scientific approach calls for at least some >precision in measures of variance. As in thermometers, radiation >spectrums and scientifically valid rates of change. And the final non sequitur (for this posting). Science is not the ability to measure things accurately. Science is the ability to prove claims through evidence and argumentation. Science is the ability to explain phenomena or processes in a rational and consistent way based on evidence. Science requires evidence, not accurate measurement. Accurate measurement is not part of the definition of science. It may be essential in some sciences where it is part of the evidence, but it doesn't enter into some others. Again, the trick is to know the difference. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Thu Jul 26 15:25:55 2001 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 18:25:55 +0300 Subject: Hist Ling, a Primer: Part 3 (was Re: "mono-descent is implicit in the comparative method ...") In-Reply-To: <103.552772c.286c1869@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 28 Jun 2001 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 6/27/2001 3:51:21 PM, dlwhite at texas.net writes: ><< By the way, since "mono-descent" is implicit in the >comparative method, saying anything along the lines of "I accept >the comparative method but reject mono-descent" is sort of like >saying "I'll take the horse but not the legs". >> >BTW, let's look at that statement: "By the way, since >"mono-descent" is implicit in the comparative method,..." >I have four different historical linguistics textbooks in front >of me, including the admirable one written by Prof Trask. I >don't see a single definition that says anything about >mono-descent. I do see references to "systematic >correspondence" between two languages. I don't see anything that >logically demands those "systematic correspondences" be only >related back to only one ancestor. Then either you are looking in the wrong place or else you lack the ability to comprehend what you read. Personally, I am somewhat astonished to see you admit such a level of ignorance quite so openly. Unfortunately, I do not have Larry's book available, but I find that I have been unable to look at any of the texts that I do have without finding a clear statement to the effect that the comparative method is used to trace the forms found in related languages back to the most likely form in their common ancestor. Perhaps you are being confused by the term "common ancestor." If there is no clearer statement, this term by itself implies "mono-descent." Note that it does not say "common ancestors," but "common ancestor" -- i.e., the single language from which the related languages are all descended. "Common" here does not mean "not rare" but means "shared by all." And "common ancestor" does not refer to a grandmother who farts at the dinner table. It refers to the single language from which all the members of a language family are descended. First let's look at David Crystal's _Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language_ (2nd edition, 1997). This is a big, glitzy (especially the 2nd edition with lots of color photos and side-bars), coffee-table type book that has a wealth of information on many aspects of language but not going into any great detail in any of these aspects. Here is what he says on the subject of language families and the comparative method (p. 294): The first scientific attempts to discover the history of the world's languages were made at the end of the 18th century. Scholars began to compare groups of languages in a systematic and detailed way, to see whether there were correspondences between them. If these could be demonstrated, it could be assumed that the languages were related -- in other words, that they developed from a common source, even though this might no longer exist. Evidence of a common origin for groups of languages was readily available in Europe, in that French, Spanish, Italian, and other Romance languages were clearly descended from Latin -- which in this case is known to have existed. The same reasoning was applied to larger groups of languages and by the beginning of the 19th century, there was convincing evidence to support the hypothesis that there was once a language from which many of the languages of Eurasia have derived. This proto-language came to be called Proto-Indo-European. Very quickly, other groups of languages were examined using the same technique. The main metaphor that is used to explain the historical relationships is that of the language family, or the family tree. Within the Romance family, Latin the 'parent' language, and French, Spanish, etc. are 'daughter' languages; French would then be called a 'sister' language to Spanish and the others. ... This way of talking must not be taken too literally. A 'parent' language does live on after a 'daughter' language is 'born', nor do languages suddenly appear in the way implied by the metaphor of birth. Nor is it true that, once branches of a family begin to emerge, they develop quite independently, and are never afterwards in contact with each other. Languages converge as well as diverge. Furthermore, stages of linguistic development are not as clear-cut as the labels on a family tree suggest, with change operating smoothly and uniformly throughout. ... The Comparative Method In historical linguistics, the _comparative method_ is a way of systematically comparing a series of languages in order to prove a historical relationship between them. Scholars begin by identifying a set of formal similarities and differences between the languages and try to work out (or 'reconstruct') an earlier stage of development from which all the forms could have derived. ... When languages have been shown to have a common ancestor, they are said to be _cognate_. ... Genetic Classification This is a historical classification, based on the assumption that languages have diverged from a common ancestor. It uses early written remains as evidence, and when this is lacking, deductions are made using the comparative method to enable the form of the parent language to be reconstructed. The approach has been widely used, since its introduction at the end of the 18th century, and provides the framework within which all world-wide linguistic surveys to date have been carried out. The success of the approach in Eurasia, where copious written remains exist, is not matched in most other parts of the world, where a classification into families is usually highly tentative. Crystal tends to used "historical relationship" in place of "genetic relationship," but this is unremarkable (see the comment of Arlotto below). He also says "common ancestor" rather than "single parent," but this is also unremarkable since "common ancestor" means the same thing and is the most frequently used term. Now let's look at the comments of Bernard Comrie in the introduction to the compendium that he edited entitled _The World's Major Languages_ (1987) on pp. 5-6: 1.2 Language Families and Genetic Classification One of the basic organisational principles of this volume, ..., is the organisation of languages into language families. It is therefore important that some insight should be provided into what it means to say that two languages belong to the same language family (or equivalently: are genetically related). It is probably intuitively clear to anyone who knows a few languages that some languages are closer to one another than are others. ... Starting in the late eighteenth century, a specific hypothesis was proposed to account for such similarities, a hypothesis which still forms the foundation of research into the history and relatedness of languages. This hypothesis is that where languages share some set of features in common, these features are to be attributed to their common ancestor. Let us take some Examples from English and German. . Thus English and German belong to the same language family, which is the same as saying that they share a common ancestor. Now let's look at the remarks of Philip Baldi in the section "Indo-European Languages" in the same volume (pp. 33-36): Claiming that a language is a member of a linguistic family is quite different from establishing such an assertion using proven methods and principles of scientific analysis. During the approximately two centuries in which the interrelationships among the Indo-European languages have been systematically studied, techniques to confirm or deny genetic affiliations have been developed with great success. Chief among these methods is the comparative method, which takes shared features among languages as its data and provides procedures for establishing protoforms. The comparative method is surely not the only available approach, nor is it by any means foolproof. Indeed, other methods of reconstruction, especially the method of internal reconstruction and the method of typological inference, work together with the comparative method to achieve reliable results. ... When we claim that two or more languages are genetically related, we are at the same time claiming that they share common ancestry. And if we make such a claim about common ancestry, then our methods should provide us with a means of recovering the ancestral system, attested or not. The initial demonstration of relatedness is the easy part; establishing well-motivated intermediate and ancestral forms is quite another matter. Among the difficulties are: which features in which of the languages being compared are older? which are innovations? which are borrowed? how many shared similarities are enough to prove relatedness conclusively, and how are they weighted for significance? what assumptions do we make about the relative importance of lexical, morphological, syntactic and phonological characteristics, and about direction of language change? All of these questions come into play in any reconstruction effort, leaving us with the following assumption: if two or more languages share a feature which is unlikely to have arisen by accident, borrowing or as the result of some typological tendency or language universal, then it is assumed to have arisen only once and to have been transmitted to the two or more languages from a common source. The more such features are discovered and securely identified, the closer the relationship. In determining genetic relationship and reconstructing proto-forms using the comparative method, we usually start with vocabulary. ... From these and other data we seek to establish sets of equations known as correspondences, which are statements that in a given environment X phoneme of one language will correspond to Y phoneme of another language _consistently_ and _systematically_ if the two languages are descended from a common ancestor. Note that both these authors use the term "common ancestor." This is the same as saying "single parent." Now we can look at some textbooks on historical/comparative linguistics. First we will look at Hans H. Hock, _Principles of Historical Linguistics_ (1986). Hock's discussion of genetic relatedness is intertwined with a general discussion of the nature of language change which makes it too lengthy to quote in full, but despite this, and the tendency toward Germanic syntax, the following clear statements can be noted: Moreover, while all natural languages change, they do not necessarily change the same things at the same time. As a consequence, as communication between different groups becomes more tenuous or stops altogether, linguistic change may increasingly operate in different directions. Given sufficient time, then, the dialects spoken by these different groups may cease to by mutually intelligible and become completely different languages. At the same time, this divergent development in many cases does not go so far as to completely obscure the fact that these languages are descended from a common source. In such cases we speak of Related Languages. (p. 8) How long such linguistic relationships may remain discernible can be seen by looking at the set of vocabulary correspondences from the major languages of Europe .... In fact, not only is it possible to recognize the major linguistic groups; within the first and largest one, that of the Indo-European languages of Europe, further subgroups can be established without great difficulties. One of these is Romance. In the case of these languages we are lucky, in that their (near-)ancestral language, Latin, is attested. We are therefore able to confirm our suspicion that these languages are related, by being descended from a common ancestor through independent, divergent developments. For the other groups, no such ancestral language is attested. And this is true also for the whole Indo-European language family to which Latin and the Romance languages belong .... However, by applying what we know about how languages change we can in many cases 'reverse' the linguistic developments and through 'Comparative Reconstruction' establish what the ancestral language looked like. (p. 9) Again, note the term "common ancestor." Next, we can look at Raimo Anttila, _Historical and Comparative Linguistics_ (1989). Anttila is often not considered to be "mainstream" because he does not generally adhere to any particular doctrine but is eclectic in his explanations. Personally, however, I find little that is objectionable in his writings. Often he presents a balance that is not obvious in more doctrinaire or "school"-oriented linguists. Among his pithier comments on genetic relatedness we find: Languages connected by sets of correspondences form a language family. Thus all the Romance languages are sisters, and therefore daughters of Latin, the parent or mother language, from which they are all descended. 'Related' is a technical term, exactly like the equivalent 'cognate', meaning that the items were once identical. (p. 300) and Those languages that represent outcomes of one and the same proto-language are grouped into a family. (p. 318) This is as pithy as you can get. I don't see how anyone could confuse this for anything other than a clear statement of "single parent" and "mono-descent" as a criterion for genetic relatedness and language families. If you can explain how multiple languages can be "one and the same language" then I will be waiting to hear. Otherwise, forget it. Finally, let's look at Anthony Arlotto, _Introduction to Historical Linguistics_ (1972). This is a very elementary work, so elementary that I often recommend it to those who have absolutely no training in linguistics. I tend to think of it as the "Little Golden Book of Historical Linguistics." I say this without being derogatory. It is just very simple and easy to understand. It hits the high spots without getting bogged down in controversial or disputed points or using complex examples that can only be understood by someone with linguistic training. Here is what it says on the subject of related languages: It has been said that historical linguistics is based on a fact and a hypothesis. The fact is that certain languages show such remarkable similarities to each other that these similarities could not be due to chance or borrowing. The hypothesis is that these were once the same language. We call this ancestor language a _common language_. (pp. 38-39) and When the evidence that two languages were once the same becomes conclusive, we then speak of these two languages as being _genetically related_. Another way of phrasing the same fact is to say that they belong to the same _language family_. Note that when we group languages genetically, our claim is purely a historical one and does not necessarily imply that the attested languages resemble each other in any particularly definable degree .... In the course of time, the languages will have changed; the amount of change will be dependent on various factors, not all of which are clearly understood at the moment. ... Often, the similarities between two languages which attest their common origin will not be at all obvious at first glance. Or, on the other side of the coin, large amounts of borrowing may get in the way of correct conclusions. However, by a rigorous application of the methods of historical-comparative linguistics, it is often possible to say whether two or more languages are genetically related. Here we note the same point raised by Anttila: Genetically related languages were once the same language. Indeed, here we learn that this is the fundamental hypothesis of historical linguistics. We also note that Arlotto explains that genetic relationship is a historical relationship, thus validating Crystal's use of the term "historical relationship." The two are not interchangeable, however, for while a genetic relationship is always a historical relationship, not every historical relationship is necessarily a genetic one (unless one restricts "relationship" to meaning "genetic relationship"). I am sure that there are similar or identical statements to be found in practically any textbook or introductory work that deals with language families and genetic relatedness of languages. Or it that fails, you could just use a dictionary. Here is what Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged (1994) has to say under "comparative method": _Historical Ling._ a body of procedures and criteria used by linguists to determine whether and how two or more languages are related and to reconstruct forms of their hypothetical parent language. You will notice that this says "parent language," not "parent languages." The single parent is just part of the definition of related languages -- everybody's definition (except yours). >What Winifred Lehmann writes is that the comparative method >"contrasts forms of two or more related languages to determine >the precise relationships between those forms." Either as a >matter of phonology or morphology, it seems it is forms, not >languages, that are being "contrasted." >If you can describe why or how you think "mono-descent" is >implicit in the comparative method, that might make me think what >you are saying is true. I doubt it. I have never known you to be convinceed by evidence and rational argumentation. But in case you actually mean it, here is the reason why "mono-descent" is implicit, not just in the comparative method, but in historical linguistics: GENETICALLY RELATED LANGUAGES WERE ONCE THE SAME LANGUAGE. Now, what part of this don't you understand? >At this point, you might want to take a closer look at that >horse you are selling. It seems those legs are not what you would >call factory options. Which is exactly what he said. You can't have the horse without the legs. You can't have the comparative method without "mono-descent" of language families. It's not an option. >><>first round.>> >Of course! After all, theoretically - it just couldn't happen. >How many fingers do you see? Only one. The middle one on your right hand. You can put it down now -- we got the message. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From connolly at memphis.edu Thu Jul 26 04:16:48 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 23:16:48 -0500 Subject: Rate of language change Message-ID: Having read several learned but indigestible treatises on whether the rate of language change is constant, I would urge all to remember the pseudo-science known as glottochronology. It is based precisely on the assumption that at least vocabulary is lost at a constant rate. Trouble is, it doesn't work. For instance, Pennsylvania Dutch would have had to have separated from German before the discovery of America, to cite one notorious example. Neither can we posit a constant rate of grammatical or syntactic change. Consider North Germanic languages. Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian were virtually indistinguishable; the principal difference was whether unstressed syllables contained or . The modern languages hardly resemble each other at all, since Norwegian has changed drasticaly, while Modern Icelandic retains most of the grammatical features of Old Icelandic and has developed phonetically in so consistent a way that the spelling has needed only slight modification. Now surely part of this is because Iceland is isolated in the North Atlantic, while Norwegian gradually became rather like Danish. But if isolation is an explanation, we can only conclude that in prehistoric times, language change is even less constant than what we observe. Peace and joy nevertheless. Leo Connolly From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Thu Jul 26 13:38:51 2001 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 16:38:51 +0300 Subject: multiple "ancestors" Message-ID: I would like to make a couple of remarks on Steve Long's claim that a language could have multiple genetic ancestors, perhaps from a slightly different perspective than the objections already brought up by Larry Trask and others. It should be noted that the assumption of multiple genetic ancestors actually invalidates the most central concepts of historical linguistics (e.g. language family, descent, convergence, divergence, borrowing, family tree, Indo-European, etc.). These terms are defined in the context of the comparative method and the assumption of a single parent. They are quite simply meaningless, if the single parent asumption is *not* accepted - in which case one would either have to redifene the terms or not to use them at all. Consequently, the acceptance of the concept of "multiple genetic ancestors" would immediately invalidate *all* established results ever obtained in the field of historical linguisics. As for the assumption of a single genetic ancestor (to which there are some rare exceptions, to which the standard tools of historical linguistics, especially the comparative method, are not applicable), it should be fairly obvious that it is the only reasonable starting point. This assumption is based on direct observations of language acquisition (we do not observe the development of mixed idiolects in cases where a child receives input from more than one language) and stability of language over time - it is extremely rare for a langauge to change so rapidly that the continuity between it and its ancestor would clearly be disrupted. (The stability is of course merely an effect of how language acquisition works.) Regards, Ante Aikio From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Thu Jul 26 21:58:10 2001 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 00:58:10 +0300 Subject: Thresholds of Comprehensibility In-Reply-To: <25.182e85ef.2885cfb3@aol.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 17 Jul 2001 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > Hopefully, you see the problem in this. You appear to be saying that you > DON'T know what rate of change in a language is, but you are SURE that it > cannot be measured by changes in individual sounds or words. > Now, I don't know whether the latter is true or not. I think that one would > have to do some real measuring among recorded languages to know the answer to > that. I'm sorry, but I cannot understand what you might mean here. Are you saying that you would find out whether you are measuring the right thing if you just went ahead and measured? This seems just circular. > But it is not logical to eliminate such a way of defining "rate of change in > a language", when you say you have no definition of those terms yourself. I don't think so. "The rate of change" is of course not an established term with an exactly defined meaning, but this does not mean that any definition could be accepted, if no one suggests a better one. It should be pretty obvious that sound change is a poor metric of language change. This is no a priori assumption, but one based on observation. For example, a small amount of conditioned sound changes may trigger a typological shift which has radical consequences to the morphosyntax of the language. In these kinds of cases, your metric would show only little change. > One definition of dissimilarity that can obviously be measured is the point > at which changes cross over into incomprehensibility. And this would apply > to sounds, grammar and even syntax. And though the measure is binary (yes or > no), binary data can carry enormous meaning when viewed cumulatively, across > a language system. I must ask how exactly would you "measure" comprehensibility. Moreover, comprehensibility is obviously a poor metric of similarity. For instance: Sami /njuolla/ 'arrow' and Finnish /nuoli/ 'arrow' are pretty similar, but the mutual *comprehensibility* of Finnish and Sami is simply zero. If I uttered, out of the blue, a sentence containing the word /njuolla/ to a monolingual speaker of Finnish, he wouldn't understand a word, so your metric would presumably give "no similarity" as a result. Regards, Ante Aikio From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Jul 26 19:54:28 2001 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 15:54:28 EDT Subject: Comprehensibility: sound vs grammar Message-ID: >Steve Long >You act as if you have some special information that says otherwise and >somehow clearly makes my statement "not make any sense." >Do you have any proof of this, one way or the other? Or is this just another >overstated impression of yours? -- Mr. Long, he knows the languages in question. You don't. Is there an obvious inference to be drawn here? From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Jul 27 10:11:03 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 11:11:03 +0100 Subject: Comprehensibility: sound vs grammar In-Reply-To: <75.17f1011b.288c7e51@aol.com> Message-ID: --On Sunday, July 22, 2001 3:06 pm +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: [LT] > < divergence.>> > And so is there any way of objectively measuring degree of divergence? Not that I know of. There are too many dimensions of change. Who can say whether a change in pronunciation should be weighted more or less heavily than a change in grammar, or in lexicon? [SL] > < borrowed (a la DLW's finite verbs), then perhaps they are the least > likely to change, and therefore are the features that least reflect > accurately rates or degrees of change.>> [LT] > < dramatically, then the language has changed greatly, and we cannot pretend > otherwise merely because the pronunciation hasn't changed much. >> > Typical disparaging and groundless overstatement. Really? So, Steve, you want to entertain the possibility that a language can undergo large changes in grammar without changing very much overall? Uh-huh. Sure. ;-) > First of all, you slip right into your usual conclusions - "changed > greatly." > Secondly, no one said a change in grammar doesn't change a language. My > point was that morphology and grammar may PERHAPS least accurately > reflect rates of degrees of change. Incomprehensible. If the grammar of a language changes, then the language has changed. You know what your position reminds me of? Some years ago, inflation in Britain had reached politically unacceptable levels. The government, worried about this, noticed that the price of housing was rising faster than anything else. So, what did they do? They redefined the inflation rate so as to exclude the cost of housing, thereby producing an agreeably lower "inflation rate", which they then dubbed the "underlying inflation rate". In doing this, they conveniently overlooked the blunt fact that everybody has to have housing and that everybody has to pay the market price for it, whether the government is counting this expense or not. It appears to me that you want to define "linguistic rate of change" so as to exclude change in grammar. Why? This is simply perverse. > What is the basis of your criticism here? What's your measure of change > here? How do you measure change so that you can say a language changes > "greatly" when a grammar changes "dramatically?" How do you measure any > of that? I can't quantify linguistic change at all. I thought we'd settled that some time ago. Is it your impression that the difference between our English and King Alfred's English resides almost entirely in pronunciation and lexicon, while the grammatical differences are trifling? Or that Julius Caesar could learn to understand modern Italian without bothering about the trifling differences in grammar? > Absolute statements. Conclusions with no objective basis. Ill-defined > terms. The usual. No. Just a recognition of reality. You ought to try reality, Steve. It has many virtues. ;-) > But does change in grammar have anywhere as much impact on > comprehensibility as phonology? My statement was a PERHAPS. You act as > if you have some special information that says otherwise and somehow > clearly makes my statement "not make any sense." I'm an American in Britain. The grammatical differences between British and American English are few and small, but they exist, and they have at times caused me difficulties. I had to learn that, when an Englishman says "I insist that this is not done", he usually means "I insist that this not be done." And I had to learn that, when he says "I've got a letter", he usually means "I've gotten a letter." And I also had to learn to accept and understand such word salad as "A deal has been agreed" and "Immediately she arrives, we'll eat" and "Your car needs the battery changing" and "Which is my one?" Multiply these differences by a hundred, and you get something I would have failed to understand at all without a good deal of experience. > Do you have any proof of this, one way or the other? Or is this just > another overstated impression of yours? See above. 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 Fri Jul 27 14:13:32 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 15:13:32 +0100 Subject: One Step at a Time In-Reply-To: <8c.9c76d07.288c841d@aol.com> Message-ID: --On Sunday, July 22, 2001 3:31 pm +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: [LT, on Muke's question] > < verbs, which gives rise to some daughters.>> > Then why did Muke write "those from a language X that conjugated one way > and those from a language Y that conjugated another way?" The point I > believe of the hypothetical was two lines of genetic descent. Sorry; not relevant. A language is a language -- that is, it is *one* language. How the language got that way is irrelevant. Once it exists, it is a single language. If it gives rise to several daughters, at least some of which are amply recorded, then we can reconstruct that single ancestral language as usual -- including its verb classes, if it had any. But the comparative method can't tell us anything about how that proto-language came into existence -- unless, of course, the proto-language itself has attested or reconstructed relatives, in which case we can apply the comparative method again to obtain a still more remote reconstruction. However, if the first proto-language did not in fact descend by divergence from a single ancestor, then we can't possibly apply the comparative method a second time, because the conditions for applying the comparative method are not met. > And the key here is the assumption that there is only one ancestor > language somewhere along the line. That assumption is NOT justified by > the comparative method, which yields only ancestor forms. The idea that > there has to be one "parent" somewhere comes from a different theory. Steve, for the seventeenth time: if there was not a single ancestor, then the comparative method simply cannot be applied, and nothing can be reconstructed. Why is this simple idea so hard to grasp? > If two languages can each contribute genetically distinct classes of > verbs to one "daughter" language, then they can each contribute those > classes to multiple "daughter" languages. Really? How do you know that? Can you cite a single example of such a thing? I'm pretty sure you can't. However, if such a thing ever did happen, then the resulting languages would not constitute a language family; they would not exhibit the required systematic correspondences; and nothing could be reconstructed. > There does not have to be a > single language intervening, only original unitary ancestor forms coming > from different earlier languages. Fantasy, I'm afraid, so far as anybody knows. Look, Steve. Do you remember the technique we all learned in school for extracting the square root of a number with pencil and paper? (Well, at least my generation did.) Now, take the number and try to extract its square root by the familiar technique. You will fail, and any result you get will be gibberish. Why? Because, if we start with a negative number, then the conditions for applying the familiar technique are not satisfied, and any attempt at applying it anyway will return nothing, or at least nothing but rubbish. Well, the same is true of your scenario. If you take a bunch of languages which do not descend by divergence from a single common ancestor, then the conditions for applying the comparative method are not satisfied, and any attempt at applying it will return nothing -- or at least nothing but rubbish. Why is this so hard to understand? [LT] > << The comparative method has nothing to say about the origin of a > proto-language, unless there are yet further languages that can be > compared with it normally.>> > But that's not true, for a number of reasons. One is that the "further > languages" may be forced into a single parent based on a particular > method of family tree construction. Steve, I simply despair of you. > In fact, when the comparative method has "nothing to say" about the > origin of certain forms, the tree model has often taken over and > assigned those forms to the parent in any case. Steve, your postings are becoming wilder and wilder. Before now, I could at least see where your misunderstandings lay -- I think. But this time I can't. This passage strikes me as perfectly demented. > So that Prof Trask's > "further language" will actually not be recognized as evidence of "the > origins of the > proto-language." All I meant was this. If we have some Germanic languages, then we can reconstruct Proto-Germanic. But we can't go any further than Proto-Germanic, unless we have some relatives of Proto-Germanic -- say, Proto-Celtic and Proto-Slavic. If we have these too, then we can perform comparative reconstruction again and get Proto-Indo-European. If we don't, though, we can't, and Proto-Germanic is as far as we can go. [much snipping] > It is the assumption of single parentage that turns "other" genetic > strains into non-genetic forms. This is the circular effect that can > erase the possibility of multple ancestors, even if it is there. But > the comparative method itself might possibly support EITHER conclusion. No, Steve. This is false. I'm afraid you simply do not understand the comparative method at all. You still regard it as some kind of Ibistick. Well, I've done my best, to no avail. I'm signing off from this thread now. I'll leave it to others to pursue this fruitless discussion, if they want 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 acnasvers at hotmail.com Sat Jul 28 09:28:59 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2001 09:28:59 +0000 Subject: The Single *PIE Village Theory Message-ID: Steve Long (21 Jul 2001) wrote: >First of all, the arrowwood example - which you [DGK] dismissed - is how I >must understand the ordinary behavior of tree-naming on a local level - before >science, trade or dictionarians intervene. All our historical experience with >"common names" for trees and plants is that they are highly local and >irregular. The arrowwood example was not given with any illustrations of correspondences to the yew-name problem, and that's _your_ job. It's not up to me to point out that Gk. , like , can refer to several distinct plants, or that yews are indeed known by different words and phrases in different parts of S Europe (you might have drawn a parallel between "high-bush cranberry" and "albero della morte", pace Euell Gibbons). Simply shoveling a big pile of data into a reader's face isn't the best way to make a point. Also, I don't believe your sweeping generalization is correct. _Some_ of our historical experience points to "highly local and irregular" phytonyms. _Other_ experience indicates widespread and highly stable ones. Both extremes may characterize names for the same plant, as is indeed the case with Taxus baccata. Some Mediterranean areas show your "highly local and irregular" behavior, but a large part of N Europe is content with reflexes of *eiwo-, and has been for a long time. >I cannot with any integrity accept the idea that most *PIEists even knew the >name for a yew tree or most other trees. And that is because when we look at >pre-lierate societies we see that such comprehensive distinguishing between >flora is limited to a specialized group within the group, if it is anyone's >job at all. This is likely to be true of all societies having specialized groups, literate or not, which takes us back at least to the upper Palaeolithic. I'm neither a botanist nor a woodworker, and I couldn't tell you the difference between a mulberry and a sycamore without help. But as long as society contains recognized experts (which in this case might simply be "lumberjacks"), it is probable that most members of a speaking community will defer to those experts in naming trees, and there is no reason to expect a chaotic outcome. >So, if I were to look for the source of the names of the yew, it would not be >*PIE speakers. It would be linguistic communities that would have some real >vested interest in finding a common name for the yew among themselves. These >would be people who made a living out of trees and wood - especially those >along the intergroup supply chain who were trading wood in a manner that what >tree the wood came from would make a difference. I have no quarrel with this paragraph. It fits well with the notion that PIE *takso- originally referred to yew-wood. This word might well have been borrowed into PIE from non-PIE-speakers along the intergroup supply chain, which harmonizes with my original claim that PIE-speakers lived in a yewless environment. >We have evidence that stone and metal workers were specialists at a very early >date. We have evidence of trade in worked goods ranging several hundred miles >and that evidence extends from Cro-Magnon to the mesolithic obsidian cutters >of the Italian coast - even the Iceman's arrow points were from a site 300 >miles from his home. Workers in wood, bone, tusk and antler would have looked >to extend their markets beyond a few local customers - the other trades were >doing it. This means they needed to identify the raw materials they needed to >tree-cutters and describe the wood they used to traders and customers. And >the primary "name" standardizers would be those who moved goods from market to >market, buying and selling raw materials and finished products. Again, no quarrel, and I see no discrepancy with the "yewless PIE homeland" proposal. >That is the primary way I see a standard name coming about, reconciling the >highly observable inconsistency of local names - and that would include early >IE speakers. Scientific botany is comparatively recent - its an anachronism. >If this has any possible connection with "a recognized PIE tree with a >European naming pattern," then I might be able to answer your question. Allow me to be more concrete. We have Lat. 'beech', Gk. 'type of oak', and Germanic forms (e.g. OE 'beech', 'carved beech-staff, document, book') pointing to PGmc *bo:k-, all of which presuppose PIE *bha:go-. This is what I mean by a "recognized PIE tree". Yes, scientific nomenclature is recent, and I don't envision prehistoric Linnaei running through the woods insisting on "one genus, one name". PIE *bha:go- didn't necessarily denote a single genus in the Linnaean sense; it might have referred to any member of the beech-family Fagaceae, or (conceding one of your points) to trees having dense, fine-grained wood. At any rate, trees called *bha:go- appear to have actually _grown_ in PIE-land. The nature of prehistoric societies with respect to the use of dendronyms could be argued ad infinitum. That is why I am asking you to find another tree (not necessarily a Linnaean taxon) whose behavior in European IE languages resembles that of the yew, and which beyond a reasonable doubt was known in living form to PIE-speakers. Whatever questions we have about the speaking communities, at least in regard to the matter of "standard" naming, should be canceled out by the fact that we are dealing with the same speakers, places, and migrations. DGK From bronto at pobox.com Thu Jul 26 15:06:06 2001 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 08:06:06 -0700 Subject: The Single *PIE Village Theory Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > . . . We have evidence of trade in worked goods ranging several > hundred miles and that evidence extends from Cro-Magnon to the > mesolithic obsidian cutters of the Italian coast - even the > Iceman's arrow points were from a site 300 miles from his home. . . . Pardon my ignorance - Do we know where the Iceman's home was? -- Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/ From dlwhite at texas.net Thu Jul 26 12:32:15 2001 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 07:32:15 -0500 Subject: Descent vs. Influence Message-ID: > So, is that what you consider the difference between descent and influence? - > sound-meaning correspondences = descent > distinctions made, ordering of elements and so on = influence > So where one finds systematic "sound-meaning correspondence", are those forms > indicative of "descent?" No. Sometimes elements from a foreign source have been incorporated into a native frame, as in the French element in English. So I was defining what is not even potentially descent. As for other things, I would be moderately happy to have Hungarian "goulash" described as Hungarian "lexical influence" (however minor) in English. I would not be happy to have "goulash" make English a mixed language that is one-millionth (or whatever) Hungarian, by descent. The limits of when the concept of incorporation may be applied were, by the way, what Dr. Trask and I were arguing about (or should have been) before my Aug 1 deadline (closely followed by an Aug 15 deadline) intervened. I think Michif can be seen as French incorporated into Cree, Anglo-Romani as Romani incorporated in English, etc. Not everyone agrees. I will get back to it. Dr. David L. White From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Jul 29 13:19:09 2001 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 29 Jul 2001 16:19:09 +0300 Subject: UP and lexicon size In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 21 May 2001 Douglas G Kilday wrote: >Robert Whiting (17 May 2001) wrote: >>In fact there is a sort of Zipf's Law for this because function >>words are relatively few in number but are used very frequently >>while the number of content words is huge (and growing >>constantly) but the individual words are much rarer in use. >Excuse my skepticism, but I can't believe the _net_ number of >contentives in a given language is growing constantly. As new >contentives enter a language, others exit. Lexica don't have >rubber walls. And I (Robert Whiting) would have replied: [I say would have replied because I already had this written as part of a larger response that I had not had time to finish] Sure they do. Ask any lexicographer. In fact, you don't have to ask a lexicographer; they will tell you without asking unless you can figure out a way to stop them. It is known locally as the "lexicographer's lament." Here is a quotation from Frederick C. Mish, Editor in Chief of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary Tenth Edition (2000), taken from the preface (p. 6a): The ever-expanding vocabulary of our language exerts inexorable pressure on the contents of any dictionary. Words and senses are born at a far faster rate than that at which they die out. He then goes on to provide some statistical data of the kind that a professional lexicographer in his position might easily have access to that back up his statement. So lexica do have rubber walls. The lexicon of any language expands to allow its speakers to talk about whatever they want or need to talk about. But I see from your subsequent postings that you consider all lexicographers to be pathological liars and that they are just in league with their publishers to get people to believe that there are so many new words in the most recent dictionary that everyone has to buy a copy. But then you go on to disprove your own point by establishing that it is easy to see when a new word enters the language, but very difficult to establish when an old word leaves. Therefore, by your own reasoning, new words and senses enter the language faster than they die out, just because you can never be sure that the old words are really gone. What makes the difference, of course, is writing. If you don't have writing, once a word is gone, it is gone. If it isn't used for three generations, no one knows it, or even that it once existed (unless it is preserved in a compound that continues in existence). Without writing, there is no record of the word so it can't be revived. Writing simply provides external storage for the lexicon of the language. Without writing, there is no place to store the lexicon except in the memory of speakers. Speakers know the words that they know, and that's it. If they hear an unfamiliar word, they can't look it up in a dictionary -- they can only ask someone else what it means or try to guess by analogy or from context. Now it is quite possible that internal storage is limited. That is, if you want to learn a new word you have to forget some word that you already know. Since you claim that this is the way that lexica work, your mind would seem to work this way. If RAM is getting full, you will have to write something to the hard disk before you can put something else in. If your hard disk is getting full, you have to delete something before you can add a new file. But, by analogy with writing, it is possible to transfer the old file that you don't need at the moment to external storage by copying it to a diskette before deleting it. Then if you find that you need it later, you can always recover it from the diskette (provided you can remember what diskette it is on and where you put the diskette). So there is a difference between the individual's lexicon and the lexicon of the language. The individual's lexicon may well be limited by internal storage (and the amount of internal storage may well vary by individual). There are different kinds of vocabulary, which require different kinds of storage. Active vocabulary consists of words that the individual uses in his speech production. This must be kept in the equivalent of random access memory (constantly available). Then there is passive vocabulary. This consists of words that the individual recognizes and understands but that he does not use in his own speech production. This can be stored in a different location not requiring constant immediate access (on the hard disk, as it were). Finally, there is occasional vocabulary, consisting of rare, archaic, specialized, and even obsolete words, that can be kept in external storage (on a diskette = in a dictionary) and can be accessed in case of need (say to read Shakespere or Marlowe, or in case one wants to take up the study of medieval armor, collect coins, or take up falconry and so on). Now this analogy is not precise because we know exactly how much storage capacity our RAM, hard disk, and diskettes have and how and how much information can be stored there, but we don't know much about how things are stored in the human mind or what its storage capacity is. Perhaps the human mind does work like a computer -- but since computers are not capable of the same things that the human mind is, there is reason to doubt this. Developing a computer that works like the human mind is the goal of the AI people (and I wish them luck). The human mind is capable of intelligence (well, some human minds are), that is, it can analyze data and reach a conclusion that it has not been previously programmed with. But to get back to the size of the lexicon, it doesn't really matter what one believes about it. Professional lexicographers say that the lexicon of English is constantly expanding; semi-naive native speakers say that the size of the lexicon is constant. Which one are you going to believe? (I know where I'd put my money.) But as I say, it doesn't really matter what you believe. Some people believe that the universe is constantly expanding; some believe that it is in a steady state. What people believe about it doesn't affect the way it works. It will continue to work the way it does, regardless. So it is with the lexicon of a language. It will work the way it does regardless of what people believe about it. There will always be words to let its speakers talk about whatever they need or want to talk about. If there is no word for something that they need or want to talk about, let's say computers and computer applications, then they will create one: by borrowing one from another language (can't think of any computer terminology that has been borrowed from other languages offhand; since most computer development was done by English speakers, the terminology has generally been exported to other languages); or by using an old word with a new sense (mouse, disk, bug, virus); or by new compounds (software, internet, floppy disk); or by abbreviation (RAM, ROM, DOS, modem, univac, awk, perl); or by free invention or neologisms (glitch, ergonomics); or by expropriating personal names (baud, Turing machine); etc., etc. The top-end dictionaries of computer terminology claim to have around 13,000-15,000 entries. Even allowing for a reasonable amount of exaggeration, double-counting, etc., I think we could safely assume around 10,000 words, expressions, and senses that have been added to the language in the last half-century in this one field alone. So to make your claim reasonable, you will have to come up with a list of 10,000 words, expressions, and senses that have been lost from the English lexicon in the past 50 years. And once you find your first 10,000 lost words, then we can look at things like aeronautics, microbiology, and nuclear physics to see how many more you need to keep up. So I'll excuse your skepticism. Skepticism is a healthy way to look at things. But if you want to be known as a wise man rather than just a skeptic, you would do well to have evidence to back up your intuitions and beliefs. [Anyway, that's what I would have said, had not a number of other people, such as Larry Trask and Jim Rader, pointed out the fallacies in the reasoning that led to your conclusion, posted on Monday, May 28, 2001, that "All things considered, net stasis of lexical size makes more sense than continuous expansion." But actually, neither one makes particular sense. There is nothing that I can think of that *requires* continuous expansion of a language's lexicon. The factor that controls lexicon size is the number of things (objects, phenomena, and processes), real or imagined, that the speakers of a language need or want to talk about. If this number has net growth, then the size of the lexicon will increase; if it declines, the lexicon will shrink. If it is constant, the lexicon will tend to stay about the same size. It has simply been observed by lexicographers (and some linguists) that, historically, the lexicon of English has been constantly expanding. On the other hand, if net stasis of lexical size is a linguistic *requirement*, then it must be a linguistic universal. Even among the most fervent seekers after linguistic universals I have never seen "net stasis of lexical size" proposed as one. Furthermore, such a requirement raises immediate questions that I have never seen addressed. Such questions include: Is the fixed size of the lexicon the same for all languages? If so, what is the size of the lexicon of every language? If not, how is the fixed size of the lexicon for a given language determined? What factors enter into this determination? Are all these factors linguistic, or can they be socially or culturally determined? How is it determined when the lexicon is full and some words must be removed? What happens if the required maximum size of the lexicon is inadvertently exceeded? Do the speakers get a certain amount of time to remove the excess words or does the system crash? What happens to speakers who don't know that the allowed size of the lexicon has been exceeded? When you have answers to questions like these, it might be possible to consider "net stasis of lexical size" seriously. Of course, if the answer to the last question is "nothing", then there is no basis for the concept because it is undetectable. That is to say, the *requirement* can't be taken seriously because there is no penalty for ignoring it.] But then, on Sat, 14 Jul 2001 Douglas G Kilday wrote Re: Uniformitarian Principle: >Several list-members have invoked a linguistic UP, usually >without any clear statement, and not always consistently. Larry >Trask has been the staunchest advocate of the UP on this list, >yet he has attacked the principle of net lexical stasis, >apparently believing that the inventory of contentives in a >language grows continuously (as claimed by Robert Whiting). First, as I said above, it's not particularly my claim. Ask any lexicographer of English. I just happen to think that it is obvious that the lexicon of a language can expand to any size that its speakers want or need. The lexicon of the individual may be limited in size, but not that of the language. Fortunately, not all speakers of the language want or need to talk about all of the same things. No speaker can know the entire vocabulary of the language, but he doesn't have to. He needs a core vocabulary to use for general communication purposes and if he wants to communicate in a specialized field then he needs additional vocabulary particular to that field. But the lexicon of the language contains not only the core vocabulary, but also *all* of the specialized vocabularies. It may be possible that the core vocabulary is more or less static (this was the assumption of the glottochronologists -- but that didn't work either), but it may be possible that it isn't. Second, the UP doesn't restrict what happens (events), but rather how things can happen (processes). Lexicon size is not a process, so the UP doesn't have anything to say about it. What the UP says is that the processes by which the size of the lexicon changes will always have been the same. Thus we can expect that languages have always been able to add words by borrowing, by coining new words (free invention), by compounding, by analogy, by reanalysis, etc. That is, we should not postulate any mode of word formation in prehistory that cannot be observed today. However, saying that the UP requires that the size of the lexicon of PIE had to be the same size as the lexicon of modern English is a non sequitur worthy of someone with considerably less linguistic training. >Now, if the UP and LT's view of lexical growth are both correct, >the alleged present inflationary situation has _always_ >characterized languages, all of which are therefore, in >principle, traceable back to a single word. (So was that word >/N/, /?@N/, /tik/, or /bekos/? Never mind ... rhetorical >question.) Non sequitur. The UP doesn't have anything to say about the size of lexicons, or of any other population. Population size is not a process but a summation over events (births and deaths). If total births exceed total deaths then the population is growing; if deaths exceed births then it is declining; if they are equal then it is static. What the UP says is that the methods of birth and death will have always been much the same, not that the population size has always been constant. >For the purposes of this list, I would suggest a statement of >the UP roughly as follows: "The history and prehistory of >languages used by anatomically modern humans involve no >fundamental processes not occurring today." Adequate, if somewhat wordy. My professor always expressed it as: "Anything that happens later could have happened earlier." What this means is that the processes that have led to an observed event (even if that event is unique) could have led to that event when it wasn't observed because the processes don't change -- they have always been there. Note the use of "could have happened." This does not mean that such an event "must have happened." This limits the value of historical parallels. Historical parallels only show that a particular event could have happened at some other time, not that it must have happened. Showing that it must have happened requires a different kind of evidence. For example, the observed breakup of Latin into the Romance languages does not prove that there was a PIE language that broke up into the modern IE languages. It just proves that there could have been such a language and such a breakup. But the fact that from the Romance languages can be reconstructed a proto-language (proto-Romance) that matches in detail the known parent (Latin) and that by using the same methods a proto-language of the modern IE languages can be reconstructed in great detail makes it much more convincing that there was a PIE language that broke up into the modern IE languages in the same way that Latin broke up into the modern Romance languages. By contrast, for the Altaic languages, the inability to reconstruct a convincing proto-language for this group means that the historical parallel of the breakup of Latin into the Romance languages is not available as evidence of the existence of an Altaic language family. Some other mechanism must be invoked to account for the (mostly typological) similarities of this group of languages. >This leaves rather vague the matter of what "fundamental >processes" are, like "physical forces" in geology. Specific >examples of results might well be unique, so the UP is _not_ >equivalent to the rather crude synchronic typological arguments >often encountered in reconstructive debates. It deals with >dynamics, not statics. Ah, then you actually realize that the UP has nothing to do with a static lexicon size. >An example to which the UP might be applied is the proposal that >pre-PIE had ergative-absolutive case-marking. If the proponents >can give clear examples of E-A languages turning into >nominative-accusative languages during historical times, and in >the process today, then the proposal is credible. If OTOH the >record, and current behavior, show that E-A case-marking tends to >develop out of N-A structure, then the ergative pre-PIE >hypothesis is in trouble. No, this is a misuse of negative evidence and the UP. All the UP says is that if historical examples of E-A > N-A can be shown then E-A > N-A could have happened in pre-PIE. It does not say that it must have happened nor does it say that N-A > E-A cannot happen nor does it imply that either E-A > N-A or N-A > E-A has to happen. Now admittedly, if there are hundreds of examples of N-A > E-A and none of E-A > N-A, that makes E-A > N-A in pre-PIE a much more difficult row to hoe, but it still doesn't make it impossible. It just means that convincing evidence has to come from elsewhere. This is exactly like Dr. David L. White's contention that finite verbal morphology can't be borrowed, based on hundreds of examples of the borrowing of nominal morphology and no clear examples of the borrowing of finite verbal morphology. This may make for a strong presumption -- a heuristic -- but is not convincing. Evidence has to come from someplace else. But his contention that verbs are higher up in the food chain than nouns are and eat nouns for breakfast is not evidence, it is just a plausible story. And, a priori, it is not even particularly plausible, since there is no a priori reason that speakers should view nouns and verbs with different levels of awe. If it is true then, it must be part of the fabled Universal Grammar, something that every human being is born knowing. I'm not saying that he should give up his idea (just like people shouldn't give up working on Universal Grammar). If he keeps working on it and succeeds in proving that finite verbal morphology can't be borrowed, he may someday be canonized by the Chomskians as one of the first people to identify a concrete feature of Universal Grammar. But to see if you have grasped the point about negative evidence, here is a multiple choice historical question to test your comprehension: There is no evidence that Richard Nixon was involved in the Watergate conspiracy. This means that: a) Nixon was not involved in the Watergate conspiracy. b) All evidence that Nixon was involved in the Watergate conspiracy has been lost, destroyed, or suppressed. c) Either a or b could be true. (Never mind ... rhetorical question. :>) Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From sarima at friesen.net Thu Jul 26 13:50:23 2001 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 06:50:23 -0700 Subject: Uniformitarian Principle In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 09:47 AM 7/20/01 +0000, Douglas G Kilday wrote: >That wouldn't be a very intelligent assumption. Nature is full of >discontinuous processes like earthquakes, landslides, and lightning bolts >which do _not_ involve any change in physical laws. However, processes involving cross-generation transfer rarely are so. It takes time to learn a language, and too much change between generations is prevented by the requirement of communication between parent and child. >It has been tacitly assumed that a _single_ rate of change is valid. No, it has been concluded that a *range* of rates is valid - probably following something resembling a normal curve, with the larger outliers progressively rarer. >Larry Trask's example of Basque, John McLaughlin's example of Comanche, >and the well-known Great Vowel Shift of Middle English have two things in >common. They involve systematic shifting of phonemes over a finite >interval (50-100 years) and no apparent correlation with external >(non-linguistic) factors. And these are probably close the maximum possible rates of change possible without isolating the children from their parents. Changes much faster than these would seriously disrupt communication. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Jul 26 06:11:51 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 02:11:51 EDT Subject: Uniformitarian Principle Message-ID: In a message dated 7/25/01 11:40:01 PM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes: << Someone has used the term "punctuated equilibria" from the Eldridge-Gould model of speciation, which in my opinion doesn't belong here. Analogies between evolutionary biology and linguistic change are very poor, not least because language is inherently incapable of reaching equilibrium. Instead, phonemic shifting suggests classic stick-slip behavior, or Reid's elastic-rebound theory of earthquakes. >> Another quick note. If I remember rightly, Dixon applied punctuated equilibrium to the language diversity issue -- dialects in the manner of organisms splitting off and diversifying until they reach a point where the diversity is no longer adaptive. There's a shaking out that follows, resulting in greater linguistic uniformity among speakers (or organisms.) The question that PE addressed in natural selection does seem to have some clear analogies to languages - if groups of speakers (like organisms) have a tendency to split off into dialects that develop into languages, why aren't there ten million languages by now? Obviously, there is a functional factor - even in preliterate societies - that "pulls" back on all the regional, subcultural and other diversity and tends to uniformity. The "punctuation" happens, on the other hand, because uniformity and equilibrium are not in the end effectively adaptive to a constantly changing environment. When a species becomes very uniform and specialized to a specific environment, that necessarily increases its vulnerability to inevitable environmental change. (E.g., the near extinction of the lazy, carefree giant rabbits that evolved on predator-free Pacific islands before sea-going European cats landed.) Thus the equilibrium falls apart, diversity returns and the cycle starts again. PE would therefore be an attempt to explain the wavering balance between everyone speaking their own private dialect (clearly dysfunctional) and everyone speaking the exact same dialect/language (perhaps equally dysfu nctional.) What perhaps justifies the analogy between linguistic and biological diversity and the attendent processes is the assumption that they are both are "preemptively adaptive" systems. Some part of them changes constantly, which keeps life - and perhaps language - a step ahead of inevitable environmental change. (Hmmm. This turned out longer than I had hoped.) <> A friendly correction. I am not trying "to beat professional comparativists at their own game." (Lord knows, Prof Trask is sure to take that and run with it.) My point about quantification is purely defensive. (And my goals are much more modest.) The assertion has been made that some measure of linguistic 'rate of change' can be used in some way to date *PIE. My point was - and it still stands - that there is no scientific basis for that assertion. Quantification is just what science uses to keep everyone accurate and on the same page. And quantification is therefore essential when you attempt to describe the "rate" of anything. If you can't measure (or really even DEFINE, it turns out) a concept as "quantified" as rate of change, then the concept is not objective or checkable. This is equivalent to legally making the speed limit be a speed that just overall "feels too fast." It is a purely subjective standard. And whatever else it is, it is not science. Regards, Steve Long From acnasvers at hotmail.com Mon Jul 30 11:49:26 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2001 11:49:26 +0000 Subject: The Iceman's Berries Message-ID: Stanley Friesen (5 Jul 2001) wrote: >Thus, there is a large class of roots in Pokorny, and elsewhere, that are >only attested anciently from northern Europe and immediately adjacent >areas. These form a substantial corpus of words that, while locally >shared, cannot be confidently reconstructed for PIE proper. One >interesting factoid about this corpus is that it includes most of the roots >in Pokorny with a reconstructed *a that is not traceable to an a-coloring >laryngeal. (Note, this is not an identifying characteristic, it is an >observation). >Now, my *hypothesis* about many of these words is that they are borrowings >from a non-IE language family formerly wide-spread in northern Europe, but >now extinct. I wish I could figure out how to test this idea. I would look first at hydronyms. Much of the leg-work of collecting old hydronyms in W Europe and determining their constituents has been done; the results are mostly in the German literature. I am thinking particularly of Hans Krahe's papers in the old series of Beitraege zur Namenforschung. Krahe summarizes his system in "Indogermanisch und Alteuropaeisch" (Saeculum VIII, 1957, pp. 1-16). He identifies suffixes such as -na, -ma, -ra, -antia and roots such as Alb-, Ar-, Av-, Var-. As a series of Old European hydronyms based on the root Al-, for example, he gives Ala (Norway), Alma (Etruria), Almana (mod. Alme, NW Germany), Alara (mod. Aller, W Prussia), Alantia (mod. Elz, SW Germany), and *Almantia (mod. Aumance, France). Krahe interprets his Old European system of hydronyms as the relic of an early stage of IE, and assigns meanings to some of the roots on the basis of "cognates": hence Al-, Av-, and Var- are supposed to mean simply 'water, stream' vel sim.; Alb- is supposedly 'white'; the Neckar allegedly means 'black'. Krahe notes the problem that many of the roots and "unsuffixed" names contain short [a] and resemble non-IE forms, but argues that the suffixes are IE, so the entire system must be IE. Hans Kuhn in "Ein zweites Alteuropa" (Namn och Bygd LIX, 1971, pp. 52-70) presents a more sophisticated analysis. He notes that hydronyms and other toponyms in -ur-, -ar-, and -ir- constitute a deep stratum found throughout W Europe but best preserved in the upper Po valley, N Switzerland, and part of S France. In much of NW-NC Europe, these roots commonly take the suffixes -s-, -k/g-, -n-, and -apa. Kuhn doubts the validity of IE "cognates": the river Suhre might seem to invite explanation in terms of *su:ro- (IEW 1039) 'sour; salty; bitter', but this etymology can hardly apply to the Norwegian island Surno/y, which appears to have the same root. Kuhn regards his -ur/ar- stratum as definitely non-IE, and Krahe's stratum as a later Indo-Europeanizing intrusion which incorporated many of the pre-IE names, commonly adding suffixes. Krahe considered -apa to be a form of *akwa:- (IEW 23), though it should be noted that Pokorny also required *ap- (IEW 51) to handle some Indo-Iranian forms. Either way, it is plausible that IE-speakers could add 'water' to pre-IE hydronyms. Kuhn observes that representatives of his -ur/ar- stratum are almost completely absent from E Denmark, where Megalithic monuments occur. It appears that the intrusive Megalithic society (which is plausibly the source of the Germanic Seewoerter like , , , , , ) obliterated the earlier stratum here in the early second millennium BCE. Krahe's estimate of 1500 BCE for _his_ stratum fits this chronology. The early IE-speakers must have absorbed the Megalithians. On these matters W.P. Schmid in "Alteuropaeisch und Indogermanisch" (Mainz 1968) and "Baltische Gewaessernamen und das vorgeschichtliche Europa" (Idg. Forsch. LXXVII, 1972, pp. 1-18) has positioned himself as the anti-Kuhn. He regards all the "Old European" hydronyms as resulting from undifferentiated old IE, and goes far beyond Krahe in supplying IE etymologies for the roots. For example, he refers Atese~ and Atesy~s (Lithuania), Ata (Latvia), Attersee (Austria), Odra (Ukraine), and Adria (i.e. the Adriatic!) to *at- (IEW 69) "ein Verbum der Bewegung". Now I can imagine how Bewegung connects the concept of 'year' (Lat. < *atnos, Goth. ) to 'river', but 'lake' or 'sea'? Also an arbitrary "d/t-Wechsel" is introduced which thumbs its nose at established comparative IE. Schmid's underlying philosophy of a pan-IE Alteuropa leaves no room for determining the actual stratification, and in my opinion Kuhn's model makes a lot more sense. Schmid places the Old European "center of gravity" (Schwerpunkt) in the Baltic region, and observes that the Slavic homeland (das Gebiet der Urslaven) lacks Old European hydronyms, which he explains by the loss of the pre-Slavic system. In my view, Schmid's "center of gravity" is a phantom based on the preconception of a Baltic IE homeland which is unwarranted by the facts. The logical place to put the IE homeland is where one does _not_ find pre-IE hydronyms, and that excludes the Baltic in favor of the Slavic Urheimat. Anyhow, what I would do (if I didn't have my hands full with S European matters) is to compare the corpus of "Old European" hydronomastic elements (found in Krahe's BzN papers) with that corpus of N European IE roots, looking mainly for systematic phonetic similarity. The results would likely suggest further directions of investigation. DGK From sarima at friesen.net Fri Jul 27 00:56:57 2001 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 17:56:57 -0700 Subject: About the Yew1 In-Reply-To: <013b01c1115b$d77a57e0$3e564341@swbell.net> Message-ID: At 03:37 PM 7/20/01 -0500, proto-language wrote: >Dear Douglas and IEists: >The example you give, capis, seems to me to be different. if R = root vowel, >it is CRCid-. >pe:s, of course, would be CRd-. >This could, of course, be a Dehnstufe but does not the absence of /d/ make one >question that a bit. Furthermore, gradation is normally associated with >syntactic or grammatical usages. What function would the Dehnstufe serve here? I have seen no convincing (to me) cases which require a true Dehnstufe in PIE proper. Just about every lengthened grade I have seen can either be traced to some form compensatory lengthening (often, but not always, due to loss of laryngeals), or is a reasonable analogical extension of such a lengthening. This leads me to suspect that grammatical lengthened grades are analogical extensions of compensatory lengthened grades that developed in the individual dialects. Note, in this model I treat lengthening due to loss of laryngeals as simply one particular (and common) type of compensatory lengthening. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From acnasvers at hotmail.com Sun Jul 29 09:27:24 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Sun, 29 Jul 2001 09:27:24 +0000 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: Patrick C. Ryan (20 Jul 2001) wrote: >> [DGK] >> Regarding PCR's objection that the long vowel in Lat. 'foot' arose by >> compensative lengthening from *peds instead of gradation: Palmer gives this >> as an example of gradation. Apart from this crude appeal to authority, we >> may note 'one-handled sacrificial vessel', gen. , which >> shows that Latin d-stems did _not_ regularly undergo compensation of *-ds in >> the nom. sg. >[PCR] >The example you give, capis, seems to me to be different. if R = root vowel, >it is CRCid-. >pe:s, of course, would be CRd-. >This could, of course, be a Dehnstufe but does not the absence of /d/ make one >question that a bit. Furthermore, gradation is normally associated with >syntactic or grammatical usages. What function would the Dehnstufe serve here? [DGK] Given the structural difference between and , my argument was rather weak. A better one occurs to me. Latin -ds- is normally assimilated to -ss-, and this has occurred with in 'worst' < *ped-simos lit. 'lowest, humblest'. Therefore, we should expect *peds > *pess. But the nouns gen. 'unit' and gen. 'bone' show that the nom. sg. degeminates the final in Latin ss-stems. Hence, if all cases of Lat. 'foot' had normal grade, we should expect nom. sg. *peds > *pess > *pes, not . Gradation explains the observed form better than compensation. Our presumably represents *pe:ds. Aren't cases associated with syntax and grammar? Don't we have the same phenomenon of Dehnstufe restricted to the nom. sg. in other IE words? Palmer gives , , , and Gk. as examples. The original "function" must have been to accommodate changes in the stress and timing of syllables, for IE Ablaut is broadly parallel to the vowel-alternations of modern Spanish, e.g. 'I sleep', 'I slept', 'he/she slept'. Short /o/ and /e/, stable in Classical Latin, underwent severe changes in Vulgar Latin and Continental West Romance depending on their position with respect to the word-accent, but original /u/ and /i/ remained relatively stable. A similar episode must have taken place in late pre-PIE (or whatever you choose to call it). From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Jul 27 07:15:36 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 08:15:36 +0100 Subject: Genetic Descent Message-ID: > What do you call it when Hebrew or Swahili verbs are inflected for > person etc? I call it different from IE. And Hebrew does indeed inflect a verb to show the feminine, with exactly the same suffix as it uses on adjectives and some nouns - this would be exactly parallel to using -ess on verbs. Peter From rao.3 at osu.edu Sun Jul 29 22:29:45 2001 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Sun, 29 Jul 2001 18:29:45 -0400 Subject: Anglo-Romani (Long, was Re: Genetic Descent) Message-ID: "Rick Mc Callister" wrote, in a message dated July 14, regarding calo: > The big problem is the actual origin of the lexicon [...] > So, Professor Rao, I'd appreciate it if you'd take a look at calo/ I prefer not use any titles in this list, as I am not a linguist. My primary interest is Sanskrit, and IE studies as impacting on it. I have done a bit reading on bilinguals due to personal reasons. What was being said on the original thread seemed, at times, to be at odds with my unerstanding. I am not really qualified to go beyond that, especially Romani etymology, as that would require knowledge of East/Central European languages that I do not have. All I can suggest is to consult Turner's Comparative Dictionary of Indo-Aryan Languages if Indic origin of a word is suggested: Romani words must be from late MIA stage, and a Sanskrit dictionary is not really suitable for this. In other respects, Calo seems to be in the same boat as Anglo-Romani. --- H. W. Hatting wrote >The central question for me would be: > is Anglo-Romani *now* > (a) a different language influenced to a big extent by English lexicon and > grammar or > (b) a group-language variant of English using lexicon from a non-English > source? > V. Rao has clearly shown that Romani went through a stage of strong English > influence in the past. For me, the question to answer in order to classify > Romani as (a) or (b) is whether there is an uninterrupted chain of > "Romani-as-a-first-language" speakers which leads to the speakers of "old" > Anglo-Romani to its speakers today (which means (a)), or whether the chain > was broken, and Anglo-Romani became a dead language, learnt by its speakers > when being initiated into the Romani community by elder people, The latter is asserted to be the case at least since 1960. Unfortunately, 19c writers do not seem to address this question. Leland cites one instance of a mother correcting her child when he used a wrong Romani word. But he also cites a case of a knife-sharpener telling his companion some Romani words the latter did not know. Clearly there was a great deal of person-to-person variation that makes any further analysis impossible. [And the possibility of words being 'borrowed' from Continental Gypsies would make it worse.] My position is that in 1800 Romani (of some sort) was still being spoken in England. By 1900 (1850?), Gypsies of England (but not Wales) were speaking basically English that could be mixed with Romani based jargon. Any attempt to draw a finer line would be pointless. From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Jul 26 18:01:56 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 14:01:56 EDT Subject: *Leo Connolly Message-ID: Leo Connolly makes an analogy here between language and human descent that is worth considering: In a message dated 7/20/01 6:26:10 AM, connolly at memphis.edu writes: << My biological child is by nature always my child, even if I leave all the nurturing to other people. While a nanny or day-care person may nurture him, that is influence, not descent. So too with language, and I'm as amazed as David White that anyone should confuse the two. >> BUT, unless something special has gone on here, your biological child is NOT ONLY your child. It's also someone else's. And the relationship of that someone else has nothing to do with "influence" or "nuture." How could we forget the OTHER parent - especially a mother - in this analogy? And if the analogy holds, doesn't that at least bring up consideration of what it would mean in terms of IE reconstruction. (Unless we're going back to those early cultures where - according to Robert Graves - the women of the tribe could deny the connection between sexual relations and pregnancy.) Take that child you mentioned and eleven of it's siblings. Do up comparative tables of gender, eye color, hair color, right or left-handedness, etc. Now, RECONSTRUCT THE SINGLE "PARENT" of those kids. Unless something special happened - that reconstruction will not be Leo Connolly. Though it may be *Leo Connolly. In fact, it will be some blending of two parents melded into one. This is the problem - plain and simple - with Larry Trask's claim that the comparative method cannot reconstruct a language that did not exist. Because it can - under these circumstances - create a single-parent *Leo Connolly that does not exist. Of course, one can irradicate the existence of this problem by denying the genetic contribution of a mother. We can call that "influence," because dad contributed finite verbal morphology and finite verbal morphology wins when it comes to establishing "true" genetic descent. Looking back at Dr. White's posts, that is pretty clearly the position he took. So, the question remains - stronger than ever given the analogy. Why are some systematic correspondences denied the status of being "genetic" for no other reason than the assumption that there can only be one parent? Regards, Steve Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jul 26 08:16:37 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 03:16:37 -0500 Subject: Lehmann's Syllabicity Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" To: Sent: Friday, July 20, 2001 11:49 AM Subject: Re: Lehmann's Syllabicity [PRp] >> the unusual fact that most IE >> roots display a front-back vowel (also, potentially no vowel) contrast, >> which indicates morphosemantic differences only --- not lexicosemantic >> ones. ... >> I would first like to learn what list-members consider to be the better >> alternatives for an explanation of this phenomenon. [PG] > A similar case can be made for Sanskrit, where we do have some information > about its origin. Sanskrit can (almost) be described as a one-vowel > language in the same way as PIE almost can - we had this suggestion about a > year ago on the list, I believe. In Sanskrit it is due to the collapse of > original short *e, *a and *o into the single vowel . There are > sufficient traces of both *e and *o for us to be sure that it is not a > continuation of a one-vowel system from PIE, but is properly derived from a > situation with at least a three-way distinction. [PCR] This interests me greatly. What do you consider to be the "sufficient traces"? [PG] > We might therefore wonder if the so-called PIE one-vowel system is due to > collapse from an earlier situation. This is what is argued by the > Nostraticists. Kaiser & Shevoroshkin suggest a complete collapse of short > vowels in "West Nostratic" while they are kept separate in Uralic and Altaic > and Dravidian. Bomhard's view (1996) is rather more complicated, and > therefore more nuanced. In essence he avoids the idea of vowel collapse, > but does allow certain diphtongs and simple vowels to merge into a PIE > system from which IE could develop through further changes. [PCR] I think it is obvious that the view of Kaiser and Sheveroshkin is identical in this respect to my own: three vowels become ^, Lehmann's syllabicity. [PG] > We must also add in here two theories that affect vowels: > Firstly, that a < *eH pushed an original **a to *e in some IE dialects. > Secondly, that an original **ka, **ke, **ko collapsed inot the ke, k'e, > kwe we see in PIE. [PCR] Regarding the first theory, it seems totally unnecessary if we assume that all short vowels collapsed in ^, from which, for morphological (perhaps combined with phonological) reasons, *e/*o developed. ^ from *a does not need any more impetus than ^ from *o. On the second one, I cannot accept the idea that IE labiovelars developed from pre-PIE dorsal stops + *o, presumably later *w^ because they corresponds to fricatives in other languages derived from Nostratic. I believe at an early stage, *C+o did result in *Cw^ but that these glides were lost without trace in all branches. But, I do believe that pre-PIE dorsal stops + *e did develop into dorsal stops + *y^, and that this glide, rather than the quality of the vowel which followed it (with some exceptions), determined the palatality of the dorsal stop in satem-languages. 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, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jul 26 08:32:02 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 03:32:02 -0500 Subject: Lehmann's Syllabicity Message-ID: Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen" Sent: Friday, July 20, 2001 10:50 AM > On Fri, 13 Jul 2001, proto-language [i.e., Pat Ryan - JER] wrote: >> [...] >> Let us assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that some unspecified >> language earlier than but ancestral to IE had a structure in which >> differences of vowel-quality signaled lexical differences: *men- /= *man- >> /= *mon-. This is certainly justifiable on typological grounds. >> First, I would like to know how list-members believe these lexical >> differences were maintained in IE. [JER] > In Indo-Iranian where this actually happened, the various sources just > merged. I see no objection to the view that the widely monotonous vocalism > of PIE has passed through a comparable collapse. The actual event of > merger apparently antedates the protolanguage quite a bit, for there has > been at least time to create - or borrow and retain - words with other > vocalisms than /e/. It would also be reasonable to suppose that the many > vocalic alternations (ablaut "grades") depart from an already-collapsed > unitary /e/ than from a retained diversity of vowel timbres that just > ended up parallel even after the mergers. This pushes unitary /e/ back > into pre-ablaut pre-PIE and leaves ample time for later developments that > blurr the picture a bit. One may also note that the IE ablaut types can > even be detected on the sole basis of a single IE language as, say, Greek > which is certainly not contemporaneous with the protolanguage. [PCR] If we assume that a previous front-mid-back vocalism collapsed into a single vocalism, which we might term syllabicity, and indicate by ^ as Lehmann does, OR indicate as (pre-Ablaut) *e, bearing in mind that [e] may not have been its phonetic realization; we end up, temporarily, with one lexico-semantic vowel. Typologically, languages with one (if any) or two lexico-semantic vowels show highly developed consonantism; frequently, consonants are present with no glide, and palatal and velar glides. Does this suggest to you, as it does to me, that pre-PIE *men, *man, *mon, went through an early phase of *my^n, *m^n, *mw^n on their way to becoming *m^n, eventually *me/on//*mN? 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, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jul 26 08:58:39 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 03:58:39 -0500 Subject: Lehmann's Syllabicity Message-ID: Dear Leo and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Leo A. Connolly" Sent: Friday, July 20, 2001 10:48 PM > Pat Ryan wrote: >> There are a number of IEists who do not subscribe to Lehmann's theory of >> "syllabicity", > I don't, of course, but I think we've been through that already. >> which he originated to explain the unusual fact that most IE roots display a >> front-back vowel (also, potentially no vowel) contrast, which indicates >> morphosemantic differences only --- not lexicosemantic ones. >> Unusual because in the great majority of languages around the world, varying >> root-vowels indicate lexical rather than morphological differences (Semitic >> sharing this peculiarity though perhaps not its parent PAA). > ....... >> Let us assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that some unspecified >> language earlier than but ancestral to IE had a structure in which >> differences of vowel-quality signaled lexical differences: *men- /= *man- >> /= *mon-. This is certainly justifiable on typological grounds. > I have absolutely no evidence for what I'm about to say, so please: it is > mere speculation -- Gedankenlinguistik, wenn man's so nennen will. It is the > merest possibility and for that reason not worth flaming in a refutation. [PCR] I will try never to flame you, Leo. > 1. The proposed men- *man- *mon- opposition is somewhat weird in that > it has three non-high vowels: where are *min- and *mun-? > 2. This suggests that an original distinction was restructured when /e/ > and /o/ were used to signal certain morphological categories. They > could replace each other as required. They could also be added to /i/ > and /u/, producing the diphthongal ablaut series we know and love. > 3. It is well known that [a] is at least extremely rare in indisputably > IE roots, except in proximity to an "a-coloring laryngeal". There has > recently been a discussion on this list proposing that non-laryngeal [a] > in Northern European forms means that these are not PIE in origin. This > could mean either that (a) an earlier > *man- merged with something else (*men- and/or *mon-) in most > environments, or (b) that there was no earlier /man-/. Since > four-vowel, a-less systems exist, neither possibility seems better than > the other. >> First, I would like to know how list-members believe these lexical >> differences were maintained in IE. > My speculations suggest that many such lexical differences were > precisely *not* maintanied. They entail that the root types /men-/ and > /mon-/ (and /man-/, if it existed), merged as what we might call /men-/ > or even /mVn-/. And if the analysis was /mVn-/ (/V/ a non-high vowel > with features to be added by morphology), extension of the morphological > e:o ablaut to stems with original /i u/ would be readily understandable. [PCR] Why do you think that might be preferable to simply regarding /i, u/ as allophones of /y, w/? > Two final comments: > 1. These speculations apply independent of whether PIE was a descendant > of Proto-Nostratic or even Proto-World. They are triggered by internal > IED phenomena. > 2. Again, they are *SPECULATIONS*. Please don't pounce too hard on > such a tempting target. [PCR] Never. 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, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jul 26 09:10:32 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 04:10:32 -0500 Subject: Lehmann's Syllabicity Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Friday, July 20, 2001 11:33 AM [PCRp] >> ... the unusual fact that most IE >> roots display a front-back vowel (also, potentially no vowel) contrast, >> which indicates morphosemantic differences only --- not lexicosemantic >> ones. [PG] > The word "vowel" needs defining here! Would you count a sequence "eu" as > the same as, or different from, the vowel "e"? If (as I believe we must) we > count it as different, then your problem disappears. Ignoring the e/o/zero > ablaut, PIE shows: > e > eu > ei > er > el > em > en > eH 1 -2 -3 - etc > All of these carry lexicosemantic differences. [PCR] Interesting. But does not directly address my question. Supposing that a language ancestral to PIE could distinguish between *mad, *med, and *mod _lexically_, how might these lexical differentiation have been maintained in earliest PIE when they would all eventually end up as *me/od-. My feeling is that glides are the typologically correct hypothesis. After glides were lost, root-extensions filled in for the lack of differentiating features. I was just wondering if anyone had another (possibly better) idea? [PG] > Even if we don't like the sequences er, el, em, en as diphthongs, we must > still recognise the zero grades as vocalic elements - vowels - with > lexicosemantic significance. [PCR] I'll bite. Why should *er be regarded as a diphthong rather than a sequence of vowel + consonant? Incidentally, I am not so sure that *R should be regarded as a vowel. Why is it not just simply a sonorous consonant that can, in certain circumstances, appear in typically vocalic positions? 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, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138) From ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com Sun Jul 1 22:32:52 2001 From: ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 15:32:52 -0700 Subject: Mr. Long's objections Re: Handfuls of Unrelated Forms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: NOTE: I am writing to the list as moderator. On 28 Jun 2001, Steve Long wrote to complain about the rough handling he has received from me when I write as a linguist subscribed to the list. He states > In a message dated 6/28/2001 4:38:04 AM, alderson+mail at panix.com writes: > << Once again, the crucial importance of vowel length has been missed. > The words for _arrow_ and _poison_ both begin with a *long* vowel, /i:/, [ moderator snip ] > I'm sorry but this is REALLY undeserved. > 1. Let me give you an earlier post on this list where you might have brought > all this up: > In a message dated 6/27/2001 9:20:37 PM, acnasvers at hotmail.com wrote: > << the oxytone 'arrow' referred by L&S to the root of 'to > go'...>> I do not know how Mr. Long came by these dates. The two messages in question have the following headers (here repeated in full up to the point of departure from toad.xkl.com): Received: from mail1.panix.com ([166.84.0.212]) by toad.xkl.com with TCP/SMTP; Mon, 25 Jun 2001 12:14:59 -0700 (PDT) Received: from panix6.panix.com (panix6.panix.com [166.84.0.231]) by mail1.panix.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5F9584870B for ; Mon, 25 Jun 2001 15:14:07 -0400 (EDT) Received: (from alderson at localhost) by panix6.panix.com (8.8.8/8.7.1/PanixN1.0) id PAA05996; Mon, 25 Jun 2001 15:14:07 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 15:14:07 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <200106251914.PAA05996 at panix6.panix.com> X-Authentication-Warning: panix6.panix.com: alderson set sender to alderson+mail at panix.com using -f From: Rich Alderson To: Indo-European at xkl.com In-reply-to: <111.125ec83.285f8916 at aol.com> (X99Lynx at aol.com) Subject: Re: Yew Two References: <111.125ec83.285f8916 at aol.com> Sender: Indo-European mailing list Reply-To: Indo-European at xkl.com Received: from hotmail.com (f15.law7.hotmail.com [216.33.237.15]) by toad.xkl.com with TCP/SMTP; Tue, 26 Jun 2001 01:26:07 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mail pickup service by hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC; Tue, 26 Jun 2001 01:30:39 -0700 Received: from 216.165.137.44 by lw7fd.law7.hotmail.msn.com with HTTP; Tue, 26 Jun 2001 08:30:38 GMT X-Originating-IP: [216.165.137.44] From: "Douglas G Kilday" To: Indo-European at xkl.com Subject: Re: About the Yew1 Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 08:30:38 -0000 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Message-ID: X-OriginalArrivalTime: 26 Jun 2001 08:30:39.0559 (UTC) FILETIME=[47EB6D70:01C0FE1A] Sender: Indo-European mailing list Reply-To: Indo-European at xkl.com Please note the Date: and Received: headers. My response was written at noon (Pacific Daylight Time) , 25 June 2001, on panix.com, and arrived at toad.xkl.com the same day, while Mr. Kilday's was written at 1:30am (Pacific Daylight Time), 26 June 2001, on hotmail.com, and arrived at toad.xkl.com the same night. Because of the very large number of posts on numerous topics in the past few weeks, I have been grouping posts on the same topic in the outgoing queue. Thus, Mr. Kilday's message will indeed have been sent out before my own, since the two threads in which they appear are separated in time. It would appear that Mr. Long's mail system is reporting the arrival time in his mailbox as the origination time of the message, rather than the actual time of composition. As moderator of the list, there is no way I can compensate for broken software on the receiving end. Let me point out that I do not review incoming postings before writing my own comments on issues of interest to me, which I would view as unethical. Thus, even if Mr. Kilday's post had arrived before I wrote my own, I would not have known what he had to say on the subject until the message was being prepared for final posting to the list. (As will be clear from the occasional blunder on my part with regard to off-topic, potentially libelous, or other unwanted posts, if I'm pressed for time, I might not know what he had to say until I read it at my subscription address.) The other points brought up by Mr. Long are not issues of moderation, but of fact, and so will be answered in a separate post when I am wearing my linguist hat (and which will therefore come from panix.com, rather than toad.xkl.com). Rich Alderson IE list owner and moderator ------- From ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com Tue Jul 3 00:35:27 2001 From: ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 17:35:27 -0700 Subject: About the Yew1 In-Reply-To: <12.ecfb31b.286cec91@aol.com> Message-ID: > In a message dated 6/27/2001 9:20:37 PM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes: Actually, Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 08:30:38 -0000 >> The word I cited, , is an epithet of several diverse plants. As you >> suggest, the most plausible connection is with 'type of knife', >> and the epithet probably means 'having knife-like leaves', since vines and >> weeds are hardly suitable for carving. > If I came to a similar conclusion about a linguistic matter, the moderator > would bite my head off. The moderator objects to this. As moderator, I do not react to any post, no matter how contrary to my own way of thinking as a linguist, so long as it bears some passing resemblance to the general area of discussion of the list and is not simmply arrant nonsense. While I happen to think that Mr. Long is wrong in a number of his conclusions, I continue to send out his posts just as I do those I agree with. Rich Alderson IE list owner and moderator From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jul 1 01:17:23 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 21:17:23 EDT Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look Message-ID: In a message dated 6/30/2001 3:17:22 AM, alderson+mail at panix.com writes: << The one thing linguists in the field have been able to verify about language change is that the rate of change in non-literate societies is roughly the same as that in literate societies--which means that our tools are doing a good job when we date our reconstructions accordingly. Please read chapter 1 of Mary R. Haas' _The Prehistory of Languages_ (Mouton: _Janua Linguarum, Series Minor Nr. 57_, 1969; no ISBN, but the LoC card number is 76-75689) for a discussion of the kinds of predictions about the nature of non-literate language that have been made by non-linguists, and disproven by linguists. >> Will do. I will try to get my hands on a copy while I'm in NY next month. Steve Long From mclasutt at brigham.net Mon Jul 2 16:59:11 2001 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 10:59:11 -0600 Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look In-Reply-To: <12e.714796.28658a6e@aol.com> Message-ID: [[I wrote]] <> [[Steve Long wrote]] I'm sorry because I think you may have mentioned this before - but how did the separation of the Shoshoni and Comanche work? Did one separate and move away or did they both migrate to other places? The Comanche separated from the Shoshoni in central Wyoming and moved south. The Shoshoni stayed in place. [[I wrote]] << So we wind up with 75 years of extensive phonological change and then 75 years of very little phonological change in the same preliterate language....>> [[Steve Long wrote]] Actually, one can see this the other way around. It's the linguists in the field with preliterate languages that are becoming literate who are in the best position to discern a difference between what changes and at what pace in preliterate versus literate languages. The "rate of change" in unrecorded languages that were spoken thousands of years ago is obviously not subject to direct observation. The Comanche after 1872 were not "becoming literate" in Comanche. They were becoming literate in English. Comanche literacy is a very recent thing, only starting in the 1950s. Several recent sound changes in Comanche are the result of the process of language obsolescence, so post-1950's Comanche would not be relevant for this discussion. As far as the unrecorded languages "thousands of years ago", our observations of rates of change in very late prehistoric non-literary languages like Comanche, Nahuatl, etc. during the periods in which they remained non-literaty are absolutely relevant to what went on in the distant past. This is exactly what archeologists and anthropologists do in their fields--observe late prehistoric cultures in Australia, Namibia, Brazil, etc.--to understand cultural items and their use that have been found in the buried record. It's what paleontologists have been doing with dinosaurs for the last 30-some-odd years--examining the behavior and anatomy of modern animals--to understand the nature of dinosaur behavior and anatomy in order to correct the errors and misperceptions of the past two centuries. Judiciously extrapolating similar situations in the recent past into the distant past is a well-established and acceptable scientific method. Regards, Steve Long John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. Associate Professor, English Utah State University Program Director USU On-Line Linguistics http://english.usu.edu/lingnet (435) 797-2738 (voice) (435) 797-3797 (FAX) mclasutt at brigham.net From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Jul 1 19:04:06 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 20:04:06 +0100 Subject: Genetic Descent Message-ID: >>> what I am asserting is that the morphemes used in conjugation are >>> very resistant to borrowing. ... >> The highly productive English morpheme -ess ... > is <-ess> used in conjugation? Oh, you mean "conjugation" as in the verb patterns of Latin and other IE inflected languages? Then you cannot assert your statement as something true of all languages, only of those which show Latin-like conjugation. Which ultimately means IE. Which means your assertion can simply be tested empirically against the actual evidence. So it reduces to "there are few, if any, cases of verbal suffix morphemes being borrowed within IE languages." OK, I'll grant you that. Peter From connolly at memphis.edu Mon Jul 2 04:08:13 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 23:08:13 -0500 Subject: Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent) Message-ID: Rick Mc Callister wrote: > I'm not an expert but to refer to <> as a subject strikes > me as patently wrong. <> is obviously an indirect object. If > modern linguists are declaring it a subject, I wanna know why. > Is it because with these constructions, the subject tends to be > inanimate? No. The problem is that to varying degrees in different languages, these Experiencers have some of the properties of subjects, even though they are morphologically objects. In Spanish and Italian, the only significant subject property is positional: they normally occupy the preverbal "subject" slot. But the syntacticians are interested in universal grammar, and in some languages the situatiin is quite different. In Icelandic, these oblique "subjects" control reflexives and can undergo "subject-to-object raising", retaining their original case in the process. Most verbs with such NPs also have a nominative NP which cannot occupy subject position or be raised; these nominatives control only verb agreement, and then not person, only for number, and optionally at that. Most (not all) ergative languages follow this pattern: with transitive verbs, the ergative NP has most of the syntactic subject properties, while the "Absolutive" (another name for nominative) NP controls only verb agreement. In Tagalog there's a 50-50 split in many senetnces, with subject properties about equally divided. So that's the reason. I understand the problem, but I disagree sharply with their conclusion: the morphological subject is the *only* subject as far as I'm concerned, and the "oblique subjects" that through their weight around in these languages are simply the ones which rank highest in the hierarchy of "deep cases" i.e. semantic roles -- the ones which in some sense "should" be the subject (and in English most typically are). We formerly had such things -- think "methinks" -- an object in preverbal position not controlling verb agreement. We have since solved our problem by making _me_ into a true subject _I_ -- with no change in meaning! Spanish might do that too some day, but no sign of its happening yet. > The verb is not passive either, however. <> is the subject > and actor. Actor? That's a technical term in Role & Reference Grammar, but the RRG folks would say here that _libros_ is an "Undergoer". After all, it isn't doing anything. From miskec4096 at hotmail.com Sun Jul 1 15:24:42 2001 From: miskec4096 at hotmail.com (Kreso Megyeral) Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 17:24:42 +0200 Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole Message-ID: >Anyway, thanks for the correction. Now I know that there are -- apparently >-- no Hungarian loans into Albanian. Most interesting. Absolutely >*everybody* who ever set foot in the Balkans seems to have conquered >Albania at some point, and I can hardly believe that the Hungarians never >did. Well, if you consider Hungarians as invaders to Balkans, then it's strange. But, except for their personal union with Croatia, they'd never had any contact with Balkans (if you consider Croatia a Balkan country, of course). Or their possession of Transilvania and Vojvodina. Apart from that, could anyone explain the etymology of previously mentioned "ul" in Albanian? Is it of IE origin? And, I would also ask Mr. Aikio for etymology of Hungarian verb (if it is of Uralic origin, of course). From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jul 1 01:10:59 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 21:10:59 EDT Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns" Message-ID: In a message dated 6/30/2001 6:13:33 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: <> In a message dated 6/30/2001 7:32:15 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: << Second, I have not proposed any rate of change.... And why do you keep accusing me darkly of making sinister claims? >> Well, then, I apologize to Larry Trask for misunderstanding his positions. I think I've lost track of who said what. I think Dr White was involved in this in some way. I know I should be accusing someone darkly of making sinister claims. I just hope it's not me. Well, anyway, sorry about that. Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jul 1 02:01:42 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 22:01:42 EDT Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns" Message-ID: In a message dated 6/30/2001 5:52:51 AM, alderson+mail at panix.com writes: << So that, I think, is the pithy answer to your continued asking of why any language can't have more than one ancestor under the comparative method: The method does not address single languages, but groups of languages, and as was pointed out by Larry Trask, if we can't build a protolanguage with the comparative method, the languages in question are *JUST* *NOT* *RELATED*. >> Then let my rephrase my question. Can more than one proto-language be reconstructed from a "group" of languages? And, if so, then will those additional proto-languages show up in reconstruction if one assumes before hand that there was only one proto-language? If on the other hand the answer to the first question is no, then why not? This goes back again to the terms I quoted from Winfred Lehmann: "In using the comparative method, we contrast forms of two or more related languages to determine the precise relationship between these forms. We indicate this relationship most simply by reconstructing the forms from which they developed." (Hist Ling 3d ed, 1992 pb) p 142. I pointed out the Lehmann's use of the term "forms" rather than "languages" in the above quote. The reason was to relate it way back to the hypothetical that Dr White brought forward where the "nominal morphology, derivational or non-finite verbal morphology,... and categories" might be shared with one language, "finite verbal morphology" with another. Dr White indicated that verb morphology might have some preemptive claim over those other forms. But my point was that the presence of those diverging systematic forms would suggest more than one "proto-language" could be reconstructed at least with regard to the language that showed both forms. Regards, Steve Long From hstahlke at gw.bsu.edu Sun Jul 1 02:30:11 2001 From: hstahlke at gw.bsu.edu (Herb Stahlke) Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 21:30:11 -0500 Subject: ``mono-descent is implicit in the comparative method ...`` Message-ID: Steve, what do you recognize as evidence and how do you evaluate it? How do you tell the difference between regular sound correspondences that result from common descent and what look like regular sound correspondences that result from extensive borrowing? For example, the many Germanic/Romance h/k vs. k/k correspondences. At this point I understand that you are arguing for dual or multiple ancestry for individual languages, but you don't address how you differentiate among the various contributions and how your differentiation would differ from that of the conventional combination of comparative method and dialectology. Herb Stahlke <<< X99Lynx at aol.com 6/30 9:15p >>> In a message dated 6/27/2001 3:51:21 PM, dlwhite at texas.net writes: << By the way, since "mono-descent" is implicit in the comparative method, saying anything along the lines of "I accept the comparative method but reject mono-descent" is sort of like saying "I'll take the horse but not the legs". >> BTW, let's look at that statement: "By the way, since "mono-descent" is implicit in the comparative method,..." I have four different historical linguistics textbooks in front of me, including the admirable one written by Prof Trask. I don't see a single definition that says anything about mono-descent. I do see references to "systematic correspondence" between two languages. I don't see anything that logically demands those "systematic correspondences" be only related back to only one ancestor. What Winifred Lehmann writes is that the comparative method "contrasts forms of two or more related languages to determine the precise relationships between those forms." Either as a matter of phonology or morphology, it seems it is forms, not languages, that are being "contrasted." If you can describe why or how you think "mono-descent" is implicit in the comparative method, that might make me think what you are saying is true. At this point, you might want to take a closer look at that horse you are selling. It seems those legs are not what you would call factory options. Going back to your post of 6/22/2001 10:27:51 PM, where you responded to the hypothesis: "Situation #1: Language A shares its ENTIRE 'nominal morphology, derivational or non-finite verbal morphology,... and categories' with Language B, but it's 'finite verbal morphology' is shared with no known language. RESULT: There should be no doubt in anyone's mind that this would be universally seen as establishing a genetic relationship between A and B." You responded: <> Now, it's not the comparative method that is telling you to come to those conclusions. The comparative method in the example above presumably established that "the ENTIRE "nominal morphology, derivational or non-finite verbal morphology,... and categories" are shared with Language B, as a matter of systematic correspondence. It's your decision to doubt whether all those shared features are enough to establish a genetic relationship. The comparative method has not prompted or justified any such conclusion. It is simply supplied the data. As far as the world wide absence of mixed or borrowed finite verbal morphology: if you consider this as the best and preemptive indication of a genetic relationship, that conclusion is not "implicit in the comparative method" either. You might say that it's a conclusion you've come to because of the application of the method, but not in any way that it is built-in to the method. Not in any way. Dr White also writes: <> You don't have that quite right either. My point is that YOU can't "coherently distinguish between influence and descent." You are certainly good at assuming "mono-descent." But the example above - where you can entertain the possibility that "the ENTIRE "nominal morphology, derivational or non-finite verbal morphology,... and categories" can be shared due to "influence" - shows that you are having some problems with the difference between influence and descent yourself. In the hypothetical above, I don't believe you've given any coherent operational distinction between "influence and descent." <> Of course! After all, theoretically - it just couldn't happen. How many fingers do you see? Regards, Steve Long From dlwhite at texas.net Sun Jul 1 13:49:01 2001 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 08:49:01 -0500 Subject: "mono-descent is implicit in the comparative method ..." Message-ID: > BTW, let's look at that statement: "By the way, since "mono-descent" is > implicit in the comparative method,..." > I have four different historical linguistics textbooks in front of me, > including the admirable one written by Prof Trask. I don't see a single > definition that says anything about mono-descent. Maybe that is because I just made up the term a few days ago. "Implicit" may be a bit strong, but the comparative method as traditionally conceived and practiced has never contemplated mutli-descent. > Going back to your post of 6/22/2001 10:27:51 PM, where you responded to the > hypothesis: > "Situation #1: Language A shares its ENTIRE 'nominal morphology, > derivational or non-finite verbal morphology,... and categories' with > Language B, but it's 'finite verbal morphology' is shared with no known > language. RESULT: There should be no doubt in anyone's mind that this would > be universally seen as establishing a genetic relationship between A and B." > You responded: > < not possible, I would hope, simply to ignore in such a case the problem of > where the verbal morphology came from, as if it came out of nowhere, no > problem. If it is not traceable to Language B, we are not justified in > blithely proceeding as if it is, or ignoring it.>> > Now, it's not the comparative method that is telling you to come to those > conclusions. The comparative method does indeed tell me that such a fundamental aspect of a language as finite verbal morphology cannot be treated as non-existent merely because its origins are problematic. > The comparative method in the example above presumably established that "the > ENTIRE "nominal morphology, derivational or non-finite verbal morphology,... > and categories" are shared with Language B, as a matter of systematic > correspondence. > As far as the world wide absence of mixed or borrowed finite verbal > morphology: if you consider this as the best and preemptive indication of > a genetic relationship, that conclusion is not "implicit in the comparative > method" either. Certainly not. It is based on observation, supported after the fact by some ratiocination of a sort that Dr. Trask evidently hates ... > My point is that YOU can't "coherently distinguish between influence and > descent." Yes I can, in a way that explains why finite verbal morphology is evidenty not subject to borrowing in the same way as nominal morphology. You just say it's circular when I do, yet still refuse to answer the question of why language mixture or multi-descent, if it is really so common as you say, has not led to mixed finite verbal morphologies all over the place. It seems that your basic problem is failure (or refusal) to discriminate between descent and origin of morphmemes. Dr. David L. White From bmscott at stratos.net Mon Jul 2 13:22:40 2001 From: bmscott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 09:22:40 -0400 Subject: "mono-descent is implicit in the comparative method ..." In-Reply-To: <103.552772c.286c1869@aol.com> Message-ID: On 28 Jun 2001, at 1:19, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > BTW, let's look at that statement: "By the way, since "mono-descent" > is implicit in the comparative method,..." > I have four different historical linguistics textbooks in front of > me, including the admirable one written by Prof Trask. I don't see > a single definition that says anything about mono-descent. You shouldn't expect to find *implicit* consequences in a definition. You will, however, find an explicit statement of this consequence in Section 6.6 of Anthony Fox, _Linguistic Reconstruction: An Introduction to Theory and Method_ (Oxford: OUP, 1995): Of course, it must be acknowledged that the nature of genetic continuity, and therefore of language inheritance, is, as noted above, somewhat ambiguous. If language contact is a major factor in linguistic change, with substratum influence as a typical manifestation, then there is continuity between a language and its substratum as well as with earlier stages of the 'same' language. If, for example, features of French can be attributed to the Celtic substratum of Gaul, then Celtic, as well as Latin, can be regarded as a legitimate ancestor of French. But the Comparative Method is only able to accommodate a single source. Again, however, it is clear that this is entirely in keeping with the aims of the method: given a set of languages with a common inheritance (e.g. the Romance or Germanic languages) the method will identify only those features that belong to this inheritance, and exclude features from any other source, including the substratum. This is simply a consequence of the way in which the method works: by establishing sets of correspondences between the languages compared. You'll find there a great deal more on what the comparative method can and cannot do. You might also look at Roger Lass, _Historical Linguistics and Language Change_ (Cambridge: CUP, 1997). > I do see references to "systematic correspondence" between two > languages. I don't see anything that logically demands those > "systematic correspondences" be only related back to only one > ancestor. Are you suggesting that some of the phonological correspondences might go back to an ancestor L1, while others went back to a different ancestor L2? If so, please explain how this would work. If not, what do you mean? In a related post you write: 'If you assume only one parent where there was more than one parent, the comparative method can be used to reconstruct a language that never existed'. How? (Presumably you have something more in mind than the familiar ways in which reconstructed languages are oversimplifications and approximations.) Assuming that the situation could actually arise, it seems to me that the comparative method would either partially reconstruct one parent or, more likely, fail to reconstruct anything. Finally, are you suggesting that the comparative method could somehow be applied differently if one assumed from the beginning that the languages being compared had, say, two parents? If so, please explain how. What would one do differently? Brian M. Scott From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Jul 1 03:58:55 2001 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 23:58:55 EDT Subject: The Single Parent Question Message-ID: In a message dated 6/30/01 8:35:12 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: > This won't help you here. I won't ask if you've ever argued a science case > in Federal Court or ever did plasma analysis or worked on neural systems or > did any high-order economic analysis. You've claimed an extremely high level > of certainty with regard to the reconstruction of proto-languages. I'm > looking at the scientific validity of that claim. -- no, you aren't, because you don't have the knowledge-base to do so. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jul 2 08:51:39 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 09:51:39 +0100 Subject: The Single Parent Question In-Reply-To: <74.c5b78ec.286cc3c6@aol.com> Message-ID: --On Thursday, June 28, 2001 1:30 pm +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: [LT] > So far as I know, all I have ever claimed about the > comparative method is that it cannot produce proto-languages that never > existed. And that's just true. Do you want to challenge this? >> > Yes. OK, then -- fire away. But you are defending a position which is wildly, ludicrously false -- not an easy task. ;-) > There are perhaps a number of ways in which the comparative method might > "produce" a language or a part of a language that that never existed. > There is perhaps one way that is relevant to this discussion. > If you assume only one parent where there was more than one parent, the > comparative method can be used to reconstruct a language that never > existed. No. This is fantasy. The comparative method does not "assume" any number of parents at all. And it can no more conjure up an ancestral language that never existed than it can extract cube roots. Steve, when we attempt to apply the comparative method to some linguistic data, we *do not* "assume* in advance that we must be looking at a single parent. If there *was* a single parent, then the method will tell us about it. Otherwise, the method gives us only a nil return. Steve, where are you *getting* this stuff from? > If a language family "inherited" from more than one prehistoric parent, > the comparative method will not be able to distinguish more than one > parent - IF you assume only one parent. If you assume all > reconstructible features descended from one parent - where there were > actually multiple parents - you will reconstruct a language that never > existed. Steve, this is wildly false. This is roughly the scenario proposed for Celtic by all those archaeologists, the scenario that led to the introduction of this thread in the first place. Now, Steve, what you are claiming is the following. Two or more quite distinct languages can meet and mingle, and can as a result give rise to a variety of offspring, each daughter consisting of a different admixture of features from the original languages. Right? Now, do you know of any instance in which such a thing has happened? I don't. I have never heard of such a thing -- except as a fantasy scenario -- and I do not believe there is any known case of such a thing. And I have the gravest doubts that any such event is even possible. But suppose it is. Suppose such a thing did manage to happen. Suppose, to make it concrete, that Basque and Spanish were to interact in just such a way, and give rise to half-a-dozen languages, each consisting of a different mixture of Basque elements and Spanish elements, a couple of thousand years later. Now suppose we tried to apply the comparative method to the resulting collection of languages -- "collection", because this assembly would *not* be a family, as we use that term in linguistics. What would happen? Steve concludes that the method would, by some arcane means known only to him, automatically conjure up a single ancestral language for the whole assembly. But would it? No. It would not. Instead, the method would once again give a nil return. We could note the presence of many common elements in the languages under investigation, but we could not find the required systematic correspondences, and so we could reconstruct nothing. Therefore, we could not demonstrate common ancestry for the languages -- reasonably enough, since, in the scenario we are considering, the languages are *not* related, in the sense of 'related' which is relevant to the comparative method, where 'related' means 'descended by divergence from a single common ancestor'. For the seventeenth wearisome time, let me remind you of the case of Tlingit and Eyak-Athabaskan: a huge number of shared elements, and undoubtedly some kind of shared prehistory, but no systematic correspondences, therefore no reconstructed ancestor, and therefore no proof of common origin. I note that Steve has remained silent on this splendid example throughout the discussion. As cases like this one demonstrate beyond dispute, the comparative method cannot reconstruct ancestral languages that never existed. > How does the comparative method tell if there was more than one parent > language? It depends on the assumption one makes from the start - I > think its ability to see multiple descent is canceled out by the single > parent assumption. It will show "systematic correspondences" but has no > way of distinguishing multiple descent for those correspondences. The > comparative method is a powerful tool, but even the Hubbell can't see the > far side of the moon. And what is this last remark supposed to mean? Steve, if there there never was a single common ancestor, then there simply cannot be any systematic correspondences. Simply shoveling lumps of language A and lumps of language B into a bag and labeling the bag 'language C' does not produce any systematic correspondences. It produces only shared elements -- no more. And the comparative method cannot be applied to mere shared elements. > Without the single parent assumption, I suspect the comparative method > could also support explanations that include multiple "genetic strains." > In which case, the method would produce data that could be used to > reconstruct one or multiple parents. In which case, one of those two > reconstructions would be false. And that would be one way the > comparative method could be used to reconstruct a proto-language that > never existed. Steve, you "suspect" all sorts of wild things that have nothing to do with reality. You might as well assert that you "suspect" that the comparative method causes baldness. ;-) [LT] > < grappled with linguistic data in an effort to demonstrate common ancestry, > or to challenge someone else's efforts in this direction?>> > This won't help you here. I won't ask if you've ever argued a science > case in Federal Court or ever did plasma analysis or worked on neural > systems or did any high-order economic analysis. Ah, so the answer is "no", then. ;-) No, Steve; I haven't done any of these other exciting things. And I've also never played first base for the St. Louis Cardinals. But what on earth does any of this have to do with understanding how the comparative method works? I was trying to find out if you really knew what the comparative method is, what it does, how it works, and what can be expected of it. I'm afraid your increasingly wild assertions about it have persuaded me that you really do not know anything about the method. You seem to have some fantasyland version of the comparative method in your head, one which you have invented for yourself and which bears no resemblance to the real thing. Your fantasy method can find systematic correspondences where none exist, and it can reconstruct ancestral languages that never existed. The real McCoy can't do any of these surprising things. > You've claimed an extremely high level of certainty with regard to the > reconstruction of proto-languages. No; I haven't. I've claimed that the method cannot reconstruct an ancestral language which never existed. > I'm looking at the scientific validity of that claim. Which I have not made, though I'm happy to discuss the strengths and limitations of the method, if the moderator and the other list-members are willing. As it happens, IE provides some magnificent examples of troublesome points in reconstruction. > That demands that the process should be rational and reproducible. It is. Or do you want to deny that, too? > If you're saying I'm missing something, spell it out. Well, I apologize for my bluntness, but I really do not think that you understand what the comparative method is. If you did, you would not make these wild statements about it. > But not with the conclusions or unexplained assumptions that you have been > relying on so far. Steve, I have not been relying on any unexplained assumptions. Chapter 8 of my textbook explains in moderately great detail the assumptions upon which the method rests. Do you want to challenge any of these? > And I assume you aren't claiming any kind of unique psychic powers > in your use of the comparative method that are beyond ordinary > comprehension. Far from it, and I really do not know why you are bringing up "psychic powers". The point of the method is that it relies squarely on hard linguistic evidence, and not on fantasies or wild guesses. If the hard evidence is not there, then the method returns nothing. You keep denying this, and I can only conclude that it is you who are appealing to "powers beyond ordinary comprehension". 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 alderson+mail at panix.com Tue Jul 3 02:24:52 2001 From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 22:24:52 -0400 Subject: The Single Parent Question In-Reply-To: <74.c5b78ec.286cc3c6@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Thu, 28 Jun 2001 13:30:46 EDT, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote: > In a message dated 6/27/2001 12:29:59 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: >> And what is that? So far as I know, all I have ever claimed about the >> comparative method is that it cannot produce proto-languages that never >> existed. And that's just true. Do you want to challenge this? > Yes. > There are perhaps a number of ways in which the comparative method might > "produce" a language or a part of a language that that never existed. There > is perhaps one way that is relevant to this discussion. > If you assume only one parent where there was more than one parent, the > comparative method can be used to reconstruct a language that never existed. > If a language family "inherited" from more than one prehistoric parent, the > comparative method will not be able to distinguish more than one parent - IF > you assume only one parent. If you assume all reconstructible features > descended from one parent - where there were actually multiple parents - you > will reconstruct a language that never existed. I still don't think you know how the comparative method works, but let that go. You seem to be claiming that if we found a group of languages descended from a prehistoric Michif, we could not reconstruct the two parents thereof. You are probably correct. However, from the point of view of the comparative method, these languages do *not* have two parents, but only one, the paleo-Michif. If, on the other hand, we were dealing with a larger set of languages, some descended from the left-hand parent of paleo-Michif; some, the right-parent; and some from paleo-Michif itself, we could (if the events in question were not so far in the past as to prevent our dull tools from working at all) in princi- ple work out the relations of all and sundry. Rich Alderson linguist at large From bamba at centras.lt Mon Jul 2 05:54:34 2001 From: bamba at centras.lt (Jurgis Pakerys) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 07:54:34 +0200 Subject: real proto-lang Message-ID: [Larry Trask:] > In a message dated 6/27/2001 12:29:59 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: > << And what is that? So far as I know, all I have ever claimed about the > comparative method is that it cannot produce proto-languages that never > existed. And that's just true. Do you want to challenge this? >> [Steve Long:] > Yes. > There are perhaps a number of ways in which the comparative method might > "produce" a language or a part of a language that that never existed. There > is perhaps one way that is relevant to this discussion. I hope prof. Trask didn't mean that _all_ proto-languages (produced by comparative method) really existed. I've always imagined that there's some degree of uncertainty and those proto-languages cannot be compared to the real ones. Consider the Baltic branch. We have Lithuanian and Latvian (so called Eastern Baltic) still alive, some corpus of Old Prussian (so called Western Baltic), and only bits of data on other Baltic and considered-to-be-Baltic languages. Let's say we reconstruct a proto-Baltic based on the data currently available. I think our reconstruction would be just one of a number of possibilities (but not the real proto language that existed). Just because we know nothing about Baltic languages that died out leaving no records, just becaue we can't be 100% sure about Old Prussian facts (try reconstructing Latvian using just 16th century translations from German ;), etc. Maybe I'm wrong, but it looks very hard to reconstruct a _real_ proto-language. Sometimes we're able to reconstruct only fragments of it (I'm not saying this about very well documented language families). I guess it's better to understand those proto-languages as some tools of comparative linguistics than real languages that existed at some point of time. Best regards, Jurgis Pakerys PhD student Vilnius university From philjennings at juno.com Mon Jul 2 22:33:57 2001 From: philjennings at juno.com (philjennings at juno.com) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 17:33:57 -0500 Subject: Uniformitarian Principle Message-ID: On Fri, 29 Jun 2001, Larry Trask said: > It started like this. Somebody asked whether it was possible that languages > spoken very long ago had systematically changed much more slowly than > languages have been observed to change in the last several thousand years. > I replied as follows. I said: if you can find good, hard, solid, shiny > evidence that such was the case, then fine. But, in the absence of such > evidence -- and I don't know of any -- no such assumption can be defended, > because it flagrantly violates the Uniformitarian Principle -- as it plainly > does. I was that somebody. The basic subject here is the "rate of change" of human languages, and whether that rate itself changes (accelerates / decelerates) over time, as a consequence of other factors that have changed over human history. In physics, we are pleased to know that the rate of (locational) change of falling objects increases with mass and decreases with distance, in accordance with laws described by Isaac Newton. Gravity is a constant, but it is contingent on mass and distance. Philosophically, language belongs in two places, (1) in the individual toolbox of each language speaker, and (2) in the community of those who use language to understand each other. If the rate of change of human languages is governed by laws to do with individual ears, brains, mouths, vocal cords, et cetera, and these physical attributes have not changed over thousands of years, then the rate of change of human languages can intelligently be assumed to be constant. If the rate of change of human languages is governed by laws to do with how often humans talk to others in their community, to strangers, to people with different areas of expertise, and so forth, then as society gets more complex and populations increase, the rate of change will accelerate or decelerate through time. We don't know enough about the rate of change of human languages to say either (1) or (2). It appears that a consensus has not been achieved as to how to measure rates of language change. If such a consensus could be achieved, we could use it to test hypothesis (1), hypothesis (2), and dozens of other hypotheses. Gravity is a simple thing as it's contingent on two factors. Language is so likely to be much more complex, that it's easy to see why people throw up their hands and say: "let's just assume the rate is uniform across all space and time." This assumption, however, is more an admission of defeat than a principle to be championed. Larry Trask has given us the history of Basque as an instance where the rate of language change decreased as Basque society grew increasingly engaged with a complex world. This is certainly the opposite of what I'd expected, in arguing for a gradual increase in the rate of change of languages over time, which is what I'd theorized in a prior post. However, in a contrary way, it is also evidence for hypothesis (2), substituting deceleration for acceleration. I suspect that Larry Trask would like to be armed with a hundred instances of rates of change veering one way or the other without respect to any societal factors whatever. This would be evidence that rates of change are truly random, and uniformitarianism is the best way to smooth across several millennia of random ups and downs. This is an application of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to language change. We don't know => we can't know => there are no consistent factors out there to be known. It's odd to find linguists reconciled to randomness re. rates of language change, when they delight in systems and consistency in all other areas. Also, the evidence in Larry's hundred instances is anecdotal in the absence of a consensual measuring system, and some anecdotes, however entertaining, will be wrong. The posts I make to this service are often embarrassingly ignorant. In this case I hope someone will point out to me that systematic and creditable work has been done on measuring rates of language change. I will be grateful for any citations. From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Jul 1 05:50:55 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 00:50:55 -0500 Subject: Handfuls of Unrelated Forms Message-ID: Dear Steve etal. and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 11:35 AM > In a message dated 6/27/2001 9:20:37 PM, acnasvers at hotmail.com wrote: > << the oxytone 'arrow' referred by L&S to the root of 'to > go'...>> > ( is th infinitive form of .) > So I was not the first to make this connection on this list or in print. And > so whatever sin I committed I'll promptly forward to Lidell-Scott. And > perhaps also to co-lister DGK for repeating it without your analysis. > 2. The connection of , arrow, to , go through, was hardly of much > matter to my point, which has little to do with where came from. [PCR] One of the reasons linguistics makes such little progress is that so-called "experts" are permitted tacitly by their indulgent colleagues to propose etymologies as totally naif as , 'arrow', from , 'go through'. Arrows for ancient warfare (where flesh would not be later eaten) used poison when and if available; and thus a connection with 'yew' or some other plant furnishing poison would be natural and expected. Arrows, as any child should know, rarely "go through" anything. They go *into* things. I would bet that no one can produce a word for 'arrow' in any language with the base meaning of 'that which goes through'. 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, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138) From alderson+mail at panix.com Tue Jul 3 01:56:04 2001 From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 21:56:04 -0400 Subject: Handfuls of Unrelated Forms In-Reply-To: (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Thu, 28 Jun 2001 12:35:32 EDT, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) complained: > In a message dated 6/28/2001 4:38:04 AM, alderson+mail at panix.com writes: >> Once again, the crucial importance of vowel length has been missed. >> The words for _arrow_ and _poison_ both begin with a *long* vowel, /i:/, >> while the present active participle of _ei~mi_ "go" (accent is also >> important, since this is a different verb from _eimi'_ "be") begins with a >> *short* vowel /i/. >> Further, in the accusative /i:on/ the final consonant is etymologically < >> *-m, as is obvious from a perusal of the introductory handbooks, while in >> the participle /ion/ (neuter nominative/accusative singular), /-n/ is final >> due to the Greek rule dropping final -t (cf. the stem, found in the genitive >> _iontos_). There is nothing at all to connect these forms historically; to >> claim otherwise is to return to the days of _lucus a non lucendo_ and the >> fly-foot fox. >> Steve, you have a terrible habit of grabbing handfuls of unrelated forms >> which look to you as if their semantics ought to connect them... > I'm sorry but this is REALLY undeserved. > 1. Let me give you an earlier post on this list where you might have brought > all this up: > In a message dated 6/27/2001 9:20:37 PM, acnasvers at hotmail.com wrote: Already dealt with by the moderator: This message was written, and received in the list queue, after my post. Its apparent priority is an artifact of a badly designed mail-reading program. >> the oxytone 'arrow' referred by L&S to the root of 'to >> go'... > ( is th infinitive form of .) > So I was not the first to make this connection on this list or in print. And > so whatever sin I committed I'll promptly forward to Lidell-Scott. And > perhaps also to co-lister DGK for repeating it without your analysis. Liddell and Scott may be forgiven their error, since they were not privy to the succeeding 150 years of Indo-European scholarship. You, in theory if not in practice at least, were. Mr. Kilday did not attempt to derive any etymological connection from the L&S material. He simply noted *their* connection between _i:'os_ "arrow" and the verb "to go". You, on the other hand, made the following statement in your message of Mon, 18 Jun 2001 12:40:54 EDT on the subject _Yew Two_: > One important and early word for "arrow" in Greek was (accus., .) > One important and early word for 'poison" in Greek was The connection > may have been animals with fangs or that shot venom. The word seems a bit > transparent, being a participle for (L&S- <"ibo"?), with the > sense of "pass through". (E.g., "[pelekus] eisin dia douros" (the axe goes > through the beam) Iliad 3:61.) Thus, *you* have made an unwarranted connection among three distinct roots, accepting the L&S connection of _i:'os_ "arrow" to _ei^mi_ "I will go" and extending it to _i:'os_ "poison" via "animals with fangs or that shot venom". Was the characterization I made of your etymologizing truly unwarranted? > 2. The connection of , arrow, to , go through, was hardly of much > matter to my point, which has little to do with where came from. I'm > guilty of going off on a tangent there, so I suppose I deserve it. But I > hope that won't divert anyone from attending to my real point in the original > post on this. It may not have been of much matter to you, but it's characteristic of how you go about your etymologizing. I call to mind a post you made on Tue, 15 May 2001 21:49:27 EDT, on the subject _A Note on Beavers_, in which you suggest connections of a number of words containing the phoneme /b/ in Greek to the PIE etymon *bhebhros, even going so far as to refer two verb-stem formants, the present and perfect reduplications, to a single prefix _bi-/be-_ which you think has "causal" force. As for your point, it always seems to be argumentation for the sake of saving the Anatolian homeland from the fatal blow linguistics gives it, no matter how hard you have to twist the linguistic material to do so. > 3. I don't know how L-S found a relationship between and , but > the lenghtening of the initial vowel in Greek to mark past time might have > applied in some way. Augment could have been a device to separate > arrow, neuter, nom, accus, voc [passed through?], from , passing > through, pres part, nom, accus, voc. I should also point out that there are > forms of that show an -m- ) and that there are forms of > arrow that appear not to have the long i-, , gen, dat, sing, > plu. Another point is that L-S specifically refers the meaning "go through" > to the accusative form. The "lenghtening of the initial vowel in Greek to mark past time", that is, the temporal augment, is due to contraction of vowels otherwise in hiatus, and does not apply willy-nilly to any vowels at all. The imperfect forms of _ei^mi_ actually show this phenomenon, with an initial long diphthong E:i- (written ). Initial /i/ is never lengthened in augment. Further, non-finite forms (participles and infinitives) never, *never* get the augment, whether segmental _e-_ or vocalic contraction. Greek participles and infinitives, in point of fact, do not show tense, only aspect (durative vs. punctual). The form you write _iomen_ is, if I understand it correctly, a 1st person plural subjunctive, segmented i-o-men (stem-thematic vowel-ending), and has nothing to do with the accusative ending -n < *-m, nor with the present parti- ciple formant -o-nt- seen in the participle _iO:n, iousa < *i-ont-ya, ion_. And as I have stated above, L&S can be forgiven their mid-19th Century errors; you cannot. > But how this all actually worked is something I can't answer. But, once > again, if any of it is incorrect, you should hardly vent your wrath my way as > I am hardly the first to suggest it. You are the first to suggest a connection among all three words (and a fourth, also dealt with by Mr. Kilday in the post you quoted so briefly). So you are hardly innocent of original error. > As to the comment about "unrelated forms": > Which forms are unrelated and which are not? Well, the point I've been > trying to make is that "related" forms - in the sense of "genetic" forms - > may NOT be the answer to many of the "paleolinguistic" questions being > addressed here. But the method you choose to make your point is so highly flawed as to damage your case. Let me make a literature recommendation, to show how phonologically unrelated but semantically connected forms *ought* to be studied: Calvert Watkins' _How to Kill a Dragon_, which examines a set phrase from Indo-European poesy through its many manifestations in the daughter languages. Of course, you will have to accept that the words in question mean _kill_ and _serpent_, and have done for a very long time. > Most of these "alternative" explanations deal with BORROWED forms. And I am > suggesting that a large handful of "unrelated" forms with strong semantic > identity ARE EVIDENCE of borrowing. They may not prove borrowing, but they > are probative (the difference is important.) Why are evidence? Because a > big enough handful and a more careful understanding of historical context CAN > suggest an absence of coincidence. The phonological rules are not always > clear, but I try to draw parallels where I can to other instances of > borrowing. There is a problem here: You are *assuming* "strong semantic identity" when it is not clear that any such exists. In order for the material to support your case, you have to *argue* the identity, taking account of the evidence against your interpretation and proving the superiority of the latter. And you can't pick words at random that you think *ought* to be related without carefully looking at the evidence that they are completely separate. > I do think there is a value on this list to hearing an alternative point-of- > view and a value to not dismissing it out of hand. Or jumping the gun about > connections that I did not even originate. Your point of view has not been dismissed out of hand. We have taken the time to point out to you, many times, the errors of fact you adduce as evidence for your point of view. You can either accept the corrections, to work on streng- thening your arguments with better evidence, or not. Rich Alderson linguist at large From X99Lynx at aol.com Mon Jul 2 17:31:49 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 13:31:49 EDT Subject: Mr. Long's objections Re: Handfuls of Unrelated Forms Message-ID: [ moderator edited ] In a message dated 7/2/01 2:51:17 AM, ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com writes: << On 28 Jun 2001, Steve Long wrote to complain about the rough handling he has received from me when I write as a linguist subscribed to the list... I do not know how Mr. Long came by these dates. The two messages in question have the following headers (here repeated in full up to the point of departure from toad.xkl.com)... >> Actually, all I was doing was pointing out that I wasn't the only one crazy enough to repeat the ion-eimi relationship. I was NOT trying to make a federal case out of it. And I should point out that I wouldn't fault Douglas Kilday or his post for it since I probably got it from Lidell-Scott, which is what he also cited. All I was trying to do was reassure this particular moderator/member of the list that - if it is a mistake, I wasn't the first one who ever made it. As far as the rough treatment, I've consulted my doctors and they say that once again I'll live. As far as the mystery of where I got these dates from -- again to reassure the moderator and anyone on this list that I am playing fast and loose with e-mail documentation - the answer is the dates are automated. The documentation is below. Once again, there was no real criticism of moderator or any list member meant here. This was really just a bit of a defensive observation. cc: US Dept of Justice, FCC, U.N. Commission on Moderation of IE Lists and Human Rights (note this last line is in jest... :)) ------------------------- In a message dated 6/28/01 5:38:04 AM, alderson+mail at panix.com writes in a post titled "Re: Yew Two": << The words for _arrow_ and _poison_ both begin with a *long* vowel, /i:/, while the present active participle of _ei~mi_ "go" (accent is also important, since this is a different verb from _eimi'_ "be") begins with a *short* vowel /i/.... ----------------------- Headers -------------------------------- Return-Path: Received: from rly-zd01.mx.aol.com (rly-zd01.mail.aol.com [172.31.33.225]) by air-zd03.mail.aol.com (v78_r3.8) with ESMTP; Thu, 28 Jun 2001 05:38:04 -0400 Received: from toad.xkl.com (toad.xkl.com [192.94.202.40]) by rly-zd01.mx.aol.com (v79.22) with ESMTP id MAILRELAYINZD15-0628053741; Thu, 28 Jun 2001 05:37:41 -0400 Received: from mail1.panix.com ([166.84.0.212]) by toad.xkl.com with TCP/SMTP; Mon, 25 Jun 2001 12:14:59 -0700 (PDT) Received: from panix6.panix.com (panix6.panix.com [166.84.0.231]) by mail1.panix.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5F9584870B for ; Mon, 25 Jun 2001 15:14:07 -0400 (EDT) Received: (from alderson at localhost) by panix6.panix.com (8.8.8/8.7.1/PanixN1.0) id PAA05996; Mon, 25 Jun 2001 15:14:07 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 15:14:07 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <200106251914.PAA05996 at panix6.panix.com> X-Authentication-Warning: panix6.panix.com: alderson set sender to alderson+mail at panix.com using -f From: Rich Alderson To: Indo-European at xkl.com In-reply-to: <111.125ec83.285f8916 at aol.com> (X99Lynx at aol.com) Subject: Re: Yew Two References: <111.125ec83.285f8916 at aol.com> Sender: Indo-European mailing list Reply-To: Indo-European at xkl.com>> ------------------------------ In a message dated 6/27/01 10:20:37 PM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes in a post titled "Re: About the Yew1: << the oxytone 'arrow' referred by L&S to the root of 'to go'; ----------------------- Headers -------------------------------- Return-Path: Received: from rly-zc01.mx.aol.com (rly-zc01.mail.aol.com [172.31.33.1]) by air-zc02.mail.aol.com (v79.27) with ESMTP id MAILINZC22-0627222037; Wed, 27 Jun 2001 22:20:37 -0400 Received: from toad.xkl.com (toad.xkl.com [192.94.202.40]) by rly-zc01.mx.aol.com (v79.20) with ESMTP id MAILRELAYINZC19-0627222006; Wed, 27 Jun 2001 22:20:06 -0400 Received: from hotmail.com (f15.law7.hotmail.com [216.33.237.15]) by toad.xkl.com with TCP/SMTP; Tue, 26 Jun 2001 01:26:07 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mail pickup service by hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC; Tue, 26 Jun 2001 01:30:39 -0700 Received: from 216.165.137.44 by lw7fd.law7.hotmail.msn.com with HTTP; Tue, 26 Jun 2001 08:30:38 GMT X-Originating-IP: [216.165.137.44] From: "Douglas G Kilday" To: Indo-European at xkl.com Subject: Re: About the Yew1 Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 08:30:38 -0000 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Message-ID: X-OriginalArrivalTime: 26 Jun 2001 08:30:39.0559 (UTC) FILETIME=[47EB6D70:01C0FE1A] Sender: Indo-European mailing list Reply-To: Indo-European at xkl.com>> From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Jul 1 03:44:23 2001 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 23:44:23 EDT Subject: Uniformitarianism and the Arrowwood Message-ID: In a message dated 6/30/01 4:46:49 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: > You can "argue anything" you like about linguistic history that is strictly > linguistic . But the problem that's obvious is the non-linguistic elements. -- you haven't yet shown any problem. > What I've tried to show - and I think that I have shown - is that assumptions > about the early "meaning" of many of these words may easily be doubted on > closer examination. -- again, no evidence whatsoever. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Jul 1 03:54:27 2001 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 23:54:27 EDT Subject: Yew Two Message-ID: In a message dated 6/30/01 7:35:48 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: > Well, the problem is that I can't tell you when or how often the word would > have been borrowed, if in fact it was ever borrowed. -- then why are you wasting our time with an obvious piece of folk-entymology? > And the reason I like it is because I don't think that any one can say for > sure how would have been borrowed into Celtic or some part of > Celtic. -- do we have to go through the methods for identifying loan-words and the period in which they were borrowed AGAIN? > If you have a notion of what it would looked like, I'd be happy to hear it. -- since there's no evidence at all of any such loan, that would be rather futile. > In Gaelic, of course, I only had , so that's what I used. And it > looked good. -- until someone who knew the actual linguistic evolution commented. > I should say - again - that the real problem I have with *ebor as some > ancient name for yew is that the word seems to apply to a whole range of > woods and bone materials -- and your specific evidence for that _in this case_ is? What? From acnasvers at hotmail.com Sun Jul 1 09:42:35 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 09:42:35 -0000 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: Eduard Selleslagh (28 Jun 2001) wrote: >1. The very well known case of Lat. 'fagus' (Eng. beech and similar in other >Germanic, e.g. beuk in Du.) and Gr. 'phe:gss' (Dor. phagss) (Eng. oak) proves >that different trees can be meant by a name from the same IE source, even when >all the peoples involved were probably equally familiar with both species. Can >anybody suggest how this could happen? I'm sure Steve Long could explain this on the basis of trees being named after their practical use rather than by the recognition of distinct breeding populations or "species". I have never denied that this occurs. We have Lat. 'oak' and Eng. both from PIE *perkwo-, in addition to your example. My original comment about the yew and the PIE homeland (which I never thought would generate any significant commotion) depended on the yew being too distinctive in several respects to undergo name-shifting, but such a claim can be challenged, and SL's postings are multiplying like rabbits, much too rapidly for me to keep up. >The only thing beech trees and oaks (but: what kind of oak? There are widely >different types in N. and S. Europe) have in common is that they provide us >with good quality (and dense) wood for making furniture. Any child can see the >difference between a beech tree and an oak, especially by the leaves and the >'fruits'. Seeing the difference between the two types of wood requires a >little more competence, but not much. It's worth noting here that French has 'oak' < Gaul. *cassanos, not a reflex of . The Celtic word resembles Gk. 'chestnut-tree', so we may have here borrowings from Old European for 'dense wood' vel sim. If I'm not mistaken, oaks and chestnuts are classified in Fagaceae, the "beech family". >[Anecdotal info: I was born in Hoboken, a S. suburb of Antwerp, Belgium, which >was founded by the Salic Franks after the 5th. c. (date unknown). In the 10th. >c. a Latin text calls it Hobuechen, meaning 'High Beeches'. It is located on a >former heath on glacial sand deposits. On less inhabited parts of this heath >belt you can still find the odd taxus, but they are rather rare, if not >exceptional] Thanks. The name "Hoboken" (in New Jersey) puzzled me for years. >2. There was a Belgic tribe called (by J. Caesar) the Eburones. Anything to do >with ebur-, yew, bows, etc.? (I guess real ivory is to be excluded). Most likely it has to do with the yew. Catuvolcus, who killed himself with yew-poison, belonged to this tribe. Also, SW of the Seine, Caesar encountered the Eburovices (mod. top. E'vreux) whose name apparently means 'yew-winners' (i.e. those who win battles with yew-bows) and contrasts with the Lemovices 'elm-winners'. I regard *ebur- 'yew' as pre-IE (Old European), but Lat. 'ivory' as IE. Conventional wisdom takes the latter as a Hamitic loan (from Egy. <3bw> vel sim.) which fails to explain the /r/ or the other peculiarities: nom. , gen. , adj. . The long/short vowel-alternation and -r/rn- behavior could hardly come from Hamitic, and loanwords are usually normalized to common forms. This looks like an IE word which has preserved two archaisms: the gradation seen in nom. 'foot', gen. and the alternation seen in nom. 'maple', adj. . Boars have ivory, and boar-hunting has been a macho-thing for millennia, so it's not necessary to assume that PIE-speakers had access to elephant-tusks. DGK From dsalmon at salmon.org Sun Jul 1 02:23:15 2001 From: dsalmon at salmon.org (David Salmon) Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 19:23:15 -0700 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: The Gymnosperm Library of the University Bonn website says, "The species of Taxus are more geographically than morphologically separable; they were all treated by Pilger (3) as subspecies of T. baccata." They all have much the same properties, although various species prefer various locales. Their range extends from Japan to India, Iran to Europe, as well as Americas. Taxus Linnaeus 1753 http://www.botanik.uni-bonn.de/conifers/ta/ta/ T. baccata is the common European yew. Taxus baccata Linnaeus http://www.botanik.uni-bonn.de/conifers/ta/ta/baccata.htm T. sumatrana appears from the range descriptions to be the variety of yew found in India. Taxus sumatrana (Miquel) de Laubenfels 1978 http://www.botanik.uni-bonn.de/conifers/ta/ta/sumatrana.htm But Indian sources speak of also of t. baccata, sometimes described as t. wallachiana Basic information on Bhutan's Himalayan yew (Taxus baccata) http://www.fao.org/docrep/X5335e/x5335e08.htm Taxus Wallachiana http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:Q6U1WJ9iL9s:www.cites.org/CITES/eng/ctt ee/plants/10/PC10-13-3.pdf+taxus+baccata+India&hl=en [check the .pdf file avail. from google] Question: If the word for "yew" has Indo-European or PIE roots, do the Indo-Iranian or Sanskrit words for "yew" also fit this theory? (I don't know what those words are; no translation for "yew" is given in the Sanskrit online dictionaries I've consulted.) I have noticed that the discussion of IE and PIE on this list generally ignores the Indo- side of PIE and IE word analysis. Why is this? Unfamiliarity with that area? Respectfully, a lurker, David Salmon From gordonbr at microsoft.com Sun Jul 1 23:46:03 2001 From: gordonbr at microsoft.com (Gordon Brown) Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 16:46:03 -0700 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: For that matter, what about Eboriacum (isn't that the Latin for York?) -- any possible relation to *ebur-? > ---------- > From: Eduard Selleslagh[SMTP:edsel at glo.be] > Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 10:16 AM > 2. There was a Belgic tribe called (by J. Caesar) the Eburones. > Anything to do with ebur-, yew, bows, etc.? (I guess real ivory is to > be excluded). From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Jul 1 03:48:41 2001 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 23:48:41 EDT Subject: Red Deer in Anatolia Message-ID: In a message dated 6/30/01 6:15:28 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: > Actually what I mean to say - attempting to behave in a more rational way - > is that if you know of any pair of terms that *clearly contrast* the fallow > and red deer species in IE languages before Latin before @100 AD, I'd like > to see them. -- since it's you who is trying to overset the dictionaries, the burden of proof is entirely on you. Or, of course, we could slap ourselves on the forehead in sheer wonder that Steve Long has discovered something which eluded centuries of linguists. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Jul 1 05:29:05 2001 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 01:29:05 EDT Subject: The Iceman's Berries Message-ID: In a message dated 6/30/01 5:55:48 PM Mountain Daylight Time, sarima at friesen.net writes: > Unless the Hittite form belongs here, I would not reconstruct this word to > PIE. It looks more like a European word, like many other words shared only > between Slavic, Germanic and Celtic. -- I'd say a late dialect term in the north and center of the PIE world. From proto-language at email.msn.com Sun Jul 1 05:30:45 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 00:30:45 -0500 Subject: The Iceman's Berries Message-ID: Dear Stanley and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stanley Friesen" Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2001 1:33 AM > At 03:10 PM 6/14/01 -0400, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >> I-- well, a word for it would be a helpful hint. >> We have *eiwo, and *taksos >> *ei-wo produces cognates in Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, and (possibly) >> Hittite. > Unless the Hittite form belongs here, I would not reconstruct this word to > PIE. It looks more like a European word, like many other words shared only > between Slavic, Germanic and Celtic. [PCR] And just how does a "European word" look? What are its identifying characteristics? 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, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138) From petegray at btinternet.com Sun Jul 1 19:09:11 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 20:09:11 +0100 Subject: European Genetics/IE Message-ID: > Dialect creolism? How would dialect creolism differ, effectively, from dialect mixing, which is a pretty normal event? A creole has the bulk of its vocabulary from one source and the grammar from another; but dialects (by definition) already share large portions of both. Peter From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Jul 3 01:58:25 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 21:58:25 EDT Subject: e-mail date and time Message-ID: [ moderator edited ] <> In a message dated 7/2/01 8:48:39 PM, ALDERSON at toad.xkl.com writes: <> The two different e-mailers on the machines I am at now automatically return the date and time that the post reached the aol mailbox, in the form you see it above. I don't see anything in the preferences that would change that. I presume that the idea is date/time of receipt. Sorry about the inconvenience. The path is documented below. < 'type of knife', and the epithet probably means 'having knife-like leaves', since vines and weeds are hardly suitable for carving.... ----------------------- Headers -------------------------------- Return-Path: Received: from rly-zc01.mx.aol.com (rly-zc01.mail.aol.com [172.31.33.1]) by air-zc02.mail.aol.com (v79.27) with ESMTP id MAILINZC22-0627222037; Wed, 27 Jun 2001 22:20:37 -0400 Received: from toad.xkl.com (toad.xkl.com [192.94.202.40]) by rly-zc01.mx.aol.com (v79.20) with ESMTP id MAILRELAYINZC19-0627222006; Wed, 27 Jun 2001 22:20:06 -0400 Received: from hotmail.com (f15.law7.hotmail.com [216.33.237.15]) by toad.xkl.com with TCP/SMTP; Tue, 26 Jun 2001 01:26:07 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mail pickup service by hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC; Tue, 26 Jun 2001 01:30:39 -0700 Received: from 216.165.137.44 by lw7fd.law7.hotmail.msn.com with HTTP; Tue, 26 Jun 2001 08:30:38 GMT X-Originating-IP: [216.165.137.44] From: "Douglas G Kilday" To: Indo-European at xkl.com Subject: Re: About the Yew1 Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 08:30:38 -0000 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Message-ID: X-OriginalArrivalTime: 26 Jun 2001 08:30:39.0559 (UTC) FILETIME=[47EB6D70:01C0FE1A] Sender: Indo-European mailing list Reply-To: Indo-European at xkl.com>> <> Sorry about that. I was just kidding. Steve Long From stevegus at aye.net Sun Jul 1 03:12:32 2001 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 23:12:32 -0400 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. Message-ID: Lionel Bonnetier wrote: >> It isn't necessarily the only instance; 'propter,' 'contra,' and >> 'versus' are often put after the noun they govern, and forms such as >> 'quapropter' became lexicalised. > Thanks. And I forgot "quiscumque" and the like, > where -cum and -que take quite different roles... I was reminded, when I replied to this, that (being a lawyer in my day job) I've occasionally wondered about the antiquity, or lack of same, of formations like "whereof," "whereas" and "therefore." I'm not that well read in Old English, but I don't recall that they are common there, if they exist at all. There are not many of these constructions in Old Norse, and those are mostly late. But a few similar constructions arose in modern Swedish, like -varigenom- and -varfo"r-. The use of "where" and "there" when "what" or "that" would seem to be expected is also somewhat peculiar, and shared between English and Swedish. Are these imitations or calques on Latin forms? -- If heaven be our country, what can earth be but a place of exile? Let us long for death and constantly meditate upon it. --- John Calvin, "Meditating on the Future Life" From jer at cphling.dk Sun Jul 1 23:21:28 2001 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 01:21:28 +0200 Subject: Word Order and verb endings In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 28 Jun 2001, Kreso Megyeral wrote: > [... W]hat is general opinion on theory that PIE had the opposition > between indefinite and definite conjugation, as Hungarian does. Some > of the linguists interpret thematic vowel in declension and > conjugation as some kind of suffixated article. The theory is proved > by the fact that there is no intransitive thematic vowel of > undisputable IE origin. Your attitudes? The thematic vowel is not used as an object or definiteness marker anywhere in IE. The testimony of IE itself is that the thematic vowel marks the subjunctive. In the nominal system, the thematic vowel is used to create adjectives. I would suppose - but cannot prove - that there is a common origin involved, in that the subjunctive was originally the verb of subordinate clauses, so that stems with the thematic vowel would be used to modify stems without it. Jens From proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Jul 2 14:07:06 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 09:07:06 -0500 Subject: Word Order and verb endings (was Re: No Proto-Celtic?) Message-ID: Dear Thomas and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Thomas McFadden" Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 2:22 PM > it seems to me that explanations of this type (both the one from > Vidhyanath Rao and Patrick Ryan's response to it) are going to run > serious danger of violating some desirable version of the uniformitarian > principle. unless i misunderstand what they're arguing. [PCR] I do not immediately see the application. Why not explain the connection you see? 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, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138) From edsel at glo.be Mon Jul 2 10:51:46 2001 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 12:51:46 +0200 Subject: bishop Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2001 9:44 PM > Why do you claim, Ed, that eis te:n polin > istambul involves rules jumping > languages? Wasn't the contemporary Greek pronunciation /i:sta:mbulin/? It > would simply be taken over as a meaningless phonetic string. > Peter [Ed] I never said that: I said Konstantin?polis > Istambul was the consequence of jumping languages, and that 'eis te:n polin' was a 19th century invention (reconstruction, without any attestation) by linguists that thought that when a word is loaned by another, very different, language, the same rules as in language evolution should apply. In Byzantine (and New) Greek 'eis te:n p?lin' would have been (would be) pronounced 'istimb?li(n)', with two i's and o instead of u. The Turkish accent is on 'a' (Ist?mbul > Ger. Stambul), which shows that the I is prothetic, while the derivation from 'eis te:n p?lin' would have had the accent on the 'u' (Istamb?l). Even less than half a century ago, many Classicists studying ancient Greek hardly ever bothered about the notoriously capricious (to westerners, that is) Greek accent. To the Turks, all the syllables of Konstantinopolis apparently formed a meaningless string, as I noted before. > Ed's original follows: > Konstantinopolis > Istambul, a far too complex name for the invading Turks, > who didn't understand a word of Greek. They just kept the two syllables that > caught most attention STAN-POL, plus voicing and adding an epenthetic vowel > to make it pronouncible to them. (Like 'e-special' in Spanish). I wonder if > they ever realized its true meaning (Christian emperor Constantine's city), > because otherwise they would probably have changed it. Note that the > reconstruction as a derivation from 'eis te:n polin' is a 19th c. linguist's > fable based on the mistaken idea that the same rules apply when a word jumps > between two unrelated (or perceived to be so) languages, as during the > historical evolution of the same language. > Ed. selleslagh From connolly at memphis.edu Mon Jul 2 23:01:36 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 18:01:36 -0500 Subject: bishop Message-ID: petegray wrote, in response to Ed Selleslagh: > Why do you claim, Ed, that eis te:n polin > istambul involves rules jumping > languages? Wasn't the contemporary Greek pronunciation /i:sta:mbulin/? It > would simply be taken over as a meaningless phonetic string. should already have been something like [is ti(m) bolin], as in current Greek. The vowels would be all wrong. And why on earth would the Greeks have given something meaning 'to the city' as the name of their capital? Ed is right: that etymology is a fable, but it's so bad I'd be reluctant to blame it on a linguist. It's in a class with _tip_ 'gratuity' < T(o) I(nsure) P(rompt) S(ervice), or **** < F(or) U(nlawful) C(arnal) K(nowledge). It's amazing how many people accept such things, but linguists shouldn't. Leo Connolly From oebel at cc.saga-u.ac.jp Mon Jul 2 04:36:39 2001 From: oebel at cc.saga-u.ac.jp (Oebel) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 13:36:39 +0900 Subject: German (was:Dubya and before that, minimal pairs) Message-ID: You should have asked your German colleague to say "Vase" or "Vitrine" as there you may, of course, find the "v" as in "village" whereas in most cases it is pronounced - as e.g. in "Vater" - as "f". Best regards from a German currently teaching in Japan - Guido Oebel ---------- > ^M7^Oo^Pl : Leo A. Connolly > ^H6^Pf : Indo-European at xkl.com > ^L^O^V< : Re: German (was:Dubya and before that, minimal pairs) > ^Q^W^PM^Sz^N^^ : 2001^TN6^L^N27^Sz 13:01 > Robert Whiting wrote: >> ... I had a German-speaking >> colleage who pronounced English as [w] (as in "willage"). When I >> pointed out to her that she could easily pronounce the [v] sound in >> she said, "Oh, no, German doesn't have that sound -- we use >> for [f] like in . Well, what can you say? Now if 'village' >> were written *, she would have had no trouble pronouncing it. > Sure she would have. The fact is, some Germans pronounce as > labiodental [v], while others use a bilabial fricative. When speaking > English, the latter use the bilabial fricative in lieu of the English > bilabial glide /w/ and the labiodental fricative /v/. Since this is > obviously wrong in each instance, but English has no bilabial fricative, > English speakers usually believe these Germans have said [v] instead of > /w/ and [w] instead of /v/, when in fact they said neither. Spelling > had nothing to do with her pronunciation problems. > Leo Connolly From sarima at friesen.net Mon Jul 2 05:49:20 2001 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 22:49:20 -0700 Subject: the 'Dhole' In-Reply-To: <000701c1009a$8abeacc0$b270fe8c@lucent.com> Message-ID: At 08:53 AM 6/29/01 -0400, Vidhyanath Rao wrote: >The avoidance of dense forest by wolfs may be a better explanation: ... It is interesting how few people seem to know that the older common name for that species, at least in North America, was Timber Wolf. They do not particularly avoid forests. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Jul 3 04:38:27 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2001 00:38:27 EDT Subject: the 'Dhole' Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 7/1/01 10:52:51 PM, dlwhite at texas.net writes: <> Just briefly again,... yes. Or, mostly yes. - I should have written "Wolves as a general rule and apparently especially in southern Asia are found in MORE open habitats than the dhole." I also assume we are speaking of the grey wolf, as other kinds of "wolves" may be more distant in descent than the dhole. - A quick search on the web will return many, many repetitions of the statement that "Wolves do not live in" or "are seldom found in arid deserts or tropical forests." - The basic problem with the "southern heat and humidity" idea may be that in fact the Indian Wolf, a subspecies of canis lupus, is found "south down the middle of India towards Madras and Bangalore." See a map of its range to the deep south of the subcontinent at http://www.myinternet.co.uk/wsgb/education/newsletters/archive/winter2000.htm. Also, according to the WSGB, "Wolves in India tend to prefer open habitat, usually scrubland, avoiding forested areas. This is possibly an adaptation to avoid competition with big cats such as tigers and leopards, and the Asian wild dog or dhole, although wolf populations do sometimes overlap leopard territories. [An alternative explanation is that] wolves may have initially arrived in India from the arid areas of the Middle East and naturally colonised open habitat rather than the moister forests." An analogy is also draw to the adpative behavior of the Ethiopian wolf, which inhabits relatively high, treeless ground exclusively. - Recent studies (e.g., Helen Purves and Carol Doering, Wolves and People: Assessing cumulative impacts of human disturbance on wolves in Jasper National Park, 1999) tend to show that the best indicators of wolf movement and habitat are prey biomass concentration, "least-cost paths" and avoidance of human development areas. Although tropical forests are extremely rich in prey, movement in them tends to be difficult and inefficient for the particular predation style of the wolf - as with other heavily obstructed areas such as bouldered areas, salt marshes and steeper slopes. And this "least cost" analysis would seem to be the best explanation for the otherwise ubiqutous wolf's relative absence from many dense tropical and sub-tropical forest environments. - The dhole by all accounts favors dense forests, especially tropical and sub-tropical forests. ("In the Soviet Union, the dhole inhabits alpine areas and dense forests; in India, dense forest and thick scrub jungle up to 2,100m; in Thailand, dense montane forest up to 3,000m.") Such specialized adaption could not have been recent. I didn't find any clear references to the dhole inhabiting "open steppes" or "tundra" environments; some evidence from the late Pleistocene also seems to locate the dhole in thickly forested environments (e.g., Ovodov, 1977). If there were "dholes" on the open steppes in those days, the first impression might be that they were materially and taxonomically distinct from the main branch of the species. - The best evidence we have perhaps is that the dholes's more modern environment has been determined by the natural and human-induced shrinkage of its primary environment. According to the World Conservation Union, the major factors affecting the dholes range have been (note the final reference to wolves): "In India, disease appears to be important in population regulation. In C.a. primaevus, virulent distemper, rabies, or both are thought to kill dholes periodically in Chitawan and Corbett. The prey base in these areas suggests that these should be among the best dhole habitats in this subspecies' range. Their rarity in this region may be due to natural causes, or may be the result of increased human contact (and contact with domestic dogs) leading to frequent disease introductions. 2. C. a. dukhunensis: Two forms of disturbance within reserves by local people: stealing of kills; and disturbance at den sites during the breeding season leading to den shifting and possible pup mortality. Threats in outside reserves include poisoning, resulting from conflicts with cattle grazers and depletion of natural prey (Axis axis, Cervus unicolor) by poachers (Johnsingh 1986). 3. Declines in populations for "unexplained" reasons have been documented in Kanha and the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, reasons for decline after 1920 are uniformly uncertain.... Ovsyanikov suggests that poison bait programmes aimed at elimination of wolves, Canis lupus, may have inadvertently eliminated dholes in areas in which the two species overlap." There's good reason to think that the dhole developed as a specialized adaption to dense forest environments and its distribution has not been particularly affected by the wolf - as it does not appear to be particularly affected by tigers or bears. On the other hand, the wolf's relative absence from typical dhole habitats can also be explained in much more obvious and universally applicable ways. Nothing suggests anything like the innate superiority of the wolf. Finally, I cannot find anything that attributes the distribution of the wolf being affected by heat or humidity. <> Not that it has anything to do with the wolf's range in that region, but the Mayan military class called themselves by the name of a predator in the neighborhood that is quite capable of being thought as "competition" - the jaguar. But then again, there were sabre-tooth tigers and wolves living alongside of one another in Florida @10,000 years ago. Perhaps the ocean air canceled out the humidity. Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Mon Jul 2 13:12:38 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 14:12:38 +0100 Subject: 'albeit' In-Reply-To: <001101c0fefb$675d7b80$9b70073e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: --On Tuesday, June 26, 2001 8:32 pm +0100 petegray wrote: [quoting on 'albeit'] >> "all-bite" .... the pretentiousness of Times journalists >> (more justifiably, perhaps). > The word is not pretentious at all in the educated speech of those I work > with (or in my own). I guess its "death and resurrection" is a phenomenon > not shared by all the English speaking world. I really wish some linguist had been paying attention to this word. It's been doing startling things. As recently as ten years ago, I think, 'albeit' was as dead as a doornail in English. I never encountered it at all except in texts written a long time ago. Then, something like six or seven years ago, it started to turn up with some frequency. One of my colleagues here at Sussex noted that the word was suddenly appearing in student work. And I began seeing it more and more often, in newspapers, in academic writing, and in non-fiction books. Now it seems to be everywhere, or almost everywhere. (It never besmirches my own writing, I can tell you.) Why? How? How did this decaying corpse get dragged out of its coffin and foisted back onto the language? Who did this, and why? And why have English-speakers in their tens of thousands been so eager to embrace this reanimated zombie of an expired polysyllable and to use it in preference to everyday monosyllables like 'but' and 'though'? I propose Trask's Law of Lexical Change: Never use a plain short word that everyone understands if you can use a long, silly word that many people don't understand -- possibly including you. Sorry, folks. I'm afraid that I, tedious old fart that I am, still find 'albeit' unspeakably pretentious. In my new handbook of English usage, out shortly from Penguin, I condemn the word in ringing tones and warn the reader that its use may get him suspected of belonging to a lower life-form. Well, this handbook is a little more forthright than most. 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 proto-language at email.msn.com Mon Jul 2 15:01:01 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 10:01:01 -0500 Subject: *G^EN- Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2001 2:49 PM > Pat said: >> *keubH2-, 'lie down, lay down', >> I see no reason not to derive it from Pokorny's 2. *kew-, 'bend' [PG] > Help yourself. It doesn't alter my (or any normal) understanding of PIE. [PCR] I am not sure if I am being tagged with an *abnormal* understanding of PIE by maintaining the primacy of CVC-roots. Is that your intention? But your remark also puzzles me. I thought you were objecting to my willingness to derive every non-borrowed PIE stem ultimately from a CVC-root. And as part of an objection, you cited *keubH2- as an example of a stem that was not derived from a simpler CVC-root, hence was itself a root (CVCCH), obviously not CVC! If you have no problem with deriving *keubH2- from *kew-, then what was your point in mentioning it (*keubH2-) at all? Under these circumstances, why should I care? Isolating the initial CVC-component of PIE stems allows comparison with initial CVC-segments of PAA triliteral roots. Just for the record, I would analyze *keubH2- as follows: 1) Root theme: *ke/o- (better *khe/o-), 'to close (around)'; + 2) *-w, repeated activity implying a goal = *k(h)ew-, 'close up all around' + 3) *-b, 'spot, location' = *k(h)eub-, nominal: 'closed up place'; verbal: 'make a closed up place (as by curling up in sleep)' + 4) *-H (H1 = ), stative = *k(h)eubH-, 'curled up while lying'. 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, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Tue Jul 3 22:37:34 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2001 17:37:34 -0500 Subject: *G^EN- Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2001 2:48 PM > Pat said: >> Let me clarify what I was saying. Even if we could trace all attested IE >> forms back to *g^enH1-, and no attested form could be derived from **g^en- >> ...I would still maintain that the non-attestation of **g^en- is a >> historical accident, and that **g^en- still must be reconstructed for some >> earlier date in order to provide the basis for *g^enH1-. > I reply: > This is based entirely on a theoretical assumption. Nothing wrong with > that, but not everyone is in agreement on that theory. Furthermore, it also > assumes that *g'en is CVC. In PIE terms, I would see it as CV, and the > attested root *g'enH / g'nH as the true CVC, parallel to so many PIE roots > such as *leikw / likw, *derk / drk ....etc [PCR] Well, you obviously have a liking for syllablic nasals. I guess you will think I am copping a plea by appealing to Nostratic (and PAA) again. In cognates with *CVn- roots, Nostratic (and PAA) show no signs of syllabic nasals. This suggests strongly that syllabic nasals are an IE development. Now, it appears to me that you wish to reconstruct a *g^N-, which you would consider an example of CV. Why not explain to me why you believe it is preferable to regard *g^NH- as a CVH rather than simply a zero-grade of *g^en + H-? Obviously, I reject the parallel you suggest. For me, *leikw- is a CVC (*ley-) plus root-extension *-kw. 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, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138) From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Mon Jul 2 16:10:47 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 11:10:47 -0500 Subject: kinkajou In-Reply-To: <328191389.3202802839@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk> Message-ID: So what is the kinkajou in Spanish? Or, to be more precise, what do locals call it? Costa Ricans tend to lump cat and dog-sized wild mammals into pisotes "fast, climbing mammals", mozotes "shy, quiet nocturnal mammals" and zorros "road-kill mammals". Pisotes include coatis and other raccoon-like animals. Mozote is too ambiguous to pin down Zorro, literally "fox" in Spain, is used for possum "zorro blanco", skunk "zorro hediondo" and so on. Zorrilla is also "skunk". In various parts of South America, they use zorri/n, zorrita, etc. for "skunk". Raccoons OTOH are well known enough to have their own name, "mapache" Although dictionaries give zarigu"ey, zarigu"eya for "possum", I've never met anyone who ever used that term or had even heard it. [ moderator snip ] >My recent edition of Collins, one of the best British desk dictionaries, >not only enters 'kinkajou' but gives it two senses. Sense 1 is the Central >and South American mammal Potos flavus, also called 'honey bear' or >'potto', and related to the raccoon. Sense 2 is as another name for the >potto, an African prosimian primate, Perodicticus potto, belonging to the >loris family. Apparently kinkajous and pottos, in spite of their rather >distant relationship, resemble each other so strongly that English-speakers >have not hesitated to transfer the names in both directions. >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) Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From DFOKeefe at aol.com Mon Jul 2 21:57:01 2001 From: DFOKeefe at aol.com (DFOKeefe at aol.com) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 17:57:01 EDT Subject: Proto-Celtic - An Exploration: Celtic ICM & Q/P Words = Function IE Roots Message-ID: Dear Dr. Aikio & I.E. List, Thank you for your constructive comments, and even your disagreements. You are correct about there being no initial consonantal gradation in Fenno-Ugric, though there is apparently a similar such phenomenon in Uralic (which I will discuss later in this note). However, I am interested in the similarity of the process of consonantal gradation in Finnish-Estonian, consonantal alternation in Uralic and consonantal assimilation in Hungarian and initial consonant mutation in the Celtic languages. These somewhat similar processes are phonologically complex and not to be picked up in one or two centuries. August A. Koski and Ilona Milahyfy in A HUNGARIAN BASIC COURSE, N.Y.: Hippocrene Books, 1990 discuss consonantal assimilation on page 71, where they point out that voiced consonants (b, d, g, gy, v, z, zs) become voiceless consonants (p, t, k, ty, f, sz, s) and vice versa in certain situations. That is, if a voiced consonant proceeds an unvoiced consonant, the voiced consonant is assimilated and pronounced as unvoiced, somewhat similar to lenition. Likewise, if an unvoiced consonant precedes a voiced consonant, the unvoiced consonant is pronounced as voiced, similar to Celtic eclipsis, though d and n do not become n and ng as in Celtic. Also, on page 138, they point out that if an n comes before a p or b, it is pronounced as m and the digraph ny before k and g is pronounced as n. i also observed that possessive pronouns are placed at the end of nouns (p. 138) and also the indirect object (137). The change from voiced to unvoiced consonant of Ugric consonantal assimilation is nearly identical to that of eclipsis in Celtic. And also, Celtic languages attach pronouns to the end of prepositions. Consequently, whether speaking in terms of a Celtic - Fenno-Ugric relationship, or in terms of the nature of Celtic initial consonantal mutation, Fenno-Ugric consonantal gradation and consonantal assimilation are relevant as systematic morphological processes. Also, please note that Bjorn Collinder in AN INTRODUCTION TO THE URALIC LANGUAGES, Berkley: Univ. Cal. Press, 1965, points out that Lappish has gradation which goes through the whole vocabulary (p. 65) and also he states that "On the other hand, it is not unlikely that there was gradation in Common Uralic....." p. 72. The ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, 15th ed., 1994, Vol. 22, in an article entitled Languages of the World, p. 690, states "the Sami languages exhibit similar alternations, but the process applies to all consonants......" Presumably, this means that alternation applies to initial consonants, too. The exact development of Proto-Celtic initial consonant mutation, and Proto-Fenno-Ugric and Proto-Uralic (Samoyedic) consonantal assimilation / alternation / gradation may be difficult for us to ascertain at this time. But the fundamental shift between voiced and unvoiced consonants is a shared common feature. Based on these exceptional obvious similarities, I conclude that there was some tie-in. Our opinion that there is a strong relationship between Indo-European and Fenno-Ugric is buttressed by Professor Kalevi Wiik's own independent research. He is a distinguished professor of phonetics in Finland. He is well-supported by modern genetic data which has knocked out the isolationist linguistic claims of Basques and Fenno-Ugrics, particularly as regards the rh negative blood factor. We used Modern Irish and Modern Finnish because if the two languages were related long ago, they should show some strong similarities today, even if a few borrowed Latin words are included in either vocabulary. (I frequently get criticized for comparing the Finnish numeral three to the Irish word for pigeon on account of its 3 toes. That was the only rationale I could come up with.) Your comments that our works on Uralic are pretty much on the mark. They are tentative explorations. I will label them as such. If Celtic is related to Fenno-Ugric, and there is a reasonable possibility that it is, then it may be possible for a partial, low grade IE link to Uralic. Please note, by a partial linguistic link, I mean links limited to very basic resemblances only, with no links to grammar, conjugation, declension. A limited, but consistent connection at most. Regards, David O'Keefe Houston, Texas From DFOKeefe at aol.com Mon Jul 2 22:10:02 2001 From: DFOKeefe at aol.com (DFOKeefe at aol.com) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 18:10:02 EDT Subject: Proto-Celtic & Proto-Fenno-Ugric in Herodotus and C. Ptolemy Message-ID: Hello I.E. List, In PROTO-CELTIC - AN EXPLORATION: CELTIC ICM AND Q/P WORDS AS A FUNCTION OF IE ROOTS we mentioned a possible connection with the Fenno-Ugric languages and some of their consonantal change characteristics. Research indicates that there was some shared geographical areas in Central Europe between Celts and Hungarians in prehistoric times. I have written a very brief paper, ANCIENT AND MODERN HUNGARIAN PLACE NAMES, F.-U. CONSONANTAL ASSIMILATION / GRADATION AND A POSSIBLE CELTIC I.C.M. CONNECTION, which I have placed in Section XII. of our web site http://hometown.aol.com/dfokeefe/page1.html While this very brief paper is not meant to be profound, it does get the point over that Hungarians have been in Central Europe since very early times. They appear to have been quite close to the Celtic peoples. Consequently they could have influenced each other culturally and linguistically. Also, if the Hungarians were in Central Europe in prehistoric times, then this might better explain the settlement of the Baltic region better than assuming that the Finns and Estonians went directly up to their present areas via Central and Western Russia. I am not interested in which ethnic / linguistic group went first. It seems from Pittman and Ryan that most IE-FU people appear to be about 7,000 years old. Regards, David O'Keefe Houston, Texas From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Wed Jul 4 04:35:27 2001 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2001 07:35:27 +0300 Subject: PU trees (WAS: About the Yew1) In-Reply-To: <3FBE0C2659BC3B4EAB3536F20FA25039040EA7EB@red-msg-02.redmond.corp.microsoft.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 14 Jun 2001, Gordon Brown wrote: > Ante, can you give us some modern reflexes of these tree names, say in > Finnish, Estonia, Saami, perhaps others? PU *s?ksi 'siberian pine' > Komi /sus?-pu/ (/pu/ 'tree'), Khanty (Vakh-Vasjugan dialect) /L?g?l/, Manysi (Pelymka dialect) /t??t/, Nenets /tideh/ (no cognates in more western Uralic, because the tree only grows in the speaking area of Samoyedic, Ob-Ugric & Permic) PU *d??xmi 'bird cherry' > Sami (North) /duopma/, (South) /foeme/, Finnish /tuomi/, Estonian /toom/, Mordvin (Erzya) /l?om/, Manysi (Pelymka) /l???m/, Selkup (Taz) /c^?m/, Kamass /lem/ etc. PU *kaxsi 'spruce' > Sami /guossa/, Finnish /kuusi/, Estonian /kuusk/, Mordvin /kuz/, Khanty (Vasjugan) /kag?t/, Nenets /xadi/ etc. PU *koxji 'birch' > Finnish /koivu/, Estonian (South) /k?iv/, Mari /kue/, Nenets /xo/, Nganasan /k??/ etc. PU ?*pic?(V)lV or ?*pic?(V)rV 'rowan' > Finnish /pihla-ja/, Estonian /pihlakas/, Mordvin /piz?ol/, Udmurt /palez?/ (metathetic), Khanty (Vakh-Vasjugan) /pec??r/ etc. (the reflexes of this word contain phonological irregularities). For more details, please look up the words in the relevant etymological dictionaries (Uralisches Etymologisches W?rterbuch, Suomen Sanojen Alkuper?, etc.) Regards, Ante Aikio From bmscott at stratos.net Fri Jul 6 01:09:54 2001 From: bmscott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 21:09:54 -0400 Subject: About the Yew1 In-Reply-To: <3FBE0C2659BC3B4EAB3536F20FA25039040EAD71@red-msg-02.redmond.corp.microsoft.com> Message-ID: On 1 Jul 2001, at 16:46, Gordon Brown wrote: > For that matter, what about Eboriacum (isn't that the Latin for > York?) -- any possible relation to *ebur-? , earlier in Ptolemy. It's been derived from a personal name that is said to be related to the 'yew' word, but Ekwall points out that it could itself just as well be directly from that word. Brian M. Scott From bronto at pobox.com Fri Jul 6 03:15:45 2001 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 20:15:45 -0700 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: Gordon Brown wrote: > For that matter, what about Eboriacum (isn't that the Latin > for York?) -- any possible relation to *ebur-? Here's Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-names: [ c 150 Ptol ...] The Brit name is held to be derived from a pers. n. (Gaul , Welsh ). But this name is supposed to be a derivative of Gaul (Ir ) `yew', and might then well be derived directly from the tree-name. Owing to popular etymology the Brit name was changed into OE , which may have been supposed to contain OE `boar'. Scandinavians at an early date came to know the name, and in their speech it became , found in Egill's Arinbjarnardra'pa of 962. A later development of this is , found in later ON sources, as in Fagrskinna. In this form the name was re-adopted by the English. -- Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/ From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Jul 6 06:34:40 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 02:34:40 EDT Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: In a message dated 7/5/2001 7:02:26 PM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes: << It's worth noting here that French has 'oak' < Gaul. *cassanos, not a reflex of . The Celtic word resembles Gk. 'chestnut-tree', But see , Grk; , Lat, cinnamon tree, any tree "with an aromatic bark"; Greek, "of ivy"; , Grk; Lat, "English ivy" or a similar plant; Cf., Lat , a larva gathered from under the bark of trees, (Pliny); Lat , a hewer of trees; , a forest in ancient Germany. Regards, Steve Long From edsel at glo.be Fri Jul 6 12:53:49 2001 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 14:53:49 +0200 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Douglas G Kilday" Sent: Sunday, July 01, 2001 11:42 AM > Eduard Selleslagh (28 Jun 2001) wrote: [snip] >> [Anecdotal info: I was born in Hoboken, a S. suburb of Antwerp, Belgium, >> which was founded by the Salic Franks after the 5th. c. (date unknown). In >> the 10th. c. a Latin text calls it Hobuechen, meaning 'High Beeches'. It is >> located on a former heath on glacial sand deposits. On less inhabited parts >> of this heath belt you can still find the odd taxus, but they are rather >> rare, if not exceptional] > Thanks. The name "Hoboken" (in New Jersey) puzzled me for years. [Ed] Lots of Peter Stuyvesant's crew members were actually Flemish, and often from Antwerp, a consequence of the mass migration to Holland at the end of the religion wars (1585 and on). [snip] > I regard *ebur- 'yew' as pre-IE (Old European), but Lat. 'ivory' as > IE. Conventional wisdom takes the latter as a Hamitic loan (from Egy. <3bw> > vel sim.) which fails to explain the /r/ or the other peculiarities: nom. > , gen. , adj. . The long/short vowel-alternation > and -r/rn- behavior could hardly come from Hamitic, and loanwords are > usually normalized to common forms. This looks like an IE word which has > preserved two archaisms: the gradation seen in nom. 'foot', gen. > and the alternation seen in nom. 'maple', adj. . > Boars have ivory, and boar-hunting has been a macho-thing for millennia, so > it's not necessary to assume that PIE-speakers had access to elephant-tusks. [Ed] I don't think there is an -r/rn alternation. In my view, the -n after the -r is an (abbreviated) adjective-forming suffix indicating origin, source etc. Cf. Slavic -no (hladno, krasno...) or even Lat./Etrusc. -na. Ed. Selleslagh From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Jul 5 16:10:52 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 12:10:52 EDT Subject: "mono-descent is implicit in the comparative method ..." Message-ID: In a message dated 7/4/01 8:26:11 AM, dlwhite at texas.net writes: << "Implicit" may be a bit strong, but the comparative method as traditionally conceived and practiced has never contemplated mutli-descent. >> An important distinction. "Implicit" seems simply inaccurate. As I understand it, the comparative method IN AND OF ITSELF contemplates neither multiple nor singular descent of 'languages'. Rather it deals with forms. Your position that finite verb forms are never 'borrowed' or 'mixed' relates - objectively and without theoretical extension - only to forms. If there were languages that was made up solely of finite verbs, the question of relatedness of these languages could be narrowly defined. But that appears not to be the case. <> Fine. Assume that 'finite verbal morphology' is present and whole-heartedly 'treated as existent' and assumed to be fundamental and therefore the preemptive indicator of descent. The real question in the hypothetical is why, given those assumptions, it is proper to label the 'nominal morphology, derivational or non-finite verbal morphology,... and categories' shared with a different language family as non-genetic. I wrote: <> Let's assume that 'finite verbal morphology' is never 'borrowed' or 'mixed' and can only be transmitted by ordinary processes from an ancestor to a daughter language. That still does not tell me or anyone why other forms cannot be descended from a completely different ancestor. Certainly, if those forms include 'nominal morphology, derivational or non-finite verbal morphology,... and categories' shared with a different language family. As a real example, Niger-Kordofanian is a "well-established language family where... there was very very little lexical evidence for this family," but "the nominal class system of the major subfamilies agree in detail as to the markers for the different classes." This prompted "Baxter and Manaster Ramer(1996), following... Schadenberg (1981)" to classify "Niger-Kordofanian as ... established purely on [nominal] morphological grounds...." Non-derivative verbal morphology apparently played no part in establishing the overall family. (from a hl post from manaster at umich.edu dated Tue, 24 Feb 1998 14:43:02 EST.) Here, noun morphology is used to establish descent. Could a suddenly discovered contra-indicating verbal morphology shared with other languges c hange the status of that noun morphology from "genetic" to "non-genetic?" The comparative analysis of those nominal forms would not have changed in the least. So it has to be theory outside the comparative method that causes the shift in status from "genetic" to "non-genetic." The systematic correspondence of the FORMS remains intact. So, again, why should the presence or absence of shared verbal morphology change the "genetic" status of other morphology in the language, or negate the possibility of more than one familial relationship? <> How is "language descent" established in any way other than by the origin of morphemes and other shared forms? The concept of language descent is entirely based on the establishing systematically corresponded forms. I don't think you have supplied a coherent explanation of how you "discriminate between descent and the origins of morphemes." But my question is specifically what theory can justify making language descent a contest between different sets of validly corresponding systematic forms - multiple morphemes with validly established multiple origins? When the comparatively proven descent of forms show different origins, why should one be "genetic" and the others "non-genetic?" You will need a completely different theoretical basis for the "mono-descent" of languages. The comparative method apparently will not support it. Regards, Steve Long From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Wed Jul 4 08:19:09 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2001 09:19:09 +0100 Subject: Borrowing of verbal morphology Message-ID: There have recently been claims on this list that verbal morphology can never be borrowed. But I note now that this claim is falsified by an example presented in the Thomason and Kaufman book which started the discussion. On pp. 215-222, T&K discuss the example of Asia Minor Greek, which has been massively influenced by Turkish -- in phonology, in morphology, in syntax, and in lexicon. There are many local varieties of Greek in Asia Minor; all have been heavily influenced by Turkish, though each shows a different array of borrowed features. On p. 219, T&K point out that some varieties of Greek have borrowed Turkish verbal inflections -- specifically personal agreement suffixes. They cite examples from Cappadocian Greek, in which the Turkish past-tense agreement suffixes <-ik> (first-plural) and <-iniz> (second-plural) have been borrowed and are attached to Greek verbs. These suffixes are taken over in invariant form, without the Turkish vowel-harmony alternants, even though Asia Minor Greek has also borrowed vowel harmony from Turkish, and applies vowel harmony to certain Greek suffixes, at least when these are added to words of Turkish origin. 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 Wed Jul 4 12:53:19 2001 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2001 07:53:19 -0500 Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns" Message-ID: > Dr White indicated that verb > morphology might have some preemptive claim over those other forms. Yes, that is my claim. Cases known (to me) are so few that sampling error (in a somewhat informal sense) is a real possibility, but it seems that borrowing of nominal morphology typically (or at least often) involves a sort of creeping infiltration, as in Rumanian or Old Lithuanian, whereas borrowing of finite verbal morphology, if it has occurred, which I doubt, would involve borrowing of the whole set. This in turn raises the possibility that such cases have been mis-conceptualized, that it is not the finite verbal morphology that has been borrowed but everything else. Admittedly this seems a bit wild at first, but the case of Anglo-Romani indicates that things of the sort, "abrupt relexification" or whatever, are within the range of possiblility. Either way, no "creeping infliltration" of finite verbal morphology is known, so it would seem that though our first instinct might be to think that nominal morphology and finite verbal morphology would "act" the same in borrowing, the truth (such as we can grasp it) appears to be that there is an unanticipated assymmetry between the two. But lest I anticpate my Parvum Opus to much, I will shut up now. Dr. David L. White From JoatSimeon at aol.com Wed Jul 4 16:31:33 2001 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2001 12:31:33 EDT Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns" Message-ID: In a message dated 7/4/01 5:25:34 AM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: > Then let my rephrase my question. Can more than one proto-language be > reconstructed from a "group" of languages? And, if so, then will those > additional proto-languages show up in reconstruction if one assumes before > hand that there was only one proto-language? If on the other hand the > answer to the first question is no, then why not? -- you only get a protolanguage out of the group of languages used to reconstruct if there was, in fact, a protolanguage. If the languages aren't genetically related, the method produces nothing. From alderson+mail at panix.com Fri Jul 6 00:23:03 2001 From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 20:23:03 -0400 Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns" In-Reply-To: <12f.c63d5a.286fde86@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On 30 Jun 2001, Steve Long wrote: > In a message dated [= received at AOL --rma] 6/30/2001 5:52:51 AM, > alderson+mail at panix.com writes: >> So that, I think, is the pithy answer to your continued asking of why any >> language can't have more than one ancestor under the comparative method: >> The method does not address single languages, but groups of languages, and >> as was pointed out by Larry Trask, if we can't build a protolanguage with >> the comparative method, the languages in question are *JUST* *NOT* >> *RELATED*. > Then let my rephrase my question. Can more than one proto-language be > reconstructed from a "group" of languages? No. That's what we've been telling you all along: The comparative method absolutely assumes a single parent for any group of related languages, and cannot assume anything else. > And, if so, then will those additional proto-languages show up in > reconstruction if one assumes before hand that there was only one > proto-language? The question is meaningless. > If on the other hand the answer to the first question is no, then why not? The quote you cite from Lehmann makes that clear: The reconstruction process assumes a single ancestral form for each set of forms taken from the multiple languages under discussion. > This goes back again to the terms I quoted from Winfred Lehmann: "In using > the comparative method, we contrast forms of two or more related languages to > determine the precise relationship between these forms. We indicate this > relationship most simply by reconstructing the forms from which they > developed." (Hist Ling 3d ed, 1992 pb) p 142. The total set of reconstructed forms, based on all the forms attested in the group of languages under examination, is considered to be a single language. Period. By definition. Period. > The reason was to relate it way back to the hypothetical that Dr White > brought forward where the "nominal morphology, derivational or non-finite > verbal morphology,... and categories" might be shared with one language, > "finite verbal morphology" with another. Dr White indicated that verb > morphology might have some preemptive claim over those other forms. That is between Dr. White and you. I can sympathize with his position, but am not prepared to defend it. However, be careful here, because this example is of *ONE* *SINGLE* *LANGUAGE*, and you already know that the comparative method is about *groups* of languages (and the individual forms taken therefrom). > But my point was that the presence of those diverging systematic forms would > suggest more than one "proto-language" could be reconstructed at least with > regard to the language that showed both forms. *Only* if these diverging forms can be found elsewhere within the same group of languages being examined at the time. If there are no correlates, there is no reconstruction possible, and therefore no proto-language. I repeat in full a definition I have given before in brief, from Haas' _The Prehistory of Languages_ (p. 32): A protolanguage, then, is reconstructed out of the evidence that is acquired by the careful comparison of the daughter languages and, in the beginning of the work, what is reconstructed reflects what can be discovered by working backwards in those cases where all or most of the daughter languages point ot the same conclusion. This provides the initial framework. Once this is established, the principle of analogy can be drawn upon, and by its use instances in which there are aberrations, statistically speaking, can often also be plausibly accounted for. Deductive as well as inductive hypotheses must be constructed and checked. Then when all the comparisons that can reasonably be made have been made, and when all the reconstructions that can reasonably be made have been made, the result is a PROTOTYPICAL MODEL OF THE DAUGHTER LANGUAGES, or, what we normally call a protolanguage. (The emphasis by all caps is in small caps in the original; it is what I often cite as the definition of "protolanguage".) Rich Alderson linguist at large From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Jul 5 19:47:57 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 15:47:57 EDT Subject: One Step at a Time Message-ID: In a message dated 7/5/2001 2:51:47 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: << OK, then -- fire away. But you are defending a position which is wildly, ludicrously false -- not an easy task. ;-) >> Typically, your conclusions come first. You don't have to wait for the evidence. <> Let's just start this with a basic question, to be sure you are saying what you appear to be saying. If you assume Basque and Spanish are entirely lost and unrecorded in your example above, and all that is being compared are the "half-a-dozen languages" you mention... Are you saying there will be no systematic correspondences to be found among those "half-a-dozen languages"? Steve Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jul 5 21:55:41 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 16:55:41 -0500 Subject: The Single Parent Question Message-ID: Dear Joat and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: Sent: Saturday, June 30, 2001 10:58 PM > In a message dated 6/30/01 8:35:12 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com > writes: >> This won't help you here. I won't ask if you've ever argued a science case >> in Federal Court or ever did plasma analysis or worked on neural systems or >> did any high-order economic analysis. You've claimed an extremely high >> level of certainty with regard to the reconstruction of proto-languages. >> I'm looking at the scientific validity of that claim. [JS] > -- no, you aren't, because you don't have the knowledge-base to do so. [PCR] I do not subscribe to much of what Steve writes either but I do believe he is asking pertinent question. This type of snobbish response is not at all helpful. Steve is not suggesting for one moment that he has the training in IE linguistics of many on this list. He is questioning the methodology used based on his familiarity with it in other disciplines. Linguistics should be done with the same, generally recognized scientific methodology as other sciences --- whenever that is possible. I find this totally unobjectionable. 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, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138) From alderson+mail at panix.com Fri Jul 6 00:46:46 2001 From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 20:46:46 -0400 Subject: real proto-lang In-Reply-To: <003401c102bb$b4b53940$eb1d3bd4@desk> (bamba@centras.lt) Message-ID: On 2 Jul 2001, Jurgis Pakerys wrote (quoting Larry Trask from a post by Steve Long): [Larry Trask:] >> In a message dated 6/27/2001 12:29:59 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: >> << And what is that? So far as I know, all I have ever claimed about the >> comparative method is that it cannot produce proto-languages that never >> existed. And that's just true. Do you want to challenge this? >> > I hope prof. Trask didn't mean that _all_ proto-languages (produced by > comparative method) really existed. I've always imagined that there's some > degree of uncertainty and those proto-languages cannot be compared to the > real ones. [ snip ] > Maybe I'm wrong, but it looks very hard to reconstruct a _real_ > proto-language. Sometimes we're able to reconstruct only fragments of it (I'm > not saying this about very well documented language families). I guess it's > better to understand those proto-languages as some tools of comparative > linguistics than real languages that existed at some point of time. The question only arises from a misunderstanding of the term "protolanguage". A protolanguage is a construct of the comparative method which *models* the real language ancestral to the languages which go into the comparison, but it is not that actual language. Depending on the breadth of the materials from which linguists can draw in the reconstruction process, it may be very close, but it will not and cannot be the ancestral language itself. (Some writers in English have the very bad habit of referring to unattested languages ancestral to known families as "protolanguages", but this is a misuse of the term, and confusing to non-linguists and to those not well versed in the theoretical side of historical linguistics.) So if we can only reconstruct fragments of an ancestral language, our proto- language is deficient, but that does not make it wrong in what it does capture, nor does it make it a "protolanguage that never existed". The latter term would refer to the ability to create a protolanguage from, e. g., English, Nahuatl, and Xhosa, and have it stand scrutiny. Rich Alderson linguist at large From bronto at pobox.com Tue Jul 3 06:18:28 2001 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 23:18:28 -0700 Subject: diction and contradiction Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > I'm reminded of the Monte Python skit. > Eric Idle: You're not arguing. You're just being contrary. > John Cleese: [pause, thinking] No-I'm-not. >>From vol.2 pp 86-89: Man [Michael Palin]: Look this isn't an argument. Mr Vibrating [John Cleese]: Yes it is. Man: No it isn't, it's just contradiction. Mr Vibrating: No it isn't. [...] Man: Oh, look this is futile. Mr Vibrating: No it isn't. Man: I came here for a good argument. Mr Vibrating: No you didn't, you came here for an argument. Man: Well, an argument's not the same as contradiction. Mr Vibrating: [pause?] It can be. [...] Slightly closer to topic, why is Italy called in Hungarian? (I was in Urbana yesterday, popped in to the Slavic & East European department of the university library, where I once had a job; and happened to see there a Hungarian map of Europe.) -- Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/ From Georg-Bonn at t-online.de Fri Jul 6 08:27:16 2001 From: Georg-Bonn at t-online.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 10:27:16 +0200 Subject: Handfuls of Unrelated Forms In-Reply-To: <004b01c101f1$cbfebce0$fbf1fea9@swbell.net> Message-ID: Someone called "Proto-Language" wrote: >One of the reasons linguistics makes such little progress is that so-called >"experts" are permitted tacitly by their indulgent colleagues to propose >etymologies as totally naif as , 'arrow', from , 'go through'. the basic meaning of /eimi/ is "to go to or into" One of the reasons linguistics makes such little progress is that people with so little Greek are permitted to voice their irrelevant opinion in specialist fora. (FYI: Greek is the IE language with those funny letters.) -- Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn From g_sandi at hotmail.com Wed Jul 4 09:42:00 2001 From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi) Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2001 09:42:00 -0000 Subject: Rate of Change Message-ID: >To: Ed Selleslagh >Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 19:06:27 +0200 [ moderator snip ] >[Ed] >Italy had a very prestigious culture that exported ideas, art forms, etc. >rather than receiving them. It was - and still is largely - in the period of >stability that followed the rapid change after the collapse of the Roman >Empire (Maybe it didn't change that much, as it is based very much on Tuscan >regional speech that may be a lot older). The Risorgimento and Mussolini >caused mainly self-affirmation and glorification, not change. >Spanish (actually: Castilian) is possibly even more conservative than Italian: >you can still read Cervantes without any study of older forms of Castilian. >Its style is very old-fashioned, with very long Latin-style sentences, with a >lot of verbosity etc. but basically he uses modern Castilian. And even older >Castilian is not much different. I don't think that we have any real disagreement, Ed. Rates of linguistic change vary greatly, and social changes are no doubt an important contributing factor. The problem that I see is that what I see as roughly the same level of social upheaval may be associated with different rates of linguistic change, so that the predictive power of social change -> linguistic change is rather limited. The War of Roses may well be related to the Grat Vowel Shift in English, but did the Thirty Years' War, say, have the same effect on Standard German? Much of the German countryside was depopulated by the latter war, if I recall my history correctly. As for Italian vs. Spanish, I was specifically thinking of phonetic change. I think that the phonology and phonetics of Standard Italian, based on but certainly not identical to, the dialect of Florence, have remained virtually unchanged since the Middle Ages. This is not true of Spanish: you may well be able to read Cervantes in the original, but the following changes have taken place since the late Middle Ages (which was my baseline): loss of voiced fricatives (v > b, z > s, Z > S, dz > ts > T (Latin American and Andalusian s)), followed by retraction of shibillants (S > x). In morphology, the pluperfect (cantara) has lost its original function (still there in literary Portuguese) and has acquired the same function as the imperfect subjunctive (cantase). Has anything equalling these changes taken place in standard Italian? Cordially, Gabor From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu Fri Jul 6 22:34:42 2001 From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 18:34:42 -0400 Subject: Rate of Change In-Reply-To: <002101c10188$d9eaac60$3502703e@edsel> Message-ID: > In modern times we have the opposite: notwithstanding rapid cultural > change, we see a lot of convergence due to greatly improved > communications and mass media, which act as linguistic role models, > much more than any Acad?mie ever did. Here in Flanders, e.g. we see > the pretty fast breakdown of dialects, via a stage of 'intermediate' > language or seriously locally colored standard language. In the > Netherlands, by and large, this stage has already been passed. actually, sociolinguistic work of the last few decades, especially by Bill Labov and his students, has shown that this, which seems very plausible, isn't quite right. in spite of increased literacy and mass media, local dialects are continuing to develop independtly and diverge from the standard in a number of places. of course in many other places the dialects are disappearing or being brought closer to a standard language, but what seems to be crucial in causing this is not literacy and standard language media, but rather increased mobility of speakers. in one study, two immediately adjacent neighborhoods in the philadelphia suburbs were examined, one of which had been around for some time and was inhabited mainly by people who were born there or nearby, the other of which had been recently built and was inhabited by and large by famillies that had moved to the area from all over the country. the children living in the first neighborhood showed all characteristics of the philadelphia dialect, even those few whos families had actually recently arrived, and in fact they showed characteristics of changes currently in progress in the dialect that were further differentiating it from standard american english. on the other hand, the children in the new neighborhood showed markedly less of the characteristics of the philadelphia dialect in their speech, even those few whose families had been in the area for a while. so the crucial factor here is not exposure to normalizing media and education, but movement between dialect areas. now, what this means for the very different dialect situations of europe is less clear. the european dialects were of course much more diverse, and have clearly been weakened in the recent past, but it still seems that mobility would be the key. another thing to consider is that many of the extinct or near extinct dialects of Europe were, in distinction to the dialects of North American English, not mutually intelligible with the standard language of the country in which they were spoken (listen to a local dialect of Austrian or especially Swiss German). it may well be that such extreme variation can be threatened by much lower levels of mobility, because not just social interaction, but simple communication can be disturbed. just a thought. > The biggest change in English, which makes Old English > incomprehensible, has of course been Norman French. the role that the influx of Norman French played in the massive morpho-syntactic changes that occurred between old and middle english is a matter of some controversy i think, and seems often to have been overstated. vocabulary aside, there is actually some evidence that the influence of Scandinavian was of much more importance at that time. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Wed Jul 4 18:26:29 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2001 13:26:29 -0500 Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] Rubia and lluvia are not homophones because assibilated /R^/ and /z^/ are noticibly different. You hear something similar to /z^rubja/ & /z^ubja/. There are different degrees of assibilation as well as voiced and unvoiced varieties. This increases the difference between the two. I'm not sure but I think Czech also has both /z^/ and assibiliated /R^/. Someone please correct me on that. Places that are known for stronger assibilation include Guatemala, Costa Rica, Bogota, parts of Chile (I've heard it from people from both the North and South) and parts of Argentina (especially Corrientes, according to Argentines I've spoken to). Costa Rican assibilated /R^/ (except for ) tends to be voiced while Guatemalan assibilated /R^/ tends to be unvoiced. and are affricates similar to and . You occasionally see Costa Ricans saying for in Central American fiction. A weaker form of assibilation often shows up in Central and Southern Mexico, the rest of Central America and lot of the rest of South America. It's sort of in between a standard trill and Costa Rican assibilated /R^/. Even in Costa Rica, not everyone uses assibilated /R^/. My wife uses a type of retroflex /R/ similar to an emphatic North American English /r/ [as in R-r-ight!]. Costa Ricans will often use trilled /rr/ for emphasis. >Since in many varieties of Argentinian Spanish (as well as in Chile and >Uruguay), the phonetic realizations of orthographic and are also [Z], >do these examples imply that there are varieties of Spanish where lluvia >'rain' and rubia 'blonde' are homophones, pronounced as ['ZuBya]? Same for >callo 'corn (on foot)' and carro 'cart, car', both [kaZo]? >Gabor Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From edsel at glo.be Wed Jul 4 17:23:16 2001 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2001 19:23:16 +0200 Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change) Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gabor Sandi" Sent: Saturday, June 30, 2001 3:43 PM [snip] > Since in many varieties of Argentinian Spanish (as well as in Chile and > Uruguay), the phonetic realizations of orthographic and are also > [Z], do these examples imply that there are varieties of Spanish where lluvia > 'rain' and rubia 'blonde' are homophones, pronounced as ['ZuBya]? Same for > callo 'corn (on foot)' and carro 'cart, car', both [kaZo]? [Ed Selleslagh] As far as I know, the rr > Z territory (mainly (sub-)Andean Argentina, Mendoza etc.) and the y, ll > Z (or often S) (around the Mar del Plata and wide surroundings) do not really overlap, but I may be mistaken. Rick McCallister would be a better source. Anyway, among themselves, y and ll give rise to a lot of homophones, even in standard Castilian: call?/cay? (he shut up/ he fell) etc...A bit more wouldn't be all that problematic to native speakers, especially because to the trained ear there is a slight difference between Z from rr and Argentinian/Uruguayan Z from y or ll. The Z from rr often sounds like the pronuciation of someone who cannot reproduce a rolling r correctly, or as a more strongly voiced American r with a shade of Z. Ed. From bmscott at stratos.net Wed Jul 4 20:02:41 2001 From: bmscott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2001 16:02:41 -0400 Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On 30 Jun 2001, at 22:21, Gabor Sandi wrote: > But are you sure that the two Hungarian words that have pretty > much infiltrated all European languages (kocsi & husza'r, cf Eng. > coach and hussar) have not entered Albanian? Not having a proper > Albanian dictionary in my home, I cannot check up on this. For no good reason I have an old Albanian-Italian dictionary to hand. It has () 'carro, carrozza, vettura' and what appears to be a variant, () with the same gloss. I saw no obvious candidate for (). Brian M. Scott From petegray at btinternet.com Wed Jul 4 18:58:57 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2001 19:58:57 +0100 Subject: Genetic Descent Message-ID: > 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]. 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? Peter From connolly at memphis.edu Fri Jul 6 04:10:25 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 23:10:25 -0500 Subject: Genetic Descent Message-ID: Vidhyanath Rao wrote: >> Neither can we say that _gustar_ and _piacere_ are "passive". What activity >> is performed, and by whom or what? If neither the meaning nor the form is >> passive, in what sense can one say that these verbs are? > I am ignorant of the fine details. What are the etymological origins of > gustar and piacere? _piacere_ is from Latin _place:re_ 'please', which had the same syntax: item liked nominative, person who likes it dative. Pokorny, IEW 831, connects this Latin _placidus_ 'smooth, calm' and to a lot of rather semantically unlikely words in other languages. Not being a Latin etymologist, I can only say that the etymology seems unsatisfactory. but I have no better suggestion. _gustar_ comes from Latin _gusta:re_, which has many obvious cognates in other IE languages. However, _gusta:re_ was construed as an active verb meaning 'take a taste of something': Caesar vinum gustavit. NOM wine-ACC tasted 'Caesar tasted the wine.' As far as I know, this usage has been lost in Spanish, with _gustar_ adopting both the syntax and meaning of Lat. _place:re_. > I often get the impression that, as passives so often come from > resultative/stative constructions, people consider the latter to be > passives (in origin). I wonder if that is the case here. I don't quite understand the question. I don't think either comes from a passive, and unlike _gusta:re_, _place:re_ apparently always was stative. But are we discussing etymology here or people's perceptions? Leo Connolly From agkozak at socrates.Berkeley.EDU Thu Jul 5 16:39:04 2001 From: agkozak at socrates.Berkeley.EDU (A. G. Kozak) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 09:39:04 -0700 Subject: Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent) Message-ID: ----Original Message----- >From: Leo A. Connolly [SMTP:connolly at memphis.edu] >To: [SMTP:rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu];Indo-European at xkl.com >Subj: Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent) >Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2001 2:49 AM . . . >We formerly had such things -- think "methinks" -- an object in preverbal >position not controlling verb agreement. We have since solved our problem >by making _me_ into a true subject _I_ -- with no change in meaning! I can see what you're getting at, but isn't this a bit of an oversimplification? We haven't changed any object into a subject; we've simply dropped the peculiar "methinks" from the language, mostly because it looks so wrong to anyone unfamiliar with older forms of English. If anyone had remembered that "me-" is a dative and that "-thinks" is a reflex of AS. "?yncan" ("to seem") and not "?encan" ("to think"), we'd probably all still be saying it. As it is, however, "methinks" ended up being the last remnant of a verb otherwise lost in ModE., & so it was prone to be misunderstood and finally abandoned. A. G. Kozak Department of Classics University of California at Berkeley From acnasvers at hotmail.com Fri Jul 6 08:33:34 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 08:33:34 -0000 Subject: Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent) Message-ID: Leo A. Connolly (1 Jul 2001) wrote: >So that's the reason. I understand the problem, but I disagree sharply >with their conclusion: the morphological subject is the *only* subject >as far as I'm concerned, and the "oblique subjects" that through their >weight around in these languages are simply the ones which rank highest >in the hierarchy of "deep cases" i.e. semantic roles -- the ones which >in some sense "should" be the subject (and in English most typically >are). We formerly had such things -- think "methinks" -- an object in >preverbal position not controlling verb agreement. We have since solved >our problem by making _me_ into a true subject _I_ -- with no change in >meaning! Spanish might do that too some day, but no sign of its >happening yet. Don't these expressions represent distinct verbs and constructions? "I think" < OE 'I think; intend' < "methinks" < OE 'to me it seems' < Of course, the two verbs are related, since < PGmc *thunkjan is a factitive, 'to cause to be thought' = 'to seem'. Dutch has preserved the vocalic contrast between and ; Du. = "methinks". I wouldn't say that English has made "me" into "I" here. Instead, many speakers have reinterpreted "methinks" as a pseudo-archaic variant of "I think", leading to such usages as a comic-book king saying "Methinks I shall hold a jousting tournament" (incorrect since it expresses intention, not seeming). This didn't happen with the parallel "meseems", which can't be reinterpreted as "I seem". Some dictionaries (e.g. the AHD) have purged "meseems" while retaining "methinks", even though the former was still productive in late 19th-cent. poetry. DGK From rao.3 at osu.edu Thu Jul 5 14:00:05 2001 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 10:00:05 -0400 Subject: Sound changes versus sound changes Message-ID: > [Steve Long:] > The other factor is HOW "DISSIMILAR" those changes are, in the sense that you > used similar above, in "little or no similarity." We're not talking about > "unexpected" or uncommon shifts here but rather shifts that make the words > sound significantly different. In other words, a fricative to a labial > versus a fricative to another fricative. An ordinary listener might have a > better chance of finding a similarity in the latter than the former. But sound changes don't seem to work that way. Labov, in his monograph about sound changes, looked at various examples of changes in progress and came to the conclusion that changes of place are more complex than changes of effort and such things at metathesis can remain partial, limited by semantics etc. So p>f may be a smaller change than f > th. From leo at easynet.fr Thu Jul 5 21:28:14 2001 From: leo at easynet.fr (Lionel Bonnetier) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 23:28:14 +0200 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. Message-ID: Douglas G Kilday wrote: > It's much more plausible to regard -cum as the remnant of a formerly > widespread postpositive use of prepositions (sorry, I don't know how to > avoid this oxymoron). But the trickiest question was: Why did "cum" remain a postposition while all other adpositions became prepositions in Latin? (And why only with pronouns?) > This usage is preserved better in p-Italic: e.g. > Umbrian 'pro arce Fisia pro civitate > Iguvina', Oscan 'in Vibiis Beriis'. Similarly, in Epic > Greek many prepositions may follow their objects, but in Attic prose only > may do so. 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? From edsel at glo.be Fri Jul 6 13:18:02 2001 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 15:18:02 +0200 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Gustafson" Sent: Sunday, July 01, 2001 5:12 AM [ moderator snip ] > I was reminded, when I replied to this, that (being a lawyer in my day job) > I've occasionally wondered about the antiquity, or lack of same, of > formations like "whereof," "whereas" and "therefore." > I'm not that well read in Old English, but I don't recall that they are > common there, if they exist at all. There are not many of these > constructions in Old Norse, and those are mostly late. But a few similar > constructions arose in modern Swedish, like -varigenom- and -varfo"r-. The > use of "where" and "there" when "what" or "that" would seem to be expected > is also somewhat peculiar, and shared between English and Swedish. > Are these imitations or calques on Latin forms? [Ed Selleslagh] Also Dutch and German, therefore W. Germanic (and its generally acknowledged impact on Swedish, but less to none on older Scandinavian). Dutch: d/waarvoor, d/waarvan, d/waarom, etc. German: wof?r/daf?r, wovon/davon, warum/darum, etc. I think this is authentic West-Germanic. E.g. Dutch and German use Waarom/warum? for 'Why?' and have no other word for it that doesn't involve a postposition. Ed. From connolly at memphis.edu Fri Jul 6 19:02:51 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 14:02:51 -0500 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. Message-ID: Steve Gustafson wrote: > I was reminded, when I replied to this, that (being a lawyer in my day job) > I've occasionally wondered about the antiquity, or lack of same, of > formations like "whereof," "whereas" and "therefore." > I'm not that well read in Old English, but I don't recall that they are > common there, if they exist at all. There are not many of these > constructions in Old Norse, and those are mostly late. But a few similar > constructions arose in modern Swedish, like -varigenom- and -varfo"r-. The > use of "where" and "there" when "what" or "that" would seem to be expected > is also somewhat peculiar, and shared between English and Swedish. > Are these imitations or calques on Latin forms? not hardly. They also occur in at least German and Dutch: German womit 'with what?', damit 'with it/them', hiermit 'hereby', Du waarmee 'with what?', daarmee 'with it/them' etc. There's nothing like tis in Latin. Leo Connolly From sarima at friesen.net Fri Jul 6 02:28:31 2001 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 19:28:31 -0700 Subject: The Iceman's Berries In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 01:29 AM 7/1/01 -0400, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 6/30/01 5:55:48 PM Mountain Daylight Time, >sarima at friesen.net writes: >> Unless the Hittite form belongs here, I would not reconstruct this word to >> PIE. It looks more like a European word, like many other words shared only >> between Slavic, Germanic and Celtic. >-- I'd say a late dialect term in the north and center of the PIE world. Certainly. I have some hypotheses about the nature of many of the late dialect terms of the north (and sometimes center), but those do not at present have a very sure footing. However, I would tend to place this term in with the others of like distribution, and thus I *guess* it may have been borrowed from some pre-IE language family of the north or Europe. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From sarima at friesen.net Fri Jul 6 02:39:15 2001 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 19:39:15 -0700 Subject: The Iceman's Berries In-Reply-To: <002801c101ef$13654520$fbf1fea9@swbell.net> Message-ID: At 12:30 AM 7/1/01 -0500, proto-language wrote: >Dear Stanley and IEists: >> Unless the Hittite form belongs here, I would not reconstruct this word to >> PIE. It looks more like a European word, like many other words shared only >> between Slavic, Germanic and Celtic. >[PCR] >And just how does a "European word" look? >What are its identifying characteristics? It is shared between the northern European branches of IE, and perhaps is also found in the north-central dialects (aka Balto-Slavic). Balto-Slavic attestation is somewhat marginal here, but there are so many words shared specifically between Balto-Slavic and the other European branches that I have a hard time excluding it. Certainly Balto-Slavic appears to have been adjacent to some of the northern European dialects through most, or all, of its history, so shared innovations are not that unexpected. Since these branches are all mutually adjacent at the time of first attestation, such a limited attestation is insufficient to establish PIE antiquity for a word. Thus, there is a large class of roots in Pokorny, and elsewhere, that are only attested anciently from northern Europe and immediately adjacent areas. These form a substantial corpus of words that, while locally shared, cannot be confidently reconstructed for PIE proper. One interesting factoid about this corpus is that it includes most of the roots in Pokorny with a reconstructed *a that is not traceable to an a-coloring laryngeal. (Note, this is not an identifying characteristic, it is an observation). Now, my *hypothesis* about many of these words is that they are borrowings from a non-IE language family formerly wide-spread in northern Europe, but now extinct. I wish I could figure out how to test this idea. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From dlwhite at texas.net Fri Jul 6 13:18:51 2001 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 08:18:51 -0500 Subject: the 'Dhole' Message-ID: I really don't have time for all this, but an interested person might want to consult Grzemek. Dholes are not restrictd to any particular habitat within their range. They are found in the alpine steppes of Tibet (wolves too), for example. Wolves are found in essentially all habitats of the northern hemisphere except deserts and tropical forests (which are not necessarily dense). In northern Mexico they are restricted to (lightly) forested mountains, and do not occur in the semi-arid sub-tropical lowlands. Habitat segregation that is not characteristic of two species in general is fairly often found where there ranges overlap, and that appears to be what has happened in India. Dr. David L. White From sarima at friesen.net Fri Jul 6 13:52:34 2001 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 06:52:34 -0700 Subject: the 'Dhole' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 12:38 AM 7/3/01 -0400, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >Just briefly again,... yes. Or, mostly yes. >- I should have written "Wolves as a general rule and apparently especially >in southern Asia are found in MORE open habitats than the dhole." This sounds like competitive exclusion, where two ecologically similar species partition the available space on the basis of *slight* differences in efficiency in different environments. >- A quick search on the web will return many, many repetitions of the >statement that "Wolves do not live in" or "are seldom found in arid deserts >or tropical forests." Arid deserts they certainly tend to avoid, probably because they require more resources than deserts readily provide. Their absence from tropical forests may be due more to competitive exclusion - there are generally more species of carnivore in rain forests to offer such competition. There is a general pattern - species tend to be limited in the direction of the harsher environment by intrinsic ability, and on the in the direction of richer environments by competitive exclusion. It shows up repeatedly in manipulation experiments. It certainly was the case with the coyote, which expanded into the former range of the wolf after we humans extirpated it in many areas. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From douglas at nb.net Fri Jul 6 14:32:58 2001 From: douglas at nb.net (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 10:32:58 -0400 Subject: kinkajou In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > So what is the kinkajou in Spanish? For Potos flavus, quick Spanish-language Web search returns several common names in Spanish: martilla cercoleto martucha cuchicuchi kinkajou kinkaj? kinkayu perro de monte mico de noche marta guatuza cusumbo tutamono leoncito shosna chosna micole?n I suppose these are used respectively in different countries? It's possible some are erroneous. -- Doug Wilson From redux7 at hotmail.com Fri Jul 6 16:39:23 2001 From: redux7 at hotmail.com (eleonora litta) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 18:39:23 +0200 Subject: lupo cervino, loup-cervier.... Message-ID: Hi everyone, in a XIV century Italian manuscript I have found this animal, apparently a lynx, which would symbolise the ability to judge distances, time, speed... (the manuscript is about fighting techniques, BTW). only this animal is called lupo cervino, which in italian would mean 'deer-wolf'. At the beginning I thought it was for the lynxs fur, spotted like the deer one, then a French guy told me that in France they have this loup-cervier, which is a big lynx who hunts deers, so I reconsidered my position. They also told me in a Spanish name for the lynx being lobo cerval. I have to find out which is the truth about all this. do you know something about the ancient names for 'lynx' in the IE languages, and about their evolution? Thank you for your help Eleonora Litta From X99Lynx at aol.com Fri Jul 6 17:07:04 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 13:07:04 EDT Subject: Ockham's Razor Message-ID: I wrote: <> In a message dated 6/30/2001 8:37:21 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com writes: <<-- Hesychius. >> If these kinds of details make a difference to anyone - which I am beginning to doubt - Hesychius is often dated to @ 5th Century AD and therefore considered post-Classical and "post-Roman" - maybe by as much some 700 years. S. Long From dlwhite at texas.net Fri Jul 6 13:06:29 2001 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 08:06:29 -0500 Subject: 'albeit' Message-ID: > As recently as ten years ago, I think, 'albeit' was as dead as a doornail > in English. I never encountered it at all except in texts written a long > time ago Well, it occurs in Tom Lehrer's "Fight Fiercely Harvard": ...Albeit they possess the might, nonetheless we have the will!" "Hurl that spheroid down the field", and all that. Dr. David L. White From douglas at nb.net Fri Jul 6 14:03:40 2001 From: douglas at nb.net (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 10:03:40 -0400 Subject: 'albeit' In-Reply-To: <572915.3203071958@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk> Message-ID: Reports of the death of this word once again appear to be exaggerated. The Merriam-Webster usage dictionary discusses the repeated at-least-partially-imaginary resurrection of the word, and remarks: "_albeit_ seems never to have gone out of use, though it may have faded somewhat in the later 19th century." ( Message-ID: On 2 Jul 2001, at 14:12, Larry Trask wrote: > As recently as ten years ago, I think, 'albeit' was as dead as a > doornail in English. I never encountered it at all except in > texts written a long time ago. I'm 53, and I've been using it all my life. It's true that I originally acquired it from reading and pronounced it to myself as 'all-bite', but I straightened that out before I was 12. I've always considered it a perfectly normal word in a formal register, both in writing and in speech. > Sorry, folks. I'm afraid that I, tedious old fart that I am, > still find 'albeit' unspeakably pretentious. How very odd; it would never even have occurred to me that anyone might find it so. (I shan't lose any sleep over it in any case!) Brian M. Scott From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Jul 6 15:06:34 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 16:06:34 +0100 Subject: Proto-Celtic - An Exploration: Celtic ICM & Q/P Words Function IE Roots In-Reply-To: <98.1712bf11.2872482d@aol.com> Message-ID: --On Monday, July 2, 2001 5:57 pm +0000 DFOKeefe at aol.com wrote: > Our opinion that there is a strong relationship between > Indo-European and Fenno-Ugric is buttressed by Professor Kalevi Wiik's own > independent research. He is a distinguished professor of phonetics in > Finland. He is well-supported by modern genetic data which has knocked out > the isolationist linguistic claims of Basques and Fenno-Ugrics, > particularly as regards the rh negative blood factor. Nonsense. Absolute balderdash. First, genetic data cannot conceivably establish any linguistic conclusions whatever. Second, the observations about the proportion of Rh-negative blood among the Basques are just that: observations, not "claims", and least of all "linguistic claims". Third, the linguistic isolation of Basque is just as much a fact today as it ever was. Fourth, Kalevi Wiik has not established anything at all, least of all about Basque. What he does is to draw pretty maps showing Uralic-speakers wandering all over the solar system zillions of years ago. He has built a career out of this simple party piece. The rest of this posting is too distressing to comment on. 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 proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Jul 6 22:36:01 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 17:36:01 -0500 Subject: Word Order and verb endings Message-ID: Dear Jens, Kreso, and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen" Sent: Sunday, July 01, 2001 6:21 PM > On Thu, 28 Jun 2001, Kreso Megyeral wrote: >> [... W]hat is general opinion on theory that PIE had the opposition >> between indefinite and definite conjugation, as Hungarian does. Some >> of the linguists interpret thematic vowel in declension and >> conjugation as some kind of suffixated article. The theory is proved >> by the fact that there is no intransitive thematic vowel of >> undisputable IE origin. Your attitudes? [JER] > The thematic vowel is not used as an object or definiteness marker > anywhere in IE. The testimony of IE itself is that the thematic vowel > marks the subjunctive. In the nominal system, the thematic vowel is used > to create adjectives. I would suppose - but cannot prove - that there is a > common origin involved, in that the subjunctive was originally the verb of > subordinate clauses, so that stems with the thematic vowel would be used > to modify stems without it. [PCR] I am not sure this matter is quite so easily disposed. I am wondering if Jens would agree that a stress-accent origin for the thematic vowel is as likely as considering it a suffix. I personally favor the idea that the thematic vowel is a result of stress-accent on the syllable following the root-syllable at one early stage of IE. Now, generally in IE, C'VC correlates with durative verbal notions, and CVC' with momentary verbal ideas. And, as we all know, there are complex relationships between nominal (object) definiteness and verbal aspects. Let us also recall that the "subjunctive" has been characterized as a "thematic present" (Beekes) so what the "subjunctive" came to mean is not necessarily how it started out. I do not pretend to know much about Hungarian so I will leave speculation here, for the moment. I can say that the comparison might be more than of passing interest if it can be shown that the Hungarian indefinite conjugation has uses which suggest modalities like intention or necessity; and, as a consequence, are non-declarative --- but I do not know if this is or has been historically true. 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, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138) From colkitto at sprint.ca Fri Jul 6 21:51:15 2001 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 17:51:15 -0400 Subject: bishop Message-ID: [ moderator edited] Pete Gray: > Why do you claim, Ed, that eis te:n polin > istambul involves rules jumping > languages? Wasn't the contemporary Greek pronunciation /i:sta:mbulin/? It > would simply be taken over as a meaningless phonetic string. why is this a problematic explanation? Leo A. Connolly: > should already have been something like [is ti(m) bolin], as > in current Greek. The vowels would be all wrong. And why on earth would the > Greeks have given something meaning 'to the city' as the name of their > capital? The capital was known as "i polis" the city for an extended period. The study of toponyms is littered with such cases, cf. Scottish Gaelic Gallaibh, Cataibh. > Ed is right: that etymology is a fable, but it's so bad I'd be reluctant to > blame it on a linguist. It's actually rather a good one. There's an article in Language: Tiersma, Peter. 1982. "Local and General Markedness". L 58: 832-849. whch deals precisely with such cases, where placenames or nouns denoting location locative or directonal forms become unmarked > It's in a class with _tip_ 'gratuity' < T(o) I(nsure) P(rompt) S(ervice), or > **** < F(or) U(nlawful) C(arnal) K(nowledge). No,it isn't. > It's amazing how many people accept such things, but linguists shouldn't. Yes they should. It's part of the warp and woof of linguistics, much more so than various obscurantist mathematical formulations. Robert Orr From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Jul 8 20:07:56 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 15:07:56 -0500 Subject: bishop In-Reply-To: <3B40FD51.F0CDABBE@memphis.edu> Message-ID: That's too bad, I was thinking about a future in which the Big Apple would be known to its Spanish-speaking inhabitants as <> > should already have been something like [is ti(m) >bolin], as in current Greek. The vowels would be all wrong. And why on >earth would the Greeks have given something meaning 'to the city' as the >name of their capital? Ed is right: that etymology is a fable, but it's >so bad I'd be reluctant to blame it on a linguist. It's in a class with >_tip_ 'gratuity' < T(o) I(nsure) P(rompt) S(ervice), or **** < F(or) >U(nlawful) C(arnal) K(nowledge). It's amazing how many people accept >such things, but linguists shouldn't. >Leo Connolly Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From dlwhite at texas.net Sat Jul 7 02:31:22 2001 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 21:31:22 -0500 Subject: Borrowing of verbal morphology Message-ID: > There have recently been claims on this list that verbal morphology can > never be borrowed. But I note now that this claim is falsified by an > example presented in the Thomason and Kaufman book which started the > discussion. On pp. 215-222, T&K discuss the example of Asia Minor Greek, In noted this case in my first discussion of the subject. This is a different kind of borrowing, because it involves addition of a borrowed suffix rather than replacement of a native suffix by a borrowed suffix. Megleno-Rumanian shows the same sort of thing (as Anatolian Greek). In my later postings I have been simplifying somewhat, as having to use some term that would exclude this sort of thing would be a bit awkward. I have also been rhetorically ignoring (at times) the case of Kormakiti, which again shows clear differences, for the same reason. Sorry if I confused anybody (or everybody), but this issue is nothing if not complex. Dr. David L. White From dlwhite at texas.net Sat Jul 7 02:57:11 2001 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 21:57:11 -0500 Subject: Descent vs. Influence Message-ID: I had hoped not to have to get into this, but from recent postings it seems "no such luck". It has recently been claimed that influence is or may be taken as a kind of descent. Let us look at an example of what that would mean. Rumanian has some resemblances to Latin and some resemblances to Albanian. Yet the resemblances are of fundamentally different kind. Its resemblances to Latin have to do with the descent over time of the set of arbitrary correspondences between sounds and meanings that any language must have. Its resemblances to Albanian on the other hand relate not to sound-meaning correspondences but rather to things like the distinctions made, ordering of elements, and so on. Though these are both kinds of resemblance, they are not the same kind of resemblance. Why one is called descent and the other is called influence should be fairly obvious. If influence is descent, then Rumanian is _by descent_ both a Romance and a Balkan (for lack of a better term) language. But this is nonsense. To say that influence is really a kind of descent because the two are both kinds of resemblance is like saying that apples are really oranges because the two are both kinds of fruit. No. There is simply no point in obliterating the meanings of our terms and concepts. Where there is a difference of meaning we are clearly justified in using different terms. I am distressed to find such back-sliding, even by people who should know better, on what I had thought were some clearly established points. Dr. David L. White From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Jul 7 08:38:26 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 04:38:26 EDT Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns" Message-ID: In a message dated 7/6/01 11:18:00 PM, alderson+mail at panix.com writes: << The total set of reconstructed forms, based on all the forms attested in the group of languages under examination, is considered to be a single language. Period. By definition. Period. >> Well, I'm sure if you punctuate it enough, it will surely end up being true. Actually, you put yourself in a logical bind here that I'm sure you will understand if you consider it carefully and unemotionally. The Lehmann quote very prudently avoids this equation between "forms" and "languages." ("In using the comparative method, we contrast forms of two or more related languages to determine the precise relationship between THESE FORMS. We indicate this relationship most simply by reconstructing THE FORMS from which they developed." Caps mine.) The reason this is wise is that it avoids a conclusion that the comparative method in and of does not support in the very example you described earlier. In fact, you give a clear example of where the comparative method - applied to "a larger set of languages" - will reconstruct the total set of related forms into not one, but three different languages. In a message titled "Re: The Single Parent Question" dated 7/5/01 3:21:49 PM, alderson+mail at panix.com writes: << ...if we found a group of languages descended from a prehistoric Michif, we could not reconstruct the two parents thereof. You are probably correct.... from the point of view of the comparative method, these languages do *not* have two parents, but only one, the paleo-Michif. If, on the other hand, we were dealing with a larger set of languages, some descended from the left-hand parent of paleo-Michif; some, the right-parent; and some from paleo-Michif itself, we could (if the events in question were not so far in the past as to prevent our dull tools from working at all) in principle work out the relations of all and sundry. >> Please observe carefully where you've arrived in this last paragraph. You have used the comparative method on languages linked by various systematic correspondences. And the result you forecast is that with the application of the method in this situation you will have ended up reconstructing three languages - not one. And one of those reconstructed languages will contain what you know are TWO genetically distinct sets of forms. In other words, repeating your words above: << The total set of reconstructed forms, based on all the forms attested in the group of languages under examination, is considered to be a single language.>> is not the case in the example you give. In fact, the "total set of reconstructed forms" yielded by the application of the method in the example you give MUST be three reconstructed languages. Because you CANNOT reconstruct the two ancestors accurately UNLESS you recognize that there are two distinct sets of systematic correspondences in the already reconstructed language "paleo-Mistif." This means that you are using less than "the total set of reconstructed forms" that you've already identified in "paleo-Mischif" to also reconstruct the left-handed parent. And less than the "total set" to also reconstruct the right-handed parent. The comparative method triangulates back to a single set of reconstructed forms. It does not triangulate back to a whole language. And, in the example you give, "the total set of reconstructed forms" - multiple triangulations - yields three different reconstructed languages. I understand the comparative method enough to know that you cannot count apples and end up with oranges. What in fact the method does is compare forms and find correspondences that show common descent, not whole languages or all the possible genetic aspects of a reconstructed language. In the example you give, multiple applications of the method to the same data yield multiple reconstructions, each using only a subset of the total reconstructed forms. And so the "total set of reconstructed forms" does not equal one language. The definition you give is not coherent. Of course, equating a reconstructed set of forms to a "language" does not only create a logical incoherence. If two languages share noun morphology alone (as in the Niger-Kordofanian example), it is patently absurd to call the resulting reconstructions a "language." The processes that created the correspondences do not all call for the existence of a third language, even if they do establish descent from a common form. And the comparative method establishes descent from a common set of forms, but it can say nothing else about the relationship of the remainder of those two languages. Inferences may be drawn. But that is what they are at best - inferences, not part of the method itself. If this equation of forms to a single language is by definition, a careful look at the operation as you yourself described it shows that the definition is logically faulty. And that has nothing to do with me, so personal remarks and brow-beating won't change it. Steve Long From bamba at centras.lt Sun Jul 8 22:18:31 2001 From: bamba at centras.lt (Jurgis Pakerys) Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2001 00:18:31 +0200 Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns" Message-ID: [David L. White quotes:] >> Dr White indicated that verb morphology might have some preemptive claim >> over those other forms. [David L. White responds:] > Yes, that is my claim. Cases known (to me) are so few that sampling error > (in a somewhat informal sense) is a real possibility, but it seems that > borrowing of nominal morphology typically (or at least often) involves a sort > of creeping infiltration, as in Rumanian or Old Lithuanian, [...] What are the cases of "Old Lithuanian" nominal morphology borrowing you have in mind? Do you mean the ones like allative (locative case denoting direction towards something, e.g. tevop(i) "towards the father"), adessive (... denoting proximity to something, e.g. upeip(i) "by the river"), etc.? Would you say these are examples of pattern / model borrowing from some Fennic source (as it is sometimes suggested)? (I'm sorry if I misuse "Fennic" (I have no reference at the moment), but I hope Ante Aikio will correct me and will also express his views on the subject). How would you describe "creeping infiltration" in this ("Old Lithuanian") case? How can it be compared to Rumanian? What exactly is the nominal morphology borrowing case in Rumanian? Best regards, Jurgis Pakerys PhD student Vilnius University From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Jul 7 09:03:53 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 05:03:53 EDT Subject: Handfuls of Unrelated Forms Message-ID: In a message dated 7/5/01 4:52:20 PM, proto-language at email.msn.com writes: << Arrows, as any child should know, rarely "go through" anything. They go *into* things. I would bet that no one can produce a word for 'arrow' in any language with the base meaning of 'that which goes through'.>> In a message dated 7/7/01 1:01:42 AM, Georg-Bonn at t-online.de writes: << the basic meaning of /eimi/ is "to go to or into">> I'm not sure if I'm helping here, but... I wrote: ... with the sense of "pass through". (E.g., "[pelekus] eisin dia douros" (the axe goes through the beam) Iliad 3:61.)" As a spear often "goes through" a shield in Homer or an arrow might go though a soldier's protective gear. For a notion of what the Greeks thought an arrow might do, see, e.g., . S. Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jul 7 10:25:13 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 05:25:13 -0500 Subject: Handfuls of Unrelated Forms Message-ID: Dear IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stefan Georg" Sent: Friday, July 06, 2001 3:27 AM > Someone called "Proto-Language" wrote: >> One of the reasons linguistics makes such little progress is that so-called >> "experts" are permitted tacitly by their indulgent colleagues to propose >> etymologies as totally naif as , 'arrow', from , 'go through'. [Some who used to go by Ralf-Stefan before he began to assume airs with the title Dr., wrote] > the basic meaning of /eimi/ is "to go to or into" [PCR] I doubt very sincerely whether YOU have more Greek than Liddell or Scott even though we know --- ad nauseum --- that you have a PhD. On page 198 of the abridged L&S Greek-English Lexicon, *they* say, the basic meaning of /eimi'/ is "to go"; and I greatly prefer their opinion on matters Greek to yours. The *second* example of its usage there is "khroo`s ei'sato, IT WENT THROUGH the skin". This certainly establishes the meaning "go through", which, you might have noticed if you had been following the thread, I quoted from an earlier post; I did not propose "go through" though I recognized its validity. And several other usages, like "to fly", might be similarly interpreted. [DR. STEFAN] > One of the reasons linguistics makes such little progress is that people with > so little Greek are permitted to voice their irrelevant opinion in specialist > fora. (FYI: Greek is the IE language with those funny letters.) [PCR] Well, we listened patiently to your irrelevant opinions about Uralo-Eskimo. [ Moderator's note: The reference is to a very interesting group of postings on the Nostratic mailing list, irrelevant to this newsgroup. It's been a few months since the last slanging match between these gentlemen. I am calling a halt here and now. --rma ] 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, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138) From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Jul 7 15:01:28 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 16:01:28 +0100 Subject: Handfuls of Unrelated Forms Message-ID: > One of the reasons linguistics makes such little progress is that people with > so little Greek are permitted to voice their irrelevant opinion in specialist > fora. Whoa-up there buddy! I am grateful for those who raise any linguistic questions in these fora. My Latin, Greek and Sanskrit happen to be more than passable, but it is an excellent discipline for me to have to defend or argue particular positions which perhaps I have never questioned because they are "common knowledge". I also discover the gaps in my own so-called knowledge. I am also grateful to the colleagues on this list who tolerate my stupidity when I, in turn, voice an opinion in an area where I lack the necessary specialist knowledge, but don't realise it. So all of you out there with no Greek - firstly go out and learn some, but also go on stating your opinions! Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Jul 7 06:05:36 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 07:05:36 +0100 Subject: real proto-lang Message-ID: > it's better to understand those proto-languages as some tools of comparative > linguistics than real languages that existed at some point of time. This is the "abstractionist" way of understanding reconstruction. It has also been applied to reconstructed phonemes. "Abstractionists" would claim that PIE *bh, *kw etc are simple symbols denoting the set of relationships between the reflexes of *bh, kw etc in the attested languages. Fine and dandy, but we must ask if something is lost. The abstractionist position appears (from the little I know) to be losing ground rapidly, because of the advances in our understanding of PIE based on a more realist approach, which treats our reconstruction as a real language. Firstly there is all the debate - on this list and elsewhere - about homeland, where and who and what pots and what grave customs and so on. If the reconstructed language is merely a "tool of comparative linguistics" then these questions are closed down. Secondly there are questions of how such a language would actually work. Typology comes in here, but not only typology. The "new sound" of PIE would not have arisen if *bh etc had been seen purely as an abstract tool for comparisons. So while at one level I relate to your idea, at another I think there are advantages in treating our reconstructions as if they were actual spoken human languages - even while admitting the limits of our knowledge. Peter From rao.3 at osu.edu Fri Jul 6 14:43:54 2001 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 10:43:54 -0400 Subject: Uniformitarian Principle Message-ID: wrote: > Gravity is a constant, but it is contingent on mass and distance. The first part is actually an consequence of the UP. People (Dirac?) have proposed theories in which the gravitational constant (and more recently, the cosmological constant) changes over time. It is just that such theories do not solve any pressing problem. From bmscott at stratos.net Sat Jul 7 11:50:55 2001 From: bmscott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 07:50:55 -0400 Subject: About the Yew1 In-Reply-To: <28.17b44c65.2876b600@aol.com> Message-ID: On 6 Jul 2001, at 2:34, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > But see , Grk; , Lat, cinnamon tree, > any tree "with an aromatic bark"; Greek, "of ivy"; > , Grk; Lat, "English ivy" or a similar plant; Cf., > Lat , a larva gathered from under the bark of trees, > (Pliny); Lat , a hewer of trees; , a forest > in ancient Germany. I am reminded of Nennius, who had 'made a heap of all that [he] could find', but being both an amateur and a relative beginner, I have a few questions about just how much of a heap it is. At the risk of exposing my ignorance, isn't Lat from something like *, with */dt/ > */ss/ and thence to /s/ after the diphthong? The root then is (from PIE */keH2id-/, I take it). is OHG 796. E. Schwarz takes the /k-/ to be a Celtic substitution for Gmc /x-/ in an underlying */xaisi/ 'beech'. Buck also identifies MLat (and OLG ) as containing a 'beech' stem . Does this appear outside of Gmc (apart from borrowings like Fr )? For that matter, does it appear elsewhere in Gmc? Finally, I note that Gk () has an Attic variant (); does this imply an older form with /-kj-/ or perhaps /-tj-/? Brian M. Scott From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jul 7 20:43:23 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 15:43:23 -0500 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: Dear Eduard and Douglas and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Douglas G Kilday" Sent: Sunday, July 01, 2001 4:42 AM > Eduard Selleslagh (28 Jun 2001) wrote: >> 1. The very well known case of Lat. 'fagus' (Eng. beech and similar in other >> Germanic, e.g. beuk in Du.) and Gr. 'phe:gss' (Dor. phagss) (Eng. oak) >> proves that different trees can be meant by a name from the same IE source, >> even when all the peoples involved were probably equally familiar with both >> species. Can anybody suggest how this could happen? > I'm sure Steve Long could explain this on the basis of trees being named > after their practical use rather than by the recognition of distinct > breeding populations or "species". I have never denied that this occurs. [PCR] I think we will find that, in the absence of borrowing, all trees will have been named primarily for their principal uses, secondarily for some characteristic of appearance. It is probably obvious to most by now that, if a tree is named for its use, another group that prefers another tree for the same use, may well transfer the use-determined name to its preferred substitute. [DGK] > We have Lat. 'oak' and Eng. both from PIE *perkwo-, in > addition to your example. My original comment about the yew and the PIE > homeland (which I never thought would generate any significant commotion) > depended on the yew being too distinctive in several respects to undergo > name-shifting, but such a claim can be challenged, and SL's postings are > multiplying like rabbits, much too rapidly for me to keep up. >> The only thing beech trees and oaks (but: what kind of oak? There are widely >> different types in N. and S. Europe) have in common is that they provide us >> with good quality (and dense) wood for making furniture. Any child can see >> the difference between a beech tree and an oak, especially by the leaves and >> the 'fruits'. Seeing the difference between the two types of wood requires a >> little more competence, but not much. > It's worth noting here that French has 'oak' < Gaul. *cassanos, not > a reflex of . The Celtic word resembles Gk. > 'chestnut-tree', so we may have here borrowings from Old European for 'dense > wood' vel sim. If I'm not mistaken, oaks and chestnuts are classified in > Fagaceae, the "beech family". [PCR] To me, it is fairly straightforward, that one name for 'oak' was originated, contrary to the usual methods I indicated above, by the idea that oaks attract lightning; accordingly, we should expect that *perkwu-s could have been applied to any tree by IE-speakers that caught their fancy as the special province of the lightning-god. If IE-speakers valued a particular oak as a place of assembly and judgment, as, for instance, the ancient Hessians did at Gaesmere, they might have called an oak with a name derived from *k^as-, 'direct'. But oaks have had a useful history of providing edible nuts as well. A group of IE speakers, for whom this was the more important aspect of an oak, probably called it *aig-, which I would speculate meant 'point-ball' = 'acorn'. As is well-known, this term later was used for 'horse chestnut'. Thus, though theoretically possible, I think it is hazardous in the extreme to draw far-reaching conclusions about IE orgins from tree or plant names since these terms varied in reference according to the cultural preferences of the IE-speakers employing them. [DGK] > I regard *ebur- 'yew' as pre-IE (Old European), but Lat. 'ivory' as > IE. Conventional wisdom takes the latter as a Hamitic loan (from Egy. <3bw> > vel sim.) which fails to explain the /r/ or the other peculiarities: nom. > , gen. , adj. . The long/short vowel-alternation > and -r/rn- behavior could hardly come from Hamitic, and loanwords are > usually normalized to common forms. This looks like an IE word which has > preserved two archaisms: the gradation seen in nom. 'foot', gen. > and the alternation seen in nom. 'maple', adj. . > Boars have ivory, and boar-hunting has been a macho-thing for millennia, so > it's not necessary to assume that PIE-speakers had access to elephant-tusks. [PCR] I guess there is no one on the list that would care to pursue this but I am convinced that the proper transliteration is Egyptian **jjbw rather than 3bw for both 'elephant' and 'ivory'. This would correspond to IE **aibh-, the basis of Old Indian ibha-H, 'elephant'. I would analyze this as **H(1)ai-, 'point-like, tusk' + -*bh-, formative of animal names. I am not writing *H(2) because I believe the *a is derived from a reduction of *a: not colored by a particular "laryngeal", a theory which is inherently flawed, based as it is on a total misunderstanding of the facts of Semitic phonology. Obviously, a term with a basic meaning like this could easily be applied to both elephants and wild swine but for swine, the probability is that it is derived from **H(1)e-, 'tooth' + *-bh-. The matter of the misperceived *r/*n alternation has already been addressed in another post. But, speaking of the final -*r of forms related to 'ivory', I have found that it is a frequent final component of IE color-terms; and I believe it probably should be interpreted as such here, i.e. 'tusk-animal-colored' = 'ivory'. As for *pe:s-, it is hard to believe that the long vowel is anything more than a reflex of the elided final consonant, i.e. compensatory lengthening. Though we frequently think of spears as being made of ash (probably derived from *o/o:s-, and meaning simply 'bone-hard'[?]), perhaps some kind of yew had some function connected with swine. A possibility, that *ebur- is composed of *H(1)ebh- + one of the various *wer- roots, might be entertained. And yes, I am aware of the discrepancy between *b and *bh. 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, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138) From bronto at pobox.com Sun Jul 8 02:26:21 2001 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 19:26:21 -0700 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > But see , Grk; , Lat, cinnamon tree, any tree > "with an aromatic bark"; . . . Lat , a hewer of trees; `to strike, beat, cut, kill' > , a forest in ancient Germany. `bluish grey' -- Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/ From acnasvers at hotmail.com Wed Jul 11 10:28:03 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 10:28:03 -0000 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: Steve Long (28 Jun 2001) wrote: >I don't think so. Your [DGK's] first post was probably right. I seriously >doubt that you'll find a single reference to yews or any other tree as >in all of Classical Greek. Even your own Dioscorides cited = yew "as >a Latin word" according to L-S. The best evidence is that the Greeks used >"smilax" for the yew when it was appropriate. Other words may have been >applied, by Greeks using the yew for other purposes, when appropriate. As was >probably the case in Celtic, Germanic and Slavic, the more modern yew words >probably stood for a variety of trees and wood uses among the Greeks. Well, score one for yew, Steve. I can't find any attestation of 'yew' in Classical Attic, so I must retract my rash claim that it was the "regular Greek word". However, when Dioscorides says "Ro:maioi ... taxoum" it doesn't mean the cognate was unknown in Greek. Oddly enough, in fact, the 6th-cent. "Dioscurides Latinus" uses the Greek acc. form , not . "The best evidence is that words were applied when appropriate." I can't disagree with that, but inspection of the attested Attic words for 'yew' suggests that platitudes can be transcended. Cratinus (died 419 BCE) has , as does Theophrastus (371-287). Plato employs , while and belong to later Attic. Plato's usage is highly significant, as he otherwise shows a fondness for archaisms like and . The stem mi:l- cannot be a reduction of smi:l-. As for the ending, the forms in -os appear to be used consistently for 'yew', but not the forms with the "Aegean" ending -ax. Therefore, as a working hypothesis, I take as the regular Attic for 'yew', and (which lacks IE etyma according to Watkins) as an "Aegean" term meaning 'having sharp leaves' related to 'type of knife'. The form (found in Callimachus, 3rd cent. BCE, and later) is either a contamination or a pseudo-archaism. I'm not sure whether is a contamination; it might be a legitimate "Aegean" word. Anyhow, it's now up to you to show that ever "stood for a variety of trees and wood uses among the Greeks". >There's actually strong evidence of the importance of vines (the bindweed is a >vine) to the ancient woodworking and carving trades. Pins, plugs, bindings >and wickerwork all often used vines as basic material. Convolvulus >particularly has a thick curling trunk that made it a favorite for carving the >kinds of spiral implement handles often associated with the Celts. In fact, >the vine patterns so often used to border large carved bowls that its been >suggested they might have been a relict of the use of vines as bindings to >hold the staves on more basic bowls and barrels. This leads to the common >practice of carving vines on kraters as evidenced,e.g., in Flavius Josephus' >descriptions of the ornaments on large ceremonial bowls (smilaxi kissou kai >petalois ampelo:n eskiasto philotechno:s entetoreumeno:n.) It's not >impossible, btw, that the yew would have been one of the woods preferred for >such carvings - if one recalls the advantage of the yew as a bow material was >its bendability and ability to be steamed into a curved shape despite being >carved or turned. Are you a heavy smoker, doodler, or finger-drummer, Steve? Your elaborate defense of as 'suitable for carving', and your obsession with the purported naming of trees on the basis of manual use, suggest a thorough-going digital fixation. Now, I'm not trying to attack your personality, but in doing etymology I think you should pay more attention to empirical work, and less attention to the presumed linguistic behavior of a nation of Steve Longs. >Hacking away at anything that doesn't show direct descent from *PIE - even >though those connections clearly make better sense in terms of the material, >textual and historical evidence - really demands much more crude >generalization. Rather than even considering whether the supposed *PIE >phonology might not apply here, we are assured instead, against the obvious >practices of the cultures involved, the intricacy of attested ancient >terminology and 30 better candidates - that the yew was "the berry tree" - >can't get more crudely generalizing than that. And it's quite a piece of >carving that somehow turns that crude generalization into a serious etymology. It's not a particularly intricate piece of carving. A PIE root *eiw-/oiw- could yield *eiwom/oiwom 'small round fruit, berry', *eiwos/oiwos 'berry-tree', and *eiwa:/oiwa: 'cluster of berries'. From *oiwa: could come Lat. orig. 'cluster of berries or grapes', once in Vergil 'cluster of bees', later 'single grape'. Observe the parallel decollectivization in Fr. < Lat. . As for northern PIE-speakers moving west into yew-country and applying the generic *eiwos to a specific new type of berry-tree, when there were other berry-trees around, this sort of thing happens all the time. Consider Eng. , originally the generic term for 'beast', like Ger. . Or Amer. Eng. 'maize', originally 'grain'. Or Afrikaans 'gnu', orig. 'wild beast' (duh!). In short, my etymological proposal involves nothing out of the ordinary. I can't pretend to be able to "prove" it, and there are other proposals for "yew" on the table. But I don't see that anything is gained by quibbling over arrowwoods or "modern scientific classification" vs. ancient usage. If things were as chaotic as you suggest, it would be impossible to reconstruct _any_ PIE dendronyms. But we do have several (by consensus; you are of course free to be a dissident). DGK From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jul 7 13:17:30 2001 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 06:17:30 -0700 Subject: Rate of Change In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 06:34 PM 7/6/01 -0400, Thomas McFadden wrote: >actually, sociolinguistic work of the last few decades, especially by Bill >Labov and his students, has shown that this, which seems very plausible, >isn't quite right. in spite of increased literacy and mass media, local >dialects are continuing to develop independtly and diverge from the >standard in a number of places. of course in many other places the >dialects are disappearing or being brought closer to a standard language, >but what seems to be crucial in causing this is not literacy and standard >language media, but rather increased mobility of speakers. in one study, >two immediately adjacent neighborhoods in the philadelphia suburbs were >examined, These results are similar to ones seen in England, in this case comparing a new town (post-WW II, I think) with an established town in the same geographic area. The new town had a homogeneous dialect, similar that spoken on BBC. Or at least that is what I remember, though I heard of it some years ago. (I think the new town's dialect may even have had some unique combination of features - but I do not remember clearly). >> The biggest change in English, which makes Old English >> incomprehensible, has of course been Norman French. >the role that the influx of Norman French played in the massive >morpho-syntactic changes that occurred between old and middle english is >a matter of some controversy i think, and seems often to have been >overstated. vocabulary aside, there is actually some evidence that the >influence of Scandinavian was of much more importance at that time. I have seen several sources that claim that the main phonetic and general grammatical changes had *already* taken place by the Norman invasion. The main reason this is not more obvious is that, as is often the case, spelling remained conventional, and followed the old pronunciations. In particular, post-tonic syllables were greatly reduced, with loss of most distinctions. Thus most inflectional endings were already reduced to either /-e/ or -en/. This loss of inflectional distinctions necessarily made word order more important in establishing meaning. This covers the main differences between Old and Middle English. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From edsel at glo.be Sat Jul 7 20:09:03 2001 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 22:09:03 +0200 Subject: Rate of Change Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gabor Sandi" Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2001 11:42 AM >> To: Ed Selleslagh >> Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 19:06:27 +0200 > [ moderator snip ] >> [Ed] >> Italy had a very prestigious culture that exported ideas, art forms, etc. >> rather than receiving them. It was - and still is largely - in the period of >> stability that followed the rapid change after the collapse of the Roman >> Empire (Maybe it didn't change that much, as it is based very much on Tuscan >> regional speech that may be a lot older). The Risorgimento and Mussolini >> caused mainly self-affirmation and glorification, not change. >> Spanish (actually: Castilian) is possibly even more conservative than >> Italian: you can still read Cervantes without any study of older forms of >> Castilian. Its style is very old-fashioned, with very long Latin-style >> sentences, with a lot of verbosity etc. but basically he uses modern >> Castilian. And even older Castilian is not much different. > I don't think that we have any real disagreement, Ed. Rates of linguistic > change vary greatly, and social changes are no doubt an important > contributing factor. The problem that I see is that what I see as roughly > the same level of social upheaval may be associated with different rates of > linguistic change, so that the predictive power of social change -> > linguistic change is rather limited. The War of Roses may well be related to > the Grat Vowel Shift in English, but did the Thirty Years' War, say, have > the same effect on Standard German? Much of the German countryside was > depopulated by the latter war, if I recall my history correctly. [Ed] Yes. What I said in this message (in the part left out by the moderator) is that there are more factors that influence (rate of) change, sometimes cancelling out or reinforcing social-political upheaval: various inputs, one output (=rate of change), to speak in terms of system dynamics. [ Moderator's note: My apologies if trimming of massive quoting did violence to anyone's position on the argument. Too often, entire messages are quoted for a single comment on one paragraph, so the editorial hand is heavy on such postings. --rma ] > As for Italian vs. Spanish, I was specifically thinking of phonetic change. > I think that the phonology and phonetics of Standard Italian, based on but > certainly not identical to, the dialect of Florence, have remained virtually > unchanged since the Middle Ages. This is not true of Spanish: you may well > be able to read Cervantes in the original, but the following changes have > taken place since the late Middle Ages (which was my baseline): loss of > voiced fricatives (v > b, z > s, Z > S, dz > ts > T (Latin American and > Andalusian s)), followed by retraction of shibillants (S > x). In > morphology, the pluperfect (cantara) has lost its original function (still > there in literary Portuguese) and has acquired the same function as the > imperfect subjunctive (cantase). Has anything equalling these changes taken > place in standard Italian? [Ed] You're right of course about the evolution of Spanish pronunciation, but that didn't seriously affect the language nor its intelligibility to people from different times or places. And there is a lot of regional variation, as I mentioned in another message: e.g. in some contexts a somewhat bilabial v is still used (My Peruvian wife says 'Avraham Lincoln' while she finds it difficult to pronounce v in isolation), in Latin America written letter z/c is pronounced exactly the same as written s, etc... The Spanish pluperfect / imperfect subjunctive matter is a bit more complicated: in certain (many) cases they are indeed interchangeable, but in others not: e.g. you can say 'Quisiera una Coca Cola' but not 'Quisiese...'. Some people consider 'cantase' more "past" than 'cantara' e.g. in conditional or subordinate clauses 'Si lo hubiese sabido, no te lo hubiera/habr?a dicho' vs. 'si lo supiera, no te lo dir?a' , or 'le dije que no cantara' vs. 'le hab?a dicho que no cantase', but uses vary and many do not make this distinction (I don't know what the Real Academia says, or used to say before they nominated South Americans like Vargas Llosa). I'm much less knowledgeable in Italian, but as an outside observer I see a much less complex use of perfect subjunctives etc., not as much 'simplification' as in French though, where this has become very archaic ('si je l'e?s su...') or fallen in disuse except in standard expressions ('ne f?t-ce que...' = if it were only...). I guess Italian will become more like French in maybe 100 years or so. Who knows... Thanks for your comments. Ed. Selleslagh From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Jul 7 15:14:34 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 16:14:34 +0100 Subject: Rate of Change Message-ID: > Has anything equalling these changes taken place in standard Italian? A possible example is the increasing disuse of the simple past in favour of the composite perfect, as in French and southern German. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Jul 7 15:12:04 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 16:12:04 +0100 Subject: Rate of Change Message-ID: >> we see a lot of convergence due to greatly improved communications ..... >> breakdown of dialects, ... locally colored standard language. > but what seems to be crucial in causing this is not literacy and standard > language media, but rather increased mobility of speakers. The example of Swiss German provokes a response from me. In nearby Bavaria, there is frequent use of a "locally coloured standard", and different versions of dialect and coloured or uncoloured standard are used in different linguistic contexts. The standard language is not felt to be alien, merely socially inappropriate in certain contexts. Across the border in Switzerland, however, the standard language is felt to be alien, and is both resisted and resented as a medium of speech, although it is the norm for printed language. The local dialects are strongly fragmented, and sometimes not easily mutually comprehensible. Lack of mobility in a mountainous terrain is clearly part of the cause, but attitudes are also a powerful factor. Some German Swiss would rather speak English to other German speakers than sully their lips with the "bookish" standard language. Peter From edsel at glo.be Mon Jul 9 20:44:53 2001 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2001 22:44:53 +0200 Subject: Rate of Change Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Thomas McFadden" Sent: Saturday, July 07, 2001 12:34 AM >> In modern times we have the opposite: notwithstanding rapid cultural >> change, we see a lot of convergence due to greatly improved >> communications and mass media, which act as linguistic role models, >> much more than any Acad?mie ever did. Here in Flanders, e.g. we see >> the pretty fast breakdown of dialects, via a stage of 'intermediate' >> language or seriously locally colored standard language. In the >> Netherlands, by and large, this stage has already been passed. [snip] > so the crucial factor here is not exposure to normalizing media > and education, but movement between dialect areas. now, what this means > for the very different dialect situations of europe is less clear. the > european dialects were of course much more diverse, and have clearly been > weakened in the recent past, but it still seems that mobility would be the > key. another thing to consider is that many of the extinct or near > extinct dialects of Europe were, in distinction to the dialects of North > American English, not mutually intelligible with the standard language of > the country in which they were spoken (listen to a local dialect of > Austrian or especially Swiss German). it may well be that such extreme > variation can be threatened by much lower levels of mobility, because not > just social interaction, but simple communication can be disturbed. just > a thought. [Ed] What you call American dialects would be considered to be locally colored pronunciation, or different registers, by Europeans who live in language areas where dialects are still in dayly use. Actual dialects are usually a lot more different, even with partly different vocabulary and some grammatical features (like 'strong' instead of 'weak' conjugation of some verbs, remnants of declension or a different declension...), different phonology (e.g. Cockney glottal stops...), etc. Many European dialects could just as well be called 'closely related languages'. Extreme African-American English might come close. It's that kind of 'real' dialects I envisioned. The unifying role of TV and radio (and school and administration) in places like Flanders or S. Italy is absolutely clear: e.g. words from the standard language that are not used in the various dialect areas concerned, are introduced in everyday language and tend to crowd out local terms, while pronunciation slowly changes in the direction of these models. Having said that, I generally agree with your reasoning. >> The biggest change in English, which makes Old English incomprehensible, has >> of course been Norman French. > the role that the influx of Norman French played in the massive > morpho-syntactic changes that occurred between old and middle english is > a matter of some controversy i think, and seems often to have been > overstated. vocabulary aside, there is actually some evidence that the > influence of Scandinavian was of much more importance at that time. [Ed] That's REALLY hard to tell, because one of the bases of English (Anglian) already had some N. Germanic traits, and the Scandinavians may only have enhanced it, to the detriment of the Saxon component. The syntactic changes I can think of (in a few minutes) are clearly not Germanic: they concern word order. But I'm not a specialist. Ed. Selleslagh From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jul 12 20:12:02 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2001 15:12:02 -0500 Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change) In-Reply-To: <003801c104b8$47a0d220$4101703e@edsel> Message-ID: I haven't been to the Southern Cone but most northern and northwest Argentines I've met don't have quite the same sound for as porten~os I've met. The NW Argentines I've met had an Andean accent and those from Mendoza I've met sounded like chilenos --and indeed, I've been told that a very large percentage are. And assibilated /R/ is common among chilenos. While some porten~os I've met have a slight degree of assibilation, it's nowhere near as strong as that you often hear in Costa Rica. As Ed says, the Latin American assibilated /R/ sounds like an American /R/ with a shade of /Z/ --perhaps like an American trying to say /R/ with the mouth completely closed. There are various publications that claim that assibilated /R/ also exists in and around Navarra BUT everyone I've ever met who has ever been there says it's not the case. >As far as I know, the rr > Z territory (mainly (sub-)Andean Argentina, Mendoza >etc.) and the y, ll > Z (or often S) (around the Mar del Plata and wide >surroundings) do not really overlap, but I may be mistaken. Rick McCallister >would be a better source. >Anyway, among themselves, y and ll give rise to a lot of homophones, even in >standard Castilian: call?/cay? (he shut up/ he fell) etc...A bit more >wouldn't be all that problematic to native speakers, especially because to the >trained ear there is a slight difference between Z from rr and >Argentinian/Uruguayan Z from y or ll. The Z from rr often sounds like the >pronuciation of someone who cannot reproduce a rolling r correctly, or as a >more strongly voiced American r with a shade of Z. >Ed. Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu Sat Jul 7 13:58:02 2001 From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 08:58:02 -0500 Subject: Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent) In-Reply-To: <001201c10571$02b2cc40$9361e5a9@reshall.berkeley.edu> Message-ID: >----Original Message----- >>From: Leo A. Connolly [SMTP:connolly at memphis.edu] >>Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2001 2:49 AM >. . . >>We formerly had such things -- think "methinks" -- an object in preverbal >>position not controlling verb agreement. We have since solved our problem >>by making _me_ into a true subject _I_ -- with no change in meaning! >I can see what you're getting at, but isn't this a bit of an >oversimplification? We haven't changed any object into a subject; we've >simply dropped the peculiar "methinks" from the language, mostly because it >looks so wrong to anyone unfamiliar with older forms of English. If anyone >had remembered that "me-" is a dative and that "-thinks" is a reflex of AS. >"?yncan" ("to seem") and not "?encan" ("to think"), we'd probably all >still be saying it. As it is, however, "methinks" ended up being the last >remnant of a verb otherwise lost in ModE., & so it was prone to be >misunderstood and finally abandoned. >A. G. Kozak >Department of Classics >University of California at Berkeley Some linguists think that the OE 'me thinks' (see also Shakespearean 'me seems') represents a more general pattern also found in Classical Latin constructions such as 'me pudet' ('me shames'). If so, the shift from 'me thinks' to 'I think' is not an isolated change but an example of a more general change in which a class of (impersonal) verbs regularized a pattern from elsewhere in the grammar, the pattern of taking nominative case subjects with subject-verb agreement. Before it was lost, of course, it had become a relic form that may well have been prone to misunderstanding. Its relic status, however, marks it as precious data for what the earlier linguistic system was like and the 'me' > 'I' change as indicative of a more general change in the linguistic system. Carol Justus Linguistics Research Center University of Texas at Austin From connolly at memphis.edu Sat Jul 7 16:19:46 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 11:19:46 -0500 Subject: Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent) Message-ID: "A. G. Kozak" wrote: > ----Original Message----- >> From: Leo A. Connolly [SMTP:connolly at memphis.edu] >> Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2001 2:49 AM > . . . >> We formerly had such things -- think "methinks" -- an object in preverbal >> position not controlling verb agreement. We have since solved our problem >> by making _me_ into a true subject _I_ -- with no change in meaning! > I can see what you're getting at, but isn't this a bit of an > oversimplification? We haven't changed any object into a subject; we've > simply dropped the peculiar "methinks" from the language, mostly because it > looks so wrong to anyone unfamiliar with older forms of English. If anyone > had remembered that "me-" is a dative and that "-thinks" is a reflex of AS. > "?yncan" ("to seem") and not "?encan" ("to think"), we'd probably all > still be saying it. As it is, however, "methinks" ended up being the last > remnant of a verb otherwise lost in ModE., & so it was prone to be > misunderstood and finally abandoned. This verb (which, BTW, came out as "flyncan" on my Mac, since the codes for thorn and edh on a PC represent ligatures fl fi on the Mac) is far from unique. _like_ underwent the same change: the experiencer used to be a dative object, but was then made subject. OE also had _me hyngrede_ 'I hungered', _swa: gesae:lde iu_ "thus happened to you", _hu: hyre gespe:ow_ 'how her succeeded'. _Methinks_ is the last remnant of a once proud class of verbs that still survives in German: _mich d?nkt_ 'methinks', _mir scheint_ 'seems to me', _mich hungert_ 'me hungers', _mich d?rstet_ 'me thirsts'. But was _Tyncean_ actually abandoned? I don't think so. If anything, _Tencean_ 'cogitate' was, which (had it survived) would have yielded modern *thenk or *thench, depending on whether the 3.sg. or 1.sg. was generalized (cf. _seek_ beside compound _beseech_). Methinks that _Tyncean_ survived, acquiring the meaning (and grammar) of extinct *thenk/ch. Leo Connolly From connolly at memphis.edu Sat Jul 7 17:50:14 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 12:50:14 -0500 Subject: Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent) Message-ID: conerning _I think_ and _methinks_ Douglas G Kilday wrote: > Don't these expressions represent distinct verbs and constructions? > "I think" < OE 'I think; intend' < > "methinks" < OE 'to me it seems' < > Of course, the two verbs are related, since < PGmc *thunkjan is a > factitive, 'to cause to be thought' = 'to seem'. Dutch has preserved the > vocalic contrast between and ; Du. = > "methinks". I'm repeating myself here, since I just replied in similar vein to another mesage, but nevertheless: Yes, they are originally separate constructions and verbs, but OE _Tencean_ seems to have become extinct, its function being assumed by _think_ < _Tyncean_. But I stick with my interpretation nonetheless, since it parallels the development seen in _me TyrstT_ > _I thirst_, _me hyngerT_ > _I hunger_, _me liketh_ > _I like_, where there was no parallel verb with a personal experiencer subject. As for _meseems_ (which sounds eminently plausible, though I cannot remember encountering it), it took the other path toward resolving the problem: put the object in object position and insert a dummy subject _it_ in preverbal position. I really can't say that either of these solutions is better than the other, only that both occurred. Leo Connolly From edsel at glo.be Sat Jul 7 20:35:02 2001 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 22:35:02 +0200 Subject: Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent) Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "A. G. Kozak" Sent: Thursday, July 05, 2001 6:39 PM > ----Original Message----- >> From: Leo A. Connolly [SMTP:connolly at memphis.edu] >> Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2001 2:49 AM > . . . >> We formerly had such things -- think "methinks" -- an object in preverbal >> position not controlling verb agreement. We have since solved our problem >> by making _me_ into a true subject _I_ -- with no change in meaning! > I can see what you're getting at, but isn't this a bit of an > oversimplification? We haven't changed any object into a subject; we've > simply dropped the peculiar "methinks" from the language, mostly because it > looks so wrong to anyone unfamiliar with older forms of English. If anyone > had remembered that "me-" is a dative and that "-thinks" is a reflex of AS. > "?yncan" ("to seem") and not "?encan" ("to think"), we'd probably all > still be saying it. As it is, however, "methinks" ended up being the last > remnant of a verb otherwise lost in ModE., & so it was prone to be > misunderstood and finally abandoned. > A. G. Kozak [Ed Selleslagh] You may be interested in learning that in Dutch this expression still exists (mainly in Flanders): "me dunkt" instead of "denk ik" (or "ik denk" (I think) according to the place in the sentence). Curiously enough, most dictionaries seem to believe that "dunken" is a variant of "denken" (to think), probably misled (mizzled??? :-)) by the erroneous interpretation of the noun "eigendunk" (=exaggerated self-esteem, self-conceit) as "thought about oneself" instead of "that what seems to oneself". This interpretation looks pretty old, as in texts from several centuries ago you can find a past tense "me docht" ("***methought"), using the conjugation of "denken". BTW, the verb "dunken" is lost in Dutch. Ed. From edsel at glo.be Sat Jul 7 20:41:49 2001 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 22:41:49 +0200 Subject: Genetic Descent Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Leo A. Connolly" Sent: Friday, July 06, 2001 6:10 AM > _gustar_ comes from Latin _gusta:re_, which has many obvious cognates in > other IE languages. However, _gusta:re_ was construed as an active verb > meaning 'take a taste of something': > Caesar vinum gustavit. > NOM wine-ACC tasted > 'Caesar tasted the wine.' > As far as I know, this usage has been lost in Spanish, with _gustar_ > adopting both the syntax and meaning of Lat. _place:re_. [snip] > Leo Connolly [Ed Selleslagh] In French, 'go?ter' still reflects Latin 'gustare', 'to taste'. Portuguese uses 'gustar' in the same semantic sense as Spanish, but the construction is still that of Lat. 'gustare': no indirect object. Ed. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jul 12 20:19:17 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2001 15:19:17 -0500 Subject: Genetic Descent In-Reply-To: <3B453A31.715CEE27@memphis.edu> Message-ID: gustar can mean "to taste" but it's rarely used that way I've only come across that usage in literary Spanish Vel?zquez gives the primary meaning as "to taste", secondary "to perceive by taste" >_gustar_ comes from Latin _gusta:re_, which has many obvious cognates in >other IE languages. However, _gusta:re_ was construed as an active verb >meaning 'take a taste of something': > Caesar vinum gustavit. > NOM wine-ACC tasted > 'Caesar tasted the wine.' >As far as I know, this usage has been lost in Spanish, with _gustar_ >adopting both the syntax and meaning of Lat. _place:re_. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rao.3 at osu.edu Tue Jul 10 21:29:45 2001 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 17:29:45 -0400 Subject: Anglo-Romani (Long, was Re: Genetic Descent) Message-ID: I had asked, regarding Anglo-Romani as 'relexicalized English', how the lexicon was preserved? I think that I need to be more detailed as to what I was asking. I also took some time to try to get information on the language of English Gypsies, and thought the results might be of interest to some. Before getting to that, I will touch on a different point I had mentioned, that of syntactic influence. The paper about Konkan Saraswat Brahmans I had mentioned is Nadkarni, Biligualism and syntactic change in Konkani, Langauge 51(1975) pp. 672--683. The inherited distinction between relative pronouns are being supplanted by interrogative pronouns. [In the dialect of Marathi spoken around Madurai, Tamil Nadu, this process is complete.] The conclusion the author comes to is that when two languages are in contact, with all speakers of one (say A for definiteness) are >early< bilinguals but most speakers of B are monolingual, and speakers of A continue to speak A, influence will go from B to A and not in the reverse. I.e., the direction of influence is determined by the patterns of social contact and not what language is spoken at home. Secondly, it seems that in cases where language is used for self-identification, it is easier for syntax to be borrowed than (core) vocabulary or morphemes. In fact, sprachbund phenomena are much more about syntactic convergence than others. Yet we do not consider a sprachbund to form a new family. Also, think about modern IA langauges. Only pieces of Vedic inflection surviving are the oblique (from the genetive) and some bits of the be auxiliary. The peterite is from the -ta form which was a stative >adjective<, while other forms come from various auxiliaries. This wholescale change in morphology is never taken as affecting the getetic affiliations of ModIA. Why should it be different in cases where the syntax has been affected profoundly by external influence and not internal development? So it seems that the situations like Laha vs. Malay are exceptional in being complete replacement of syntax, rather than in the process itself. Now 'morphology', interpreted as 'how to form the words that go into the various slots recignized by the synchronic syntax' is dependent on syntax, it will be affected by this process, but that should not be relevant to genetic classification. Turning now to Anglo-Romani: H. W. Hatting wrote, in a message dated May 16, 2001 > Let me put in some information I recollect from a seminar on Romani > 1. English gypsies were speaking a version of Romani with *Romani* > grammar when they immigrated into England; > 2. Gradually, they started to use English among themselves [...] > 3. Nowadays, English Romani (with Romani lexicon and English > morphology) [...] > English Romani goes farther than most other secret languages (like > German "Rotwelsch" or Russsian "blat", in which the basic function > words (pronouns, conjunctions, auxiliaries etc.) are normally from > the "base" language which provides the morphology) [...] I interpreted this, when combined with the use of "relexification", to mean that auxiliaries, their conjugation, endings etc continued from Stage 1 to Stage 3 (with only the categories common to English and Romani being found) while the speakers in the intermediate stage were completely ignorant of Romani grammar. That I found, and still find, incredible. My question as to how the lexicon was preserved was about bridging the first and third stages. My lack of precision unfortunately misled JoatSimeon at aol.com who addressed only how Stage 3 can continue indefinitely, something that is not at all surprising. Some browsing in the library (which I should have done sooner) suggests that the intermediate stage was more complicated. "The dialect of English Gypsies" by Smart and Crofton (1875, reprinted by Gale Research, 1968, Detroit) talks about two "dialects", termed there "Deep Romanes" and "Shallow Romanes" or the "vulgar dialect". The former seems to preserve quite a bit of East European Romani morphemes (S&C refer to "the Turkish" dialect, presumably the Romani of Gypsies in (the European parts of?) the then Ottoman Empire), though there were losses of categories not found in English. The latter dialect seems closer to Blat etc than Hatting suggested. Here is the beginning of a story "How Petalengo went to Heaven" retold in both dialects: [Parts enclosed in angle brackets '<>' are English morphemes, italicized in print. Acute accent mark on vowels is denoted by a slash '/' preceding the vowel. In each sentence the old dialect version is given first, the new second. Smart and Croft do not provide a translation, only a reference to Hone's "Everyday book", 1857ed, vol. 1, p447. Our library does not have this edition and I couldn't locate this story in there, because I didn't know that 'Petalengro' means 'Smith'/blacksmith.] Mandi pookerova toot sar Petalengro I tell-nonpast you how P. Mandi<'ll> pooker tooti Petalengro ghi/as kater mi Doovelesko keri. go-past to God-possesive house jal adr/e mi Doovel' kair. [Notes: Doovel (God) is always prefixed with mi (my). Keri is adverb from kair.] Yek divvus mi Doovel vi/as adr/e bitto gav. One day God come-past to small-masc town. Yek divvus mi Doovel wel adr/e bitti gav Kek nan/ei kitchema sas ad/oi. emphatic neg inn be-past III there latch kekeno(?) kitchema od/oi find-past NEG (?) inn there Yov ghi/as adr/e Petalengro kair. He went to P-poss house jal adr/e Petalengro kair Yov sootada/s odoi sor doova raati. He sleep-past III there all that night sooter od/oi sor doova raati. This is striking. The "old" (archaizing?) dialect uses the inherited inflections, but still slips into 'Petalengro' (because -engro is already a poss. suffix? (turned into an adjective formant)). The "new" dialect uses English particles, verb endings (another story, labeled as being in "the new dialect" has "sas dik" for 'was looking') etc, but on occasion retains pronouns (I person always, II seemingly more often than III) and occasionally auxiliaries. Even Wester Boswell, the chief informant, considered both by other gypsies of the time and the authors as having good control of Romani, would slip into the new forms from time to time, and then correct himself. On the other hand, he seemed to have preserved curious archaisms: Prohibitions were with 'maw', given as 'maa' in the vocabulary, [e.g., "thou shalt not kill" is translated as "maw toot maur"], negations with forms of 'kek' without or without 'na', occasionally the latter by itself. Others seem to vary between this and the other extreme of the "new dialect": The comments in Smith and Crofton suggest that the extent of the use of inherited pronouns and the be-auxillary varied quite a bit. [See "sas diking" above. A story in a slightly later source (Leland) quoted by G. Pierce starts "Mandy su:ttod I was pirraben lang o tute" [the ending d on su:ttod, the words I and was, and probably lang (=along), o (=of) and en (=ing') are English ], with 'was' instead of 'sas'. Another story in S&C goes " chooro dinilo jookel sas peer ... Dikt/as ... Yov piriv ... adr/e /o paani. ..." Note the mixing of dikt/as, an inherited peterite, with the English -ed of pirived, and the articles '/o' (from Greek) and 'the'. Compounds can also lead to 'mixed' words, sometimes in strange ways: In the translation of Lord's Prayer, 'forgive' is "del"! [del = give, cf Mod IA 'de-'] An interesting point here is that when asked for the Romani word for something, when it had been lost, people would try to come up with some periphrase: Thus "how do you ask for a spade?" elicited "Lel kova chin hev adr/e o poov", literally 'Get the thing for cutting a hole in the ground". Sometimes, different persons would give different periphrase. For 'frog', the responses where "tikeni koli jal adr/e paani, lel drab avr/i" [little thing that goes into the water and takes the poison out] and "O stor-herengro bengesko koli ta jal adr/e o paani so piova" [the four legged diabolic thing that swims in the water which I drink] (this by Wester Boswell). It seems that the inherited word for frog 'jamba'/'jomba' had come to mean toad, though it was considered to be a form of 'jumper'. Thus far the evidence seems to point to language death. The "new dialect" is what those without adequate control of the ancestral language spoke, not a "relexification". This is underlined by the fact that extent of the use of English function words varied from person to person, with older persons having more control. The only references about 20th c. Anglo-Romani that I found in our library are G. Price(ed) "Languages in Britain & Ireland" and Kenrick, Romani English, in International J Sociology Lang, 19(1979) pp. 111--120. The former seems to be based on the latter for the most part. I could not find texts in contemporary Anglo-Romani. So I don't know if it should be considered as an arrested form of the "new dialect", or if attempts had been made to remove the English function words and endings. [Apparently, some literate Gypsies have consulted books to increase their vocabulary.] But what I read suggests that the inherited inflection is not used. In any case, contemporary Anglo-Romani looks like a case of arrested language death or a resurrected language. I am not sure if "relexification" is a suitable word to use, at least in the sense I understand it. After all, I have never heard anyone call Sanskrit of drama dialog as 'Prakrit relexified with Sanskrit' though in syntax the two are much closer than either is to Sanskrit of Panini/early upanishads. Even in morphology, there is variation in the amount of Prakrit influence when we look at the puraanas or Buddhist texts. Long compounds of medieval Sanskrit are often attempts of reconcile MIA syntax and rhythm to Panini's morphological rules. It should be noted that Kenrick who proposed that Anglo-Romani be considered a register of English (and thus the name Romani English) still endorsed a view similar to the above about the historical origin of Anglo-Romani. He just says that considering Anglo-Romani to be a register of Romani clarifies the current socio-linguistic aspects. This should not affect how we view its history. Obviously, dying languages and language shifts in progress are going to cause fuzzy-wuzzy type problems for genetic classification, just as sound changes in progress won't conform to the rules used in historical linguistics. If the process is arrested by "schooling" (of formal or informal types), as seems to have happened in Anglo-Romani, this can continue indefinitely. We should not throw out the rules due such exceptional cases, nor should we attempt to forcibly fit the cases to the rules without extensive investigation of the history. From Georg-Bonn at t-online.de Sat Jul 7 08:52:20 2001 From: Georg-Bonn at t-online.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 10:52:20 +0200 Subject: diction and contradiction In-Reply-To: <3B4163B4.579E685E@pobox.com> Message-ID: >Slightly closer to topic, why is Italy called in >Hungarian? (I was in Urbana yesterday, popped in to the Slavic & East >European department of the university library, where I once had a job; >and happened to see there a Hungarian map of Europe.) -/orsz:ag/ is "country, state", purely Hungarian; /olasz/ is immediately from Slavic, derived from the etymon behind forms like /Vlach/ othl. (also found in W/Valachia, and the earlier German designation for everything Romance (a/o Celtic), /Welsch/, OHG /wal(a)hisc/, also engl. /Welsh/;). The ultimate origine may be the Celtic (?) ethnonym given in Latin sources as /Volcae/. StG -- Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn From g_sandi at hotmail.com Sat Jul 7 10:57:39 2001 From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 10:57:39 -0000 Subject: Italy in Hungarian (was: diction and contradiction) Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From miskec4096 at hotmail.com Sat Jul 7 15:31:46 2001 From: miskec4096 at hotmail.com (Kreso Megyeral) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 17:31:46 +0200 Subject: diction and contradiction Message-ID: Anton S. wrote: >Slightly closer to topic, why is Italy called in Hungarian? >(I was in Urbana yesterday, popped in to the Slavic & East European department >of the university library, where I once had a job; and happened to see there a >Hungarian map of Europe.) The name is compound from olasz (Italian), and orszag (land, country). The word olasz itself comes from Valachus (cf. also olah "Romanian Valachian"). Similar thing occurs in Polish, where they use the word W3och for Italian, and W3ochy for Italy. The reason is probably that language of Valachians seemed close to that of Italians. Moreover, in Croatia, the former Romance (or late Latin) speaking population of Dalmatia is called Vlasi (sg. Vlah). Actually, it seems that all the speakers of the east Romance languages bear that common name. From hans.alscher at noel.gv.at Mon Jul 9 06:14:10 2001 From: hans.alscher at noel.gv.at (Mag. Hans-Joachim Alscher) Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2001 08:14:10 +0200 Subject: diction and contradiction Message-ID: Anton Sherwood schrieb: > Slightly closer to topic, why is Italy called in > Hungarian? (I was in Urbana yesterday, popped in to the Slavic & East > European department of the university library, where I once had a job; > and happened to see there a Hungarian map of Europe.) > -- > Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/ Olasz-orsz?g means welsch-land (cf. olasz-riszling = German Welsch-Riesling, a sort of white wine, cf. also Rhein-Riesling). Hungarian "olasz" / German "welsch" is used for Romanian people, in this case for Italians. Cf. Wales and Welsh, Wallonen (in Belgium), Wallis (in Switzerland), Walachei (in Romania) and so on. The name of the Celtic tribe "Volc-i" = Germanic "walh-" was first used as name for Celtic people and later transferred to Romanian people. -- Best regards, Hans-Joachim Alscher From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Jul 11 05:42:57 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 01:42:57 EDT Subject: diction and contradiction Message-ID: In a message dated 7/7/01 12:41:14 AM, bronto at pobox.com writes: << Slightly closer to topic, why is Italy called in Hungarian? (I was in Urbana yesterday, popped in to the Slavic & East European department of the university library, where I once had a job; and happened to see there a Hungarian map of Europe.)>> I think you'll find a bit of a discussion that mentions this in the archives, involving also the Volcae, Welsh, Walloons, Walha, Valsk, Wolochs, Vlachs, Wallachia, Blacorum and maybe even Gaul. The name has had many applications over the years across Europe. My notes have the following explanation: "The Slavic word of the 10th century, , was, in its plural form: , borrowed into the Hungarian with the sense of 'neo-Latin/neo-Roman, Frank,' in the form . In the period of Arpad, this was the Hungarian name for any neo-Latin people, including the Franks (cf., Latin 'Frankavilla' > Hungarian 'Olaszi'), and it is also at present the Hungarian word for 'Italian.'" Regards, Steve Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jul 7 15:34:15 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 10:34:15 -0500 Subject: The Iceman's Berries Message-ID: Dear Stanley and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stanley Friesen" Sent: Thursday, July 05, 2001 9:39 PM [ moderator snip ] >>> Unless the Hittite form belongs here, I would not reconstruct this word to >>> PIE. It looks more like a European word, like many other words shared only >>> between Slavic, Germanic and Celtic. >> [PCR] >> And just how does a "European word" look? >> What are its identifying characteristics? > It is shared between the northern European branches of IE, and perhaps is > also found in the north-central dialects (aka Balto-Slavic). Balto-Slavic > attestation is somewhat marginal here, but there are so many words shared > specifically between Balto-Slavic and the other European branches that I > have a hard time excluding it. Certainly Balto-Slavic appears to have been > adjacent to some of the northern European dialects through most, or all, of > its history, so shared innovations are not that unexpected. Since these > branches are all mutually adjacent at the time of first attestation, such a > limited attestation is insufficient to establish PIE antiquity for a word. > Thus, there is a large class of roots in Pokorny, and elsewhere, that are > only attested anciently from northern Europe and immediately adjacent > areas. These form a substantial corpus of words that, while locally > shared, cannot be confidently reconstructed for PIE proper. One > interesting factoid about this corpus is that it includes most of the roots > in Pokorny with a reconstructed *a that is not traceable to an a-coloring > laryngeal. (Note, this is not an identifying characteristic, it is an > observation). > Now, my *hypothesis* about many of these words is that they are borrowings > from a non-IE language family formerly wide-spread in northern Europe, but > now extinct. I wish I could figure out how to test this idea. [PCR] This problem in general in one with which I am quite familiar. Though I, of course, acknowledge loanwords, I frequently find the the reasons for identifying them are less than totally convincing. Now you did mention IE roots with *a that are reconstructed without a "laryngeal". I would be curious to know one or two of these. I was under the impression that "laryngealists" allowed no *a without postulating a "laryngeal" to account for it. On the other hand, I believe that a small number of IE *p, *t, and k*, began life as *ph, *th, and *kh (and perhaps *[n]k in *kar- and *kaka-), and, in the process of losing aspiration (or nasality), lengthened and preserved the proto-IE (or Nostratic) vowel quality, which, when *a, became first *a: during the period of the introduction of Ablaut, then simply *a since this was sufficient to differentiate it from *e/o roots with the same form. 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, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138) From edsel at glo.be Sat Jul 7 21:10:26 2001 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 23:10:26 +0200 Subject: The Iceman's Berries Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stanley Friesen" Sent: Friday, July 06, 2001 4:39 AM [snip] > Thus, there is a large class of roots in Pokorny, and elsewhere, that are > only attested anciently from northern Europe and immediately adjacent > areas. These form a substantial corpus of words that, while locally > shared, cannot be confidently reconstructed for PIE proper. One > interesting factoid about this corpus is that it includes most of the roots > in Pokorny with a reconstructed *a that is not traceable to an a-coloring > laryngeal. (Note, this is not an identifying characteristic, it is an > observation). > Now, my *hypothesis* about many of these words is that they are borrowings > from a non-IE language family formerly wide-spread in northern Europe, but > now extinct. I wish I could figure out how to test this idea. [Ed Selleslagh] Try Basque. You never know. But that's tricky: often, initial consonants have disappeared, in other cases initial consonants may mask ancient initial vowels (like the old verb-prefix e-: jaten < e-aten), so you have to go back to reconstructed Proto-Basque forms. And many roots are actually of IE origin (Latin, Gaulish, Romance...) Maybe people like L. Trask could help. Ed. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jul 12 20:22:38 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2001 15:22:38 -0500 Subject: The Iceman's Berries In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010705192845.00b21340@getmail.friesen.net> Message-ID: Could you elaborate more and give examples? [snip] >>And just how does a "European word" look? [snip] > One interesting factoid about this corpus is that it includes most of the >roots in Pokorny with a reconstructed *a that is not traceable to an >a-coloring laryngeal. (Note, this is not an identifying characteristic, it is >an observation). >Now, my *hypothesis* about many of these words is that they are borrowings >from a non-IE language family formerly wide-spread in northern Europe, but >now extinct. I wish I could figure out how to test this idea. >-------------- >May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jul 7 22:51:04 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 17:51:04 -0500 Subject: Fw: *G^EN- Message-ID: Dear Stanley and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stanley Friesen" Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2001 1:26 AM [SF] > Some, certainly, All I said was that it is not a *rule* that all roots > must be CVC, and thus not all CVC(V)C forms are extended roots. [PCR] And, asking you the same question, I thought I asked Peter: what are a few examples of IE roots which cannot be referred to CVC bases? > Now, for the latter I would normally require extensions with different > places of articulation. I consider that much of the variation of the -k~-g > sort is due to inter-dialect borrowing, not to originally different > (extended) roots. That is, root final consonants that differ only in > voicing or aspiration, and are associated with virtually identical meanings > are probably best treated as being post-PIE variants of one form. [PCR] I have never read this before, and am sceptical. How about a few examples? >> [SFp] >>> I find it better to just take PIE roots as they come, without trying to >>> force them into some preconceived mold. >> [PCRp] >> You assume what you attempt to argue. >> It is the form of a PIE root which is the question here. [SF] > I meant that I would reconstruct only those root forms that are multiply > attested, at least for PIE. (The issue of an earlier stage is a separate > matter). [PCR] What might some examples be? 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, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138) From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Jul 7 14:50:00 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 15:50:00 +0100 Subject: *G^EN- Message-ID: >Now, it appears to me that you wish to reconstruct a *g^N-, Balderdash! Haven't I argued all along there is no such thing? The root is *g'enH, albeit with forms from *g'nH. (I put that word in just for Larry!) Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Jul 7 14:46:45 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 15:46:45 +0100 Subject: *G^EN- Message-ID: >> *keubH2-, 'lie down, lay down', >> I see no reason not to derive it from Pokorny's 2. *kew-, 'bend' Isolating >>the initial CVC-component of PIE stems allows comparison with initial >>CVC-segments of PAA triliteral roots. Yes, I understand why you wish to derive PIE *keubH from **kew. It is always tedious to rehearse arguments. My examples were of roots with final -CH, of which there are plenty. For theoretical reasons, you wish to reduce all of these to CVC roots. You may or may not be right, but the fact that your reason for doing it is theoretical, and not based on PIE evidence, is why I suggest (too dismissively, and I'm sorry for that), that the theory is actually irrelevant to PIE data. I also suspect that PIE data will not affect your belief, so I didn't pursue the argument further. Incidentally you have still not responded to my interpretation of PIE, where I suggest that it is the -u- in *keubH which is the essential vowel, not the -e-. If you want connections with PAA, then the triliteral root *K-U-B is surely a better guess than the biconsonantal *K-e-W. Peter From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jul 7 23:12:05 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 18:12:05 -0500 Subject: lupo cervino, loup-cervier.... Message-ID: Dear Eleanora and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "eleonora litta" Sent: Friday, July 06, 2001 11:39 AM > Hi everyone, > in a XIV century Italian manuscript I have found this animal, apparently a > lynx, which would symbolise the ability to judge distances, time, speed... > (the manuscript is about fighting techniques, BTW). only this animal is > called lupo cervino, which in italian would mean 'deer-wolf'. At the > beginning I thought it was for the lynxs fur, spotted like the deer one, > then a French guy told me that in France they have this loup-cervier, which > is a big lynx who hunts deers, so I reconsidered my position. They also told > me in a Spanish name for the lynx being lobo cerval. > I have to find out which is the truth about all this. do you know something > about the ancient names for 'lynx' in the IE languages, and about their > evolution? > Thank you for your help [PCR] Warning you in advance that this will be the view of an extreme minority, but I believe the name is a compound derived from two elements: *le/ou-, 'antelope', but also 'jumping' + *(n)ka-, 'feline'. It thus shares the same initial element as *le/o(u)-, 'antelope' + *wa:-, 'wolf, predator' = 'lion'. Quote me at your own risk? 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, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138) From douglas at nb.net Sun Jul 8 13:39:20 2001 From: douglas at nb.net (Douglas G. Wilson) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 09:39:20 -0400 Subject: lupo cervino, loup-cervier.... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Note that we have a reflex in modern English: "serval", applied to an African wild cat (Felis serval) -- the name < French < Portuguese "lobo cerval" = "deerlike wolf" (Latin "cervalis" = "deerlike" < "cervus" = "deer"). Italian "cervino" = "cervato" = "deerlike", apparently. From the "Dictionnaire de L'Acad?mie fran?aise" (1694): "Loup-cervier. s. m. Animal sauvage qui tient du chat & du leopard." "Loup-cervier" and "lobo cerval" apparently are currently applied to the Canadian lynx (Lynx canadensis) and also to the Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus). I think the "deer" reference is to the spots, probably, offhand. The interpretation as "deer-hunting" seems likely to be retrospective and spurious, to my casual eye. I deny any expertise, however. "Lobo cerval" = "gato cerval" in Spanish and Portuguese apparently. There is also French "chat-cervier". -- Doug Wilson From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Jul 8 21:06:11 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 16:06:11 -0500 Subject: lupo cervino, loup-cervier.... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I remember reading somewhere that English serval, a type of small wild cat, was from Spanish or Portuguese cerval. Cerval does mean "having to do with deer". But the servals I've seen at the zoo were smaller than lynxes >Hi everyone, >in a XIV century Italian manuscript I have found this animal, apparently a >lynx, which would symbolise the ability to judge distances, time, speed... >(the manuscript is about fighting techniques, BTW). only this animal is >called lupo cervino, which in italian would mean 'deer-wolf'. At the >beginning I thought it was for the lynxs fur, spotted like the deer one, >then a French guy told me that in France they have this loup-cervier, which >is a big lynx who hunts deers, so I reconsidered my position. They also told >me in a Spanish name for the lynx being lobo cerval. >I have to find out which is the truth about all this. do you know something >about the ancient names for 'lynx' in the IE languages, and about their >evolution? >Thank you for your help >Eleonora Litta Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From connolly at memphis.edu Sun Jul 8 01:42:09 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 20:42:09 -0500 Subject: 'albeit' Message-ID: "Douglas G. Wilson" wrote: > Reports of the death of this word once again appear to be exaggerated. > The Merriam-Webster usage dictionary discusses the repeated > at-least-partially-imaginary resurrection of the word, and remarks: > "_albeit_ seems never to have gone out of use, though it may have faded > somewhat in the later 19th century." ( Also: "it has ... considerably increased in use since the 1930s ...." > ( Copperud and Gowers/Fowler are cited as remarking on the word's supposed > resurrection, 1965-1980. ( Citations are given including Churchill (1937), Nabokov (1941), Frost > (1942), Santayana (1944), etc., etc., up to 1985 (in my 1989 edition). > My own perception is that "albeit" was ordinary in 1960's writing and is > ordinary now. I admit that it has a sort of "old-fashioned" flavor, though > ... perhaps this is a misperception of a register distinction? I agree. It *is* a fairly ordinary word and always has been, as far as I can tell. Leo Connolly From stevegus at aye.net Sun Jul 8 01:47:47 2001 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 21:47:47 -0400 Subject: 'albeit' Message-ID: Brian M. Scott wrote: > I'm 53, and I've been using it all my life. It's true that I originally > acquired it from reading and pronounced it to myself as 'all-bite', but I > straightened that out before I was 12. I've always considered it a > perfectly normal word in a formal register, both in writing and in > speech. The revival of "albeit" is less peculiar than the even stranger revival of "anent," which says nothing that "about" doesn't cover. I first thought it was an archaism used as a joke, but it seems to have crept back into apparently serious contexts, and now is more common than I suspect it ever was in the past. From stevegus at aye.net Sun Jul 8 02:03:27 2001 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 22:03:27 -0400 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. Message-ID: Eduard Selleslagh wrote: << Also Dutch and German, therefore W. Germanic (and its generally acknowledged impact on Swedish, but less to none on older Scandinavian). Dutch: d/waarvoor, d/waarvan, d/waarom, etc. German: wof|r/daf|r, wovon/davon, warum/darum, etc. I think this is authentic West-Germanic. E.g. Dutch and German use Waarom/warum? for 'Why?' and have no other word for it that doesn't involve a postposition. >> I checked the Oxford dictionary, and it seems that the where- forms of these words are attested in 1200-1300's at the earliest. The there- forms of these words are somewhat earlier, and a few attested in the period labelled Old English. Few seem to be of the earliest inherited stock, though whether this is because they were lately developed, or simply never used often, is something I can't say. "Therefore" seems to be the oldest of the bunch, and it strikes me as still the commonest. They seem to have always been somewhat rare, and somewhat formal. Now, of course, they are used mostly in King James styled prose, or legal documents. According to Alister McGrath's recent book on Bible translations ["In the Beginning"], the word "thereof" was used frequently by Tyndale and his successors largely because his version of Early Modern English was uncertain as to whether the genitive of "it" should be "his" or "its." "Its" occurs but once in the King James Bible (Lev. 25:5). Using "thereof" sidestepped the difficulty. Once this word became common, its sister words also peppered the Biblical style, and became a mark of a particularly lofty register in English, appropriated by lawyers and scriveners for their purposes, and securing these words a limited but persistent place. -- When as Man's life, the light of human lust In socket of his early lanthorne burnes, That all this glory unto ashes must, And generation to corruption turnes; Then fond desires that onely feare their end, Doe vainely wish for life, but to amend. --- Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Jul 7 14:31:20 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 15:31:20 +0100 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. Message-ID: >"whereof," "whereas" and "therefore." > Are these imitations or calques on Latin forms? Note the interesting survival of one of these forms in the Word spell-checker, which offers you both "therefore" and "therefor". The latter (at least in the English I know) can only mean "for it". They don't reflect Latin forms at all, but they are clearly seen in modern German. In that language in general: Preposition + [some case of "it"] --> da (= "there") + preposition Preposition + [some case of "which"] --> wo (= "where") + preposition In both cases haitus between vowels is avoided by inserting "r". For example: from it (von-) = davon = da-von = therefrom for it (fuer) = dafuer = da-fuer = therefor (not "therefore") on it (auf) = darauf = da-r-auf = thereon from which = wovon = wherefrom for which = wofuer = wherefor on which = worauf = wo-r-auf = whereon. These are very regular in German. There are survivals of this construction in English in words such as "whereupon" and "whys and wherefors" Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Tue Jul 10 19:12:18 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 20:12:18 +0100 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. Message-ID: > The same question comes here > with Attic "peri": Why did it keep the possibility of > being a postposition while no other adpositions did? Any two-syllable preposition can occur after its noun, except ana, dia, and amphi. The position is highly marked, and the occurrence rare, but examples do occur. Sometimes the preposition is used adverbially; sometimes it is a case of tmesis, sometimes a genuine post-position. In all these cases, the accent appears on the initial syllable. You are right in this respect, that in prose the only examples we have are with peri. Peter From JoatSimeon at aol.com Sun Jul 8 02:26:07 2001 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 22:26:07 EDT Subject: One Step at a Time Message-ID: In a message dated 7/6/01 9:40:25 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com writes: > Are you saying there will be no systematic correspondences to be found among > those "half-a-dozen languages"? -- the languages in question will be descended from _either_ Spanish _or_ Basque, and the reconstruction will give you either Spanish, or Basque. It will also show up a variety of borrowed items not traceable to the proto-language; rather like the large non-IE element in the Proto-Germanic lexicon. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Jul 8 14:35:43 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 15:35:43 +0100 Subject: One Step at a Time In-Reply-To: Message-ID: --On Thursday, July 5, 2001 3:47 pm +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: [LT] > << OK, then -- fire away. But you are defending a position which is > wildly, ludicrously false -- not an easy task. ;-) >> > Typically, your conclusions come first. You don't have to wait for the > evidence. No. The (snipped) position which Steve wants to defend is that the comparative method can produce proto-languages which never existed. This position is false. Everybody in linguistics knows it's false and understands why it's false. It's only Steve who fails to realize this, and who continues to maintain that a blatant falsehood can be true. [LT] > < number of parents at all. Steve, when we attempt to apply the > comparative method to some linguistic data, we *do not* "assume* in > advance that we must be looking at a single parent.... If there *was* a > single parent, then the method will tell us about it. Otherwise, the > method gives us only a nil return... [LT on Steve's scenario] > Now suppose we tried to apply the comparative method to the resulting > collection of languages -- "collection", because this assembly would > *not* be a family, as we use that term in linguistics. [SL - The > conclusion comes first, of course.] No, Steve. Will you please stop it? In linguistics, a family of languages is, *by definition*, a group of languages which are descended by divergence from a single common ancestor. Languages which are so related constitute a family. Languages which are not so related do not constitute a family. English and French do not constitute a family merely because almost the entire abstract vocabulary of English is borrowed from French. Hebrew and Yiddish do not constitute a family merely because they are both spoken by Jews. Japanese and Chinese do not constitute a family merely because they are both written in Chinese characters. There are all sorts of interesting ways in which languages can be related, but descent by divergence from a single common ancestor is the only one that makes the languages in question a family. [LT] > What would happen? > Suppose,... that Basque and Spanish were to interact in just such a way, > and give rise to half-a-dozen languages, each consisting of a different > mixture of Basque elements and Spanish elements, a couple of thousand > years later...., the method would once again give a nil return. We could > note the presence of many common elements in the languages under > investigation, but we could not find the required systematic > correspondences, and so we could reconstruct nothing. >> > Let's just start this with a basic question, to be sure you are saying > what you appear to be saying. > If you assume Basque and Spanish are entirely lost and unrecorded in your > example above, and all that is being compared are the "half-a-dozen > languages" you mention... Yes; exactly. > Are you saying there will be no systematic correspondences to be found > among those "half-a-dozen languages"? Yes; that's what I'm saying. Or, to be more precise, there will be no systematic correspondences pointing to a common ancestor. There will be all sorts of seemingly common elements, seemingly connected in strange and puzzling ways, but those common elements will not pattern in the way that we call 'systematic correspondences'. If we try to apply the comparative method to the data, we will get some exceedingly strange results, but we will not get any proto-language at all. We cannot possibly get a proto-language, because there wasn't one. In any case, I regard this scenario as academic in the extreme. There is no known case of a whole collection of mixed languages arising by contact between speakers of two languages, with different mixtures being settled on by different groups of bilingual speakers. And I know of no reason to suppose that such a scenario is even possible, let alone plausible. Steve, why are you so exercised about a scenario which never happens? Anyway, let me try once more. Descent by divergence works as follows. A single language P is spoken in some community. Over time, P breaks up into what are at first regional dialects but which eventually diverge into quite distinct languages, the daughter languages of P. When (as usual) P is not recorded, but some of the daughter languages are, we can apply the comparative method to these daughters, find systematic correspondences, work backwards, and reconstruct the unrecorded ancestor P in some reasonable degree of detail (not in every detail, of course). In other words, the comparative method is a tool for rewinding divergence from a single common ancestor. It does this extremely well, but note: this is the *only* thing the comparative method does, or can do. It cannot do anything else. If the languages being examined are not in fact descended by divergence from a single common ancestor, then the comparative method is helpless: it can do nothing, and it can produce no result. In particular, the method cannot conjure up an ancestral language which never existed. Steve, I wish you would get this undoubted fact into your head. Note in particular that the comparative method deals only with the consequences of divergence. It has nothing to say about convergence, and it cannot be applied to instances of convergence -- which is precisely what Steve is trying to do. The comparative method can rewind divergence, but it cannot rewind convergence. 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 Sun Jul 8 02:27:56 2001 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 22:27:56 EDT Subject: The Single Parent Question Message-ID: In a message dated 7/6/01 10:00:42 PM Mountain Daylight Time, proto-language at email.msn.com writes: > Linguistics should be done with the same, generally recognized scientific > methodology as other sciences --- whenever that is possible. -- linguistics is not an experimental science. It does not use the same methodology as experimental sciences such as physics. It is a _descriptive_ science. We have to work with a limited body of data, rather like the fossil-hunters. From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Jul 8 14:54:17 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 15:54:17 +0100 Subject: The Single Parent Question In-Reply-To: <001201c1059d$3c721b80$61564341@swbell.net> Message-ID: --On Thursday, July 5, 2001 4:55 pm -0500 proto-language wrote: [Steve Long] >>> This won't help you here. I won't ask if you've ever argued a science >>> case in Federal Court or ever did plasma analysis or worked on neural >>> systems or did any high-order economic analysis. You've claimed an >>> extremely high level of certainty with regard to the reconstruction of >>> proto-languages. I'm looking at the scientific validity of that claim. > [Joat Simeon] >> -- no, you aren't, because you don't have the knowledge-base to do so. > [PCR] > I do not subscribe to much of what Steve writes either but I do believe > he is asking pertinent question. > This type of snobbish response is not at all helpful. Steve is not > suggesting for one moment that he has the training in IE linguistics of > many on this list. He is questioning the methodology used based on his > familiarity with it in other disciplines. First, the methodology of comparative linguistics is not used in any other discipline, and certainly not in physics, computing or economics. Therefore Steve cannot possibly have any "familiarity" with it in other disciplines. Second, Joat is quite right in his response. This is not snobbishness: it's just the plain truth. Steve has no right to question our methodology, because he has no experience of it, and apparently no understanding of it. The sole basis for Steve's objections appears to be that he doesn't like our conclusions. Historical linguistics is a serious scholarly discipline, and the comparative method is one of its most important tools. Neither historical linguistics nor the comparative method can be learned in three minutes, and neither can be explained so completely in an e-mail posting that an absolute beginner can at once understand it fully. Learning to do historical linguistics takes years of study and practice, and so, for that matter, does learning to use the comparative method. Every historical linguist has paid his dues here: we have all put in the hundreds and thousands of hours learning our craft, studying other people's efforts, trying things out ourselves, making mistakes, finding out what works and what doesn't, learning to distinguish good work from bad, and generally acquiring professional competence. As Alexander the Great's tutor might have said, there is no royal road to historical linguistics. If Steve Long, or anybody else, doesn't like our conclusions, then he is free to challenge them, but only if he's first paid his dues. He can't just sit there in complete ignorance of our field, make blatantly false and ridiculous statements, and then complain because nobody takes him seriously. If he suspects we're wrong about something, then the onus is on him to demonstrate our error. But he can only do this if he first learns enough about our field to speak with authority. There exist any number of textbooks and popular books which attempt to outline the practice of historical linguistics generally and of the comparative method in particular. All of these presentations are necessarily somewhat simplified, and a reader who has mastered their content still cannot call himself a historical linguist. > Linguistics should be done with the same, generally recognized scientific > methodology as other sciences --- whenever that is possible. It is. Look. Would Steve Long, or anyone else, consider it perfectly in order to contradict the most basic conclusions of specialists in, say, particle physics, or the history of western music, or the archaeology of the Near East, on the basis of zero knowledge and experience of the field, just because he didn't like those conclusions? And why should linguistics be any different? 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 g_sandi at hotmail.com Sun Jul 8 09:37:59 2001 From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 09:37:59 -0000 Subject: Word Order and verb endings Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From miskec4096 at hotmail.com Sun Jul 8 14:22:36 2001 From: miskec4096 at hotmail.com (Kreso Megyeral) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 16:22:36 +0200 Subject: Word Order and verb endings Message-ID: >I can say that the comparison might be more than of passing interest if it can >be shown that the Hungarian indefinite conjugation has uses which suggest >modalities like intention or necessity; and, as a consequence, are >non-declarative --- but I do not know if this is or has been historically >true. No, Hungarian makes the difference between the two conjugations solely according to whether the direct object is defined or not. It's actually the way the definiteness of object is indicated on the verb, which is purely redundant, since there are other ways to express it, such as definite article. In meaning, there is perfectly no difference, especially if you translate it to a language that has no category of lexicalised definiteness, such as my native Croatian. The endings in Hungarian definite conjugation agree (at least in singular) more or less with the possessive suffixes added to nouns. Thus: Latok egy fizt. - I see a boy. (indefinite) Latom a fizt. - I see the boy. (definite) But, in similar way: Latom a fizmat. - I see my boy (or "my son"). The theory actually proposes that in the definite conjugation the speaker feels somehow more connected to the action, thus the second sentence can be translated as "My looking at/of the boy." So, if we propose that for some reason the thematic vowel had some meaning of definiteness (such as postponed article), than we can vaguely make connection to forms in Hungarian, or even to those in Caucasian languages, as well as in Kartvelian. Also, I saw later that I made a mistake in my previous message when I wrote: "...there is no thematic VOWEL of an indisputable IE origin." I meant, no thematic VERB, of course. The whole cathegory of definite conjugation in Hungarian is interesting, since it's limited only to Ugric. If Mr. Aikio could give some more exact data on the development of the cathegory, I would be very grateful. From colkitto at sprint.ca Sun Jul 8 15:02:13 2001 From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 11:02:13 -0400 Subject: Word Order and verb endings Message-ID: On Thu, 28 Jun 2001, Kreso Megyeral wrote: > [... W]hat is general opinion on theory that PIE had the opposition > between indefinite and definite conjugation, as Hungarian does. Some > of the linguists interpret thematic vowel in declension and > conjugation as some kind of suffixated article. The theory is proved > by the fact that there is no intransitive thematic vowel of > undisputable IE origin. Your attitudes? There's an article by Kortlandt in JIES 1983 or 1984 addressing this iusse. He refers to earlier work by Knobloch (1950's) making this very suggestion. Robert Orr From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu Mon Jul 9 00:13:34 2001 From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 20:13:34 -0400 Subject: Word Order and verb endings (was Re: No Proto-Celtic?) In-Reply-To: <001801c10300$481fa000$b6474241@swbell.net> Message-ID: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Thomas McFadden" > Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 2:22 PM >> it seems to me that explanations of this type (both the one from >> Vidhyanath Rao and Patrick Ryan's response to it) are going to run >> serious danger of violating some desirable version of the uniformitarian >> principle. unless i misunderstand what they're arguing. > [PCR] > I do not immediately see the application. Why not explain the connection you > see? > Pat the remark was based on a misunderstanding on my part of what Vidhhyanath Rao was arguing for. unfortunately i deleted the messages i was originally talking about, so i couldn't go back and re-read your suggestion, but i was concerned that a language was being postulated that made no morpho-syntactic distinction between finite verbs and nouns. since all attested languages do make that distinction (in a variety of very interesting and very different ways), it would violate the UP to argue for an unattested language that didn't. like i said, i don't have your posting on the topic anymore, so i don't know if you were actually suggesting something of the sort, or if i just misunderstood, as i did with V.R.'s posting. Tom [ Moderator's note: It is always possible to check the archives of this list which are kindly maintained for us by the good folk at the LINGUIST List: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/indo-european.html Just a reminder for those who may have forgotten the archives exist. -- rma ] From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Mon Jul 9 21:30:15 2001 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi) Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 00:30:15 +0300 Subject: Sound changes versus sound changes In-Reply-To: <6d.1624b343.286ed358@aol.com> Message-ID: [Steve Long] These examples also bring us back to the original topic. How many sound changes brought us from <*wixti> to /viisi/ and how long did they take? (I don't know what dates you feel comfortable with for last unity of PU.) [A.A.] The first question can hardly be given a satisfactory answer. The *path* of change was, according to the current knowledge of Uralic historical phonology, *wixti > *wiiti > *viiti > *viic?i > /viisi/. But it's difficult or impossible to say how many sound changes are involved in gradual developments like the Proto-Finnic change *ti > *c?i > ?*s?i > si. Counting only changes that affected phonological oppositions, there were only three changes (this excludes also *w > *v). As for the second question, they probably took something like 8000 years (but these isolated examples of course tell us nothing about "the rate of change", whatever that is, in Finnic/Uralic). [S.L.] Now, <*wixti> to /yuq/ appears to either involve "more" sound changes or changes that were more radical, in the sense that /yuq/ appears to diverge more from /wixti/ than /viisi/ does. [A.A.] Yes - the path was PU *wixti > *wixt? > *wi?t? > *w??t? > [Proto-Samoyedic] *w??t > *w??q > *w?q > *w'uq > /yuq/. [S.L.] If I'm right about that (and I'm not sure I am), then there are two possible factors that would be at work in evaluating "rate of change." One is HOW MANY TIMES particular words in a language undergo phonological change. There could be a good number of shifts that in the end don't necessarily travel that far from the original. Think of first person singulars in IE, if that's a good example. [A.A.] At least of earlier in this discussion, the issue was the "rate of change" in a *language*, not in the phonological manifestations of some individual lexical items. Are you suggesting that the rate of language change could be measured by counting sound changes in individual words? And what "particular words" are you referring to? [S.L.] The other factor is HOW "DISSIMILAR" those changes are, in the sense that you used similar above, in "little or no similarity." We're not talking about "unexpected" or uncommon shifts here but rather shifts that make the words sound significantly different. In other words, a fricative to a labial versus a fricative to another fricative. An ordinary listener might have a better chance of finding a similarity in the latter than the former. [A.A.] I must ask: a similarity to what? My point, as far as there was one, was that /viisi/, /?t/ and /yuq/ do not resemble each other at all. [S.L.] (snip) <> And these two examples bring up a related matter. If "every language has its own phonological system," then it might make sense to suggest that every language has its own path of phonological change. The amount of "dissimilarity" might not be a matter of time but also of the quality of the changes. A single change may end up being more "dissimilar" than a whole long series of modest changes. [A.A.] Yes, I of course agree - e.g., a change *w > *v obviously creates less dissimilarity between cognates than a change *w > *q. But sound changes are still cumulative, and thus a longer time produces more dissimilarity on average. [S.L.] The Hungarian example also brings to mind the question of how much certain changes seem just plain immeasurable. [A.A.] It is naturally impossible to "measure" dissimilarity, because the degree of observed dissimilarity is dependent on subjective matters. Counting sound changes is usually impossible in practice, because we face the problem of what should be counted as a sound change. Moreover, all changes cannot be reconstructed. Note that counting sound changes in *individual* word-forms is irrelevant, if the "rate of change" of the *language* is to be measured. [S.L.] (snip) And perhaps the phonological gap is a truer measure, if there is any reliable measure at all. [A.A.] Ok, please tell me what exactly do you want to measure - The "rate of change" of a language, or some subsystem or part of it, such as the phonological system or the lexeme for 'five'? How could the level of phonological divergence in individual cognate items be used as a measure of the rate of language change *in general*? [S.L.] But I want to point out that there are equally members of that family that appear not to have changed much at all. In fact, the high convergence percentages theorized by Dixon were meant to account for the large amount of commonality between many of those languages. As I understand it, those who disagree with him about the degree of convergence have argued instead for a high degree of conservatism in those Pama-Nyungan languages. And that does not mean that those languages did not change or even change a lot. It's rather that as much as they did change, they never change much. [A.A.] Larry already pointed out that it was *individual words* that had not changed much, not entire languages. And examples of this type are easy to find: e.g., because of the unusually conservative nature of the Finnish vowel system, some Proto-Uralic words are reflected in Finnish in an identical form, e.g. Finn. kala 'fish' < PU *kala. But the fact remains that Finnish, as a whole, is as different from Proto-Uralic as Spanish is from Proto-Indo-European. [S.L.] And, perhaps, even if some IE languages show a certain amount of "similarity" in sound systems, it in no ways means they did not change for 3000 years before attestation. It may be that they changed often, but through all those changes they never changed that much. [A.A.] Usually, we happen to know fairly exactly how those languages changed before attestation, thanks to the comparative method. So that doesn't seem to leave much room for this kind of speculation. Regards, Ante Aikio From X99Lynx at aol.com Wed Jul 11 07:05:09 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 03:05:09 EDT Subject: Sound changes versus sound changes Message-ID: I wrote: > The other factor is HOW "DISSIMILAR" those changes are, in the sense that you > used similar above, in "little or no similarity." We're not talking about > "unexpected" or uncommon shifts here but rather shifts that make the words > sound significantly different. In other words, a fricative to a labial > versus a fricative to another fricative. An ordinary listener might have a > better chance of finding a similarity in the latter than the former. In a message dated 7/7/01 7:23:32 AM, rao.3 at osu.edu writes: << But sound changes don't seem to work that way. Labov, in his monograph about sound changes, looked at various examples of changes in progress and came to the conclusion that changes of place are more complex than changes of effort and such things at metathesis can remain partial, limited by semantics etc. So p>f may be a smaller change than f > th. >> Well, even if there are "paths of change", there still is the matter of how "dissimilar" a listener perceives one sound change or set of changes to be versus another. Take, for example, where a dialect adopts a change that moves it towards unintelligability in the ears of speakers of another dialect of the same language. Some changes are going to make words harder to recognize than others. And that would be a measure of "dissimilarity" that doesn't have to do with the speaker, but rather with the listener. (On Hatteras Island, some words spoken by locals are understandable even though they are spoken differently. But some words are spoken so differently that it is difficult to guess what they are equivalent to in New York speech. Expectation does not feel like a good explanation for this. It seems to be more a matter of the degree of difference in sounds.) I would imagine that some paths that are "natural" may produce more "dissimilarity" in the ears of the listener than other natural paths. With regard to the same Labov work - I think - Benji Ward wrote something interesting in connection with his comments on t > h that I posted earlier. And this has to do with Labov's apparent approach to the "unusual or unexpected" sound change (as opposed to the "dissimilar" ones I'm talking about here.) He wrote: "In this context, Labov's (1994) book on paths of changes in vowel systems implicitly dismisses such a question by illustrating the various routes that vocalic chain shifts can take, e.g., whether the highest back vowel fronts or whether it diphthongises and heads for /aw/... No explanation for alternative paths is given, and the principles given imply that asking why one path occurs more commonly than another is devoid of linguistic interest. This is not yet obvious for "unusual sound changes", but these seem to be changes in consonants, not vowels, so the implications of Labov's study may be more restricted...." In this connection, it's pertinent to ask how dissimilar do Latin, Greek and Sanskrit "sound?" Not as a matter of morphology or divergence from a proto-language, but measured against each other in terms of intelligibility. In other words, how far away from Latin does Greek "sound" as opposed to Sanskrit? And is it proper to measure the difference in sounds based on "changes of effort" or degree of unintelligibility? On this list mutual comprehension is commonly used as an argument for a certain rate of change in IE languages. Can rate of change be correlated to relative intelligibility? Regards, Steve Long From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Jul 8 21:17:51 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 16:17:51 -0500 Subject: Michif In-Reply-To: <002f01c10164$7407a520$b32363d1@texas.net> Message-ID: How does Michif compare to Chinook jargon? Many years ago I saw a small book on Chinook Jargon that explained that the grammar was radically different from Chinook and that the vocabulary was largely derived from French --somewhere around 40% if I remember correctly. From what remember, French derived nouns included the feminine article <>. I have no idea how reliable the book was, but what I gather both the grammar and vocabulary seemed to be a compromise between French, Chinook and various other NW Native American languages. I don't think Chinook Jargon was used as anything other than a trade language but I may be mistaken >> Now, whether we regard Michif as a language with two direct ancestors, or as >> a language with no direct ancestors at all, is a matter of taste and >> definition. > > Or as a form of Cree that has borrowed all its nouns and nominal >morphology from French. Since 1) borrowing of all open class words, and 2) >borrowing of nominal morphology, are both independently attested, the >possibility (actually definition) cannot be excluded. Such a development of >Cree, critically dependent on another language for the maintanence of mutual >comprehensibility across generations, is clearly of a different sort than >what is usually encountered, but it appears no one at this point is denying >that the same sort of thing has happened in English with Anglo-Romani. In >other words, all the things it would take to make Michif a form of Cree are >known from other cases. [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sun Jul 8 21:00:04 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 16:00:04 -0500 Subject: kinkajou In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20010706101930.00a594b0@nb.net> Message-ID: There is a tremendous variety of folk-names for local flora, fauna and food in Latin American Spanish. My wife says she's heard <> in Costa Rica, literally "night monkey". I've seen references to <> "monkey lion" in Central American literature Re the others Marta, of course, is a pine marten or sable Guatuza in Costa Rica is an agouti --a large rodent that looks like a muskrat with golden fur and was called "beef" when I went in Tikal. I think it's it's a squirrel in some other places in Central America In various places, Cuchicuchi is a slang word that means something like "hanky-panky", "buddy-buddy", "snuggling up", "acting repentent when scolded", "sucking up", etc. >> So what is the kinkajou in Spanish? >For Potos flavus, quick Spanish-language Web search returns several common >names in Spanish: >martilla >cercoleto >martucha >cuchicuchi >kinkajou >kinkaj? >kinkayu >perro de monte >mico de noche >marta >guatuza >cusumbo >tutamono >leoncito >shosna >chosna >micole?n >I suppose these are used respectively in different countries? It's possible >some are erroneous. >-- Doug Wilson Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Jul 10 04:54:16 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 00:54:16 EDT Subject: the 'Dhole' Message-ID: In a message dated 7/7/01 5:23:23 PM, dlwhite at texas.net writes: << I really don't have time for all this, but an interested person might want to consult Grzemek. >> Better yet, consult "Grzimek's" (1990). <> It's rather understood the other way around. Natural habitat determines range. Dholes apparently frequent dense woodland or thick scrub and are relatively rare elsewhere. Sightings reported by the WCU over the last twelve years do not mention any steppes regions. In India and Indonesia, for the most part, dholes frequent tropical and sub-tropical forests where wolves are not expected to be found. Venkataraman, A.B., Arumogum and Sukumar, R. The foraging ecology of the dhole (Cuon alpinus) packs. Ethology 104:671-684. (1995) Venkataraman, A. Do dholes (Cuon alpinus) live in packs in response to competition with or predation by large cats? Current Science 11:934-36. (1995) Karanth, K.U. and Sunquist, M.E., Prey selection by tiger, leopard and dhole in tropical forests., J. Anim. Ecol. 64:439-450. (1995) WCU re sightings north of India; "Soviet Union: Very rare. Occasional sightings in the following regions: southwestern Primorje; Priamurje; far southeast Russia; Amur river region; and in Tian-Shan. Dramatic decline in records in Primode after 1920. No reliable information is available on the situation at Tuva, Altai, or in Kazakhstan in last 25 years.... China: Occurs very sparsely in the forested mountains of western Sichuan, southern Gansu, eastern Qinghai and eastern Tibet (Schaller). " As to the Indian wolf, it is clearly genetically, morphologically and behaviourally a distinct subspecies (Canis lupus pallipes.) "DNA evidence for Clade B... suggests that the ancestor of the wolf had arisen" in the Western Hemisphere and migrated to the Eastern Hemisphere, "to the European Continent through the Asian Continent," with the Indian or Iranian wolf evolving as a relict population. In fact, "the report on skeletal anatomy, the dingo, C. familialis dingo, closely resembles the Indian wolf and the pariah dogs of Southeast Asia. It is probable that the dingo is a direct descendant of dogs that were originally domesticated from tamed Indian wolves (C. l. pallipes) (Corbett, 1985)." (Kaoru Tsuda, Yoshiaki Kikkawa, Hiromichi Yonekawa and Yuichi Tanabe, Extensive interbreeding occurred among multiple matriarchal ancestors during the domestication of dogs: Evidence from inter- and intraspecies polymorphisms in the D-loop region of mitochondrial DNA between dogs and wolves (1997)) Perhaps all this might have some impact linguistically. S. Long From acnasvers at hotmail.com Tue Jul 10 09:19:07 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 09:19:07 -0000 Subject: Return of the minimal pairs Message-ID: Eduard Selleslagh (15 Jun 2001) wrote: [DGK, 8 Jun 2001] >> It's noteworthy here that Varro reports as a rustic pronunciation of >> : "rustici etiam quoque viam veham appellant, et vellam non villam" >> (R.R. I.2.14). >[Ed] >That's really interesting. Were those 'rustici' making the link with >'vehere/vehiculum'? (in which case it would be an archaism, true or false). I'm not sure, but I suspect the post-tonic intervocalic /h/ was a requirement of the rustic dialect, not a popular archaism. David Salmon (5 Jun 2001) has described the /h/ in as "simply a Southernism, necessary to the drawl". Similarly, appears to be the drawled form of from the affirmative adverb . In Latin, non-etymological /h/ occurs also in for 'made of brass, etc.', the cognomen Ahala ( 'wing'), and for 'mindless'. The forms with /h/ could all be drawled rusticisms. Umbrian has for the river , so the presumed rustic drawl might be a relic of p-Italic substrate in rustic Latin, like the /f:h/ alternation. >The e/i vacillation is very common, in many IE dialects, but also in the rest >of the world, e.g. among Quechua housemaids in Peru: they always speak about >'me premo' (mi primo, 'my cousin', a eufemism for their lover) when speaking >Spanish. They also interchange o/u, like in 'me pichu' (mi pecho), another >common thing anywhere. I don't know anything about the phonology of Quechua, so I can only guess that these vacillations probably represent the misfit in sound-ranges between vowels in Quechua and Peruvian Spanish. What Varro noted was a different phenomenon involving closed syllables in native speech. I suspect what he meant by "vellam non villam" was that the "rustici" used an open [I] in closed tonic syllables where "urbani" and "suburbani" had a closed [i]. A parallel is provided by the American English rusticisms "britches" for and "crick" for . DGK From g_sandi at hotmail.com Sun Jul 8 10:53:18 2001 From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi) Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 10:53:18 -0000 Subject: Proto-Celtic & Proto-Fenno-Ugric in Herodotus and C. Ptolemy Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Mon Jul 9 21:28:36 2001 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi) Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 00:28:36 +0300 Subject: Proto-Celtic - An Exploration: Celtic ICM & Q/P Words Function IE Roots In-Reply-To: <21664048.3203424394@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk> Message-ID: [Larry Trask:] Fourth, Kalevi Wiik has not established anything at all, least of all about Basque. What he does is to draw pretty maps showing Uralic-speakers wandering all over the solar system zillions of years ago. He has built a career out of this simple party piece. [A.A.] I would like to add that I completely agree with Larry's view on the quality of Kalevi Wiik's research in comparative linguistics. This is the view shared by almost all Uralists, and other specialists acquainted with Wiik's theories. Wiik's claims have been rejected for good reasons, as he has not been able to produce a single piece of evidence in support of his views that has been able to stand scrutiny. (Despite of this, he has actively publicized his wild speculations as a linguistic breakthrough outside the field, and still continues to do so - which, I think, should be considered unforgivable.) Wiik's ideas have been thoroughly criticized by researchers such as e.g. Juha Janhunen, Johanna Laakso, Eve Mikone, Jorma Koivulehto, Asko Parpola, Petri Kallio, Cornelius Hasselblatt etc. As for mr. O'Keefe's reply to my posting, my reaction to it is that it contains too many misunderstandings and factual errors (concerning e.g. the so-called consonant gradation in Uralic) to warrant any thorough commentary. So I only comment the following passage: [David O'Keefe:] The ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, 15th ed., 1994,Vol. 22, in an article entitled Languages of the World, p. 690, states "the Sami languages exhibit similar alternations, but the process applies to all consonants......" Presumably, this means that alternation applies to initial consonants, too. [A.A.] Regrettably, this demonstrates all too well why no one should mistake to consider Encyclopaedia Britannica a sufficient source of data on Samic (or, indeed, any language) for the purpose of linguistic research. To me, a native speaker of Sami, a suggestion of "initial consonant gradation" related to the Celtic initial mutations sounds as reasonable as if someone claimed on the list that English is polysynthetic and thus related to Eskimo. What was meant in the quoted passage is that the process applies to all consonants in the phoneme inventory, not to all the actual occurences of the phonemes. Moreover, "initial consonant gradation" is a theoretical impossibility. The term "consonant gradation" refers to a very specific type of morphophonological phenomenon, which is, or historically was, conditioned by either 1) the phonological structure of a following unstressed syllable (whether it was *CV or CVC; the so-called radical gradation), or 2) the prosodic structure of the word (whether the consonant occurs on the border of a syllable with secondary stress and an unstressed syllable, or on the border of two unstressed syllables; the so-called suffixal gradation). There is no way that consonant gradation could ever occur in initial position. Regards, Ante Aikio From ibonewits at neopagan.net Fri Jul 13 05:25:08 2001 From: ibonewits at neopagan.net (Isaac Bonewits) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 01:25:08 -0400 Subject: 'albeit' In-Reply-To: <3B45C4FB.16799.EFFD0FF@localhost> Message-ID: Gentlemen and Ladies, I must insert a small, albeit pretentious, note into this discussion that I, too, have used this word in writing and speech for forty years, usually in formal or academic circumstances. I suspect that it's a verbal pattern I picked up from British academic writers of the 1950s and 1960s (most of whom would have learned it in the 1920s and 1930s). Nonetheless, most of my American speaking readers and audiences don't seem to have any trouble understanding me when I use it. Perhaps the most tenacious of linguistic fossils are to be found in the communications of academic and literary fossils, before they die off and allow new paradigms to bloom... cheers, Isaac Bonewits -- ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^ "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and ^ ^ proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone ^ ^ gets busy on the proof." -- Galbraith's Law ^ ^ Isaac Bonewits, Adr.Em./ADF ^ ^ Box 372, Warwick, NY 10990 ^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ From connolly at memphis.edu Sat Jul 14 02:10:54 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 21:10:54 -0500 Subject: 'albeit' Message-ID: > Brian M. Scott wrote: >> I'm 53, and I've been using it all my life. It's true that I originally >> acquired it from reading and pronounced it to myself as 'all-bite', but I >> straightened that out before I was 12. I've always considered it a >> perfectly normal word in a formal register, both in writing and in >> speech. Steve Gustafson wrote: > The revival of "albeit" is less peculiar than the even stranger revival of > "anent," which says nothing that "about" doesn't cover. I first thought it > was an archaism used as a joke, but it seems to have crept back into > apparently serious contexts, and now is more common than I suspect it ever > was in the past. I know that Fowler mentions the "revival" of _anent_, but since I (a native english speaker with four university degrees) do not know what it means, I hesitate to say that it's actually been revived. Surely I'm not along on the list here? Leo Connolly From Georg-Bonn at t-online.de Fri Jul 13 09:37:54 2001 From: Georg-Bonn at t-online.de (Stefan Georg) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 11:37:54 +0200 Subject: Handfuls of Unrelated Forms In-Reply-To: <003201c10784$b2ba0ee0$c38b01d5@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: Of course my posting was more than silly (especially since the Greek I displayed in it was somewhat less than spotless - serves me well!). It is just that, every now and then, I feel hard pressed to resist starting what our list-owner calls a slanging match with youknowwho. Knowing that I'm at best making a fool out of myself, I promise not to react to such postings any more. My relation to Mr. Ryan deteriorated seriously when he posted unauthorized (mis-)quotes from private exchanges on the sister-list which were directed at undermining my reputation (and had nothing whatsoever to do with linguistics). Ignoring this would have been the best policy, but I went so far as to try to persuade our moderator to remove PR from the lists, which he - for good and respectable reasons - could not accept (but I have no problems to confess that I did try). Since then, I have been refraining from reacting to PRs postings (with this - puerile - exception). My apologies to everyone who is not exactly interested in this kind of stuff (arguably the majority). StG >> One of the reasons linguistics makes such little progress is that people >> with so little Greek are permitted to voice their irrelevant opinion in >> specialist fora. >Whoa-up there buddy! >I am grateful for those who raise any linguistic questions in these fora. >My Latin, Greek and Sanskrit happen to be more than passable, but it is an >excellent discipline for me to have to defend or argue particular positions >which perhaps I have never questioned because they are "common knowledge". >I also discover the gaps in my own so-called knowledge. >I am also grateful to the colleagues on this list who tolerate my stupidity >when I, in turn, voice an opinion in an area where I lack the necessary >specialist knowledge, but don't realise it. >So all of you out there with no Greek - firstly go out and learn some, but >also go on stating your opinions! >Peter -- Dr. Stefan Georg Heerstrasse 7 D-53111 Bonn ------- From miskec4096 at hotmail.com Sun Jul 15 14:38:12 2001 From: miskec4096 at hotmail.com (Kreso Megyeral) Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 16:38:12 +0200 Subject: 'albeit' Message-ID: I'm not sure whether it would be so important for the discussion, but it's exactly today that I found in the Lonely planet's (!) Scandinavian and Baltic Europe travel guide the following sentence: This fast-track towards the west has left critics talking about Estonia having sold its soul and continuing its historical tradition of foreign dominance, ALBEIT in a sweeter package. Presuming Lonely planet's guides are not made exclusively for English speakers and that this one is published in 1999, it is again one of proofs of it being quite alive word in English nowadays. From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Jul 13 07:26:19 2001 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 03:26:19 EDT Subject: real proto-lang Message-ID: In a message dated 7/13/01 1:23:06 AM Mountain Daylight Time, petegray at btinternet.com writes: > So while at one level I relate to your idea, at another I think there are > advantages in treating our reconstructions as if they were actual spoken > human languages - even while admitting the limits of our knowledge. -- I think it would be more accurate to say that they're probably very like the language as it was actually spoken. That's about as much as we can say; on the other hand, we can say that much. After all, on numerous occasions the discovery of recorded earlier forms has conformed closely to reconstructions made earlier -- the laryngeals in Hittite come to mind, or many of the archaic forms of Mycenaean Greek. From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Mon Jul 16 14:02:41 2001 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 17:02:41 +0300 Subject: real proto-lang In-Reply-To: <000201c106cb$bd957160$db11073e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Sat, 7 Jul 2001, petegray wrote: > This is the "abstractionist" way of understanding reconstruction. It has > also been applied to reconstructed phonemes. "Abstractionists" would claim > that PIE *bh, *kw etc are simple symbols denoting the set of relationships > between the reflexes of *bh, kw etc in the attested languages. > Fine and dandy, but we must ask if something is lost. The abstractionist > position appears (from the little I know) to be losing ground rapidly, > because of the advances in our understanding of PIE based on a more realist > approach, which treats our reconstruction as a real language. > Firstly there is all the debate - on this list and elsewhere - about > homeland, where and who and what pots and what grave customs and so on. If > the reconstructed language is merely a "tool of comparative linguistics" > then these questions are closed down. > Secondly there are questions of how such a language would actually work. > Typology comes in here, but not only typology. The "new sound" of PIE > would not have arisen if *bh etc had been seen purely as an abstract tool > for comparisons. > So while at one level I relate to your idea, at another I think there are > advantages in treating our reconstructions as if they were actual spoken > human languages - even while admitting the limits of our knowledge. I don't think the two positions discussed here really contradict each other. Cannot one say that the "abstractionist position" is merely the result of the application of the method, whereas everything beyond this is an *interpretation* of this result? Regards, Ante Aikio From dlwhite at texas.net Fri Jul 13 12:24:53 2001 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 07:24:53 -0500 Subject: Old Lithuanian Message-ID: > What are the cases of "Old Lithuanian" nominal morphology borrowing you have > in mind? Do you mean the ones like allative (locative case denoting > direction towards something, e.g. tevop(i) "towards the father"), adessive > (... denoting proximity to something, e.g. upeip(i) "by the river"), etc.? No. These appear to be abstract modeling, not borrowing. The cases I have in mind (I am too lazy/busy to look them up) involve final /-n/ which it has been alledged was actually borrowed from Fennic, as part of the process of creating the new category, whatever it was .... It's in TK somewhere. > Would you say these are examples of pattern / model borrowing from some > Fennic source (as it is sometimes suggested)? Yes. I have heard that Latvian has a lot more of that sort of thing than does Lithuanian, but I do not know. > How would you describe "creeping infiltration" in this ("Old Lithuanian") > case? Perhaps "marginal infiltration" would be better. I mean where a part, typically small, of a language's morphology is borrowed from a foreign source. I used "creeping" because my guess is that over time, if the two languages remain in extensive contact, the proportion could well go up. But I have no actual examples where this is known. (In the case of Baltic, the shift over to this from some sort of Fennic probably did not take that long.) > How can it be compared to Rumanian? What exactly is the nominal > morphology borrowing case in Rumanian? Rumanian has borrowed the feminine vocative of Bulgarian. For better or worse, the vocative in Rumanian is obslescent, so we are losing our example here. But the Bulgarian element thus introduced is marginal. Dr. David . White From alderson+mail at panix.com Fri Jul 13 22:49:53 2001 From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 18:49:53 -0400 Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns" In-Reply-To: (X99Lynx@aol.com) Message-ID: On Sat, 7 Jul 2001 04:38:26 EDT, Steve Long wrote: > In a message dated 7/6/01 11:18:00 PM, alderson+mail at panix.com writes: >> The total set of reconstructed forms, based on all the forms attested in >> the group of languages under examination, is considered to be a single >> language. Period. By definition. Period. > Well, I'm sure if you punctuate it enough, it will surely end up being true. Not a matter of truth by punctuation, but of emphasizing the nature of the definition. No exceptions, no averments. > Actually, you put yourself in a logical bind here that I'm sure you will > understand if you consider it carefully and unemotionally. Actually, it occurred to me that you might take this line of argument or one very like it after I wrote the message to which you are responding. > The Lehmann quote very prudently avoids this equation between "forms" and > "languages." ("In using the comparative method, we contrast forms of two or > more related languages to determine the precise relationship between THESE > FORMS. We indicate this relationship most simply by reconstructing THE FORMS > from which they developed." Caps mine.) > The reason this is wise is that it avoids a conclusion that the comparative > method in and of does not support in the very example you described earlier. > In fact, you give a clear example of where the comparative method - applied > to "a larger set of languages" - will reconstruct the total set of related > forms into not one, but three different languages. Not, of course, in the general case. > In a message titled "Re: The Single Parent Question" dated 7/5/01 3:21:49 PM, > alderson+mail at panix.com writes: >> ...if we found a group of languages descended from a prehistoric Michif, we >> could not reconstruct the two parents thereof. You are probably correct.... >> from the point of view of the comparative method, these languages do *not* >> have two parents, but only one, the paleo-Michif. >> If, on the other hand, we were dealing with a larger set of languages, some >> descended from the left-hand parent of paleo-Michif; some, the right-parent; >> and some from paleo-Michif itself, we could (if the events in question were >> not so far in the past as to prevent our dull tools from working at all) in >> principle work out the relations of all and sundry. > Please observe carefully where you've arrived in this last paragraph. You > have used the comparative method on languages linked by various systematic > correspondences. And the result you forecast is that with the application of > the method in this situation you will have ended up reconstructing three > languages - not one. And one of those reconstructed languages will contain > what you know are TWO genetically distinct sets of forms. Please observe very carefully how I arrived at the conclusion in which you take so much joy: A very special occurrence, to wit, absolute language mixture, with recognizable descendants of both parents of this special creole available for comparison. I stated that *IN* *THAT* *CASE*, and in that case only, we could proceed back from the mixed language. Otherwise, we could only reconstruct back as far as the one language in question. > In other words, repeating your words above: << The total set of reconstructed > forms, based on all the forms attested in the group of languages under > examination, is considered to be a single language.>> is not the case in the > example you give. You've misunderstood. >From the point of view of the descendants of the mixed language, and them only, there is only a single parent. You have missed the entire point of the exercise, which is that the kind of thing you want to be commonplace is only possible in a very specific instance, one that is so extremely rare as to make professional linguists disagree on its reality. > In fact, the "total set of reconstructed forms" yielded by the application of > the method in the example you give MUST be three reconstructed languages. > Because you CANNOT reconstruct the two ancestors accurately UNLESS you > recognize that there are two distinct sets of systematic correspondences in > the already reconstructed language "paleo-Mistif." This means that you are > using less than "the total set of reconstructed forms" that you've already > identified in "paleo-Mischif" to also reconstruct the left-handed parent. > And less than the "total set" to also reconstruct the right-handed parent. Wrong. Go back and read the thought experiment again. The only way to recog- nize the mixed nature of the one protolanguage is to have reconstructed the two contributor languages based on their other unmixed descendants. Without that, you have no business looking for multiple parents. > The comparative method triangulates back to a single set of reconstructed > forms. It does not triangulate back to a whole language. And, in the > example you give, "the total set of reconstructed forms" - multiple > triangulations - yields three different reconstructed languages. Not at the same chronological level it doesn't. The three reconstructions must proceed from different sets of forms drawn from different languages, or it all falls apart. > I understand the comparative method enough to know that you cannot count > apples and end up with oranges. What in fact the method does is compare > forms and find correspondences that show common descent, not whole languages > or all the possible genetic aspects of a reconstructed language. In the > example you give, multiple applications of the method to the same data yield > multiple reconstructions, each using only a subset of the total reconstructed > forms. And so the "total set of reconstructed forms" does not equal one > language. The definition you give is not coherent. There is no "multiple applications of the method to the same data" in this example. The only possible way to connect the three protolanguages that are reconstructed is an after-the-fact examination of the reconstructions, not an _a priori_ decision that they will turn up if you just hold your mouth right. > Of course, equating a reconstructed set of forms to a "language" does not > only create a logical incoherence. If two languages share noun morphology > alone (as in the Niger-Kordofanian example), it is patently absurd to call > the resulting reconstructions a "language." The processes that created the > correspondences do not all call for the existence of a third language, even > if they do establish descent from a common form. And the comparative method > establishes descent from a common set of forms, but it can say nothing else > about the relationship of the remainder of those two languages. Inferences > may be drawn. But that is what they are at best - inferences, not part of > the method itself. This only holds true if the "forms" in question are drawn only from a single subsystem of the languages under consideration, which is an extremely limited and limiting thing to do. Suppose that you are only, for whatever reason, going to deal with "nouns", and one of the languages from which you are drawing forms for comparison has developed a very strong set of denominative verbs, but otherwise lost most of its inherited nouns due to influence from an areally influential language. You will lose the data from this language by restricting yourself artificially. > If this equation of forms to a single language is by definition, a careful > look at the operation as you yourself described it shows that the definition > is logically faulty. And that has nothing to do with me, so personal remarks > and brow-beating won't change it. The logic seems to me to hold. All of the logic. Rich Alderson From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jul 17 16:12:12 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 17:12:12 +0100 Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns" In-Reply-To: <12f.c63d5a.286fde86@aol.com> Message-ID: --On Saturday, June 30, 2001 10:01 pm +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > Then let my rephrase my question. Can more than one proto-language be > reconstructed from a "group" of languages? No. > And, if so, then will those > additional proto-languages show up in reconstruction if one assumes before > hand that there was only one proto-language? It makes no difference what one assumes in advance. Comparative reconstruction will return either one proto-language or no proto-language. It can't do anything else. > If on the other hand the > answer to the first question is no, then why not? Because the comparative method is a tool for identifying descent by divergence from a single common ancestor. It doesn't do anything else, and it can't do anything else. It is not a piece of magic which can give us a video of any piece of prehistory we happen to be interested in. When I was a kid, I used to read a comic book featuring the exploits of Prince Ibis. Prince Ibis owned a magical gadget called the Ibistick, which could project any desired piece of history onto a blank wall, as though the whole thing had been videoed. If we had an equivalent in linguistics, we would be delighted. Unfortunately, we do not, and the comparative method in particular is not an Ibistick. It does what it does, and its magic does not extend any further. It does not recover any arbitrary piece of history at all: all it does is to tell us whether a single common ancestor can be recovered or not. 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 proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Jul 13 19:05:22 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 14:05:22 -0500 Subject: Lehmann's Syllabicity Message-ID: Dear IEists: There are a number of IEists who do not subscribe to Lehmann's theory of "syllabicity", which he originated to explain the unusual fact that most IE roots display a front-back vowel (also, potentially no vowel) contrast, which indicates morphosemantic differences only --- not lexicosemantic ones. Unusual because in the great majority of languages around the world, varying root-vowels indicate lexical rather than morphological differences (Semitic sharing this peculiarity though perhaps not its parent PAA). Without attempting to promote Lehmann's theory (at this time), I would first like to learn what list-members consider to be the better alternatives for an explanation of this phenomenon. Let us assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that some unspecified language earlier than but ancestral to IE had a structure in which differences of vowel-quality signaled lexical differences: *men- /= *man- /= *mon-. This is certainly justifiable on typological grounds. First, I would like to know how list-members believe these lexical differences were maintained in IE. 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, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138) From bronto at pobox.com Fri Jul 13 16:23:59 2001 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 09:23:59 -0700 Subject: Italy in Hungarian (was: diction and contradiction) Message-ID: Thanks! Gabor Sandi wrote: > ... Lengyelorsza'g (Poland), ... And why Lengyel? -- Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/ From g_sandi at hotmail.com Sat Jul 14 16:42:07 2001 From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi) Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 16:42:07 -0000 Subject: Italy in Hungarian (was: diction and contradiction) Message-ID: [ moderator edited ] > Thanks! > Gabor Sandi wrote: >> ... Lengyelorsza'g (Poland), ... > And why Lengyel? > -- > Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- Let me quote Schenker, A.M.: The Dawn of Slavic (Yale U.P., 1995), p.51: The most intriguing [problem involving Slavic tribes in Poland] is the identity and location of the Lendites (Lenditi). This ethnic appellation, which does not appear in Polish sources, seems to be derived from the root *le> d (e> represents e with a hook under it) 'untilled land'. Judging by the use of of tribal names containing this root in non-Polish sources, Lendites may refer to the Poles, cf. Lithuanian le'nkas, Hungarian lengyel, East Slavic ljax6 (6 is the "back jer"), all meaning "Pole". Also containing this root are Slavic tribal terms lenzane^noi and lenzeni'nois found in chapters 9 and 37, respectively, of Constantine Porphyrogenitus' De adminstrando imperio. The former refers to a tribe aettled in the basin of the Dnieper, while the latter appears to be located somewhere on the southern border of Rus'. Comment by GS: And I suppose the first name of that well-known Pole, Lech Walesa, has the same etymology. Gabor Sandi From miskec4096 at hotmail.com Fri Jul 13 17:41:05 2001 From: miskec4096 at hotmail.com (Kreso Megyeral) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 19:41:05 +0200 Subject: Italy in Hungarian (was: diction and contradiction) Message-ID: [ moderator edited ] Gabor Sandi wrote: "It should be noted that Hungarian names of countries outside Europe never seem to use "orsza'g", even -ia is not essential, so that we have, for example: Ki'na, Japa'n." Of course, if you consider Armenia (?rminyorszag) a part of Europe. Also, one, rather rarely encountered, ending is "f?ld" (lit. "ground"), coming historically from German, now a usual word in Hungarian, which sometimes stands for "-land" if it's not a European country. Thus Thaif?ld, Szvazif?ld. From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jul 14 01:31:10 2001 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 18:31:10 -0700 Subject: The Iceman's Berries In-Reply-To: <008601c10729$fd2071a0$c602703e@edsel> Message-ID: At 11:10 PM 7/7/01 +0200, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Stanley Friesen" >Sent: Friday, July 06, 2001 4:39 AM >> Now, my *hypothesis* about many of these words is that they are borrowings >> from a non-IE language family formerly wide-spread in northern Europe, but >> now extinct. I wish I could figure out how to test this idea. >[Ed Selleslagh] >Try Basque. You never know. But that's tricky: often, initial consonants have >disappeared, in other cases initial consonants may mask ancient initial vowels >(like the old verb-prefix e-: jaten < e-aten), so you have to go back to >reconstructed Proto-Basque forms. And many roots are actually of IE origin >(Latin, Gaulish, Romance...) So far as I have been able to tell, there are few good candidates source words in Basque for these roots. Most Basque cognates seem to be fairly well established as borrowings the other direction. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jul 14 02:21:59 2001 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 19:21:59 -0700 Subject: The Iceman's Berries In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 03:22 PM 7/12/01 -0500, Rick Mc Callister wrote: > Could you elaborate more and give examples? Well, a few random examples from Pokorny would be possible. [Translation from German mine] *bhleig-, bhli:g- (156) 'glitter' extension of *bhlei-, same meaning, see also *bhleiq-. OE. bli:can, "glitter", Old Saxon bli:kan "glitter" OHD bli:hhan strong verb, "bleich werden" ... OE bla:c, OHD bleih "pale, pallid"; OHD nleihha "whitefish", ... Lit. blizgu`,-e'ti "glisten, glitter", bly's^kiu, blys^ke'ti "twinkle, gleam" ... Lettish blaiskums "spot" ... Russian & OCS ble^ski "luster, sheen" ... Note that while the unextended form. *bhlei is found in most branches, this particular extended form is restricted to northern Europe. (In addition, the alternate extended form, *bhleiq- is a good example of the -g/-k alternation that I think is due to early inter-dialect borrowing, and it also is restricted to Germanic and Balto-Slavic). 2. *dhabh (233) "properly joined, fit, suitable"; *dhabh-ro-s same meaning. Arm darbin "smith" (*dhabhr-ino-). Lat. faber, fabri: "craftsman, artist", adj. "artistic, skilled", ... Goth. ga-daban "happen, occur, come to pass", Perf. gado:b, Adj. gado:f ist "it is fitting", ... OCS dobri, "agathos, kalos", dobji, doblji "aristos, dokimos", ... Lith. daba` "property, quality", dabi`nti "adorn", dabnu`s "graceful" and so on. Note, this one is not, in some ways, as good, as it has an Armenian reflex. However that is quite late, and Armenian is known to have been heavily influenced by other languages, including Latin. It is also a root that it is hard to put an a-coloring laryngeal in, as you get the rather difficult sequence **dhH2ebh, or even **dhH2bh. 3. dhen- (249) "strike, thrust". Only in extended forms (almost exclusively Germanic) d-extension: ON detta strong verb "fall down heavy and hard", ... E. Fris. duns "fall, decline", ... Engl dint "hit, thrust" Alb. g-dhent "chopped wood, ..." ... Gutteral extension: ON danga "beat (up), pound" ... This one is actually pretty weak all around, and may well be a simple proto-Germanic coinage. Anyway, that is enough to give a general flavor. Once upon a time I did some statistics on shared words between the branches, and came up with lots of sharing between the northern European branches and between Germanic and Balto-Slavic. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Jul 13 20:24:57 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 15:24:57 -0500 Subject: *G^EN- Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Saturday, July 07, 2001 9:46 AM [pPCR] >>> *keubH2-, 'lie down, lay down', >>> I see no reason not to derive it from Pokorny's 2. *kew-, 'bend'. Isolating >>> the initial CVC-component of PIE stems allows comparison with initial >>> CVC-segments of PAA triliteral roots. [PG] > Yes, I understand why you wish to derive PIE *keubH from **kew. > It is always tedious to rehearse arguments. My examples were of roots with > final -CH, of which there are plenty. For theoretical reasons, you wish to > reduce all of these to CVC roots. You may or may not be right, but the fact > that your reason for doing it is theoretical, and not based on PIE evidence, > is why I suggest (too dismissively, and I'm sorry for that), that the theory > is actually irrelevant to PIE data. I also suspect that PIE data will not > affect your belief, so I didn't pursue the argument further. [PCR] It is the evidence which has bolstered my support for this method of analysis. If form and semantics have no bearing on possible connections, then comparative work is frivolous. I have indicated but will reiterate that I do not consider *keubH- a CVC root + H. I consider it a CVC (*kew-) root plus *b AND *H. [PG] > Incidentally you have still not responded to my interpretation of PIE, where > I suggest that it is the -u- in *keubH which is the essential vowel, not > the -e-. If you want connections with PAA, then the triliteral root *K-U-B > is surely a better guess than the biconsonantal *K-e-W. [PCR] Not in my opinion. As I have already explained, it is CVC roots that are most readily comparable between PIE and PAA. If I am correct in suggesting that the root *kew- should be properly **khew-, the expected Arabic reflex would be gh-w. We find in Arabic gh-w-g, 'bend the body, incline towards the ground'; gh-w-S, 'dive'; gh-w-T, 'be bent (wood) [?ingh?Ta]; gh-w-y, 'cause to be bent towards'; and other which I will not include because the connection is less obvious but probably still valid. [ Moderator's note: This is irrelevant to the Indo-European list unless and until a genetic relationship between Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic can be demonstrated. --rma ] I assume your *K-U-B was a simple typing error because there are no roots of this form (*K-W-B is, of course, possible). 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, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Jul 13 21:59:56 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 16:59:56 -0500 Subject: *G^EN- Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Saturday, July 07, 2001 9:50 AM >> Now, it appears to me that you wish to reconstruct a *g^N-, > Balderdash! Haven't I argued all along there is no such thing? The root > is *g'enH, albeit with forms from *g'nH. [ moderator snip ] [PCR] Albeit it be maintained that that is what you argued, nevertheless, meseems it was capable of being interpreted thusly. 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, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138) From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jul 14 02:56:25 2001 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 19:56:25 -0700 Subject: Fw: *G^EN- In-Reply-To: <003001c10737$4e7d1320$fbf1fea9@swbell.net> Message-ID: At 05:51 PM 7/7/01 -0500, proto-language wrote: >Dear Stanley and IEists: >> Now, for the latter I would normally require extensions with different >> places of articulation. I consider that much of the variation of the -k~-g >> sort is due to inter-dialect borrowing, not to originally different >> (extended) roots. That is, root final consonants that differ only in >> voicing or aspiration, and are associated with virtually identical meanings >> are probably best treated as being post-PIE variants of one form. >[PCR] >I have never read this before, and am sceptical. How about a few examples? Interestingly, I just gave one example in my previous post. And I just found a few where Pokorny seems to almost handle it that way: *(s)keup-, *(s)keub(h)- (956) *slenk-, sleng- (961) *(s)meukh-, *(s)meug-, *(s)meugh- (971) Ah, here is a good one: 1. *(s)teu- with consonantal extensions "thrust, strike". A. *(s)teu-k-: Gr. tykos "hammer, chisel; battle-axe", tykizo "worked stone", ... OIr. toll "hollow" and "hole", Welsh twll "perforation", Breton toull "hole". ... Lett. tukste^t "knock", tauce^t "grind with a mortar and pestle" ... OIsl. styggr "angry, unfriendly", ... B. *(s)teu-g- OInd tuja'ti, tunja'ti, tunakti "presses, thrusts" ... MIr. tu:ag fem. "axe" and "arch", later stu:ag, tu:agaim "strike with an axe", ... Probably Lith. stu`ngis "stump", stu`kti "soar into the heights" ... Swed. stuka "overcome, subdue" ... ... OHG, MHG stoc, -ckes "rod, staff, tree branch", ... OE stocc "rod, branch, stump" ... [and so on for several more paragraphs]. >> I meant that I would reconstruct only those root forms that are multiply >> attested, at least for PIE. (The issue of an earlier stage is a separate >> matter). >[PCR] >What might some examples be? Oh, the majority of the roots in Pokorny :-) -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From connolly at memphis.edu Sat Jul 14 01:48:50 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 20:48:50 -0500 Subject: bishop Message-ID: Leo A. Connolly wrote: >> should already have been something like [is ti(m) bolin], >> as in current Greek. The vowels would be all wrong. And why on earth would >> the Greeks have given something meaning 'to the city' as the name of their >> capital? colkitto at sprint.ca wrote: > The capital was known as "i polis" the city for an extended period. > The study of toponyms is littered with such cases, cf. Scottish Gaelic > Gallaibh, Cataibh. (and much more good stuff) To which I say: The vowels are still all wrong, which renders the rest of it moot. Leo Connolly From connolly at memphis.edu Sat Jul 14 01:55:35 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 20:55:35 -0500 Subject: Descent vs. Influence Message-ID: "David L. White" wrote: > It has recently been claimed that influence is or may be taken as a > kind of descent. Let us look at an example of what that would mean. > Rumanian has some resemblances to Latin and some resemblances to > Albanian. Yet the resemblances are of fundamentally different kind. Its > resemblances to Latin have to do with the descent over time of the set of > arbitrary correspondences between sounds and meanings that any language must > have. Its resemblances to Albanian on the other hand relate not to > sound-meaning correspondences but rather to things like the distinctions > made, ordering of elements, and so on. Though these are both kinds of > resemblance, they are not the same kind of resemblance. Why one is called > descent and the other is called influence should be fairly obvious. If > influence is descent, then Rumanian is _by descent_ both a Romance and a > Balkan (for lack of a better term) language. But this is nonsense. To say > that influence is really a kind of descent because the two are both kinds of > resemblance is like saying that apples are really oranges because the two > are both kinds of fruit. No. There is simply no point in obliterating the > meanings of our terms and concepts. Where there is a difference of meaning > we are clearly justified in using different terms. I am reminded of the debate over the relative importance of nature and nurture in human development. Surely both are important, but everyone would agree that are utterly different processes. My biological child is by nature always my child, even if I leave all the nurturing to other people. While a nanny or day-care person may nurture him, that is influence, not descent. So too with language, and I'm as amazed as David White that anyone should confuse the two. Leo Connolly From stevegus at aye.net Sat Jul 14 04:43:09 2001 From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson) Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 00:43:09 -0400 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. Message-ID: Peter Gray wrote: > In both cases haitus between vowels is avoided by inserting "r". I think you're on to something. I am now convinced, of course, that these are WGmc in origin rather than Latin calques. The curious and otherwise unattested caseforms in where- and there- had me confused. Since none of these inverted forms seem to have been attested until Early Middle English at the earliest, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the written English forms in where- and there- represent a writer's interpretation of a dialect already losing -r in these contexts, or as you note, an epenthetic /r/ between vowels. This seems at least to explain the shapes of the related compounds in German. Now **hwafor and **thefor may not have been possible in Old English, since they probably would regularly yield the harder to analyse **hwavor and **thevor. The introduction of a consonant may have been as needful in early Middle English as it was in German in these contexts. -- When as Man's life, the light of human lust In socket of his early lanthorne burnes, That all this glory unto ashes must, And generation to corruption turnes; Then fond desires that onely feare their end, Doe vainely wish for life, but to amend. --- Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke From edsel at glo.be Sat Jul 14 09:48:20 2001 From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh) Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 11:48:20 +0200 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Saturday, July 07, 2001 4:31 PM >> "whereof," "whereas" and "therefore." >> Are these imitations or calques on Latin forms? [snip] > Preposition + [some case of "it"] --> da (= "there") + preposition > Preposition + [some case of "which"] --> wo (= "where") + preposition > In both cases haitus between vowels is avoided by inserting "r". [snip] > on it (auf) = darauf = da-r-auf = thereon [snip] > on which = worauf = wo-r-auf = whereon. > Peter [Ed Selleslagh] I have my doubts about the -r- as hiatus filling: in Dutch, the -r is always present, just like in English.. Ger. wo = Du. waar Ger. da = Du. daar So, I think it is the absence of -r- in German that requires an explanation. Ed. From alrivera at southern.edu Sat Jul 14 06:44:37 2001 From: alrivera at southern.edu (Muke Tever) Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 02:44:37 -0400 Subject: One Step at a Time Message-ID: >===== Original Message From Larry Trask ===== >> Are you saying there will be no systematic correspondences to be found >> among those "half-a-dozen languages"? >Yes; that's what I'm saying. Or, to be more precise, there will be no >systematic correspondences pointing to a common ancestor. There will be >all sorts of seemingly common elements, seemingly connected in strange and >puzzling ways, but those common elements will not pattern in the way that >we call 'systematic correspondences'. If we try to apply the comparative >method to the data, we will get some exceedingly strange results, but we >will not get any proto-language at all. We cannot possibly get a >proto-language, because there wasn't one. Suppose the parent of a "half-a-dozen languages" was a language that had two different classes of verbs: those from a language X that conjugated one way and those from a language Y that conjugated another way. (I think there was a Greek dialect of Arabic that had a feature like this mentioned on the list earlier?) The child languages would either: - retain this odd feature and both classes - reduce to one class, analogizing or dropping the forms of the other - lose both classes (Even in those that followed the latter two paths, irregularities--relics of the proto-system--might still survive.) Why shouldn't the comparative method be able to reconstruct the verbs into a "class 1" and "class 2" based on the evidence of the daughter languages, similar to the way that, say, gender of PIE words is reconstructed? Why shouldn't the comparative method be able to take these two classes, and discover that "class 1" forms correspond regularly to cognate forms in language X and its relatives, and that "class 2" forms correspond regularly to cognate forms in language Y and its relatives? If X, Y, and relatives didn't survive, other clues might lead to disparate input hypotheses. Of course, Ockham's Razor might cause these to be disregarded unless there are other clues, such as differing input phonologies("Why can 'class 1' verbs have *[?] or *[H9] in them, while 'class 2' verbs never do so?"). It may be implausible for such a language and resulting family to arise, but I don't see how the comparative method wouldn't be able to handle it should such a situation appear. *Muke! From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Jul 15 14:42:58 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 15:42:58 +0100 Subject: One Step at a Time In-Reply-To: <3B361343@webmail.southern.edu> Message-ID: --On Saturday, July 14, 2001 2:44 am -0400 Muke Tever wrote: > Suppose the parent of a "half-a-dozen languages" was a language that had > two different classes of verbs: those from a language X that conjugated > one way and those from a language Y that conjugated another way. (I > think there was a Greek dialect of Arabic that had a feature like this > mentioned on the list earlier?) > The child languages would either: > - retain this odd feature and both classes > - reduce to one class, analogizing or dropping the forms of the other > - lose both classes > (Even in those that followed the latter two paths, irregularities--relics > of the proto-system--might still survive.) > Why shouldn't the comparative method be able to reconstruct the verbs > into a "class 1" and "class 2" based on the evidence of the daughter > languages, similar to the way that, say, gender of PIE words is > reconstructed? > Why shouldn't the comparative method be able to take these two classes, > and discover that "class 1" forms correspond regularly to cognate forms > in language X and its relatives, and that "class 2" forms correspond > regularly to cognate forms in language Y and its relatives? OK. First of all, what is being asked about here is something entirely different from what Steve Long has been talking about. What Muke is asking about is a *single* language, with two classes of verbs, which gives rise to some daughters. If this happens, then there is no obstacle in principle. The comparative method will be able to reconstruct the ancestral language and its two classes of verbs -- providing only that sufficient evidence survives. Recall the familiar limitation on reconstruction: we cannot reconstruct a feature of the ancestral language which has disappeared without trace in all attested daughters. However, if the ancestral language contained two classes of verbs, and enough evidence of those two classes survives in the daughters, then we can reconstruct the original two. For this purpose, it makes no difference how the ancestral language itself came into existence, or how it acquired its characteristics. The comparative method has nothing to say about the origin of a proto-language, unless there are yet further languages that can be compared with it normally. > If X, Y, and relatives didn't survive, other clues might lead to > disparate input hypotheses. Of course, Ockham's Razor might cause these > to be disregarded unless there are other clues, such as differing input > phonologies("Why can 'class 1' verbs have *[?] or *[H9] in them, while > 'class 2' verbs never do so?"). > It may be implausible for such a language and resulting family to arise, > but I don't see how the comparative method wouldn't be able to handle it > should such a situation appear. Indeed. The method would have no difficulty in principle. But this is not the kind of thing that Steve Long keeps asking about. He is asking about a hypothetical cases in which there is no ancestral language, and an assembly of languages is constructed by selecting varying chunks of two languages. 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 Sun Jul 15 03:51:51 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 23:51:51 EDT Subject: Step Two Message-ID: Larry Trask wrote: <> I replied: <> In a message dated 7/13/01 11:46:41 PM, Larry Trask replied: <> So, just to be sure of what you are saying here: In your hypothetical you say " Basque and Spanish were to interact ... and give rise to half-a-dozen languages, each consisting of a different mixture of Basque elements and Spanish elements..." Let's say one of the "elements" you mention is Spanish finite verbal morphology. Let's say that this element is present in four of your half-dozen languages. Let's also say that this finite verbal morphology is identical in all four languages. (Once again, neither Basque nor Spanish is recorded by your hypothesis, so we are actually describing just four languages with the same verbal morphology.) I take it that you are saying that the presence of identical verbal morphology in these four languages would not constitute "systematic correspondence." Or, in your newer phrasing, that the presence of identical verbal morphology in these four languages would not constitute "systematic correspondence pointing to a common ancestor." Is this accurate as to what you are saying? Regards, Steve Long From acnasvers at hotmail.com Sat Jul 14 08:36:11 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 08:36:11 -0000 Subject: Uniformitarian Principle Message-ID: >[Phil Jennings] >> Gravity is a constant, but it is contingent on mass and distance. [Vidhyanath Rao] >The first part is actually an consequence of the UP. People (Dirac?) >have proposed theories in which the gravitational constant (and more >recently, the cosmological constant) changes over time. It is just that >such theories do not solve any pressing problem. [DGK] If memory serves, Dirac's proposal of G decreasing with the age of the universe was part of his Large Number Hypothesis (LNH), which to him was one possible solution to the "pressing problem" of ratios among various physical quantities (e.g. strength of gravity vs. electromagnetism). Theoretical physicists are seldom concerned with "practical" matters (deadlier weapons, better surveillance, etc.) though they may be called upon to contribute, like Archimedes or Oppenheimer. The real difficulty with theories of variable G is measuring its ancient values. One early proposal involved dinosaur tracks, but as there was no accurate way to determine the mass of the dinosaurs, no firm conclusions could be drawn. In my own ambitious youth, I considered careful measurements of oscillatory ripple-marks in ancient sandstones, of which I had some Middle Proterozoic specimens (dated to 1.6-1.7 billion years old). "You need to figure out how to put a flume onto a centrifuge", said a professor. The problem of determining how ripple-marks would vary under a slight (~1%) change in G exceeded my ability, and there are other undetermined factors with ancient ripples (depth of water, amount of suspended material, degree of adhesion of aggregate) which would swamp the effect of G. Hence the answer to "Is G a constant?" is a hearty "Non liquet". What has this to do with linguistics? The way I was schooled, the Uniformitarian Principle in geology states simply "The present is the key to the past". This does _not_ exclude variable G, catastrophic flooding, extinctions caused by asteroids, etc. It means that we do not posit physical forces in the past which do not operate today. Several list-members have invoked a linguistic UP, usually without any clear statement, and not always consistently. Larry Trask has been the staunchest advocate of the UP on this list, yet he has attacked the principle of net lexical stasis, apparently believing that the inventory of contentives in a language grows continuously (as claimed by Robert Whiting). Now, if the UP and LT's view of lexical growth are both correct, the alleged present inflationary situation has _always_ characterized languages, all of which are therefore, in principle, traceable back to a single word. (So was that word /N/, /?@N/, /tik/, or /bekos/? Never mind ... rhetorical question.) For the purposes of this list, I would suggest a statement of the UP roughly as follows: "The history and prehistory of languages used by anatomically modern humans involve no fundamental processes not occurring today." This leaves rather vague the matter of what "fundamental processes" are, like "physical forces" in geology. Specific examples of results might well be unique, so the UP is _not_ equivalent to the rather crude synchronic typological arguments often encountered in reconstructive debates. It deals with dynamics, not statics. An example to which the UP might be applied is the proposal that pre-PIE had ergative-absolutive case-marking. If the proponents can give clear examples of E-A languages turning into nominative-accusative languages during historical times, and in the process today, then the proposal is credible. If OTOH the record, and current behavior, show that E-A case-marking tends to develop out of N-A structure, then the ergative pre-PIE hypothesis is in trouble. From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Jul 14 16:53:44 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 11:53:44 -0500 Subject: Return of the minimal pairs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [snip] Runa, I've been told, had a three vowel system and, as I've been told, there has been a great degree of mutual influence between some Runa dialects and and local forms of Andean Spanish. In addition, in many regions of Latin America --especially in rural areas, there is confusion between unstressed /i/ & /e/ as well as between unstressed /o/ & /u/. My personal guess is that is mainly due to Portuguese or transitional forms of western Ibero-Romance. Rural Mexicans and Mexican-Americans are especially noted for this, even though, according to Luis Cabrera's Diccionario de aztequismos, Nahuatl has a 5-vowel sysem exactly like standard Spanish. Something analogous to "vellam non villam" occurs among rural Costa Ricans, who often pronounce closed syllable /e/ more like /ei/ as in /ereyDja, ere:Dja/ for the toponym /ereDja/ >>The e/i vacillation is very common, in many IE dialects, but also in the rest >>of the world, e.g. among Quechua housemaids in Peru: they always speak about >>'me premo' (mi primo, 'my cousin', a eufemism for their lover) when speaking >>Spanish. They also interchange o/u, like in 'me pichu' (mi pecho), another >>common thing anywhere. >I don't know anything about the phonology of Quechua, so I can only guess >that these vacillations probably represent the misfit in sound-ranges >between vowels in Quechua and Peruvian Spanish. What Varro noted was a >different phenomenon involving closed syllables in native speech. I suspect >what he meant by "vellam non villam" was that the "rustici" used an open [I] >in closed tonic syllables where "urbani" and "suburbani" had a closed [i]. A >parallel is provided by the American English rusticisms "britches" for > and "crick" for . >DGK Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com Mon Jul 16 14:43:52 2001 From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader) Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 10:43:52 -0400 Subject: Return of the minimal pairs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: 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.... Jim Rader > I don't know anything about the phonology of Quechua, so I can only guess > that these vacillations probably represent the misfit in sound-ranges > between vowels in Quechua and Peruvian Spanish. What Varro noted was a > different phenomenon involving closed syllables in native speech. I > suspect what he meant by "vellam non villam" was that the "rustici" used > an open [I] in closed tonic syllables where "urbani" and "suburbani" had a > closed [i]. A parallel is provided by the American English rusticisms > "britches" for and "crick" for . > DGK From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com Mon Jul 16 14:31:17 2001 From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader) Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 10:31:17 -0400 Subject: Word Order and verb endings In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > [Kreso Megyeral:] > The whole cathegory of definite conjugation in Hungarian is interesting, > since it's limited only to Ugric. If Mr. Aikio could give some more exact > data on the development of the cathegory, I would be very grateful. I'm not a Uralicist, but doesn't Mordva (not Ugric) have definite/indefinite conjugations, along with a fairly complete system of marking 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person objects on the verb? In Hungarian, as I recall, agreement beyond definiteness/indefiniteness is only possible with 1st sg. subject and 2nd sg. object, e.g., , "I see you." Jim Rader From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Jul 14 18:06:54 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 13:06:54 -0500 Subject: Anglo-Romani (Long, was Re: Genetic Descent) In-Reply-To: <000301c10987$b036c960$4f70fe8c@lucent.com> Message-ID: By coincidence, when this e-mail came in, I was looking at Carlos Claver?a's "Estudios sobre los gitanismos del espa?ol". There is a linguistic phenomenon in Spanish-speaking countries called calo/, which can mean "Romany, Hispano-Romani, Gypsy Spanish, thieves' argot, Andalusian slang, Mexican slang, Mexican-American slang, etc." Curiously enough, it's also called germani/a, since it also is said to include elements supposedly brought back by veterans of the Dutch Wars of the 16th century. A great deal of Spanish and Latin American slang is supposedly derived from calo/. The big problem is the actual origin of the lexicon. Just as Ibero-Romance linguistic historians tend to assign a Basque origin to every anciently-attested Ibero-Romance word of unknown origin. there is tendency to assign a Romany origin to just about every word of unknown origin that pops up in Andalusia and or in Peninsular popular Spanish after about 1500 or so. Most of what I've seen on Calo/ has been done by literary scholars rather than linguists and generally involves trying to hook up a word in Calo/ with something found in a dictionary of Romany or Sanskrit. There doesn't always seem to be much consistency (or precision) as to WHICH cal/o the investigators are talking about. And there don't seem to be many examples of complete sentences in what I've found, just discussions of discrete lexical items.. The result includes items such as Spanish guita, English geeta "money" --which I've seen claimed as of Romany origin by Hispanic scholars and as of Yiddish origin by at least one English-language source. I'm ignorant as to which, if either, is correct. I've even seen Spanish ganso "effeminate", which corresponds to American-English gunsel (which appears in the Maltese Falcon), as Romany when it's of Germanic origin. From what I've seen (which is not a whole lot), Calo/ goes a bit beyond relexification by perceiving nouns, verbs and adjectives as having interchangeable stems and differing only by morphological endings. Verbs seem to be formed by adding 1st conjugation (-ar) endings to any noun, often with an intensive -elar variant. In slang calo/ this is expanded, often humorously. to Spanish lexical items, e.g. <> "see you later (lit. 'we see one another')" < vidrio "glass (the material)". [snip] >Secondly, it seems that in cases where language is used for >self-identification, it is easier for syntax to be borrowed than (core) >vocabulary or morphemes. In fact, sprachbund phenomena are much more >about syntactic convergence than others. Yet we do not consider a >sprachbund to form a new family. This seems to be the case for what I've seen of calo/ >Turning now to Anglo-Romani: >H. W. Hatting wrote, in a message dated May 16, 2001 >> Let me put in some information I recollect from a seminar on Romani >> 1. English gypsies were speaking a version of Romani with *Romani* >> grammar when they immigrated into England; >> 2. Gradually, they started to use English among themselves [...] >> 3. Nowadays, English Romani (with Romani lexicon and English >> morphology) [...] >> English Romani goes farther than most other secret languages (like >> German "Rotwelsch" or Russsian "blat", in which the basic function >> words (pronouns, conjunctions, auxiliaries etc.) are normally from >> the "base" language which provides the morphology) [...] Yes, calo/ uses <> for Spanish <> "that (relative pronoun)" >Some browsing in the library (which I should have done sooner) suggests >that the intermediate stage was more complicated. "The dialect of >English Gypsies" by Smart and Crofton (1875, reprinted by Gale >Research, 1968, Detroit) talks about two "dialects", termed there "Deep >Romanes" and "Shallow Romanes" or the "vulgar dialect". The former >seems to preserve quite a bit of East European Romani morphemes (S&C >refer to "the Turkish" dialect, presumably the Romani of Gypsies in >(the European parts of?) the then Ottoman Empire), though there were >losses of categories not found in English. The latter dialect seems >closer to Blat etc than Hatting suggested. Here is the beginning of a >story "How Petalengo went to Heaven" retold in both dialects: [snip] > Mandi pookerova toot sar Petalengro > I tell-nonpast you how P. > Mandi<'ll> pooker tooti Petalengro see calo/ menda, mangue, man "I, me"; men "person", manu/s "man" > ghi/as kater mi Doovelesko keri. > go-past to God-possesive house > jal adr/e mi Doovel' kair. >[Notes: Doovel (God) is always prefixed with mi (my). Keri is adverb >from kair.] see calo/ devel, undevel, ondebel "god" >"O stor-herengro >bengesko koli ta jal adr/e o paani so piova" [the four legged >diabolic thing that swims in the water which I drink] (this by Wester >Boswell). see Calo/ mengue, bengue, beng "devil" Claver?a says it's from Sanskrit vyanga "limbless, maimed, cripple, toad, frog" >It seems that the inherited word for frog 'jamba'/'jomba' had >come to mean toad, though it was considered to be a form of 'jumper'. So, Professor Rao, I'd appreciate it if you'd take a look at calo/ Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From hwhatting at hotmail.com Mon Jul 16 15:47:12 2001 From: hwhatting at hotmail.com (Hans-Werner Hatting) Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 17:47:12 +0200 Subject: Anglo-Romani (Long, was Re: Genetic Descent) Message-ID: Dear list members, I've been away on business fo quite a while. Some interesting discussions seem to be going on, but I post only on this one (for now), as it concerns some earlier input by me. On Tue, 10 Jul 2001 17:29:45 -0400 Vidyanath Rao wrote: >I had asked, regarding Anglo-Romani as 'relexicalized English', how the >lexicon was preserved? I think that I need to be more detailed as to what I >was asking. I also took some time to try to get information on the language >of English Gypsies, and thought the results might be of interest to some. (snip) >H. W. Hatting wrote, in a message dated May 16, 2001 > > Let me put in some information I recollect from a seminar on Romani > 1. >English gypsies were speaking a version of Romani with *Romani* > grammar >when they immigrated into England; > 2. Gradually, they started to use >English among themselves [...] > 3. Nowadays, English Romani (with Romani >lexicon and English > morphology) [...] > English Romani goes farther than >most other secret languages (like > German "Rotwelsch" or Russsian "blat", >in which the basic function > words (pronouns, conjunctions, auxiliaries >etc.) are normally from > the "base" language which provides the >morphology) [...] >I interpreted this, when combined with the use of "relexification", to mean >that auxiliaries, their conjugation, endings etc continued from Stage 1 to >Stage 3 (with only the categories common to English and Romani being found) >while the speakers in the intermediate stage were completely ignorant of >Romani grammar. That I found, and still find, incredible. My question as to >how the lexicon was preserved was about bridging the first and third >stages. (snip) >Thus far the evidence seems to point to language death. The "new dialect" >is what those without adequate control of the ancestral language spoke, not >a "relexification". This is underlined by the fact that extent of the use >of English function words varied from person to person, with older persons >having more control. (snip) >In any case, contemporary Anglo-Romani looks like a case of arrested >language death or a resurrected language. I am not sure if "relexification" >is a suitable word to use, at least in the sense I understand it. After >all, I have never heard anyone call Sanskrit of drama dialog as 'Prakrit >relexified with Sanskrit' though in syntax the two are much closer than >either is to Sanskrit of Panini/early upanishads. Even in morphology, there >is variation in the amount of Prakrit influence when we look at the >puraanas or Buddhist texts. Long compounds of medieval Sanskrit are often >attempts of reconcile MIA syntax and rhythm to Panini's morphological >rules. >It should be noted that Kenrick who proposed that Anglo-Romani be >considered a register of English (and thus the name Romani English) still >endorsed a view similar to the above about the historical origin of >Anglo-Romani. This was the view which was conveyed to me at the time I did my (very limited) studies of Romani. >This should not affect how we view its history. Obviously, dying languages >and language shifts in progress are going to cause fuzzy-wuzzy type >problems for genetic classification, just as sound changes in progress >won't conform to the rules used in historical linguistics. If the process >is arrested by "schooling" (of formal or informal types), as seems to have >happened in Anglo-Romani, this can continue indefinitely. We should not >throw out the rules due such exceptional cases, nor should we attempt to >forcibly fit the cases to the rules without extensive investigation of the >history. Well, I'm certainly no expert on Angloe Romani (or any other variant of Romani). The central question for me would be: is Anglo-Romani *now* (a) a different language influenced to a big extent by English lexicon and grammar or (b) a group-language variant of English using lexicon from a non-English source? V. Rao has clearly shown that Romani went through a stage of strong English influence in the past. For me, the question to answer in order to classify Romani as (a) or (b) is whether there is an uninterrupted chain of "Romani-as-a-first-language" speakers which leads to the speakers of "old" Anglo-Romani to its speakers today (which means (a)), or whether the chain was broken, and Anglo-Romani became a dead language, learnt by its speakers when being initiated into the Romani community by elder people, so that a typical Anglo-Romani speaker would be first language English, and uses the Romani vocabulary only in cases when he/she wants to underline his/her affiliation to the Romani community and/or exclude outsiders (which means (b)). The last view was the one I got from what I learnt about Anglo-Romani, but I may be wrong. For the time being, I would propose the following distictions to bring a little order into the world of "fuzzy-wuzzy" ;-) 1. Full-blown Romani (the "old dialect"): certainly an independent, non-English language (despite some loanwords, loan-suffixes, and loan-syntax) , genetically IA; 2. Dying Romani: a language heavily influenced by English, but still being taught to children as a first language, would still be classified as genetically IA. The question is, to what extent does what is recorded as "new dialect" reflect such a stage of development, and to what extent it is simply the result of an attempt of Romanis raised in English to acquire and use the language of their elders? 3. Romani as a group-language used by English-as-first-language speakers as secret group language - a register of English, as would be any other group language substituting (say) Russian or Latin vocabulary for English. And there may be 4. Romani English - a variety of English Romani children might be raised with, being basically English, but containing lots of Romani words - the difference to (3) being that it is learnt as a first language, and that no systematical attempt is made to substitute Romani words for English. In summa, for me the dividing line is whether the language is acquired by children as a first language *and* the question of the independence of morphology. If (1) there is no un-borrowed core of morphology any more *and* (2) the transmission chain as a first language has been interupted, then a language ceases to be genetically independent of the language it has borrowed the morphology from and becomes a variety of it. From what I know, and V. Rao has shown, (1) is true for Anglo-Romani; whether (2) is true, has to be explored. Best regards, Hans-Werner Hatting From bronto at pobox.com Sun Jul 15 03:50:24 2001 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 20:50:24 -0700 Subject: fruit of the vine Message-ID: Douglas G Kilday wrote: > . . . Lat. orig. 'cluster of berries or grapes' . . . > later 'single grape'. Observe the parallel decollectivization > in Fr. < Lat. . And, in turn, Eng. < Fr. `bunch (of grapes)'. -- Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/ From proto-language at email.msn.com Sat Jul 14 22:15:58 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 17:15:58 -0500 Subject: The Single Parent Question Message-ID: Dear Larry and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Trask" Sent: Sunday, July 08, 2001 9:54 AM [ moderator snip ] [LT] > First, the methodology of comparative linguistics is not used in any other > discipline, and certainly not in physics, computing or economics. > Therefore Steve cannot possibly have any "familiarity" with it in other > disciplines. > Second, Joat is quite right in his response. This is not snobbishness: > it's just the plain truth. Steve has no right to question our methodology, > because he has no experience of it, and apparently no understanding of it. > The sole basis for Steve's objections appears to be that he doesn't like > our conclusions. [PCR] I do not wish to get into a prolonged discussion of this issue because, frankly, we all have better fish to fry. However . . . Albeit I certainly agree with much that you write, I continue to think it is a mistake to pretend that linguistic methodology is so unique. Any science that looks at different expressions of anything, and attempts to reason backwards to what the parent expression might be, is analogous to linguistics --- in my opinion. Moreover, I continue to believe that in many of his questions, Steve is questioning the quality of the logic employed not the data or actual methodology. It is obvious that you disagree. So shall we simply agree to disagree? 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, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138) From acnasvers at hotmail.com Sun Jul 15 05:41:16 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 05:41:16 -0000 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: Gordon Brown (1 Jul 2001) wrote: >For that matter, what about Eboriacum (isn't that the Latin for York?) >-- any possible relation to *ebur-? Yes. The second element is probably a Celtic collective, so the meaning of the toponym is 'abundance of yews' vel sim. Several places were called Eburodunum 'yew-fortress': modern Embrun (Hautes-Alpes), Yverdon-les-Bains (Switzerland), Bruenn/Brno (Moravia). Also there were Eburobriga 'yew-hill' (mod. Avrolles) and Eburomagus 'yew-field' (mod. Bram). DGK From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Jul 14 17:58:22 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 18:58:22 +0100 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: >> 1. The very well known case of Lat. 'fagus' (Eng. beech and similar in other >> Germanic, e.g. beuk in Du.) and Gr. 'phe:gss' (Dor. phagss) (Eng. oak) >> proves that different trees can be meant by a name from the same IE source, >> even when all the peoples involved were probably equally familiar with both >> species. Can anybody suggest how this could happen? It is worth acknowledging that it happens today. When I first moved from NZ to England, I had difficulties because no one in this country spoke English quite the way I did. Oh, the embarrassment of trying to ask for things in shops when no one knows your word for the object, and you don't know theirs! This happens also with common plants, birds, trees and such. Some are roughly the same, just enough to make you think they all might be, but then whammy! You realise that while you've been talking about one thing, everyone else has been understanding something very different. I am finally getting used to "slip roads" and "buns" (that was a very interesting conversation!) but beech trees still remain a muddle in my head. So the phenomenon is not just ancient. Peter From acnasvers at hotmail.com Thu Jul 19 06:27:39 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 06:27:39 +0000 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: [DGK] >> Conventional wisdom takes [Lat. ] as a Hamitic loan (from Egy. <3bw> >> vel sim.) which fails to explain the /r/ or the other peculiarities: nom. >> , gen. , adj. . The long/short vowel-alternation >> and -r/rn- behavior could hardly come from Hamitic, and loanwords are >> usually normalized to common forms. This looks like an IE word which has >> preserved two archaisms: the gradation seen in nom. 'foot', gen. >> and the alternation seen in nom. 'maple', adj. . >[Ed] >I don't think there is an -r/rn alternation. In my view, the -n after the -r >is an (abbreviated) adjective-forming suffix indicating origin, source etc. >Cf. Slavic -no (hladno, krasno...) or even Lat./Etrusc. -na. [DGK] You're right; this isn't really an "alternation", but the attachment of an adjectival suffix directly to a neuter stem, as seen also in Lat. 'brazen' < *ayes-neos. My views were poorly worded, and Patrick Ryan seems to think I was referring to -r/n- alternation, which is an entirely different matter. Nevertheless I think Lat. 'ivory' shows enough IE behavior to be considered a native IE word, whether or not it has cognates in I-Ir or other branches. Regarding PCR's objection that the long vowel in Lat. 'foot' arose by compensative lengthening from *peds instead of gradation: Palmer gives this as an example of gradation. Apart from this crude appeal to authority, we may note 'one-handled sacrificial vessel', gen. , which shows that Latin d-stems did _not_ regularly undergo compensation of *-ds in the nom. sg. From acnasvers at hotmail.com Sun Jul 15 09:46:30 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 09:46:30 -0000 Subject: The Single *PIE Village Theory Message-ID: Steve Long (28 Jun 2001) wrote: >What's interesting in this and the quote above [from DGK's postings] is the >notion that *PIE is >being located in a single village. >Is this the current thinking on the geographic distribution of *PIE during >the time it was *PIE (as against Pre-PIE or PIE in the process of breaking >up)? >Does anyone on the list have a problem with this view? Mallory talks about >the territorial size needed for PIE but I seem to remember it was a bit >larger than one village. I don't believe I stated or implied that my examples of the "same tribe" or "village like Mayberry" were intended to represent the entire PIE-speaking population at any time. They were directed at one of your earlier comments to the effect that "what you and I call trees in the next valley" might be different. The expression "next valley" indicates that "you" and "I" in your comment belong to the same immediate community, not to different tribes from opposite ends of PIE-land. >In any case, my problem with this, with regard to the history of the yew word >is simple. What happens when the village/tribe splits up and a part moves to >a new location, not far away, and there are yew trees there? They still speak >the same language, but now some of them have the yew (and yew word) and some >don't? Does this mean that the next extension out of the original village >could discover the yew on its own and give it even another name? And so >forth? So that by the time we hit the first 20 IE speaking villages, most >coming from the yewless core, we could have twenty different names for the >yew? This is an extreme case of what I originally argued: that PIE-speakers were unfamiliar with Taxus baccata, so there were several "discoveries" of the tree by successive migrations from the yewless core into western Europe, yielding the observed pattern of diversity in names. Again, I don't recall saying that these migrations were undertaken by single villages; they were more likely Magyar-style eruptions. >I think that what would happen - as the yew proved useful for different >purposes - is that trade words would develop that traveled not with the >language but with the products and processes. So even after *PIE split up, >there would still be new common words to be shared by the newly distinct >languages, perhaps even before the particular sound changes that occurred >later in the yew word(s). I don't disagree. In fact, PIE-speakers may well have had a word denoting 'yew-wood' or 'bow-wood' obtained by trade, and quite possibly this was *takso-. But the sight of living yew-trees would have been a novelty for the migrants, demanding a new word. For northern groups, this was *eiwo-, which I regard as IE 'berry-tree', competing in the west with pre-IE *ebur-. Greek has (unless you have found an objection); I don't know whether it's IE or not. Latin for the _tree_ may represent supersession of an earlier *axus 'yew-tree' by a derivative of the inherited word for 'yew-wood' (cf. West Romance reflexes of Lat. , not , for 'oak-tree'). The form *axus is continued by Mod. Venetic , Swiss Fr. , with accreted article in Tusc. , Lomb. & Piem. . >In fact, the functionality of language demands a little more than connecting a >word to a tree, since that is plainly not how language works at this level. >The members of a pre-literate village share names and give names on an >as-needed basis and functionality may give different names to the same object >or the same name to different objects as is necessary. To do otherwise would >be dysfunctional. Specialists only need to know specialized knowledge such as >specific tree terms and to have it otherwise would be a misallocation of >resources. If we all had to learn the exact meaning of all plant and >plant-related words in English, we'd spend many years doing nothing else. It wouldn't take many years to learn _common_ phytonyms, which is what this whole discussion is about, and you know it. On the one hand you argue for the communality of words through trade, on the other for a chaotic lexical situation at the village-level. I'll tell you what. If you can show me a recognized PIE tree with a European naming pattern comparable to that of Taxus baccata, I'll publicly admit that my efforts to use yews for the IE homeland problem were in vain. DGK From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Sun Jul 15 14:46:11 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 15:46:11 +0100 Subject: Michif In-Reply-To: Message-ID: --On Sunday, July 8, 2001 4:17 pm -0500 Rick Mc Callister wrote: > How does Michif compare to Chinook jargon? Well, for one thing, Michif is a mother tongue, while Chinook Jargon never was. > I don't think Chinook Jargon was used as anything other than a > trade language but I may be mistaken I believe that is right. 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 parkvall at ling.su.se Tue Jul 17 09:03:39 2001 From: parkvall at ling.su.se (Mikael Parkvall) Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 11:03:39 +0200 Subject: Michif In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rick McCallister wrote: >How does Michif compare to Chinook jargon? For me as a pidginist/creolist, the difference is huge. Although both laymen and linguists usually equate "mixed language" with "pidgin" or "creole", I would say that they have little to do with one another, except in that both are possible (but rare) products of language contact. Michif is a "mixed" or "intertwined" language par excellence. NPs from French, and VPs (minus the NPs) from Cree. Neither component has undergone any significant simplification, so that Michif nouns, for instance, have two lexically inherent genders -- both the masculine/feminie of French, and the animate/inanimate of Cree. It also has obviate marking, front rounded vowels, and other crosslinguistically marked stuff. A pidgin or a creole, on the other hand, is characterised by reduction/simplification, if you ask me (though this is no longer a politically correct view in creolistics, which no longer recognises any difference between the development of, say, Tok Pisin from English, and the development of, say, French from Latin (sic)). A pidgin or a creole need not necessarily be very mixed in any sense. Chinook Jargon is a pretty good case of a pidgin. Though most of the lexicon is from Chinook, most of the quirks of the lexifier's grammar have been lost. Anyone who has ever looked at Amerindian languages of this area (the Pacific Northwest) must have noticed how fearsomely inflected they are. And yet, Chinook Jargon was as nicely analytic as can be. >Many years ago I saw a small book on Chinook Jargon that explained >that the grammar was radically different from Chinook and that the >vocabulary was largely derived from French --somewhere around 40% if I >remember correctly. From what remember, French derived nouns included the >feminine article <>. Different samples of CJ have different lexical composition, depending on where, when and by whom it was spoken. In particular, the English part of its lexicon increased as the languages died. Roughly speaking, the CJ lexicon was around 50% Chinook, 20% French, 20% English and 5%+ Nootka. Some of the French nouns, but not all, include incorporation of . >I don't think Chinook Jargon was used as anything other than a >trade language but I may be mistaken This is basically correct, though it did nativise in one place, namely the Grand Ronde reservation in Oregon. /MP * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Mikael Parkvall Institutionen f?r lingvistik Stockholms Universitet SE-10691 STOCKHOLM +46 (0)8 16 14 41, +46 (0)8 656 68 24 (home) Fax: +46 (0)8 15 53 89 parkvall at ling.su.se Creolist Archives: http://www.ling.su.se/Creole From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Tue Jul 17 16:48:09 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 17:48:09 +0100 Subject: Sound changes versus sound changes In-Reply-To: <6d.1624b343.286ed358@aol.com> Message-ID: --On Saturday, June 30, 2001 3:01 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > I saw somewhere a tongue-in-cheek piece where it was predicted that by > 2020 the whole French language would be reduced to one single sound - > "en" - but that French would continue to be written as it is now. The > truth behind the humor captures what some think is the extreme nature of > the French phonological system. There is nothing "extreme" about French phonology, which in fact is rather unremarkable by world standards. It is merely that French is rather more different in pronunciation from Proto-Romance than are most Romance languages. > Despite how well the developments that > produced French can be traced and the underlying morphology is IE, the > cumulative phonological system seems worlds apart from for example > German. The objective contrast between hearing French and hearing German > simply does not suggest a close relationship. Or perhaps any > relationship at all. This is hardly surprising. French and German are not very closely related. Their last common ancestor was probably PIE, spoken at least 6000 years ago. Anyway, what languages "sound like" is not a linguistic fact of any interest. Spanish and French are rather closely related, but they sound very little like each other. The Spanish of northern Spain sounds very much like modern Greek -- a speaker who knows neither can easily confuse these two -- yet Spanish and Greek are only very distantly related. And Spanish sounds quite a lot like Basque, yet these two are not related at all. Spanish is exceedingly closely related to Portuguese, but the two languages do not sound similar: to my ears, Portuguese sounds more like Russian than it sounds like Spanish. And Galician is so closely related to Portuguese that some linguists prefer to regard the two as dialects of a single language -- yet Galician sounds far more like Spanish than it does like Portuguese. The staccato Spanish of northern Spain doesn't sound all that much like the drawled Spanish of rural Mexico -- or, for that matter, like the rhythmically different Spanish of southern Spain. To a non-speaker of English, I imagine that the English of Brooklyn and the English of Glasgow -- not to mention the English of Mississippi -- sound like wholly different languages. The Greek of Cyprus sounds far more like Turkish than it sounds like mainland Greek. The first time I heard Cypriot Greek spoken, I was convinced I was listening to Turkish, and I was bewildered because I couldn't understand any of it (I used to work in Turkey). > If morphology, grammar and syntax are the least likely things to be > borrowed (a la DLW's finite verbs) Dubious. > then perhaps they are the least likely to change, Clearly not so. > and therefore are the features that least reflect accurately > rates or degrees of change. Sorry; this makes no sense. If the grammar of a language changes dramatically, then the language has changed greatly, and we cannot pretend otherwise merely because the pronunciation hasn't changed much. > And perhaps the phonological gap is a truer > measure, if there is any reliable measure at all. There is no acceptable metric for determining degree of change. But it is certainly out of the question to assign phonological change arbitrarily greater weight than any other kind of change. [on Pama-Nyungan] > But I want to point out that there are equally members of that family that > appear not to have changed much at all. I don't think so. Most Pama-Nyungan languages have not undergone the exceptionally dramatic phonological changes called 'initial-dropping', but they have still undergone plenty of change. It is true that Proto-Pama-Nyungan * 'dog' survives as 'dog' in modern Yidiny. But then it is also true that PIE * 'nephew' survives as 'nephew' in modern Romanian. However, we should not conclude that Romanian is practically unchanged from PIE: it isn't. > In fact, the high convergence > percentages theorized by Dixon were meant to account for the large amount > of commonality between many of those languages. As I understand it, > those who disagree with him about the degree of convergence have argued > instead for a high degree of conservatism in those Pama-Nyungan > languages. And that does not mean that those languages did not change or > even change a lot. It's rather that as much as they did change, they > never change much. Well, there are certain typological characteristics which have proved to be stable in most Pama-Nyungan languages other than those undergoing initial-dropping. But P-N languages have still undergone a very significant degree of change. Neighboring P-N languages are typically not mutually comprehensible at all. > And, perhaps, even if some IE languages show a certain amount of > "similarity" in sound systems, it in no ways means they did not change > for 3000 years before attestation. It may be that they changed often, > but through all those changes they never changed that much. Similarity in sound systems is not a good metric for degree of divergence. 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 Sat Jul 14 08:45:42 2001 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 04:45:42 EDT Subject: Proto-Celtic & Proto-Fenno-Ugric in Herodotus and C. Ptolemy Message-ID: In a message dated 7/14/01 2:00:28 AM Mountain Daylight Time, g_sandi at hotmail.com writes: > Research indicates that there was some shared geographical areas in Central > Europe -- well, if you're referring to Magyars when you say "Hungarian", it would be extremely difficult for them to cross paths with the prehistoric Celts, since the Magyars didn't arrive in Europe until the 9th century CE. There were certainly Celts in what later became Hungary, but the inhabitants at the time were Thracian, Sarmatian, and later Germanic and Slavic. The area was largely Slav-speaking when the Magyars showed up in the 800's CE. There is clear evidence of PIE contact with proto-Ugrian, and of course later contacts between Indo-Iranian, Slavic, Baltic, and Germanic and various F-U languages, but the Celts are about as unlikely a candidate as you could find for such interaction, since they were a south-central European group and their extension eastwards in historic times didn't come anywhere near the F-U speakers of their time. From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Jul 15 06:16:39 2001 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 09:16:39 +0300 Subject: Omniscience [was Re: German (was:Dubya and before that, minimal pairs)] In-Reply-To: <3B395A88.CE56139@memphis.edu> Message-ID: On Tue, 26 Jun 2001, Leo A. Connolly wrote: > Robert Whiting wrote: >> ... I had a German-speaking >> colleage who pronounced English as [w] (as in "willage"). When I >> pointed out to her that she could easily pronounce the [v] sound in >> she said, "Oh, no, German doesn't have that sound -- we use >> for [f] like in . Well, what can you say? Now if 'village' >> were written *, she would have had no trouble pronouncing it. > Sure she would have. The fact is, some Germans pronounce as > labiodental [v], while others use a bilabial fricative. When speaking > English, the latter use the bilabial fricative in lieu of the English > bilabial glide /w/ and the labiodental fricative /v/. Since this is > obviously wrong in each instance, but English has no bilabial fricative, > English speakers usually believe these Germans have said [v] instead of > /w/ and [w] instead of /v/, when in fact they said neither. Spelling > had nothing to do with her pronunciation problems. My only problem with this scenario is how do it know? How does this highly intelligent sound know that when it appears in English it has to sound like [v] but when it appears in English it has to sound like [w]? And if this sound is that smart, won't it eventually take over the world? It has already made my Austrian colleague into a German. But it is good to know that it is possible to pronounce so apodictically about the speech habits of someone that one has never met or conversed with. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From X99Lynx at aol.com Tue Jul 17 17:28:19 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 13:28:19 EDT Subject: Thresholds of Comprehensibility Message-ID: In a message dated 7/14/01 2:12:22 AM, anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi writes: << At least of earlier in this discussion, the issue was the "rate of change" in a *language*, not in the phonological manifestations of some individual lexical items. Are you suggesting that the rate of language change could be measured by counting sound changes in individual words? And what "particular words" are you referring to? >> This happens. In the course of these discussions, things switch around so much, I end up on the other side of the fence. My position all along has been that "linguistic rate of change" (the words are Larry Trask's) is not a coherent concept and therefore deserves no scientific "uniformity through time" status. And that therefore it says nothing scientifically about the timeline of IE Language. My offer of how a statistical rate of change might go was not so much to advocate one, but hopefully describe how such an analysis might go - to be scientifically valid. Whether it's feasible or not is another matter. Your post appears to be saying, on the other hand, two different things. On one hand you write: <> (Caps are mine.) Then on the other hand you write: <<"rate of change" in a *language*, not in the phonological manifestations of some individual lexical items... Note that counting sound changes in *individual* word-forms is irrelevant, if the "rate of change" of the *language* is to be measured...>> Hopefully, you see the problem in this. You appear to be saying that you DON'T know what rate of change in a language is, but you are SURE that it cannot be measured by changes in individual sounds or words. Now, I don't know whether the latter is true or not. I think that one would have to do some real measuring among recorded languages to know the answer to that. But it is not logical to eliminate such a way of defining "rate of change in a language", when you say you have no definition of those terms yourself. <> BUT "key indicators" are established fact in statistical science. Yes, you can measure and predict the movement of whole systems based on certain "parts" of that system. The way you arrive at what these indicators are is not essentially theoretical. It is empirical. You do before and after's on existing systems until you find those elements which best correlate with the changes of the system as a whole. (This is the way, for example, we calculate the age of planetary bodies through the measurement of isotopic half-lives.) Then you extend those measures to unattested systems. The same applies to the "what is a sound change" question. For these purposes, relevant sound change definition comes from what actually would work best in terms of producing an accurate outcome with regard to time of change in recorded languages. There may in fact be no averageable correlation between time and particular sound changes. But that is not something you decide based on theory. That is something you would test, before you come to that conclusion. So, going back to my point, I think you've reached conclusions that are way ahead of what you can say on a simple logical basis. You wrote: <> I think this is wrong. What I was suggesting was that "dissimilarity" can be measured on an objective basis. (Or as objective as human subjects can be measured - which is objective enough.) One definition of dissimilarity that can obviously be measured is the point at which changes cross over into incomprehensibility. And this would apply to sounds, grammar and even syntax. And though the measure is binary (yes or no), binary data can carry enormous meaning when viewed cumulatively, across a language system. < *v obviously creates less dissimilarity between cognates than a change *w > *q.>> A good question to ask yourself is why you agree. Is it because of the difference in wave patterns on an oscilloscope? Or is it because of the musculature it takes to make those sounds? Is it just "how different" they sound? Or how different they sound to the people who actually live with the language? I'd suggest that you consider that the real test of difference might be in the ears of mathematically averaged listeners. If listeners expect w > q, perhaps w > v might be more "dissimilar." (Benji Ward - who I keep going back to - noted that there is an important difference between how a sound change originates/developes versus how it spreads. If w > q were somehow spreading fashionably, then w > v might sound odd indeed. In the ears of statistically sampled listeners.) Regards, Steve Long From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Jul 19 21:04:47 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 17:04:47 EDT Subject: Descent vs. Influence Message-ID: In a message dated 7/13/2001 12:28:10 AM, dlwhite at texas.net writes: << Rumanian has some resemblances to Latin and some resemblances to Albanian. Yet the resemblances are of fundamentally different kind. Its resemblances to Latin have to do with the descent over time of the set of arbitrary correspondences between sounds and meanings that any language must have. Its resemblances to Albanian on the other hand relate not to sound-meaning correspondences but rather to things like the distinctions made, ordering of elements, and so on. >> So, is that what you consider the difference between descent and influence? - sound-meaning correspondences = descent distinctions made, ordering of elements and so on = influence So where one finds systematic "sound-meaning correspondence", are those forms indicative of "descent?" I just want to be sure that is what you are saying. <> Well, so far, you haven't defined the difference EXCEPT as a conclusion. Unless you consider the above a definition of descent. Lets' ask the question again. When "resemblances" show systematic correspondence, how does one distinguish the difference again? <> It's all a matter of POV. Consider the perspective that it might be front-sliding. Regards, Steve Long From acnasvers at hotmail.com Fri Jul 20 09:47:29 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 09:47:29 +0000 Subject: Uniformitarian Principle Message-ID: Phil Jennings (2 Jul 2001) wrote: >The basic subject here is the "rate of change" of human languages, and >whether that rate itself changes (accelerates / decelerates) over time, as >a consequence of other factors that have changed over human history. In >physics, we are pleased to know that the rate of (locational) change of >falling objects increases with mass and decreases with distance, in >accordance with laws described by Isaac Newton. Gravity is a constant, >but it is contingent on mass and distance. This is a rather severe mangling of Newtonian mechanics, and in fact contradicts Galileo's observation that gravitational acceleration is independent of the falling object's mass, which Newton neatly explains. Next time, consult an introductory textbook of calculus-based physics. >Philosophically, language belongs in two places, (1) in the individual >toolbox of each language speaker, and (2) in the community of those who >use language to understand each other. If the rate of change of human >languages is governed by laws to do with individual ears, brains, mouths, >vocal cords, et cetera, and these physical attributes have not changed >over thousands of years, then the rate of change of human languages can >intelligently be assumed to be constant. That wouldn't be a very intelligent assumption. Nature is full of discontinuous processes like earthquakes, landslides, and lightning bolts which do _not_ involve any change in physical laws. >If the rate of change of human languages is governed by laws to do with how >often humans talk to others in their community, to strangers, to people with >different areas of expertise, and so forth, then as society gets more complex >and populations increase, the rate of change will accelerate or decelerate >through time. It has been tacitly assumed that a _single_ rate of change is valid. Language has many aspects, and there is no _a priori_ reason to suppose that the rates of change of all subsystems of a given language are functions of a single parameter. Nor is there an _a priori_ reason to assume or imply that rates of change should accelerate or decelerate smoothly. >Larry Trask has given us the history of Basque as an instance where the >rate of language change decreased as Basque society grew increasingly >engaged with a complex world. This is certainly the opposite of what I'd >expected, in arguing for a gradual increase in the rate of change of >languages over time, which is what I'd theorized in a prior post. >However, in a contrary way, it is also evidence for hypothesis (2), >substituting deceleration for acceleration. I suspect that Larry Trask >would like to be armed with a hundred instances of rates of change >veering one way or the other without respect to any societal factors >whatever. This would be evidence that rates of change are truly random, >and uniformitarianism is the best way to smooth across several millennia >of random ups and downs. No, that would merely be evidence that rates of linguistic change are independent of societal factors. It wouldn't tell us that the rates are truly random (i.e. independent of _all_ factors). Larry Trask's example of Basque, John McLaughlin's example of Comanche, and the well-known Great Vowel Shift of Middle English have two things in common. They involve systematic shifting of phonemes over a finite interval (50-100 years) and no apparent correlation with external (non-linguistic) factors. This type of systematic articulatory shift gives quantifiable rates of change, since the average position of the relevant articulatory organ for each phoneme actually moves some slight distance per decade in the standard speaker's head. These shifts also appear to be practically decoupled from other ongoing _linguistic_ phenomena like syntactic shifts and lexical turnover. Hence they provide a good opportunity for adapting a physical model to one particular class of linguistic changes. It is qualitatively clear that the rates of change in the phonemic shifts mentioned are strongly non-uniform: the episodes of rapid shifting have definite beginnings and endings. Someone has used the term "punctuated equilibria" from the Eldridge-Gould model of speciation, which in my opinion doesn't belong here. Analogies between evolutionary biology and linguistic change are very poor, not least because language is inherently incapable of reaching equilibrium. Instead, phonemic shifting suggests classic stick-slip behavior, or Reid's elastic-rebound theory of earthquakes. In a given language, certain phonemes are under "stress" to change position, but are held in place by "static friction". At low values of "stress", the "force" tending to move the phonemes is balanced by an opposing "frictional force". At some higher value of "stress", this "static frictional force" is overcome and movement begins. Its indefinite acceleration is prevented by "dynamic frictional force". As the phonemes move, the "stress" is reduced until its "force" is overcome by the opposing "dynamic frictional force", bringing things to a halt, back into the regime of "static frictional force". I used the annoying quotation marks because the actual quantities in phonemic shifts are only _analogous_ to the mechanical ones whose names I have borrowed. Nevertheless the linguistic quantities are real and, in principle at least, measurable. Instead of trying to beat professional comparativists at their own game, this is the sort of thing Steve Long should be doing, since his voice has been the loudest in calling for the quantification of historical linguistics. >This is an application of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to language >change. We don't know => we can't know => there are no consistent factors >out there to be known. It's odd to find linguists reconciled to >randomness re. rates of language change, when they delight in systems and >consistency in all other areas. This mumbo-jumbo is no application of Heisenberg's principle. Consult a junior-level or senior-level modern-physics textbook, not watered-down popular Sunday-supplement hogwash. >Also, the evidence in Larry's hundred instances is anecdotal in the >absence of a consensual measuring system, and some anecdotes, however >entertaining, will be wrong. Well, I hope the examples of systematic phonemic shifts offer at least a starting point for an objective measuring system. If it turns out possible to deal with simple phonemic shifts this way, then similar applications of physical models _may_ work for some of the other aspects of historical linguistics. DGK From r.piva at swissonline.ch Fri Jul 20 07:43:26 2001 From: r.piva at swissonline.ch (Renato Piva) Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 15:43:26 +0800 Subject: bishop Message-ID: 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 From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Wed Jul 25 16:36:34 2001 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 19:36:34 +0300 Subject: bishop In-Reply-To: <013a01c0f5b2$d394c4e0$b402703e@edsel> Message-ID: [Sorry for all the quoted material (and even doubly quoted). It was the only way I could see to tie the whole thing together.] On Fri, 15 Jun 2001, Eduard Selleslagh wrote: > 4. We also have cattus > gat(t)o, and in a very different context, but > under the same constraints I believe, Konstantinopolis > Istambul, a > far too complex name for the invading Turks, who didn't understand a > word of Greek. They just kept the two syllables that caught most > attention STAN-POL, plus voicing and adding an epenthetic vowel to > make it pronouncible to them. (Like 'e-special' in Spanish). I wonder > if they ever realized its true meaning (Christian emperor > Constantine's city), because otherwise they would probably have > changed it. Note that the reconstruction as a derivation from 'eis > te:n polin' is a 19th c. linguist's fable based on the mistaken idea > that the same rules apply when a word jumps between two unrelated (or > perceived to be so) languages, as during the historical evolution of > the same language. Then, on Tue, 26 Jun 2001 petegray wrote: > Why do you claim, Ed, that eis te:n polin > istambul involves rules > jumping languages? Wasn't the contemporary Greek pronunciation > /i:sta:mbulin/? It would simply be taken over as a meaningless > phonetic string. And on Mon, 2 Jul 2001 12:51:46 +0200 Eduard Selleslagh replied: > I never said that: I said Konstantin?polis > Istambul was the > consequence of jumping languages, and that 'eis te:n polin' was a 19th > century invention (reconstruction, without any attestation) by > linguists that thought that when a word is loaned by another, very > different, language, the same rules as in language evolution should > apply. > In Byzantine (and New) Greek 'eis te:n p?lin' would have been (would > be) pronounced 'istimb?li(n)', with two i's and o instead of u. The > Turkish accent is on 'a' (Ist?mbul > Ger. Stambul), which shows that > the I is prothetic, while the derivation from 'eis te:n p?lin' would > have had the accent on the 'u' (Istamb?l). Even less than half a > century ago, many Classicists studying ancient Greek hardly ever > bothered about the notoriously capricious (to westerners, that is) > Greek accent. To the Turks, all the syllables of Konstantinopolis > apparently formed a meaningless string, as I noted before. And on Mon, 2 Jul 2001 Leo A. Connolly wrote: > petegray wrote, in response to Ed Selleslagh: >> Why do you claim, Ed, that eis te:n polin > istambul involves rules >> jumping > languages? Wasn't the contemporary Greek pronunciation >> /i:sta:mbulin/? It would simply be taken over as a meaningless >> phonetic string. > should already have been something like [is ti(m) > bolin], as in current Greek. The vowels would be all wrong. And why > on earth would the Greeks have given something meaning 'to the city' > as the name of their capital? Ed is right: that etymology is a fable, > but it's so bad I'd be reluctant to blame it on a linguist. It's in a > class with _tip_ 'gratuity' < T(o) I(nsure) P(rompt) S(ervice), or > **** < F(or) U(nlawful) C(arnal) K(nowledge). It's amazing how many > people accept such things, but linguists shouldn't. And finally, on Fri, 6 Jul 2001 colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr) wrote: > Pete Gray: >> Why do you claim, Ed, that eis te:n polin > istambul involves rules >> jumping languages? Wasn't the contemporary Greek pronunciation >> /i:sta:mbulin/? It would simply be taken over as a meaningless >> phonetic string. > why is this a problematic explanation? Because it is unlikely to have happened. Not that it is impossible as a theoretical concept, but the outcome is wrong. Failure to perceive the semantic content of a string of foreign phonemes in place names (especially if it isn't known to the local inhabitants) is such a commonplace that that it is the most common (and likely) explanation of why place names generally aren't translated into other languages, simply transcribed and phonetically adjusted. Pentti Aalto once told me a story about a lake in Karelia which the locals called simply 'j?rvi' "the lake". Then the Russians came and asked "what is the name of the lake?" They were told, and so the name in Russian became Ozero J?rvi ("Lake Lake"). Then the Germans came and asked what the name of the lake was and were told and so the German name of the lake became Ozeroj?rvisee ("Lake Lake Lake"). I don't know if the story is true or not, but Pentti Aalto told a good story. However, if one looks at the old British survey maps of Iraq, one finds a number of oft repeated names of tells such as Tell Mabarif ("I don't know") and Tell Shu'ismo ("what's its name"). The surveyors asked the locals for the names of the tells and simply recorded their answers. And I rather think that that is how the Turks came to call the city Istanbul. But not by wreaking havoc on a putative 'eis te:n p?lin'. > Leo A. Connolly: >> should already have been something like [is ti(m) >> bolin], as in current Greek. The vowels would be all wrong. And why >> on earth would the Greeks have given something meaning 'to the city' >> as the name of their capital? > The capital was known as "i polis" the city for an extended period. But "i polis" doesn't look very much like Stambul (or even Istanbul) at all. > The study of toponyms is littered with such cases, cf. Scottish Gaelic > Gallaibh, Cataibh. My Gaelic isn't very good. Do these mean "into the city"? >> Ed is right: that etymology is a fable, but it's so bad I'd be >> reluctant to blame it on a linguist. > It's actually rather a good one. There's an article in Language: > Tiersma, Peter. 1982. "Local and General Markedness". L 58: 832-849. > whch deals precisely with such cases, where placenames or nouns > denoting location locative or directonal forms become unmarked Yes, and the ancient Assyrians always referred to Assur as 'a:lum' "the city", but nobody else did. There is simply no need to derive Istanbul from any form of Greek 'polis' other than its original one: Konstantinopolis. Anything else is an Occam's Razor violation. It is extremely common cross-linguistically for place names, especially long ones (over about three syllables) to become shortened by processes that have nothing to do with regular sound changes in the language involved. It is a sort of way of accommodating a natural tendency (frequently used forms tend to be easy to articulate). It is also in keeping with a general tendency to associate the unmarked form with the most common function. Such processes can involve the simplification of clusters, the elision of one or more syllables or syllable segments from the beginning, the end, or out of the middle or a combination of any of these. When we observe such developments as: Bethlehem --> Bedlam Alabama --> 'Bama Birmingham --> Brum K?rf?rstendamm --> Ku'damm Worcester --> Wooster Magdalene --> Maudlin (pronunciation only) Mississippi --> Missisip Missouri --> Mizzou Lancaster --> Lancs Lugdunum --> Lyon Neapolis --> Napoli Philadelphia --> Philly Indianapolis --> Indy etc,, etc., etc. it makes it easy to see how Istanbul could have gotten the way it is. Regardless of how these transformations may have come about, if San Francisco can become Frisco, I can see no reason to doubt that Konstantinopolis could have become StaNbul or StaNboli (N for [m] or [n] depending phonotactics of the language involved) in the common speech of the time (however it may have been written). Thus German has Stambul and Turkish has Istanbul with the normal prothetic vowel used to resolve initial consonantal clusters (cf. Smyrna --> Izmir, etc.). My conclusion would be that Konstantinopolis > Stambul/Istanbul has nothing to do with jumping languages or with any putative derivation from 'eis te:n p?lin'. And I would doubt that it was the Turks who took the two most prominent syllables of an unanalyzable phonetic string for the name of the city. I expect that that happened long before the Turks got there. The Turks probably just took the current unmarked form, Stamboli (or the like) and adapted it to their own phonology. >> It's in a class with _tip_ 'gratuity' < T(o) I(nsure) P(rompt) >> S(ervice), or **** < F(or) U(nlawful) C(arnal) K(nowledge). > No,it isn't. Not quite. The difference is that these examples are really just jokes, a form of word play. I once wrote several joke papers for a friend (a shortschrift, so to speak) that abounded in entities such as the Sam Houston Institute of Technology and the Free University of Central Kentucky. On the other hand, 'eis te:n p?lin' as the derivation of Istanbul looks more like what I would classify as a (semi-)learn?d folk etymology. Done by someone who could recognize the similarity of the Greek words to Istanbul, but who was unaware of the phonological difficulties, and especially unaware of the fact that there is no need to account for the prothetic vowel of Istanbul with a Greek form. That is the one thing about Istanbul that is unmistakably Turkish. And if you don't need this, then the whole thing just falls apart. I would tend to blame it on a philologist familiar with Greek but not Turkish rather than a linguist. >> It's amazing how many people accept such things, but linguists >> shouldn't. > Yes they should. It's part of the warp and woof of linguistics, much > more so than various obscurantist mathematical formulations. Linguists should take cognizance of them, but not be taken in by them. Word play can provide important insights into how speakers view the underlying structure of their language. Finally, I would like to comment on a remark by Ed: > I wonder if they ever realized its true meaning (Christian emperor > Constantine's city), because otherwise they would probably have > changed it. Istanbul was often referred to by the Turks as Islambul. One particularly finds this on Ottoman coins struck there. Obviously the -bul element was recognized as "city." The Turks weren't stupid even if they didn't speak an Indo-European language. :) Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From jer at cphling.dk Fri Jul 20 15:50:27 2001 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 17:50:27 +0200 Subject: Lehmann's Syllabicity In-Reply-To: <002f01c10bce$c6bf9f60$19444241@swbell.net> Message-ID: On Fri, 13 Jul 2001, proto-language [i.e., Pat Ryan - JER] wrote: > [...] > Let us assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that some unspecified > language earlier than but ancestral to IE had a structure in which > differences of vowel-quality signaled lexical differences: *men- /= *man- /= > *mon-. This is certainly justifiable on typological grounds. > First, I would like to know how list-members believe these lexical > differences were maintained in IE. In Indo-Iranian where this actually happened, the various sources just merged. I see no objection to the view that the widely monotonous vocalism of PIE has passed through a comparable collapse. The actual event of merger apparently antedates the protolanguage quite a bit, for there has been at least time to create - or borrow and retain - words with other vocalisms than /e/. It would also be reasonable to suppose that the many vocalic alternations (ablaut "grades") depart from an already-collapsed unitary /e/ than from a retained diversity of vowel timbres that just ended up parallel even after the mergers. This pushes unitary /e/ back into pre-ablaut pre-PIE and leaves ample time for later developments that blurr the picture a bit. One may also note that the IE ablaut types can even be detected on the sole basis of a single IE language as, say, Greek which is certainly not contemporaneous with the protolanguage. Jens From connolly at memphis.edu Sat Jul 21 03:48:44 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 22:48:44 -0500 Subject: Lehmann's Syllabicity Message-ID: Pat Ryan wrote: > There are a number of IEists who do not subscribe to Lehmann's theory of > "syllabicity", I don't, of course, but I think we've through that already. > which he originated to explain the unusual fact that most IE > roots display a front-back vowel (also, potentially no vowel) contrast, which > indicates morphosemantic differences only --- not lexicosemantic ones. > Unusual because in the great majority of languages around the world, varying > root-vowels indicate lexical rather than morphological differences (Semitic > sharing this peculiarity though perhaps not its parent PAA). ....... > Let us assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that some unspecified > language earlier than but ancestral to IE had a structure in which > differences of vowel-quality signaled lexical differences: *men- /= *man- > /= *mon-. This is certainly justifiable on typological grounds. I have absolutely no evidence for what I'm about to say, so please: it is mere speculation -- Gedankenlinguistik, wenn man's so nennen will. It is the merest possibility and for that reason not worth flaming in a refutation. 1. The proposed men- *man- *mon- opposition is somewhat weird in that it has three non-high vowels: where are *min- and *mun-? 2. This suggests that an original distinction was restructured when /e/ and /o/ were used to signal certain morphological categories. They could replace each other as required. They could also be added to /i/ and /u/, producing the diphthongal ablaut series we know and love. 3. It is well known that [a] is at least extremely rare in indisputably IE roots, except in proximity to an "a-coloring laryngeal". There has recently been a discussion on this list proposing that non-laryngeal [a] in Northern European forms means that these are not PIE in origin. This could mean either that (a) an earlier *man- merged with something else (*men- and/or *mon-) in most environments, or (b) that there was no earlier /man-/. Since four-vowel, a-less systems exist, neither possibility seeems better than the other. > First, I would like to know how list-members believe these lexical > differences were maintained in IE. My speculations suggest that many such lexical differences were precisely *not* maintanied. They entail that the root types /men-/ and /mon-/ (and /man-/, if it existed), merged as what we might call /men-/ or even /mVn-/. And if the analysis was /wVn-/ (/V/ a non-high vowel with features to be added by morphology), extension of the morphological e:o ablaut to stems with original /i u/ would be readily understandable. Two final comments: 1. These speculations apply independent of whether PIE was a descendant of Proto-Nostratic or even Proto-World. They are triggered by internal IED phenomena. 2. Again, they are *SPECULATIONS*. Please don't pounce too hard on such a tempting target. Regards Leo Connolly From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Jul 20 16:33:27 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 17:33:27 +0100 Subject: Lehmann's Syllabicity Message-ID: >... the unusual fact that most IE >roots display a front-back vowel (also, potentially no vowel) contrast, >which indicates morphosemantic differences only --- not lexicosemantic >ones. The word "vowel" needs defining here! Woul you count a sequence "eu" as the same as, or different from, the vowel "e"? If (as I believe we must) we count it as different, then your problem disappears. Ignoring the e/o/zero ablaut, PIE shows: e eu ei er el em en eH 1 -2 -3 - etc All of these carry lexicosemantic differences. Even if we don't like the sequences er, el, em, en as diphthongs, we must still recognise the zero grades as vocalic elements - vowels - with lexicosemantic significance. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Jul 20 16:49:35 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 17:49:35 +0100 Subject: Lehmann's Syllabicity Message-ID: >the unusual fact that most IE >roots display a front-back vowel (also, potentially no vowel) contrast, >which indicates morphosemantic differences only --- not lexicosemantic >ones. ... >I would first like to learn what list-members consider to be the better >alternatives for an explanation of this phenomenon. A similar case can be made for Sanskrit, where we do have some information about its origin. Sanskrit can (almost) be described as a one-vowel language in the same way as PIE almost can - we had this suggestion about a year ago on the list, I believe. In Sanskrit it is due to the collapse of original short *e, *a and *o into the single vowel . There are sufficient traces of both *e and *o for us to be sure that it is not a continuation of a one-vowel system from PIE, but is properly derived from a situation with at least a three-way distinction. We might therefore wonder if the so-called PIE one-vowel system is due to collapse from an earlier situation. This is what is argued by the Nostraticists. Kaiser & Shevoroshkin suggest a complete collapse of short vowels in "West Nostratic" while they are kept separate in Uralic and Altaic and Dravidian. Bomhard's view (1996) is rather more complicated, and therefore more nuanced. In essence he avoids the idea of vowel collapse, but does allow certain diphtongs and simple vowels to merge into a PIE system from which IE could develop through further changes. We must also add in here two theories that affect vowels: Firstly, that a < *eH pushed and original **a to *e in some IE dialects. Secondly, that an original **ka, **ke, **ko collapsed inot the ke, k'e, kwe we see in PIE. Peter From proto-language at email.msn.com Fri Jul 20 20:37:47 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 15:37:47 -0500 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: Dear Douglas and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Douglas G Kilday" Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2001 1:27 AM >> [Ed] >> I don't think there is an -r/rn alternation. In my view, the -n after the -r >> is an (abbreviated) adjective-forming suffix indicating origin, source etc. >> Cf. Slavic -no (hladno, krasno...) or even Lat./Etrusc. -na. > [DGK] > You're right; this isn't really an "alternation", but the attachment of an > adjectival suffix directly to a neuter stem, as seen also in Lat. > 'brazen' < *ayes-neos. My views were poorly worded, and Patrick Ryan seems > to think I was referring to -r/n- alternation, which is an entirely > different matter. Nevertheless I think Lat. 'ivory' shows enough IE > behavior to be considered a native IE word, whether or not it has cognates > in I-Ir or other branches. > Regarding PCR's objection that the long vowel in Lat. 'foot' arose by > compensative lengthening from *peds instead of gradation: Palmer gives this > as an example of gradation. Apart from this crude appeal to authority, we > may note 'one-handled sacrificial vessel', gen. , which > shows that Latin d-stems did _not_ regularly undergo compensation of *-ds in > the nom. sg. [PCR] I perhaps worded my reply poorly. I did *not* think you were acknowledging a *r/*n alternation. I was merely describing what I thought might have been the impression you were quite well correcting. The example you give, capis, seems to me to be different. if R = root vowel, it is CRCid-. pe:s, of course, would be CRd-. This could, of course, be a Dehnstufe but does not the absence of /d/ make one question that a bit. Furthermore, gradation is normally associated with syntactic or grammatical usages. What function would the Dehnstufe serve here? 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, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138) From JoatSimeon at aol.com Fri Jul 20 21:43:21 2001 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 17:43:21 EDT Subject: Sound changes versus sound changes Message-ID: In a message dated 7/20/01 2:48:10 PM Mountain Daylight Time, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: > There is nothing "extreme" about French phonology, which in fact is rather > unremarkable by world standards. It is merely that French is rather more > different in pronunciation from Proto-Romance than are most Romance > languages. -- rather like English vs. a vs. the other Germanic languages, perhaps. From sarima at friesen.net Sat Jul 21 00:33:54 2001 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 17:33:54 -0700 Subject: The Single Parent Question In-Reply-To: <00c101c10cb2$8f71dac0$e1474241@swbell.net> Message-ID: At 05:15 PM 7/14/01 -0500, proto-language wrote: >Albeit I certainly agree with much that you write, I continue to think it is a >mistake to pretend that linguistic methodology is so unique. Any science that >looks at different expressions of anything, and attempts to reason backwards >to what the parent expression might be, is analogous to linguistics --- in my >opinion. In particular, the methods of evolutionary biology are quite similar. Some are even, for all practical purposes, the same. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From X99Lynx at aol.com Sat Jul 21 08:36:25 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 04:36:25 EDT Subject: The Single *PIE Village Theory Message-ID: In a message dated 7/20/2001 3:32:45 PM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes: << I'll tell you what. If you can show me a recognized PIE tree with a European naming pattern comparable to that of Taxus baccata, I'll publicly admit that my efforts to use yews for the IE homeland problem were in vain. >> I was doing a quick look at the IE box and of course Doug Kilday's post made me look and now I have to answer at least this part. First of all, the arrowwood example - which you dismissed - is how I must understand the ordinary behavior of tree-naming on a local level - before science, trade or dictionarians intervene. All our historical experience with "common names" for trees and plants is that they are highly local and irregular. I cannot with any integrity accept the idea that most *PIEists even knew the name for a yew tree or most other trees. And that is because when we look at pre-lierate societies we see that such comprehensive distinguishing between flora is limited to a specialized group within the group, if it is anyone's job at all. So, if I were to look for the source of the names of the yew, it would not be *PIE speakers. It would be linguistic communities that would have some real vested interest in finding a common name for the yew among themselves. These would be people who made a living out of trees and wood - especially those along the intergroup supply chain who were trading wood in a manner that what tree the wood came from would make a difference. We have evidence that stone and metal workers were specialists at a very early date. We have evidence of trade in worked goods ranging several hundred miles and that evidence extends from Cro-Magnon to the mesolithic obsidian cutters of the Italian coast - even the Iceman's arrow points were from a site 300 miles from his home. Workers in wood, bone, tusk and antler would have looked to extend their markets beyond a few local customers - the other trades were doing it. This means they needed to identify the raw materials they needed to tree-cutters and describe the wood they used to traders and customers. And the primary "name" standardizers would be those who moved goods from market to market, buying and selling raw materials and finished products. That is the primary way I see a standard name coming about, reconciling the highly observable inconsistency of local names - and that would include early IE speakers. Scientific botany is comparatively recent - its an anachronism. The spread of a religion might also standardize the names of some sacred trees or wood. But the need to spec wood for trade all the way back to trees would be the first likely candidate for any tree name that spans beyond local villages. If this has any possible connection with "a recognized PIE tree with a European naming pattern," then I might be able to answer your question. Regards, Steve Long From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Jul 20 16:56:21 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 17:56:21 +0100 Subject: real proto-lang Message-ID: > Cannot one say that the "abstractionist position" is merely the > result of the application of the method, whereas everything beyond this > is an *interpretation* of this result? I would make the abstractionist position even thinner. It is not the final result of application of the method, but merely a description of the attested state of affairs. I think it is application of the method which moves beyond mere description to posit an original sound or root. Thus saying that the symbol *bh is a code for the correspondences in attested IE languages is mere description plus label; whereas positing an actual sound *bh is application of the method. Interpretation comes in when we then try to make sense of that sound, and say either that PIE needed to have *ph as well, or that the sound we write *bh was breathy voice, or allophonically aspirated, or a fricative or whatever. There are thus (for me) three stages, and the refusal to move from the first to the second seems an unnecessary limitation on what we can claim to know. Peter From jer at cphling.dk Sat Jul 21 15:22:56 2001 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 17:22:56 +0200 Subject: real proto-lang In-Reply-To: <000201c106cb$bd957160$db11073e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Sat, 7 Jul 2001, petegray wrote: > [...] > So [...] I think there are > advantages in treating our reconstructions as if they were actual spoken > human languages - even while admitting the limits of our knowledge. You're so right. We would not understand developments like {kw} > p or {gw} > b if we did not care about the phonetic substance; these changes are natural, i.e. small, because the elements concerned remain labialized stop at all stages. We wouldn't even understand a conditioned change like that of word-final *-m going to -n if we were not permitted to draw on our knowledge about the phonetic substance that tells us that the element is still a nasal consonant, even after the change. We would no doubt have to deal with suggestions like *deiwos > Eng. God for which there may just conceivable be parallels which we just don't bother to look for because we know it would be silly. If actual pronunciation counted for nothing such suggestions would have to be taken just as seriously as *nu: > Eng. now, at least until they had been properly checked. Since we do not normally do that, we do indeed work on the assumption that PIE and all the intermediate stages between it and the attested daughter languages were real and actually spoken languages. And that's what has taken us where we are. Jens From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Jul 21 07:33:18 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 08:33:18 +0100 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. Message-ID: da-von, da-r-auf etc > I have my doubts about the -r- as hiatus filling: in Dutch, the -r is always > present, just like in English.. > Ger. wo = Du. waar > Ger. da = Du. daar > So, I think it is the absence of -r- in German that requires an explanation. > Ed. Good thinking! I checked the etymology of da- and wo- in German, and you're absolutely right. Da was originally dar. Wo is less clear, but it appears to have been war (with a not o) - certainly that's how it appears in Gothic. So the -r- is a survival. Peter From petegray at btinternet.com Sat Jul 21 09:24:45 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 10:24:45 +0100 Subject: One Step at a Time Message-ID: > Suppose the parent of a "half-a-dozen languages" was a language that had > two different classes of verbs: those from a language X that conjugated one > way and those from a language Y that conjugated another way. ... To some extent this has happened within IE, with athematic verbs showing change in accent and vowel grade in certain forms, and thematic verbs which have a stable root. The former are well represented in Sanskrit, and the latter in Latin and Greek - though the separation is not as neat and complete as in your hypothetical situation. The comparative method here recognises the value of "relic" forms. Greek has been particularly useful in this respect. Although almost all its verbs are thematic like most in Latin, it preserves a good handful of relics which are in line with athematic verbs in Sanskrit. We might perhaps have found the route to reconstruction less clear without Greek, but we ought to have been able to reconstruction the PIE situation nonetheless. Peter From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jul 22 19:31:41 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2001 15:31:41 EDT Subject: One Step at a Time Message-ID: In a message dated 7/20/2001 8:29:01 AM, alrivera at southern.edu writes: << Suppose the parent of a "half-a-dozen languages" was a language that had two different classes of verbs: those from a language X that conjugated one way and those from a language Y that conjugated another way. (I think there was a Greek dialect of Arabic that had a feature like this mentioned on the list earlier?)>> In a message dated 7/20/2001 9:05:14 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk replied: <> Then why did Muke write "those from a language X that conjugated one way and those from a language Y that conjugated another way?" The point I believe of the hypothetical was two lines of genetic descent. And the key here is the assumption that there is only one ancestor language somewhere along the line. That assumption is NOT justified by the comparative method, which yields only ancestor forms. The idea that there has to be one "parent" somewhere comes from a different theory. If two languages can each contribute genetically distinct classes of verbs to one "daughter" language, then they can each contribute those classes to multiple "daughter" languages. There does not have to be a single language intervening, only original unitary ancestor forms coming from different earlier languages. << The comparative method has nothing to say about the origin of a proto-language, unless there are yet further languages that can be compared with it normally.>> But that's not true, for a number of reasons. One is that the "further languages" may be forced into a single parent based on a particular method of family tree construction. In fact, when the comparative method has "nothing to say" about the origin of certain forms, the tree model has often taken over and assigned those forms to the parent in any case. So that Prof Trask's "further language" will actually not be recognized as evidence of "the origins of the proto-language." If some of the "daughter" languages don't have one or the other verb classes, the assumption is often that those cases were "lost." All you need is three or four IE languages with both verb cases to assume that *PIE had both. So those "further languages" - which might only have had one class and point to multiple ancestry - may be of no consequence. (I once counted in Ringe's sample grid of IE "nodes" that nearly a third of all the individual forms he used to construct his tree were marked "lost" - meaning that they were not attested but were assumed to be in *PIE. I'm not positive but I think that if this assumption were not made Ringe may have gotten a very different result. I'm pretty sure that "parsimony" - the best match for the data - would have created a tree that looked more like a street map of lower Manhattan than the neat Christmas fir he got. And this even despite Ringe's strict screening for only genetic etymologies that were "certain.") What is interesting again here is that Prof Trask assumes that the "further languages" he mentions come later in the analysis. This is again the cart before the horse. Unless one knows the conclusions ahead of time, there should be no different treatment between the original set and the "further languages." They don't come in afterwards - logically they are part of the original analysis. In that case, when the "further languages" are included right from the start, multiple ancestors - according to Prof Trask - could be identified. But not, of course, if a single parent is expected. Once a single parent is assumed, all indications of multiple ancestry are considered innovations, borrowing, lost, etc. It is the assumption of single parentage that turns "other" genetic strains into non-genetic forms. This is the circular effect that can erase the possibility of multple ancestors, even if it is there. But the comparative method itself might possibly support EITHER conclusion. Regards, Steve Long From bronto at pobox.com Sun Jul 22 05:04:47 2001 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 22:04:47 -0700 Subject: Genetic Descent Message-ID: (dlwhite) >>>> what I am asserting is that the morphemes used in conjugation >>>> are very resistant to borrowing. ... (petegray) >>> The highly productive English morpheme -ess ... (bronto) >> is <-ess> used in conjugation? (petegray) > Oh, you mean "conjugation" as in the verb patterns of Latin and > other IE inflected languages? I dunno how dlwhite means it, but I understand `conjugation' to have something to do with inflection of verbs for person, number, tense and mood, none of which applies to a noun-suffix. (At least in languages with which I am acquainted. Are there languages in which one would normally say, for example, that Henri d'Orleans is the king-subjunctive of France?) > Then you cannot assert your statement > as something true of all languages, only of those which show > Latin-like conjugation. Which ultimately means IE. . . . What do you call it when Hebrew or Swahili verbs are inflected for person etc? -- Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/ From acnasvers at hotmail.com Wed Jul 25 09:49:09 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 09:49:09 +0000 Subject: Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent) Message-ID: Leo A. Connolly (7 Jul 2001) wrote: >Yes, they are originally separate constructions and verbs, but OE >_Tencean_ seems to have become extinct, its function being assumed by >_think_ < _Tyncean_. But I stick with my interpretation nonetheless, >since it parallels the development seen in _me TyrstT_ > _I thirst_, _me >hyngerT_ > _I hunger_, _me liketh_ > _I like_, where there was no >parallel verb with a personal experiencer subject. As for _meseems_ >(which sounds eminently plausible, though I cannot remember encountering >it), it took the other path toward resolving the problem: put the object >in object position and insert a dummy subject _it_ in preverbal >position. I really can't say that either of these solutions is better >than the other, only that both occurred. Yes, the vowels indicate that there must have been confusion of 'to think' with 'to seem' in Middle English, with the latter form eventually usurping the meaning of the former. Chaucer sometimes has the latter in the sense of the former, and the preterits are both : the distinction between OE 'thought' and 'seemed' has been obliterated. Instead of the Fillmorian analysis, I would draw a parallel with the use of for by some speakers of current English. Again the factitive has displaced the simple verb in the present. This is particularly common in the impersonal intransitive, e.g. "That doesn't set well with me.". However, since is much more common than was, and occurs widely in compounds, it seems unlikely that will ever completely displace . I must also question the Fillmorian view of "hunger" and "thirst". Chaucer has both a personal 'to have thirst' and an impersonal 'to cause thirst', the latter presumably from a PGmc factitive in *-jan which has fallen together in form with the simple verb. Likewise I posit *hungran 'to have hunger' beside the factitive *hungrjan > OE 'to cause hunger'. Instead of the brutally abrupt syntactic shift required by the Fillmorian scenario, we have paired constructions (personal simple, impersonal factitive) going back to Proto-Germanic of which one type gradually becomes extinct after the severe phonetic and morphologic restructuring of Middle English. Indeed Funk & Wagnalls (1903) give "hunger" [archaic] 'to make hungry; famish; starve' and "thirst out" 'cause to be thirsty; affect with thirst'. The factitives survived (as productive verbs, not isolates like "methinks") into obsolete Modern English, so they can hardly have been victims of abrupt Fillmorian shift in ME. As for "like", Whitehall gives the sense development as 'to be of like form' > 'be like' > 'be suited to' > 'be pleasing to'. "Me liketh" is an example of the fourth sense, which is now archaic in most dialects (but recall the 7-Up slogan "You like it; it likes you"). "I like" is a specialization of the third sense "I am suited to". It cannot plausibly be regarded as derived from the fourth sense by Fillmorian shift. The replacement of "meseems" by "it seems to me" and the perfectly acceptable variant "to me it seems" clarifies the matter. It has nothing to do with "case-grammar analysis" or any alleged thirsting by speakers to stick the "experiencer" in front of the sentence, since that didn't happen here (in fact, the "experiencer" was booted out of initial position). Instead, the radical restructuring of ME resulted in the obsolescence of certain sentence-frames. DGK From X99Lynx at aol.com Sun Jul 22 19:06:57 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2001 15:06:57 EDT Subject: Comprehensibility: sound vs grammar Message-ID: In a message dated 7/20/2001 4:48:10 PM, PROF TRASK WRITES: <> And so is there any way of objectively measuring degree of divergence? I WROTE: <> PROF TRASK REPLIED: <> Typical disparaging and groundless overstatement. First of all, you slip right into your usual conclusions - "changed greatly." Secondly, no one said a change in grammar doesn't change a language. My point was that morphology and grammar may PERHAPS least accurately reflect rates of degrees of change. What is the basis of your criticism here? What's your measure of change here? How do you measure change so that you can say a language changes "greatly" when a grammar changes "dramatically?" How do you measure any of that? Absolute statements. Conclusions with no objective basis. Ill-defined terms. The usual. The only reference I see to any measure you can offer is: <> Here you say that comprehensibility is some evidence of the degree of change. But does change in grammar have anywhere as much impact on comprehensibility as phonology? My statement was a PERHAPS. You act as if you have some special information that says otherwise and somehow clearly makes my statement "not make any sense." Do you have any proof of this, one way or the other? Or is this just another overstated impression of yours? Steve Long From mclasutt at brigham.net Wed Jul 25 22:43:32 2001 From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin) Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 16:43:32 -0600 Subject: Michif In-Reply-To: Message-ID: [Rick Mc Callister wrote] How does Michif compare to Chinook jargon? Many years ago I saw a small book on Chinook Jargon that explained that the grammar was radically different from Chinook and that the vocabulary was largely derived from French --somewhere around 40% if I remember correctly. From what remember, French derived nouns included the feminine article <>. I have no idea how reliable the book was, but what I gather both the grammar and vocabulary seemed to be a compromise between French, Chinook and various other NW Native American languages. I don't think Chinook Jargon was used as anything other than a trade language but I may be mistaken [I respond] Michif, unlike Chinook Jargon, became a mixed language or creole (depending on your politics) rather quickly. It didn't linger as a trade language (pidgin) for very long. Chinook Jargon never became any community's mother tongue. Unlike Chinook Jargon, which reduced the complex morphology of Northwest Coast languages to a common and manageable subset with only very basic communicative power, Michif retained the complexity of the Cree verbal system, making very few (if any) compromises to French verb morphology. Michif retained from its Cree parent the ability to discuss complex issues needed in a mother tongue community. Chinook Jargon never rose above a strictly practically-oriented trade jargon. John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D. Associate Professor, English Utah State University Program Director USU On-Line Linguistics http://english.usu.edu/lingnet (435) 797-2738 (voice) (435) 797-3797 (FAX) mclasutt at brigham.net From connolly at memphis.edu Sat Jul 21 04:34:13 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 23:34:13 -0500 Subject: Omniscience [was Re: German (was:Dubya and before that, minimalpairs)] Message-ID: >> Robert Whiting wrote: >>> ... I had a German-speaking >>> colleage who pronounced English as [w] (as in "willage"). When I >>> pointed out to her that she could easily pronounce the [v] sound in >>> she said, "Oh, no, German doesn't have that sound -- we use >>> for [f] like in . Well, what can you say? Now if 'village' >>> were written *, she would have had no trouble pronouncing it. Leo Connolly replied: >> Sure she would have. The fact is, some Germans pronounce as >> labiodental [v], while others use a bilabial fricative. When speaking >> English, the latter use the bilabial fricative in lieu of the English >> bilabial glide /w/ and the labiodental fricative /v/. Since this is >> obviously wrong in each instance, but English has no bilabial fricative, >> English speakers usually believe these Germans have said [v] instead of >> /w/ and [w] instead of /v/, when in fact they said neither. Spelling >> had nothing to do with her pronunciation problems. Robert Whiting rejoined: > My only problem with this scenario is how do it know? How does this > highly intelligent sound know that when it appears in English > it has to sound like [v] but when it appears in English it > has to sound like [w]? And if this sound is that smart, won't it > eventually take over the world? It has already made my Austrian > colleague into a German. But it is good to know that it is possible > to pronounce so apodictically about the speech habits of someone that > one has never met or conversed with. Several comments: 1. "It" (the sound, I presume) doesn't have to know anything. 2. Many millions of German speakers realize /v/ (written or, in foreign words, ) as a voiced bilabial fricative. These speakers then lack the voiced labiodental fricative, even though they have a voiceless labiodental /f/ written or . I know of no German speakers who realize German /v/ as [w], or who have a prevocalic [w] of any sort in their language. 3. Germans who possess [v] can, of course, handle initial English /v/ just fine with no special effort. Those who use the bilabial fricative cannot. And neither group does well with English /w/; without extensive practice, they produce [v] or the bilabial fricative for that one too. 4. My remark concerns how *English speakers* interpret the initial bilabial fricative. Since it's lacking in English, it is *always* wrong in an English word. Any many other scholars have noted that English speakers think that these folk perversely pronounce with [w] and with [v], when in fact they use the bilabial fricative for both. I repeat: this is not my analysis, but since I've observed the phenomenon myself, and have convinced a few people who had claimed that their spouses did it backwards in English to listen a bit more closely, whereupon they found that (mirabile dictu) I was right, I think it at least highly that your colleague talks as I said -- since millions of German speakers (probably half the country) use the bilabial fricative. 5. It did no good for you to point out that she could easily pronounce [v] in village, since she obviously could do nothing of the sort. She was probably, like most German speakers, utterly unaware of the irrelevant difference in place of articulation, just as they won't notice the irrelevant lack of aspiration in many South Germans' pronunciation of German /p t/. Your description suggests that she interpreted your comment as referring to the *letter* , which most commonly does stand for /f/. That she was aware of. Check her out again if you can. Otherwise, check the literature on bilabial fricatives in German. Regards leo Connolly From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Sat Jul 21 17:02:48 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 12:02:48 -0500 Subject: Proto-Celtic & Proto-Fenno-Ugric in Herodotus and C. Ptolemy In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I suppose there are some legitimate, main-stream works on toponyms and personal names, etc. found in Herodotus, Ptolemy et al. Could someone list some book-length works? >In a message dated 7/14/01 2:00:28 AM Mountain Daylight Time, >g_sandi at hotmail.com writes: >> Research indicates that there was some shared geographical areas in Central >> Europe [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From dsalmon at salmon.org Mon Jul 23 22:44:10 2001 From: dsalmon at salmon.org (David Salmon) Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 15:44:10 -0700 Subject: 'albeit' Message-ID: I use this word regularly, both orally and in writing. Did not know it was missing or would have spoken up sooner. I think its use is not uncommon in the legal profession (of which I am a member), which is not averse to obsolete words and which has a particular need of words that make logical distinctions, such as "therefore," "however," "moreover," "but," and others. Funny, I've always thought of myself as simply having a larger than average vocabulary, a feature which also is the pride of the English language, and of Shakespeare. I do not think I violate its rules of good usage by employing it. "Trask's Law" is merely "Trask's Preference." By his rubric, the best communicator would be one who uses simple, everyday words, lest others fail to understand. The smaller and more au courant the vocabulary, the better, and certainly one must not use words he doesn't use. Actually, although ideas are often best expressed simply and clearly (when possible), I've always found that the use of uncommon words in the midst of otherwise simple speech or writing improves an argument, cements a point, if used with care and restraint. I've also never found others to have much problem understanding me. Trask's assumption that the masses are ignorant of the word "albeit" is elitist. :-) David currently of California From GthomGt at cs.com Thu Jul 26 14:53:47 2001 From: GthomGt at cs.com (GthomGt at cs.com) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 10:53:47 EDT Subject: Quotation in IE Message-ID: Dear List, I am presently working on a paper that deals, in part, with an anomolous use of the Sanskrit quotative particle *iti* in the Rgveda. Examiniation of the origins and development of the Sanskrit quotative has played a significant role in studies of India as a linguistic area, since Kuiper's claim that the Sanskrit developments indicate a very early influence of Dravidian syntax on quotation in the RV, and Hock's detailed, skeptical, response. I am looking for references to recent literature on the subject of quotation in IE, in particular in the use of specific lexica to mark reported speech, as opposed to reported speech with zero marking. I am also interested in your comments on the following observations: Compare Spanish `Si' [`Yes'] from Latin `Sic' [thus]. Also, consider the Latin forms ita, immo, etiam [all preserving the same pronominal stem i- -- ultimately deictic -- that we find in ?ti], as well as Latin sic itself [also sometimes `Yes']. Similarly, compare French `Oui', German`Ja' and English `Yes' itself, all preserving the same . Likewise Russian `Tak' = `So, thus, like that, well, yes.' In short, the semantic shift from `Thus' to`Yes' seems to have been a common one, as we can see also in the Sanskrit affirmatives tathA and om. I would also welcome comments on English quotatives "like" and "yes." Of course, acknowledgement of any and all help will be made in the paper when it is published. Thanks in advance, George Thompson From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Jul 27 10:49:49 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 11:49:49 +0100 Subject: 'albeit' In-Reply-To: <009a01c113c9$2fce7ba0$0100a8c0@Davod.rcn> Message-ID: My little posting on 'albeit' a couple of weeks ago has attracted quite a number of responses -- so many that I've lost track now, and I'm afraid I can't thank all the respondents by name, as I would normally do. For this I apologize. A very few respondents agree with me that the word has been resuscitated from near-extinction. Most, though, take issue, and report that they have used the word, or at least encountered it, without interruption for several decades. This disproportion doesn't surprise me, since members of the second group are more likely to reply to my assertion. It's interesting that some people report that the word has never gone out of use for them. Still, I insist that the word was seldom used in a very wide variety of contexts for a long time, before becoming far more prominent a few years ago. I strongly suspect that I could in principle document this by searching a corpus of texts published around twenty years ago, but I'm afraid I'm not going to make the effort. I have one further point to report. Just yesterday, I was looking at something written by one of my research students -- a native speaker of British English -- and I noticed that she had written "all be it". She is a woman in her forties, well educated and a senior teacher, and her English is generally excellent. So I have to assume that she had picked this up from hearing it spoken, and not from seeing it written, since her error is exactly the opposite of the "all-bite" pronunciation reported by a couple of correspondents. This example, I think, is consistent with my view that the word was until recently little used. There are just three particular points about 'albeit' I'd like to reply to. One respondent reports that he makes a semantic distinction between 'albeit' on the one hand and 'but' or 'though' on the other, in that 'albeit' means something like 'though, admittedly'. This is certainly news to me, and I'm curious to know whether anyone else does the same. Another queries my declaration that 'albeit' is pretentious. Well, I'm afraid I find it so. I am confident that I'm not alone here, but I haven't so far troubled to conduct a survey of my colleagues. Maybe one day I will, though perhaps such a survey really should have been carried out a few years ago, before the word became so prominent. For me, the word is right up there with 'aforementioned' as a piece of modern standard English. ;-) Another respondent drew attention to the use of 'albeit' as a subordinator, as in this example: "The Basques are suspicious of outsiders, albeit they are wonderfully hospitable once they get to know you." The respondent found this use much less acceptable than the other use of the word, and I agree: I don't regard this as English at all, even though I have begun to encounter examples of it in writing, and even though OED2 confirms that it was once English. A final comment on my facetious "law". I really do believe that very many people are eager to avoid plain words in favor of fancy ones, and that they are constantly looking for new fancy words, which they then go ahead and use even if they don't understand the words they have chosen. My forthcoming usage handbook lists piles of these. Just a few examples: 'utilize' for 'use' 'fortuitous' for 'lucky' 'author' for 'write' 'parent' for 'bring up' 'adequate' for 'enough' 'purchase' for 'buy' 'educator' for 'teacher' 'physician' for 'doctor' 'ruination' for 'ruin' I begin to think that this tendency may be an important force in language change, but I don't think we have an established name for it. Is there one? All I can think of are 'hyperurbanism' and 'inkhornism', but neither term seems to be right. Anyway, I'd like to thank all those who took the trouble to reply, and I'm sorry I can't list them all by name. 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 naddy at mips.inka.de Sat Jul 28 14:48:03 2001 From: naddy at mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber) Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2001 14:48:03 +0000 Subject: Omniscience Message-ID: Leo A. Connolly wrote: > 2. Many millions of German speakers realize /v/ (written or, in > foreign words, > ) as a voiced bilabial fricative. These speakers then lack the > voiced labiodental fricative, even though they have a voiceless > labiodental /f/ written or . I know of no German speakers who > realize German /v/ as [w], or who have a prevocalic [w] of any sort in > their language. > 3. Germans who possess [v] can, of course, handle initial English /v/ > just fine with no special effort. Those who use the bilabial fricative > cannot. And neither group does well with English /w/; without extensive > practice, they produce [v] or the bilabial fricative for that one too. I would like to add some personal facts to the debate: (a) When speaking English, I also suffer from substituting /w/ for /v/ at least sometimes. People have made fun of me about this and pointed out that I was saying e.g. "wideo" instead of "video". (b) I do NOT realize /v/ as a bilabial in my native German, I use plain [v]. (c) Although [w] doesn't exist in my native speech, I think I've learned it without much trouble. I have no problem distinguishing /v/ and /w/ in English. So how come I end up with confusing /w/ and /v/ in my pronunciation? (Nobody has ever told me that I substitute /v/ for /w/, but I suppose it happens, too.) There are many Germanic cognate words that have /v/ in German and /w/ in English, e.g. the question words/relative pronouns and various words such as, well, "word", "water", etc. I suspect this leads straightforward to overcompensation. On the other hand, there are many Latin-derived cognates that have /v/ in both languages. If a single phoneme must be mapped to two different phonemes in cognate words, it shouldn't come as a surprise that much confusion results. -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy at mips.inka.de From bronto at pobox.com Fri Jul 27 06:37:58 2001 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 23:37:58 -0700 Subject: Uniformitarian Principle Message-ID: > Phil Jennings (2 Jul 2001) wrote: >> . . . In physics, we are pleased to know that the rate of >> (locational) change of falling objects increases with mass >> and decreases with distance, in accordance with laws described >> by Isaac Newton. Gravity is a constant, but it is contingent >> on mass and distance. Douglas G Kilday wrote: > This is a rather severe mangling of Newtonian mechanics, and > in fact contradicts Galileo's observation that gravitational > acceleration is independent of the falling object's mass, > which Newton neatly explains. Next time, consult an introductory > textbook of calculus-based physics. I think you'll find that the mass of the attracting body is not entirely irrelevant. -- Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/ From parkvall at ling.su.se Thu Jul 26 13:40:29 2001 From: parkvall at ling.su.se (Mikael Parkvall) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 15:40:29 +0200 Subject: Michif In-Reply-To: Message-ID: John McLaughlin wrote: >Michif retained the complexity of the Cree verbal >system, making very few (if any) compromises to French verb morphology. There aren't really any _compromises_, but one interesting aspect of Michif (as if there were any uninteresting ones!) is that the few French verbs that there are in the language (including "avoir" and "?tre") basically retain French, rather than Cree, flexional paradigms. And let's not forget that most Michif speakers do not speak neither French nor Cree. >Chinook Jargon never rose above a strictly practically-oriented trade jargon. This is almost correct, but I apparently need to repeat what I wrote the other week -- it did nativise! In the Grand Ronde reservation of Oregon, Chinook Jargon was used as a home language and a mother tongue, though, admittedly, usually not people's _only_ mother tongue. /MP * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Mikael Parkvall Institutionen f?r lingvistik Stockholms Universitet SE-10691 STOCKHOLM +46 (0)8 16 14 41, +46 (0)8 656 68 24 (home) Fax: +46 (0)8 15 53 89 parkvall at ling.su.se Creolist Archives: http://www.ling.su.se/Creole From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu Thu Jul 26 20:06:40 2001 From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 16:06:40 -0400 Subject: Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > As for "like", Whitehall gives the sense development as 'to be of like form' > > 'be like' > 'be suited to' > 'be pleasing to'. "Me liketh" is an example > of the fourth sense, which is now archaic in most dialects (but recall the > 7-Up slogan "You like it; it likes you"). "I like" is a specialization of > the third sense "I am suited to". It cannot plausibly be regarded as derived > from the fourth sense by Fillmorian shift. is the third sense attested at the relevant time? i ask simply because i had always assumed the story was correct that had the modern usage deriving out of the fourth sense after the collapse of the case system in ME. but it would be very interesting if it could be shown that what you say is correct. From connolly at memphis.edu Thu Jul 26 22:16:27 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 17:16:27 -0500 Subject: Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent) Message-ID: Responding to my comment on the elimination of "dative subjects" in English, Douglas G Kilday wrote: > Instead of the Fillmorian analysis, I would draw a parallel with the use of > for by some speakers of current English. Again the factitive has > displaced the simple verb in the present. This is particularly common in the > impersonal intransitive, e.g. "That doesn't set well with me.". However, > since is much more common than was, and occurs widely in > compounds, it seems unlikely that will ever completely displace . I can't think of any compounds of _sit_, though _set_ has them. No matter, the example isn't quite parallel. Although _Tencean_ was formed in the matter of factitives, the same formative was also (if I remember correctly) used for inchoatives, or for something else anyway. We cannot therefore conclude that _Tencean_ was ever in reality factitive. So if we're talking replacement here, we must still ask why we have the vocalism of one with the syntax of the other. > I must also question the Fillmorian view of "hunger" and "thirst". Chaucer > has both a personal 'to have thirst' and an impersonal > 'to cause thirst', the latter presumably from a PGmc factitive in *-jan > which has fallen together in form with the simple verb. The OED shows no signs of either a factitive or an inchoative. The normal OE usage is with accusative of person and genitive of thing, or merely dative of person. The OED lists a few OE examples with a personal subject, but they are in fact ambiguous. The first unambiguous personal subjects occur in the 14th century, indicating that a replacement process (which you may call Fillmorean if you like, though there is no need to) had begin. > Likewise I posit > *hungran 'to have hunger' beside the factitive *hungrjan > OE 'to > cause hunger'. No problem with a verb form containing -j-, but what indicates that it was ever factitive -- and if so, why the person who is made to hunger would have been the subject? That's exactly what we should not expect: "The smell of sauerkraut made me hungry", not vice versa! > Instead of the brutally abrupt syntactic shift required by > the Fillmorian scenario, Brutal? The *only* shift is that a dative has been replaced by a nominative, bringing a verb into line with the majority that always had nominative subjects. How is this brutal? And while Fillmore's system works particularly well in explaining it, it is by no means necessary. We need only note DAT > NOM. That's it! > As for "like", Whitehall gives the sense development as 'to be of like form' > > 'be like' > 'be suited to' > 'be pleasing to'. "Me liketh" is an example > of the fourth sense, which is now archaic in most dialects (but recall the > 7-Up slogan "You like it; it likes you"). "I like" is a specialization of > the third sense "I am suited to". Nego. Semantically, that could be true, if OE _li:cian_ had a personal "liker" as subject. But it doesn't; we don't find that until the 14th century, according to the OED. > It cannot plausibly be regarded as derived > from the fourth sense by Fillmorian shift. Really, why not? It's in line with the other examples and doesn't require Fillmore in particular. > The replacement of "meseems" by "it seems to me" and the perfectly > acceptable variant "to me it seems" clarifies the matter. It has nothing to > do with "case-grammar analysis" or any alleged thirsting by speakers to > stick the "experiencer" in front of the sentence, since that didn't happen > here (in fact, the "experiencer" was booted out of initial position). > Instead, the radical restructuring of ME resulted in the obsolescence of > certain sentence-frames. Well, yes: it was booted out of initial position as part of a restructuring. But isn't that what I'd been saying? Fillmore helps us understand why, but if don't like Case Grammar, try considering the facts without any particular system in mind. You will find that many Germanic verbs which once had a sentient person expressed as dative or accusative, but which nonetheless tended to put that person in preverbal position, now use the nominative instead. Such datives are found in so many languages that an appeal to dubious Germanic causatives will never explain the phenomenon. Please explain to my why German _gefallen_ and Latin _place:re_ -- both statives with no hint of causative formation -- do the same thing. The answer cannot be found within Germanic, but must say something about universal grammar. You must reach the same conclusion, Case Grammar or no. Leo Connolly From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Jul 27 07:18:14 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 08:18:14 +0100 Subject: Dative Subjects (was: Re: Genetic Descent) Message-ID: > ...confusion of > 'to think' with > I would draw a parallel with the use of for ..it seems unlikely > that will ever completely displace . Another example is "lay" and "lie". "Lay" has already replaced "lie" for many speakers. peter From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu Thu Jul 26 19:52:31 2001 From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 15:52:31 -0400 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. In-Reply-To: <005001c11218$37965a40$e433073e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Sat, 21 Jul 2001, petegray wrote: > Good thinking! I checked the etymology of da- and wo- in German, and > you're absolutely right. Da was originally dar. Wo is less clear, but it > appears to have been war (with a not o) - certainly that's how it appears in > Gothic. So the -r- is a survival. > Peter you actually don't have to go very far back to find signs of this. in somewhat older writing you'll find plenty of spellings like darnach, although i don't recall ever seeing someting like wornach. of course this may well be an etymologizing spelling. in any case it's easy to understand why the -r would have been retained intervocalically but lost finally, although i don't think the loss of final -r can be connected with the modern German vocalization of coda r, since i seem to recall seeing r-less spellings of these words in MHG, when coda r was still presumably pronounced as r. incidentally, da is commonly (usually?) spelled do in MHG, i.e. it looks like it rhymed with wo, as expected based on the other Gmc. languages. someone on the list who knows more about the history of German might be able to say something about how the two ended up NOT rhyming in NHG. i have a suspicion that it might reflect some sort of dialect difference (wo from he south, da from the center?). does anybody happen to know whether they rhyme in modern dialects, e.g. Bavarian and Alemannic? Tom From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu Thu Jul 26 20:18:57 2001 From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 16:18:57 -0400 Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc. In-Reply-To: <005001c11218$37965a40$e433073e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: and there's the additional obvious example that i forgot to mention: warum contains the a spelling (and pronunciation), another indication that something fishy is going on with the vowels in these words in NHG, for which the most obvious explanation would be dialect mixture in the standard language. On Sat, 21 Jul 2001, petegray wrote: > da-von, da-r-auf etc >> I have my doubts about the -r- as hiatus filling: in Dutch, the -r is always >> present, just like in English.. >> Ger. wo = Du. waar >> Ger. da = Du. daar >> So, I think it is the absence of -r- in German that requires an explanation. >> Ed. > Good thinking! I checked the etymology of da- and wo- in German, and > you're absolutely right. Da was originally dar. Wo is less clear, but it > appears to have been war (with a not o) - certainly that's how it appears in > Gothic. So the -r- is a survival. > Peter From sarima at friesen.net Thu Jul 26 13:58:18 2001 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 06:58:18 -0700 Subject: bishop In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 07:36 PM 7/25/01 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote: >Because it is unlikely to have happened. Not that it is impossible as a >theoretical concept, but the outcome is wrong. >... >Pentti Aalto once told me a story about a lake in Karelia which the locals >called simply 'j?rvi' "the lake". Then the Russians came and asked "what >is the name of the lake?" They were told, and so the name in Russian >became Ozero J?rvi ("Lake Lake"). Then the Germans came and asked what >the name of the lake was and were told and so the German name of the lake >became Ozeroj?rvisee ("Lake Lake Lake"). I don't know if the story is >true or not, but Pentti Aalto told a good story. Once, while researching the history of England, I ran across a hill whose name meant Hill Hill Hill, or was that Hill Hill Hill Hill. So it certainly happens. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From petegray at btinternet.com Thu Jul 26 07:34:56 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 08:34:56 +0100 Subject: bishop Message-ID: >Ozerojdrvisee ("Lake Lake Lake"). There are many such examples, world wide, (e.g. in England, the river Avon) but I've never met a three-fold one before. Thanks! >> should already have been something like [is ti(m) >> bolin], as in current Greek. The vowels would be all wrong. In the light of Renato's post, giving the evidence of =polis to Turkish -bul in a different word, the only vowel that is wrong is the central one, which we know was pronounced /A/ in that area in classical times. Is there any evidence of dialect variation within the later Koine? >> And why >> on earth would the Greeks have given something meaning 'to the city' >> as the name of their capital? To the three replies (immediately below) we should add Rome - the Romans said said "the City" and expected everyone to know what they meant. So that's not a problem. (a)> The capital was known as "i polis" the city for an extended period. (b)> The study of toponyms is littered with such cases, cf. Scottish Gaelic > Gallaibh, Cataibh. (c)> Yes, and the ancient Assyrians always referred to Assur as 'a:lum' "the city", but nobody else did. >There is simply no need to derive Istanbul from any form of Greek 'polis' >other than its original one: Konstantinopolis. Anything else is an >Occam's Razor violation. It would be, if we were inventing the use of "city" for Konstnatinopolis. But we aren't. >...'eis te:n pslin' as the derivation of Istanbul .....the phonological >difficulties, Only one, the central vowel. >there is no need to account for the prothetic vowel of Istanbul with a >Greek form. I believe that in modern Greek "to the" is simply /sti:n/ < /i:s ti:n/. So "to the city" would have been /sti:mbul/ at some stage. Peter From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu Thu Jul 26 20:30:53 2001 From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 15:30:53 -0500 Subject: bishop In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > Mississippi --> Missisip That's only in movies and song by "furrners". Down here it's "M'sippi" [snip] Rick Mc Callister W-1634 Mississippi University for Women Columbus MS 39701 From connolly at memphis.edu Thu Jul 26 21:22:00 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 16:22:00 -0500 Subject: bishop Message-ID: > Leo Connoly wrote: >> To which I say: The vowels are still all wrong, which renders the rest >> of it moot. Renato Piva wrote: > 1. Not exactly true: the I- of Istambul corresponds perfectly to the i- in > 'is tin poli'. True -- but this is the leasdt significant of the Greek syllables. > 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. Isn't the Middle Greek word is itself somewhat problematic? Some of its vowels and consonants are wrong. But never mind that. If we must choose between two etymologies for istanbul, we should choose the one with the better phonetic fit, barring some sort of other evidence favoring the poorer fit. And the better fit is, I think, to derive it from Konstantinopolis. Since this is also preferable semantgically, involving the actual name rather than a debatable circumlocution, it seems the obvious choice. Or am I missing some actual *evidence* pointing to eis te:n polin? Leo Connolly From bronto at pobox.com Mon Jul 30 15:23:08 2001 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2001 08:23:08 -0700 Subject: Stamboul (was: bishop) Message-ID: Robert Whiting wrote: > Regardless of how these transformations may have come about, > if San Francisco can become Frisco, Does anyone really call it that, though? Around here it's "the City". -- Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/ From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Thu Jul 26 11:16:58 2001 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 14:16:58 +0300 Subject: real proto-lang In-Reply-To: <003c01c111b4$b7694700$e00a073e@xpoxkjlf> Message-ID: On Fri, 20 Jul 2001, petegray wrote: > I would make the abstractionist position even thinner. It is not the final > result of application of the method, but merely a description of the > attested state of affairs. I think it is application of the method which > moves beyond mere description to posit an original sound or root. > Thus saying that the symbol *bh is a code for the correspondences in > attested IE languages is mere description plus label; whereas positing an > actual sound *bh is application of the method. I don't think I can fully agree with you here: it seems that the abstractionist position cannot be merely "a description of the attested state of affairs", because it involves etymological claims (X and Y are cognate etc.). No sound correspondences can be established even in the abstractionist framework through mere description; this is, of course, what the method is for. > Interpretation comes in > when we then try to make sense of that sound, and say either that PIE needed > to have *ph as well, or that the sound we write *bh was breathy voice, or > allophonically aspirated, or a fricative or whatever. > There are thus (for me) three stages, and the refusal to move from the first > to the second seems an unnecessary limitation on what we can claim to know. Of course, I agree. I don't think any serious comparativist would really refuse to move beyond the first stage; but the question is rather what the comparative method does. It seems to me that the method, in the strict sense, is only applicable in the first stage and everything beyond that has actually nothing to do with the method itself but merely with the result. ----- A concrete example also comes into mind here. In 1981, several problematic correspondences (concerning e.g. the origin of long vowels in Finnic, and certain words showing a lengthened vowel before intervocalic *k in Samic) between the various branches of Uralic were solved by Juha Janhunen. The exact details are not relevant here, but the solution involved positing a new Proto-Uralic consonant, which has not been preserved unchanged in any branch. The consonant was symbolized with *x by Janhunen, as its exact phonetic nature is unknown. (The paper appeared in Journal de la Soci?t? Finno-Ougrienne 77, but it is in Finnish.) I'm sure you wouldn't consider this explanation merely a description of the attested state of affairs, because no phonetic value was suggested for *x? regards, Ante Aikio From alderson+mail at panix.com Thu Jul 26 19:11:50 2001 From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 15:11:50 -0400 Subject: real proto-lang In-Reply-To: (message from Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen on Sat, 21 Jul 2001 17:22:56 +0200 (MET DST)) Message-ID: On 21 Jul 2001, Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote: > we do indeed work on the assumption that PIE and all the intermediate stages > between it and the attested daughter languages were real and actually spoken > languages. The only quibble I have with this statement is the inclusion of the "P" in "PIE". I try always to make the distinction between "IE" (the real language ancestral to all the attested daughter languages) and "PIE" (our reconstruction of that language), because the latter is almost certainly not a synchronically real language due to complete loss of lexicon (including bound morphemes) over time. (It is for this reason that I find myself irritated at times by those non-linguists who write as if they think there is a *diachronic* distinction to be made between "IE" and "PIE".) This, rather than the more extreme "abstractionist" reading of the results of the comparative method, is what I intended to get across in my responses to the original poster. Rich Alderson linguist at large From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Thu Jul 26 15:07:47 2001 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 18:07:47 +0300 Subject: Hist Ling, a Primer: Part 1 (was Re: The Single Parent Question) In-Reply-To: <74.c5b78ec.286cc3c6@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 28 Jun 2001 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 6/27/2001 12:29:59 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk >writes: << And what is that? So far as I know, all I have ever >claimed about the comparative method is that it cannot produce >proto-languages that never existed. And that's just true. Do >you want to challenge this? >> >Yes. >There are perhaps a number of ways in which the comparative >method might "produce" a language or a part of a language that >that never existed. There is perhaps one way that is relevant to >this discussion. >If you assume only one parent where there was more than one >parent, the comparative method can be used to reconstruct a >language that never existed. This is rather like saying that if you assume that the world is flat then you can walk to the edge and jump off. >If a language family "inherited" from more than one prehistoric >parent, the comparative method will not be able to distinguish >more than one parent - IF you assume only one parent. If you >assume all reconstructible features descended from one parent - >where there were actually multiple parents - you will reconstruct >a language that never existed. Such a statement shows a complete lack of comprehension of what the term "genetic relationship" means. Very simply, languages that are genetically related were once the same language. That is all there is to it. Thus genetically related languages do not "inherit" from more than one language. They only inherit from the common parent (i.e., the language that these languages were once identical to). Thus English and German are genetically related because they were once the same language (Proto-Germanic) and French and Spanish are genetically related because they were once the same language (Latin). On a different level, English and Spanish are genetically related because they were once the same language (Proto-Indo-European). Interestingly enough, Sir William Jones, who is usually credited with being the first to recognize the Indo-European unity and the founder of comparative linguistics, hit the nail pretty much on the head back in 1786 when he said: The Sanskrit language, whatever may be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both within the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed that no philologer could examine them all, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the Old Persian might be added to the same family. Here it all is, tied up in a neat ribbon. These words, delivered as a address to the Bengal Asiatic Society, are often quoted in introductory texts on comparative linguistics or on Indo-European studies and constitute the creation story of the discipline. Sir William pretty much got it right the first time. It took about a century to work out the details, but his observations have stood the test of time. That is why his words are so often quoted. He even left room for the influence of other languages ("blended with a very different idiom"), but you will notice that he didn't say 'sprung from several common sources'. But you cannot show any such thing as a "language family that 'inherited' from more than one prehistoric parent" because a language family is by definition a group of languages that were once the same language (cf. David Crystal _The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language_ [2nd edition, 1997], p. 427, s.v. "family": "A set of languages that derive from a common ancestor (parent) language..."). It is not possible for a group of languages to have once been two different languages (at least not without the intervening stage of a single language). It may be possible that the parent language was a meld of two or more different languages, but if it was, then this is what the comparative method will reconstruct. This is what the comparative method does. It tells you (if used competently) what the parent of the daughter languages looked like (just before the parent split). It doesn't tell you how the parent language got that way because it can't. That is the job of internal reconstruction, or, if other proto-languages are available for comparison, the comparative method taken to the next higher level. Now a language can be influenced by any number of languages through borrowing or convergence, but that does not make any of these languages a parent of that language. If it did, the parents of English would include Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Etruscan, Finnish, Hungarian, Malay, Mayan, Nahuatl, Sumerian, Swahili, Kaffir, Algonkian, Hawaiian, and hundreds if not thousands of other languages from which English with its capacity for swallowing foreign words whole has appropriated words for its own use. Similarly, it could be said that most of the world's 6000 (give or take a few thousand) or so languages have English as a parent if they have at least one English loanword (such as 'hamburger', 'television' or some form of 'automobile'). Carrying this reductio ad absurdum a step further, English has been heavily influenced by Latin in its lexicon, morphology, and syntax. Basque has also been heavily influenced by Latin. According to you this makes Latin a parent of both English and Basque. The next logical claim is that English and Basque must be related because they share a common parent. But to get back to the romance languages (the daughters of Latin), French and Spanish were once the same language (Latin). We can tell this by using the comparative method, which gives reconstructions of many, many lexical, morphological, and syntactic features of the parent. Since the parent is an attested language (Latin) we can check the forms against the reconstruction (proto-romance) to verify the effectiveness of the method. Let's say, for the purposes of discussion, that we can account for the differences between French and Spanish by the influence of different substratum languages (let's say *Gaulish for French and *Iberian for Spanish without committing to either the truth of the claim or of the nature of the hypothetical substratum languages). According to Steve's view this means that French now has two parents (Latin and *Gaulish) and so does Spanish (Latin and *Iberian). If we use the comparative method on French and Spanish does it reveal these second "parents"? No, it still reconstructs Latin forms because that is what is common to the two languages. Using the comparative method on French and Spanish *cannot* reconstruct *Gaulish and/or *Iberian because they are not common to the two languages being compared. The comparative method will only reconstruct what is common to the languages being compared (incidentally, I am using "languages being compared" as shorthand for "comparing forms from the languages being compared"). Okay, if that doesn't work let's say that French and Spanish both have the same substratum language and then compare them. That way both the parent and the substratum language will be common to both languages. But wait a minute -- we were accounting for the differences between French and Spanish by different substratum languages. If they both have the same substratum then we don't have different languages. There is no way to tell the difference between French and Spanish. We just have *Spench or *Franish or some such thing and nothing to use the comparative method on. Okay then, let's compare *Spench with some other romance language, say Italian. In this case since Italian is in the ancestral homeland, we can do without a substratum language, thus creating that great rarity (in Steve's view), a language with only one parent. When we reconstruct the parent of Italian and Spench what do we get? -- Latin again, because that is the only language common to both. So we see Steve's dream of being able to reconstruct multiple parents using the comparative method constantly receding before us, much as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow constantly recedes as we walk toward the rainbow. Aw, shucks. >How does the comparative method tell if there was more than one >parent language? It doesn't because there is no such thing. A mixed languages is just that. One language cannot be "genetically related." You can't use the comparative method on a language like Michif because there is nothing to compare it to. It's like asking "which weighs more, a pound of feathers?" If you have daughters of a mixed language, using the comparative method on them will reconstruct the parent language, mixed or not (and since every language is mixed to some extent, the concept has no particular significance). That's what the comparative method does. It reconstructs the probable form of the parent of genetically related languages. You can't use the comparative method on a parent language and its daughter because that's not what the comparative method does (besides, in most cases you don't have the parent until you reconstruct it from the daughters using the comparative method). The comparative method reconstructs the probable ancestor of two or more now different forms that were once the same form (in one language). It provides a possible solution to the many-from-one situation. It can do nothing about a one-from-many situation. But using the comparative method is not like solving an equation for the volume of a sphere as you seem to think. Using the comparative method requires judgment, common sense, training, and experience. You don't just plug in the data, push a button and come back later and see what the proto-language looks like. The results have to be interpreted based on the linguist's knowledge of the kinds of things that are possible in terms of sound changes and other types of linguistic developments. To do this the linguist has to be familiar with as many different languages and their histories as possible and with typological classification and its ramifications. >It depends on the assumption one makes from the start - I think >its ability to see multiple descent is canceled out by the single >parent assumption. It will show "systematic correspondences" but >has no way of distinguishing multiple descent for those >correspondences. No, what the comparative method does is identify the features of the parent language that are still present in its daughters. "Single parent" is not an assumption of the comparative method. It is the definition of genetically related languages in historical linguistics. The assumption that makes the comparative method work is that sound change (within a language) is regular. Irregular sound changes block the comparative method. Now there are some situations in which the comparative method could point to erroneous conclusions, but none of them have anything to do with "the single parent assumption." One such situation is where two or more daughter languages have independently undergone identical innovations. Features shared by daughter languages are likely to be reconstructed for the proto-language simply because it is more likely for some feature to have arisen only once and have been transmitted to the daughters than for it to have arisen independently in the daughters. But as Steve himself has pointed out some time ago, unlikely things do happen. Here typology of changes comes into play. If the change is a typologically common one, say palatalizaion of velars before front vowels or s > h > 0, then it is less unlikely for it to have arisen independently. On the other hand, if the change is typologically unusual or complex, like Grimm's Law, or depends on other changes that must have taken place in the proto-language, like Verner's Law, then the change can safely be reconstructed for the proto-language. Another situation that plays merry hell with the comparative method is changes in the proto-language that reverse themselves in one or more daughters. Such an event is rare, but not unheard of. It makes it very difficult to say what belongs to the proto-language and what doesn't. Yet another situation that causes glitches in the reconstruction of a proto-language, and that appears to be closest to what you are proposing as a method of reconstructing a nonexistent proto-language, is when two (or more) daughter languages are influenced in exactly the same way by another language. Under these circumstances, the common features from this source could be reconstructed for the proto-language when in fact the proto-language never heard of them. If the influencing language (or a descendent of it) is attested, it may be possible to identify these features and attribute them to their proper source, but if the influencing language has become extinct without leaving a trace (except for its influence on the languages we are investigating) then this influence may not be recognized for what it is. But in any case, if it is attributed incorrectly to the proto-language, it is likely to appear as an anomaly of some kind. The fact that these situations could arise show that the comparative method is not foolproof. But then no method is foolproof (Murphy's Law). Nor can a method be made foolproof. If someone devises a better method, someone else will devise a better fool. But these potential pitfalls do not invalidate the comparative method. They simply show that those who would use the comparative method need to be aware of them so that they can evaluate how much confidence can be placed in a given reconstruction. And this is where experience and training come in. >The comparative method is a powerful tool, And powerful tools require training and experience to operate. >but even the Hubbell can't see the far side of the moon. Which is why we assume that the far side of the moon is, grosso modo, not much different from the side that we can see. But until you know the answer to "how do we know that the moon is not made of green cheese?", you won't be able to come to grips with the concept of historical linguistics. >Without the single parent assumption, I suspect the comparative >method could also support explanations that include multiple >"genetic strains." Which shows how misplaced your suspicions are. You seem to be under a considerable genetic strain yourself. :) But just to show you that "the single parent assumption" doesn't have to be abandoned in order to do historical linguistic or even to uncover different "genetic strains," let's look at an actual example. By using the comparative method on English, German, Dutch, the Scandinavian languages, Gothic, etc., it is possible to reconstruct Proto-Germanic in considerable detail. The comparative method will filter out the extensive French, Latin, and Greek influence on English because it is not shared systematically by the sister languages. What we get from this is a reconstruction of the Proto-Germanic language just before it split into its daughters. Now we can take this back a step farther by using the comparative method on Proto-Germanic and its sister languages, Proto-Italic, Proto-Balto-Slavic, Proto-Indo-Iranian, etc. This gives us yet another proto-language, which we call Proto-Indo-European. Now it turns out that a number of features that we can reconstruct for Proto-Germanic, we can't reconstruct for PIE, which means that they are not found in the sister languages. This suggests that Proto-Germanic had been influenced by some other language or languages before it split into its daughters and that its sister languages were not subjected to this influence. To account for this, we propose that this influence took place between the time that Germanic split from PIE and before it split into its own daughters, a stage of the development that we refer to as pre-Proto-Germanic or sometimes simply as pre-Germanic. In order to account for the large number of features of Proto-Germanic that can't be traced back to PIE we hypothesize that there was a substratum language that heavily influenced Germanic during the pre-Germanic phase (so that Proto-Germanic is "blended with a very different idiom"). Unfortunately, unless this substratum language is actually attested, it is very difficult to say (scientifically) anything very specific about this hypothetical substrate language because: a) We can never be entirely sure whether something that appears in Proto-Germanic is an internal development or is to be attributed to the substratum. b) There is no way to reconstruct the substratum language because there is nothing to compare. The comparative method works (scientifically) because it uses two or more forms to triangulate on the original form. Proposing an origin for a single form is simply speculative because there are too many possible origins. So one can suggest that the unaccounted for (by inheritance) features of Proto-Germanic are the result of influence from some other language (which is not unreasonable because inter-language influence is a normal thing), but there is no way to prove it, and even worse, there is no way to disprove it. But the comparative method can detect this possible influence if there is enough data. It just can't say much of anything else about it. That has to come from other sources. >In which case, the method would produce data that could be used >to reconstruct one or multiple parents. In which case, one of >those two reconstructions would be false. And that would be one >way the comparative method could be used to reconstruct a >proto-language that never existed. Which is as good a way as any of saying that you don't know what the comparative method is, how it works, what the inputs are and what comes out of it. The comparative method doesn't produce data -- data is the input to the comparative method. Data is something that exists in nature. Interpretations of data are different from data. Interpretations of data involve judgment, common sense, training and experience. Interpretations of data are hermeneutics. That is why comparative linguistics is a hermeneutic discipline. Now the output of the comparative method is data in the sense that it can be used in further applications of the method to reconstruct a higher level proto-language. But there is a qualitative difference between this kind of datum and a naturally occurring one. That is why linguists (and philologists) put an asterisk (*) in front of reconstructed forms -- to show that they are not naturally occurring data. The asterisk means: caution -- this is a reconstructed datum that is not actually attested but was arrived at by interpretation of other data. ><you ever grappled with linguistic data in an effort to >demonstrate common ancestry, or to challenge someone else's >efforts in this direction?>> >This won't help you here. I won't ask if you've ever argued a >science case in Federal Court or ever did plasma analysis or >worked on neural systems or did any high-order economic analysis. The difference is that Larry is not trying to tell you how to do any of those things or telling you that you are doing them wrong. What he is telling you is that everything that you have said indicates that you don't understand the methodology of comparative linguistics. And the fact that you may have done the things you say and perhaps even done them right doesn't mean that you know anything about how to do comparative linguistics. What he is telling you is that using the methods of comparative linguistics competently requires training and experience and he is asking you what your qualifications are for critiqueing the methodology. Your answer seems to be that you don't need any. >You've claimed an extremely high level of certainty with regard >to the reconstruction of proto-languages. I'm looking at the >scientific validity of that claim. No you're not. You are just making it clear that you don't understand either the terminology or the methodology involved in that claim. You are making it clear that you have only one concept of science: predictability based on precise measurements. You are making it clear that you do not realize that sometimes science is merely explanatory without being able to make accurate or detailed predictions. You are making it clear that you have no grasp of the concept of epistemology. You seem to be under the impression that all sciences have the same methods and reach their conclusions in the same way as the sciences that you are familiar with and therefore the methods of physics should be used in linguistics. But this is not so. Physics gets its cachet from very precise measurements of universal properties or characteristics of the real world. Its plausibility stems from the fact that these constants are the same wherever or whenever they are measured and can be used to predict the actions of a physical body when subjected to certain forces in a cause and effect relationship. But comparative linguistics does not get its plausibility from precise measurements of universal constants or from predictions of cause and effect relationships. It gets its plausibility from the fact that the pieces of a correct linguistic solution must all be interlocking. This is why regular sound correspondences and pattern matching are so important in historical/comparative linguistics. Parts of the solution must be brought into uniformity with other parts of the solution (pattern matching). If the patterns of regular sound correspondences don't match throughout the reconstruction, then the reconstruction is wrong in one or more details. Historical linguistics is hermeneutic; it is a science of interpretation, of ideas and rationality, not of universal constants and causality. >That demands that the process should be rational and >reproducible. If you're saying I'm missing something, spell it >out. Okay, try this: LANGUAGES THAT ARE GENETICALLY RELATED WERE ONCE THE SAME LANGUAGE. And what in the world is rational and reproducible about high-order economic analyses? Economic analysis is as chaotic as language change. Incidentally, chaotic here is a technical term. It does not have its free meaning of "in a state of utter confusion." It refers to systems that are unusually sensitive to variations in their initial conditions or are affected by a large number of independent variables. Such systems may show patterns, even classic patterns that develop quite often, but predicting the outcome of these patterns in a particular instance usually doesn't work because the classic development of the pattern can be upset by a wide range of more or less unpredictable and unrelated variables. It is like trying to predict the weather. You can keep all the statistics you want. You can have a record of the temperature and amount of rainfall on July 4th for the past hundred years. But none of these statistics will tell you on July 3rd whether it's going to rain on your parade the next day or not (unless perhaps you are having your 4th of July parade in Riyadh). >But not with the conclusions or unexplained assumptions >that you have been relying on so far. And I assume you aren't >claiming any kind of unique psychic powers in your use of the >comparative method that are beyond ordinary comprehension. I really don't think the idea of genetically related languages is beyond your comprehension despite your claim that it is. But it is obviously beyond your limited concept of "science." Of course, it is quite possible that the aforementioned judgment, common sense, and linguistic experience are psychic powers that are beyond your comprehension. But just in case you haven't gotten it yet: LANGUAGES THAT ARE GENETICALLY RELATED WERE ONCE THE SAME LANGUAGE. This is the basic assumption of historical/comparative linguistics. This has been true for over 200 years -- from Jones' 1786 "sprung from some common source" to Anttila's 1989 "'Related' is a technical term ... meaning that the items were once identical" (p. 300). If you can just keep this in mind, you won't get hung up on the 50 parent problem. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Thu Jul 26 15:11:23 2001 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 18:11:23 +0300 Subject: Science? (was Re: The Single Parent Question) In-Reply-To: <001201c1059d$3c721b80$61564341@swbell.net> Message-ID: On Thu, 5 Jul 2001 proto-language wrote: >From: >Sent: Saturday, June 30, 2001 10:58 PM >>In a message dated 6/30/01 8:35:12 PM Mountain Daylight Time, >>X99Lynx at aol.com writes: >>>This won't help you here. I won't ask if you've ever argued a >>>science case in Federal Court or ever did plasma analysis or >>>worked on neural systems or did any high-order economic analysis. >>>You've claimed an extremely high level of certainty with regard >>>to the reconstruction of proto-languages. I'm looking at the >>>scientific validity of that claim. >[JS] >> -- no, you aren't, because you don't have the knowledge-base >>to do so. >[PCR] >I do not subscribe to much of what Steve writes either but I do >believe he is asking pertinent question. But he is not asking a question. He is making a claim. He is claiming that he is competent to judge the scientific validity of comparative linguistics without having to know anything about comparative linguistics either with respect to the data or to the means of evaluating and interpreting the data. >This type of snobbish response is not at all helpful. If it could convince Steve that he is trying to play ice hockey with the equipment used in baseball, it would be very helpful indeed. But since it won't, it is not particularly helpful except to people who aren't Steve. But is no more unhelpful than hubristic pronouncements that the conclusions reached by a discipline are incorrect without knowing how those conclusions were reached. What is unhelpful is to claim that these conclusions are wrong, not because they are not supported by the data, but because they were not reached by the methods that are used in other disciplines. The only reasons that can be accepted for the conclusions being wrong is that they are not supported by the data or that there is another conclusion that is better supported by the data. To do this requires familiarity with both the data and the methodology by which the conclusions were reached. Pointing out this simple fact is neither snobbish nor unhelpful. >Steve is not suggesting for one moment that he has the training >in IE linguistics of many on this list. Of course he isn't. What he is suggesting is that he doesn't need that training in order to accomplish the same thing that people with this training have and that despite their training and his lack of it, he has done it right and they have done it wrong. In short, he is suggesting that all that training in comparative linguistics is a waste of time, that anyone who can tie his own shoes can do comparative linguistics. >He is questioning the methodology used based on his familiarity >with it in other disciplines. But he hasn't mentioned any disciplines that use the same methodology. He is choosing disciplines that don't use the same methodology or that that have different types of data from comparative linguistics. He is trying to use the tools that he is familiar with to do a job that they weren't designed for. He is trying to drill a hole with a crosscut saw because he only has or knows how to use a crosscut saw. Furthermore, he is telling people who know how to use a brace and bit that they can't use it for drilling holes because he doesn't know how to use it. It is simply a non sequitur. He is comparing things that are not comparable. If he wants to compare comparative linguistics with a comparable science, let him talk about dactylography -- about how one goes about comparing fingerprints to see if they are the same. His claim is that one can't do science without accurate measurements. He is apparently unaware that the definition of science says nothing about making measurements. In effect, he is saying that the only way to tell the difference between a square and a triangle is to measure the perimeter and compute the area and then calculate the ratio of one to the other, or, if one has a different kind of measuring device, by measuring the interior angles and adding them up. When people tell him that actually you can tell the difference between a square and a triangle by comparing the shapes, he says "shapes? -- you can't measure shapes! -- what kind of science is that?" When he says that the conclusions of comparative linguistics can't be believed because they aren't produced with the methodology used in physics or chemistry or molecular biology while at the same time making it obvious that he has no idea what the methodology used in comparative linguistics is, he is simply paraphrasing the old dodge about lack of qualifications not being a bar to making decisions. He is saying "I don't know anything about comparative linguistics, but I know what I like." In short, he is not being objective about comparative linguists; apparently he can't be because he doesn't seem to understand what the objects of comparative linguistics are. He confuses terminology at the most basic levels, using terms like language and language family interchangeably. His only valid conclusion is that the objects of comparative linguistics are not the objects of physics. What he can't seem to grasp is that that does not make the manipulation of the objects of comparative linguistics any less scientific than the manipulation of the objects of physics. Sometimes it is possible to say (scientifically) whether two objects are the same or different without having to (or even being able to) measure them. >Linguistics should be done with the same, generally recognized >scientific methodology as other sciences --- whenever that is >possible. It is recognizing when it is possible that is the trick. Besides, Linguistics *is* done with the same scientific methodology that is applicable to other sciences: Data are analyzed to arrive at theories that have explanatory power, that have a test for inadequacy, and that can be confirmed or disconfirmed by additional data. That is scientific methodology. Scientific methodology says nothing about a requirement for quantification or accurate measurements of physical properties. Differences in how this methodology are applied are usually dictated by the nature of the data or the goals of the discipline. Where the data are easily quantifiable and/or measurable, quantification and measurement may become an integral part of the methodology, but where not, not. Within the parameters of the disciplines, it is as objective a statement to say that Spanish and French are genetically related languages or that Greek 'hippos' and Latin 'equus' are cognates as it is to say that the base of natural logarithms is 2.71828+. But one cannot tell how objective a statement about genetically related languages or cognates is if one does not know what genetically related languages or cognates are. Please don't mistake what I am saying here. I am not saying that methodology can't be criticized. You have heard me say often enough that Meritt Ruhlen's methodology is inadequate to discover what he claims that it does. What I am saying is that methodology must be judged in relation to the data it is used on and the conclusions it reaches based on that data. Methodology cannot be faulted because it is not the same as the methodology used in another discipline where the data types or the goals of the discipline may be different. And it cannot be faulted because one does not like the conclusions that it produces. In the final analysis conclusions are believable only because of the evidence and the argumentation that produce them. If the evidence doesn't warrant the conclusions or if the argumentation is full of gaps and inconsistencies, that is what makes the conclusions suspect, not the fact that they weren't produced with equations using universal constants or by a megabuck machine with micrometric precision. >I find this totally unobjectionable. Unobjectionable in principle, but objectionable in malpractice. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Thu Jul 26 15:15:20 2001 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 18:15:20 +0300 Subject: Hist Ling, a Primer: Part 2 (was Re: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns") In-Reply-To: <6e.c0bd599.2865a684@aol.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 23 Jun 2001 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 6/22/2001 12:44:17 AM, hstahlke at gw.bsu.edu writes: ><< There's an almost trivial sense in which Steve has to be >right, but I think he's taken his case beyond that point. Having >worked on Niger-Congo languages, especially those of the eastern >half of West Africa, I've been faced with the question of where >to begin.... As Bill Welmers used to say, "You get to the point >where you know that these language can't be unrelated." Of >course, he would also add that you then start using the >comparative method to work out the relationships and make sure >they're there. We're dealing with different orders of >hypothesis. Using some careful lexicostatistics gives you a >reasonable hypothesis, but then applying the comparative method >takes you to a much stronger one. As I said, this is an almost >trivially obvious point. >> [For Herb]: When Steve is right, it is almost always in a trivial sense. Being able to distinguish the trivial from the significant seems to be one of his major problems. Of course, it isn't always easy, and it is exacerbated when one doesn't understand the discipline or its terminology. It is almost impossible to tell what is significant if one does not understand the parameters. >Well, of course, my question was, at that point, did you ever >consider the hypothesis that the language had two ancestral >language groups to whom it "can't be unrelated." Not the same thing at all. Herb is talking about "these languages" as a putative language family. "The language" is not a language family. A language family is descended from a single language. That is the definition of a language family.<-- In case you don't recognize it, that mark is a "period." It means that is the end of the thought. In other words a language family is a group of languages that are descended from a single language PERIOD. Saying "think of a language family with two parents" is like offering a mathematical proof and saying "now divide by 0." It just is not part of the system. Division by 0 is not defined. A language family with two parents is not defined. Of course you could say "let's define a language family as having two or more parents," but then you aren't doing comparative linguistics any more. You're doing a gedankenexperiment much like saying "assume there is no gravitational attraction at the earth's surface." You can only do this as a thought exercise because such a thing does not exist. It is like constructing a point at infinity so you can see what happens when all the parallel lines in the universe meet (ans: it gets very crowded) or like saying "what if three points define a line? -- we only get our picture of geometry by assuming that two points define a line but how do we know that that's right?" >But, in any case, believe me, what you've described is not >trivial at all when you're dealing with some very 20-20 hindsight >style explanations. Larry Trask's explanation of why languages >can't have more than one genetic ancestor typically offer the >conclusions as if they were explanations. On the contrary. You are making the same mistake again. Larry hasn't been talking about individual languages and he hasn't said that "languages" can't have more than one ancestor. He has been talking about language families. You are the one who has been talking about language families as if they were languages. Now a language can have as many parents as you want it to. If you think that every language that has contributed something to English is a parent of English, then English has at least several hundred parents. But this is not the way that comparative linguists consider language development or the way that they define genetic links. A language is not a language family. A language can be influenced by any number of other languages, related or not. You can think of these influencing languages as parents of that language if it gives you a warm glow or helps you sleep through the night. But a language family has only one parent because that is the definition of a language family. >In another post I tried to ask why one "systematic >correspondence" - which would alone have been considered enough >to establish a "genetic' relationship - should be considered >non-genetic because of the presence of another "more genetic" >systematic correspondence. >I was obviously referring to a situation where both "genetic" and >"non-genetic" elements both create what would ordinarily be >called "patterns." (The kind of patterns you might see even if, >for example, the hypothesis you described in your post about >relatedness ended up being wrong.) [Or the kind of patterns you might see if you'd been smoking some really weird stuff.] >Here's Larry Trask's reply. Note that below "miscellaneous >common elements" aren't patterns. Only genetic patterns have >"patterns." >In a message dated 6/22/2001 10:44:59 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes: ><elements: instead, as always, we rely entirely on patterns.... >It is patterns that demonstrate common ancestry, not the presence >of any number of miscellaneous common elements.... >We do not recognize genetic links on the basis of miscellaneous >elements: instead, as always, we rely entirely on patterns.... >It is patterns that demonstrate common ancestry, not the presence >of any number of miscellaneous common elements... >And Albanian is not Greek, Romance, Slavic, Hungarian or Turkic, >even though elements of these origins greatly outnumber the >inherited elements.... >It is a distinct branch of IE, because this is the only >conclusion permitted by the patterns we observe.... >Patterns, patterns, patterns.>> >There may be an explanation for the one only parent rule. But >this cannot be it. You are so fixed on the word "patterns" that you don't seem to be able to see the key phrases in what Larry is saying. These are "genetic links" and "common ancestry." These both refer to the same basic premise: Genetically related languages were once the same language. This is simply the definition of genetic relationship in comparative linguistics. "Genetic links" thus refers to the correspondences between languages that were once the same language. "Common ancestry" refers to the same thing. That two or more forms in two or more languages were once the same form in a single language. That's what genetically related (or "cognate") means. Let me repeat that in case you didn't get it: LANGUAGES THAT ARE GENETICALLY RELATED WERE ONCE THE SAME LANGUAGE. This is the explanation of what you call the "one parent rule." >As you were kind enough to concede, you have to see patterns >BEFORE you even apply the comparative method. Heck, borrowing >creates patterns. "Patterns" therefore CANNOT explain the >difference between genetic and non-genetic relationships. Sure they can. You just have to be able to tell the difference. Admittedly, it's not always easy, but the more information you have, the easier it gets. And one of the things about doing linguistic reconstructions is that you use all the information you can get. But saying that because inheritance and borrowing both produce patterns you can't tell the difference between them is just another of your famous non sequiturs. It is like saying that you can't tell the difference between plaids and polka dots because they are both patterns. And this is what you call science. I can visualize you dressed in plaid trousers, a polka dot shirt, a paisley tie, and a striped blazer and claiming that it is a well coordinated outfit because "hey, man, like they're all patterns and like, y'know, all patterns are the same." Believe it or not, not all patterns are the same. It is possible to tell the difference between different types of patterns. And believe it or not, some people can actually tell the difference between different plaid patterns without a spectrometer. Quite simply, the patterns that inherited words form are (usually) different from the patterns that borrowed words form. Inherited words have always been in the language (that's what inherited means). Borrowed words have been in the language for less time than inherited words. Thus borrowed words have followed a different path to get where they are than inherited words have and hence create different patterns. For example, PIE *p comes into Germanic as /f/ but into Greek and Latin as /p/. Thus in English it is easy to tell inherited Germanic "flat" (ON 'flatr', OS 'flat', OHG 'flaz') from 'plate', 'platter', 'platen', 'platypus', etc borrowed from Latin or Greek. Of course, the fact that both Greek and Latin have the same reflex of PIE *p means that it is harder to tell inherited Latin words with /p/ from Greek loans, but this doesn't affect the reconstruction of either Proto-Germanic or PIE, only of Proto-Italic. But it does point out that it is not always easy, or in some instances even possible, to distinguish borrowing from inheritance. Sometimes the patterns aren't different enough to allow a decision to be made. But this is, in general, an exception rather than a rule. And I can't think of another discipline (that isn't based on "first principles" such as mathematics is) where there don't arise decisions that are too close to call one way or the other on the basis of the available data. Frequently even borrowings of the same word or root will pattern in different ways depending on when the borrowing took place. In French, Latin ([k]) before [a] developed first into [C] ([tS]) and later into [S]. Because of these changes, it is often possible, from the patterns which the borrowings form, to tell when words with the same root from the Latin-French continuum came into English. Thus 'cant', 'chant' 'chanteuse' (the inherited cognate is 'hen', another regular correspondence); 'candle', 'chandler', 'chandelier', etc. Indeed, the differences in patterning even allow us to recognize borrowings from closely related languages (or even dialects): Native word: shirt rear 'em yard fox borrowing: skirt raise them garden vixen On the other hand, borrowings from unrelated languages often stand out on the basis of their completely un-native patterns: bwana kangaroo okapi quetzalcoatl kinkajou So Larry is quite right. The secret to comparative linguistics (which you seem to consider some sort of mystical psychic process) is: "Patterns, patterns, patterns." The moral of the story? -- If you aren't good at pattern recognition, don't take up comparative linguistics. But even more important, if you haven't got the patience to work through all the patterns to see if they are regular or specious, or whether they result from inheritance or borrowing, don't even think about comparative linguistics. But there is nothing wrong with noticing correspondences or even patterns before applying the comparative method. This is known as a heuristic device. A heuristic is something that gives you an indication of where to look for something (sometimes called a "clue" for those who seem to operate without them and don't recognize the concept). The thing about heuristics is that they don't tell you if what you notice is significant or not. This is why one then applies the comparative method -- the comparative method will tell you whether what you have noticed is just a flash in the pan or is solid gold. But the fact that you can notice patterns before applying the comparative method does not mean that the comparative method cannot (or CANNOT if your caps lock is stuck) tell the difference between inherited and borrowed forms. That's just one of those little logical hiccups that you have from time to time that surface as non sequiturs. It may be true sometimes that you can't tell the difference between inheritance and borrowing, but not as a general rule. To illustrate the points that you have raised (about being able to see patterns without using the comparative method and about whether it is possible to tell the difference between inherited and borrowed material) I have a couple of small assignments for you of the type that I often set for students. I could just tell you the answers as examples, but since linguistic arguments just seem to roll off your back, it might mean more to you if you work them out for yourself. I really do think that it is difficult to see how this stuff works if you don't do some of it yourself. 1) Greek 'theos' "god" and Latin 'deus' "god" are identical in meaning and quite similar in form. Are these two words in fact cognates? What is the most plausible explanation for their similarity? Finally, how do we know? 2) There are two words in English that are more or less a fixed pair: 'salt' and 'pepper'. Both of these words appear in a similar form in almost all IE languages. One of them is inherited from PIE and one of them is a loanword in practically every IE language. Which one is which and how do we know? Now you don't have to answer these, but then I will know that you aren't really the self-appointed watchdog of proper scientific method as you claim, but are just kvetching about the methodology of comparative linguistics because you don't like its conclusions. If you do answer them, then I will give you some more complex ones. Incidentally, "are they cognates?" in question 1 means "were they once the same word (in the same language)?" I mention this because at one time you thought that cognates were words that had the same meaning. Although you seem not to be using the word that way at this particular moment, you do have a tendency to recidivism. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Thu Jul 26 15:19:08 2001 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 18:19:08 +0300 Subject: Language is made up of independent parts? (was Re: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole) In-Reply-To: <26.1736db1d.2865a8a5@aol.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 23 Jun 2001 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 6/22/2001 10:44:59 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk >writes: [SL] >>> Words and morphs are not like biological cells. Each word or >>>piece of morphology does not contain a hologram of the entire >>>language in its DNA. We cannot clone an entire language out of a >>>single word or verb morphology. A language is made up of many >>>totally independent parts. Why should the "genetics" of one part >>>affect the "genetics" of another part. "A language is made up of many totally independent parts." This is your first mistake (in this posting). A language is a fully integrated system. All the parts are interdependent. You just think that language is made up of individual, "totally independent," parts because the interactions between the parts are so complex and operate on so many different levels that linguists (or others) break language into individual parts in order to make it possible to study language without having to deal with the incredible complexity of the overall system. This is called reductionism. It is a way to study complex systems by separating out what are apparently subsystems and studying these subsystems in isolation. Thus you get works entitled "the phonology of X", "the morphology of X", "the syntax of X", etc. where "X" is your favorite dialect, language, language family, and so on. The problem with this is that specialists in the various subsystems sometimes forget that their particular speciality is not the entire system and treat it as if it were. Those who are easily led astray are, of course, led astray by this and think that the subsystems are "totally independent." Then you get claims of a hierarchical structure in language where the various levels cannot affect each other. Thus "morphology can't affect phonology" or "syntax can't affect morphology." The existence and common use of terms like "morphophonemic" or "morphophonetic" and "morpho-syntactical" make such claims a priori unlikely. But spoken language is a system for expressing meaning through sounds. Therefore meaning and sound have to be interrelated. Saying that they are not is just a way of avoiding the complexity of the reality. It may be possible to study phonology, morphology, and syntax separately (if that's how you want to break up language into parts), but you can't use just one of them to communicate meaning because that's not the way language works. Language may be studied as independent subsystems, but it works as one single fully integrated system. Another reason for separating languages into these levels is that that seems to be the way that children learn language. First sounds (phonology), then words (morphology), and finally how to put words together to make grammatically correct sentences (syntax). Thus there seems to be some natural progression from level to level in L1 (first language) acquisition. But children haven't learned the language until they have mastered all three and integrated them into one system. Here is what Anttila 1989 has to say on the subject (p. 320), albeit in a slightly different context: All levels of grammar are intimately tied together, and we have seen that various grammatical facts can condition sound change. There cannot be syntax without sound in the actual functioning of the language. Thus the best target for genetic classification still remains the middle of language. ... To ensure that we do not float too high, our units of comparison have to be anchored to the lower levels by sound correspondences. So "A language is made up of many totally independent parts" is simply a false premise. [LT] >><>not apply the term to individual elements within a language. We >>can no more ask whether the English word 'pity' is genetic or not >>than we can ask whether it is green and squishy.>> >Well, that's fine. And I know a guy who refuses to call his >mother "mom". But at least he has an explanation for it. And is his explanation objective or subjective? I once saw a guy pitch a no-hitter and still lose the game, but what does either one have to do with the subject? It's just another of your non sequiturs. >Is there a more "pithy" answer to why there can only be one >genetic ancestor than this one? Yes. Genetically related languages were once the same language. Since it is not possible for two languages to be the same language without actually being the same language, there can be only one genetic ancestor for genetically related languages. QED. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Thu Jul 26 15:22:08 2001 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 18:22:08 +0300 Subject: If books are common, telephones must be rare (was Re: Rate of Change) In-Reply-To: <12f.9b813c.286ad667@aol.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 27 Jun 2001 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >I wrote: ><similarity, that might work. But "pita" and "father" clearly do >have some prima facie structural similarities.>> Especially if you come from certain areas of New York City where is realized as [t] and have a non-rhotic phonology that realizes both final -a and -er as [@] (schwa). >In a message dated 6/26/2001 11:40:28 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com writes: >><< -- well, you're wrong there. >>Consider the following words, all cognates and all meaning >>"horse" and all derived from *ekuos >>jor >>eoh >>'sp >>yuk >> >No I think I'm right. No surprise here. >Consider the following words, not apparently cognates and ALL >meaning "horse:" >caballos >ko:n >so qui li >marka >umma >nag >lo: >zaldi >mustang >hippos >The words in my list make the words in your list all look pretty >close, in comparison. As I said, it is a matter of degree. This is a fairly spectacular non sequitur even by your usual standards. The part of your original claim that you have wisely snipped (without indication) from your original post was: I would suspect that "found" cognates that truly have no recognizable resemblances are rare. This is what JoatSimeon at aol.com was replying to and now you claim that the fact that unrelated words often have no recognizable resemblances proves that cognates that have no recognizable resemblances are rare. As I say, a non sequitur of truly epic proportions. It is much the same as saying that looking at alligators and butterflies proves that related species that are not similar are rare. >And that's the problem with subjective evaluations. They lack >objective measure. No, that's the problem with letting jockeys bet on horse races; or a judge bet on the outcome of a case he is hearing. They can decide who is going to win. But the only subjective evaluation is yours. Your list of words has no standard by which it can be measured. All the words in the first list were once the same word (that's what "cognate" means. None of the words in your list were. Therefore it is possible to measure the distance between the words in the first list and their ancestor but it is not possible to measure the difference between the words in your list because there is nothing that they are all related to. But you are claiming that because your list is subjective, then the first list must be also. Just another non sequitur. Whenever you have two interrelated binary choices there are four possible outcomes. If the binary choices are related and unrelated and similar and dissimilar then you can have: 1 related and similar 2 related and dissimilar 3 unrelated and similar 4 unrelated and dissimilar You are saying that because 4 is common, then, a priori, 2 must be rare. This is practically the definition of a non sequitur. >That's why a scientific approach calls for at least some >precision in measures of variance. As in thermometers, radiation >spectrums and scientifically valid rates of change. And the final non sequitur (for this posting). Science is not the ability to measure things accurately. Science is the ability to prove claims through evidence and argumentation. Science is the ability to explain phenomena or processes in a rational and consistent way based on evidence. Science requires evidence, not accurate measurement. Accurate measurement is not part of the definition of science. It may be essential in some sciences where it is part of the evidence, but it doesn't enter into some others. Again, the trick is to know the difference. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Thu Jul 26 15:25:55 2001 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 18:25:55 +0300 Subject: Hist Ling, a Primer: Part 3 (was Re: "mono-descent is implicit in the comparative method ...") In-Reply-To: <103.552772c.286c1869@aol.com> Message-ID: On Thu, 28 Jun 2001 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 6/27/2001 3:51:21 PM, dlwhite at texas.net writes: ><< By the way, since "mono-descent" is implicit in the >comparative method, saying anything along the lines of "I accept >the comparative method but reject mono-descent" is sort of like >saying "I'll take the horse but not the legs". >> >BTW, let's look at that statement: "By the way, since >"mono-descent" is implicit in the comparative method,..." >I have four different historical linguistics textbooks in front >of me, including the admirable one written by Prof Trask. I >don't see a single definition that says anything about >mono-descent. I do see references to "systematic >correspondence" between two languages. I don't see anything that >logically demands those "systematic correspondences" be only >related back to only one ancestor. Then either you are looking in the wrong place or else you lack the ability to comprehend what you read. Personally, I am somewhat astonished to see you admit such a level of ignorance quite so openly. Unfortunately, I do not have Larry's book available, but I find that I have been unable to look at any of the texts that I do have without finding a clear statement to the effect that the comparative method is used to trace the forms found in related languages back to the most likely form in their common ancestor. Perhaps you are being confused by the term "common ancestor." If there is no clearer statement, this term by itself implies "mono-descent." Note that it does not say "common ancestors," but "common ancestor" -- i.e., the single language from which the related languages are all descended. "Common" here does not mean "not rare" but means "shared by all." And "common ancestor" does not refer to a grandmother who farts at the dinner table. It refers to the single language from which all the members of a language family are descended. First let's look at David Crystal's _Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language_ (2nd edition, 1997). This is a big, glitzy (especially the 2nd edition with lots of color photos and side-bars), coffee-table type book that has a wealth of information on many aspects of language but not going into any great detail in any of these aspects. Here is what he says on the subject of language families and the comparative method (p. 294): The first scientific attempts to discover the history of the world's languages were made at the end of the 18th century. Scholars began to compare groups of languages in a systematic and detailed way, to see whether there were correspondences between them. If these could be demonstrated, it could be assumed that the languages were related -- in other words, that they developed from a common source, even though this might no longer exist. Evidence of a common origin for groups of languages was readily available in Europe, in that French, Spanish, Italian, and other Romance languages were clearly descended from Latin -- which in this case is known to have existed. The same reasoning was applied to larger groups of languages and by the beginning of the 19th century, there was convincing evidence to support the hypothesis that there was once a language from which many of the languages of Eurasia have derived. This proto-language came to be called Proto-Indo-European. Very quickly, other groups of languages were examined using the same technique. The main metaphor that is used to explain the historical relationships is that of the language family, or the family tree. Within the Romance family, Latin the 'parent' language, and French, Spanish, etc. are 'daughter' languages; French would then be called a 'sister' language to Spanish and the others. ... This way of talking must not be taken too literally. A 'parent' language does live on after a 'daughter' language is 'born', nor do languages suddenly appear in the way implied by the metaphor of birth. Nor is it true that, once branches of a family begin to emerge, they develop quite independently, and are never afterwards in contact with each other. Languages converge as well as diverge. Furthermore, stages of linguistic development are not as clear-cut as the labels on a family tree suggest, with change operating smoothly and uniformly throughout. ... The Comparative Method In historical linguistics, the _comparative method_ is a way of systematically comparing a series of languages in order to prove a historical relationship between them. Scholars begin by identifying a set of formal similarities and differences between the languages and try to work out (or 'reconstruct') an earlier stage of development from which all the forms could have derived. ... When languages have been shown to have a common ancestor, they are said to be _cognate_. ... Genetic Classification This is a historical classification, based on the assumption that languages have diverged from a common ancestor. It uses early written remains as evidence, and when this is lacking, deductions are made using the comparative method to enable the form of the parent language to be reconstructed. The approach has been widely used, since its introduction at the end of the 18th century, and provides the framework within which all world-wide linguistic surveys to date have been carried out. The success of the approach in Eurasia, where copious written remains exist, is not matched in most other parts of the world, where a classification into families is usually highly tentative. Crystal tends to used "historical relationship" in place of "genetic relationship," but this is unremarkable (see the comment of Arlotto below). He also says "common ancestor" rather than "single parent," but this is also unremarkable since "common ancestor" means the same thing and is the most frequently used term. Now let's look at the comments of Bernard Comrie in the introduction to the compendium that he edited entitled _The World's Major Languages_ (1987) on pp. 5-6: 1.2 Language Families and Genetic Classification One of the basic organisational principles of this volume, ..., is the organisation of languages into language families. It is therefore important that some insight should be provided into what it means to say that two languages belong to the same language family (or equivalently: are genetically related). It is probably intuitively clear to anyone who knows a few languages that some languages are closer to one another than are others. ... Starting in the late eighteenth century, a specific hypothesis was proposed to account for such similarities, a hypothesis which still forms the foundation of research into the history and relatedness of languages. This hypothesis is that where languages share some set of features in common, these features are to be attributed to their common ancestor. Let us take some Examples from English and German. . Thus English and German belong to the same language family, which is the same as saying that they share a common ancestor. Now let's look at the remarks of Philip Baldi in the section "Indo-European Languages" in the same volume (pp. 33-36): Claiming that a language is a member of a linguistic family is quite different from establishing such an assertion using proven methods and principles of scientific analysis. During the approximately two centuries in which the interrelationships among the Indo-European languages have been systematically studied, techniques to confirm or deny genetic affiliations have been developed with great success. Chief among these methods is the comparative method, which takes shared features among languages as its data and provides procedures for establishing protoforms. The comparative method is surely not the only available approach, nor is it by any means foolproof. Indeed, other methods of reconstruction, especially the method of internal reconstruction and the method of typological inference, work together with the comparative method to achieve reliable results. ... When we claim that two or more languages are genetically related, we are at the same time claiming that they share common ancestry. And if we make such a claim about common ancestry, then our methods should provide us with a means of recovering the ancestral system, attested or not. The initial demonstration of relatedness is the easy part; establishing well-motivated intermediate and ancestral forms is quite another matter. Among the difficulties are: which features in which of the languages being compared are older? which are innovations? which are borrowed? how many shared similarities are enough to prove relatedness conclusively, and how are they weighted for significance? what assumptions do we make about the relative importance of lexical, morphological, syntactic and phonological characteristics, and about direction of language change? All of these questions come into play in any reconstruction effort, leaving us with the following assumption: if two or more languages share a feature which is unlikely to have arisen by accident, borrowing or as the result of some typological tendency or language universal, then it is assumed to have arisen only once and to have been transmitted to the two or more languages from a common source. The more such features are discovered and securely identified, the closer the relationship. In determining genetic relationship and reconstructing proto-forms using the comparative method, we usually start with vocabulary. ... From these and other data we seek to establish sets of equations known as correspondences, which are statements that in a given environment X phoneme of one language will correspond to Y phoneme of another language _consistently_ and _systematically_ if the two languages are descended from a common ancestor. Note that both these authors use the term "common ancestor." This is the same as saying "single parent." Now we can look at some textbooks on historical/comparative linguistics. First we will look at Hans H. Hock, _Principles of Historical Linguistics_ (1986). Hock's discussion of genetic relatedness is intertwined with a general discussion of the nature of language change which makes it too lengthy to quote in full, but despite this, and the tendency toward Germanic syntax, the following clear statements can be noted: Moreover, while all natural languages change, they do not necessarily change the same things at the same time. As a consequence, as communication between different groups becomes more tenuous or stops altogether, linguistic change may increasingly operate in different directions. Given sufficient time, then, the dialects spoken by these different groups may cease to by mutually intelligible and become completely different languages. At the same time, this divergent development in many cases does not go so far as to completely obscure the fact that these languages are descended from a common source. In such cases we speak of Related Languages. (p. 8) How long such linguistic relationships may remain discernible can be seen by looking at the set of vocabulary correspondences from the major languages of Europe .... In fact, not only is it possible to recognize the major linguistic groups; within the first and largest one, that of the Indo-European languages of Europe, further subgroups can be established without great difficulties. One of these is Romance. In the case of these languages we are lucky, in that their (near-)ancestral language, Latin, is attested. We are therefore able to confirm our suspicion that these languages are related, by being descended from a common ancestor through independent, divergent developments. For the other groups, no such ancestral language is attested. And this is true also for the whole Indo-European language family to which Latin and the Romance languages belong .... However, by applying what we know about how languages change we can in many cases 'reverse' the linguistic developments and through 'Comparative Reconstruction' establish what the ancestral language looked like. (p. 9) Again, note the term "common ancestor." Next, we can look at Raimo Anttila, _Historical and Comparative Linguistics_ (1989). Anttila is often not considered to be "mainstream" because he does not generally adhere to any particular doctrine but is eclectic in his explanations. Personally, however, I find little that is objectionable in his writings. Often he presents a balance that is not obvious in more doctrinaire or "school"-oriented linguists. Among his pithier comments on genetic relatedness we find: Languages connected by sets of correspondences form a language family. Thus all the Romance languages are sisters, and therefore daughters of Latin, the parent or mother language, from which they are all descended. 'Related' is a technical term, exactly like the equivalent 'cognate', meaning that the items were once identical. (p. 300) and Those languages that represent outcomes of one and the same proto-language are grouped into a family. (p. 318) This is as pithy as you can get. I don't see how anyone could confuse this for anything other than a clear statement of "single parent" and "mono-descent" as a criterion for genetic relatedness and language families. If you can explain how multiple languages can be "one and the same language" then I will be waiting to hear. Otherwise, forget it. Finally, let's look at Anthony Arlotto, _Introduction to Historical Linguistics_ (1972). This is a very elementary work, so elementary that I often recommend it to those who have absolutely no training in linguistics. I tend to think of it as the "Little Golden Book of Historical Linguistics." I say this without being derogatory. It is just very simple and easy to understand. It hits the high spots without getting bogged down in controversial or disputed points or using complex examples that can only be understood by someone with linguistic training. Here is what it says on the subject of related languages: It has been said that historical linguistics is based on a fact and a hypothesis. The fact is that certain languages show such remarkable similarities to each other that these similarities could not be due to chance or borrowing. The hypothesis is that these were once the same language. We call this ancestor language a _common language_. (pp. 38-39) and When the evidence that two languages were once the same becomes conclusive, we then speak of these two languages as being _genetically related_. Another way of phrasing the same fact is to say that they belong to the same _language family_. Note that when we group languages genetically, our claim is purely a historical one and does not necessarily imply that the attested languages resemble each other in any particularly definable degree .... In the course of time, the languages will have changed; the amount of change will be dependent on various factors, not all of which are clearly understood at the moment. ... Often, the similarities between two languages which attest their common origin will not be at all obvious at first glance. Or, on the other side of the coin, large amounts of borrowing may get in the way of correct conclusions. However, by a rigorous application of the methods of historical-comparative linguistics, it is often possible to say whether two or more languages are genetically related. Here we note the same point raised by Anttila: Genetically related languages were once the same language. Indeed, here we learn that this is the fundamental hypothesis of historical linguistics. We also note that Arlotto explains that genetic relationship is a historical relationship, thus validating Crystal's use of the term "historical relationship." The two are not interchangeable, however, for while a genetic relationship is always a historical relationship, not every historical relationship is necessarily a genetic one (unless one restricts "relationship" to meaning "genetic relationship"). I am sure that there are similar or identical statements to be found in practically any textbook or introductory work that deals with language families and genetic relatedness of languages. Or it that fails, you could just use a dictionary. Here is what Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged (1994) has to say under "comparative method": _Historical Ling._ a body of procedures and criteria used by linguists to determine whether and how two or more languages are related and to reconstruct forms of their hypothetical parent language. You will notice that this says "parent language," not "parent languages." The single parent is just part of the definition of related languages -- everybody's definition (except yours). >What Winifred Lehmann writes is that the comparative method >"contrasts forms of two or more related languages to determine >the precise relationships between those forms." Either as a >matter of phonology or morphology, it seems it is forms, not >languages, that are being "contrasted." >If you can describe why or how you think "mono-descent" is >implicit in the comparative method, that might make me think what >you are saying is true. I doubt it. I have never known you to be convinceed by evidence and rational argumentation. But in case you actually mean it, here is the reason why "mono-descent" is implicit, not just in the comparative method, but in historical linguistics: GENETICALLY RELATED LANGUAGES WERE ONCE THE SAME LANGUAGE. Now, what part of this don't you understand? >At this point, you might want to take a closer look at that >horse you are selling. It seems those legs are not what you would >call factory options. Which is exactly what he said. You can't have the horse without the legs. You can't have the comparative method without "mono-descent" of language families. It's not an option. >><>first round.>> >Of course! After all, theoretically - it just couldn't happen. >How many fingers do you see? Only one. The middle one on your right hand. You can put it down now -- we got the message. Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From connolly at memphis.edu Thu Jul 26 04:16:48 2001 From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly) Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 23:16:48 -0500 Subject: Rate of language change Message-ID: Having read several learned but indigestible treatises on whether the rate of language change is constant, I would urge all to remember the pseudo-science known as glottochronology. It is based precisely on the assumption that at least vocabulary is lost at a constant rate. Trouble is, it doesn't work. For instance, Pennsylvania Dutch would have had to have separated from German before the discovery of America, to cite one notorious example. Neither can we posit a constant rate of grammatical or syntactic change. Consider North Germanic languages. Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian were virtually indistinguishable; the principal difference was whether unstressed syllables contained or . The modern languages hardly resemble each other at all, since Norwegian has changed drasticaly, while Modern Icelandic retains most of the grammatical features of Old Icelandic and has developed phonetically in so consistent a way that the spelling has needed only slight modification. Now surely part of this is because Iceland is isolated in the North Atlantic, while Norwegian gradually became rather like Danish. But if isolation is an explanation, we can only conclude that in prehistoric times, language change is even less constant than what we observe. Peace and joy nevertheless. Leo Connolly From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Thu Jul 26 13:38:51 2001 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 16:38:51 +0300 Subject: multiple "ancestors" Message-ID: I would like to make a couple of remarks on Steve Long's claim that a language could have multiple genetic ancestors, perhaps from a slightly different perspective than the objections already brought up by Larry Trask and others. It should be noted that the assumption of multiple genetic ancestors actually invalidates the most central concepts of historical linguistics (e.g. language family, descent, convergence, divergence, borrowing, family tree, Indo-European, etc.). These terms are defined in the context of the comparative method and the assumption of a single parent. They are quite simply meaningless, if the single parent asumption is *not* accepted - in which case one would either have to redifene the terms or not to use them at all. Consequently, the acceptance of the concept of "multiple genetic ancestors" would immediately invalidate *all* established results ever obtained in the field of historical linguisics. As for the assumption of a single genetic ancestor (to which there are some rare exceptions, to which the standard tools of historical linguistics, especially the comparative method, are not applicable), it should be fairly obvious that it is the only reasonable starting point. This assumption is based on direct observations of language acquisition (we do not observe the development of mixed idiolects in cases where a child receives input from more than one language) and stability of language over time - it is extremely rare for a langauge to change so rapidly that the continuity between it and its ancestor would clearly be disrupted. (The stability is of course merely an effect of how language acquisition works.) Regards, Ante Aikio From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi Thu Jul 26 21:58:10 2001 From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio) Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 00:58:10 +0300 Subject: Thresholds of Comprehensibility In-Reply-To: <25.182e85ef.2885cfb3@aol.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 17 Jul 2001 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > Hopefully, you see the problem in this. You appear to be saying that you > DON'T know what rate of change in a language is, but you are SURE that it > cannot be measured by changes in individual sounds or words. > Now, I don't know whether the latter is true or not. I think that one would > have to do some real measuring among recorded languages to know the answer to > that. I'm sorry, but I cannot understand what you might mean here. Are you saying that you would find out whether you are measuring the right thing if you just went ahead and measured? This seems just circular. > But it is not logical to eliminate such a way of defining "rate of change in > a language", when you say you have no definition of those terms yourself. I don't think so. "The rate of change" is of course not an established term with an exactly defined meaning, but this does not mean that any definition could be accepted, if no one suggests a better one. It should be pretty obvious that sound change is a poor metric of language change. This is no a priori assumption, but one based on observation. For example, a small amount of conditioned sound changes may trigger a typological shift which has radical consequences to the morphosyntax of the language. In these kinds of cases, your metric would show only little change. > One definition of dissimilarity that can obviously be measured is the point > at which changes cross over into incomprehensibility. And this would apply > to sounds, grammar and even syntax. And though the measure is binary (yes or > no), binary data can carry enormous meaning when viewed cumulatively, across > a language system. I must ask how exactly would you "measure" comprehensibility. Moreover, comprehensibility is obviously a poor metric of similarity. For instance: Sami /njuolla/ 'arrow' and Finnish /nuoli/ 'arrow' are pretty similar, but the mutual *comprehensibility* of Finnish and Sami is simply zero. If I uttered, out of the blue, a sentence containing the word /njuolla/ to a monolingual speaker of Finnish, he wouldn't understand a word, so your metric would presumably give "no similarity" as a result. Regards, Ante Aikio From JoatSimeon at aol.com Thu Jul 26 19:54:28 2001 From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 15:54:28 EDT Subject: Comprehensibility: sound vs grammar Message-ID: >Steve Long >You act as if you have some special information that says otherwise and >somehow clearly makes my statement "not make any sense." >Do you have any proof of this, one way or the other? Or is this just another >overstated impression of yours? -- Mr. Long, he knows the languages in question. You don't. Is there an obvious inference to be drawn here? From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Fri Jul 27 10:11:03 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 11:11:03 +0100 Subject: Comprehensibility: sound vs grammar In-Reply-To: <75.17f1011b.288c7e51@aol.com> Message-ID: --On Sunday, July 22, 2001 3:06 pm +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: [LT] > < divergence.>> > And so is there any way of objectively measuring degree of divergence? Not that I know of. There are too many dimensions of change. Who can say whether a change in pronunciation should be weighted more or less heavily than a change in grammar, or in lexicon? [SL] > < borrowed (a la DLW's finite verbs), then perhaps they are the least > likely to change, and therefore are the features that least reflect > accurately rates or degrees of change.>> [LT] > < dramatically, then the language has changed greatly, and we cannot pretend > otherwise merely because the pronunciation hasn't changed much. >> > Typical disparaging and groundless overstatement. Really? So, Steve, you want to entertain the possibility that a language can undergo large changes in grammar without changing very much overall? Uh-huh. Sure. ;-) > First of all, you slip right into your usual conclusions - "changed > greatly." > Secondly, no one said a change in grammar doesn't change a language. My > point was that morphology and grammar may PERHAPS least accurately > reflect rates of degrees of change. Incomprehensible. If the grammar of a language changes, then the language has changed. You know what your position reminds me of? Some years ago, inflation in Britain had reached politically unacceptable levels. The government, worried about this, noticed that the price of housing was rising faster than anything else. So, what did they do? They redefined the inflation rate so as to exclude the cost of housing, thereby producing an agreeably lower "inflation rate", which they then dubbed the "underlying inflation rate". In doing this, they conveniently overlooked the blunt fact that everybody has to have housing and that everybody has to pay the market price for it, whether the government is counting this expense or not. It appears to me that you want to define "linguistic rate of change" so as to exclude change in grammar. Why? This is simply perverse. > What is the basis of your criticism here? What's your measure of change > here? How do you measure change so that you can say a language changes > "greatly" when a grammar changes "dramatically?" How do you measure any > of that? I can't quantify linguistic change at all. I thought we'd settled that some time ago. Is it your impression that the difference between our English and King Alfred's English resides almost entirely in pronunciation and lexicon, while the grammatical differences are trifling? Or that Julius Caesar could learn to understand modern Italian without bothering about the trifling differences in grammar? > Absolute statements. Conclusions with no objective basis. Ill-defined > terms. The usual. No. Just a recognition of reality. You ought to try reality, Steve. It has many virtues. ;-) > But does change in grammar have anywhere as much impact on > comprehensibility as phonology? My statement was a PERHAPS. You act as > if you have some special information that says otherwise and somehow > clearly makes my statement "not make any sense." I'm an American in Britain. The grammatical differences between British and American English are few and small, but they exist, and they have at times caused me difficulties. I had to learn that, when an Englishman says "I insist that this is not done", he usually means "I insist that this not be done." And I had to learn that, when he says "I've got a letter", he usually means "I've gotten a letter." And I also had to learn to accept and understand such word salad as "A deal has been agreed" and "Immediately she arrives, we'll eat" and "Your car needs the battery changing" and "Which is my one?" Multiply these differences by a hundred, and you get something I would have failed to understand at all without a good deal of experience. > Do you have any proof of this, one way or the other? Or is this just > another overstated impression of yours? See above. 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 Fri Jul 27 14:13:32 2001 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 15:13:32 +0100 Subject: One Step at a Time In-Reply-To: <8c.9c76d07.288c841d@aol.com> Message-ID: --On Sunday, July 22, 2001 3:31 pm +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: [LT, on Muke's question] > < verbs, which gives rise to some daughters.>> > Then why did Muke write "those from a language X that conjugated one way > and those from a language Y that conjugated another way?" The point I > believe of the hypothetical was two lines of genetic descent. Sorry; not relevant. A language is a language -- that is, it is *one* language. How the language got that way is irrelevant. Once it exists, it is a single language. If it gives rise to several daughters, at least some of which are amply recorded, then we can reconstruct that single ancestral language as usual -- including its verb classes, if it had any. But the comparative method can't tell us anything about how that proto-language came into existence -- unless, of course, the proto-language itself has attested or reconstructed relatives, in which case we can apply the comparative method again to obtain a still more remote reconstruction. However, if the first proto-language did not in fact descend by divergence from a single ancestor, then we can't possibly apply the comparative method a second time, because the conditions for applying the comparative method are not met. > And the key here is the assumption that there is only one ancestor > language somewhere along the line. That assumption is NOT justified by > the comparative method, which yields only ancestor forms. The idea that > there has to be one "parent" somewhere comes from a different theory. Steve, for the seventeenth time: if there was not a single ancestor, then the comparative method simply cannot be applied, and nothing can be reconstructed. Why is this simple idea so hard to grasp? > If two languages can each contribute genetically distinct classes of > verbs to one "daughter" language, then they can each contribute those > classes to multiple "daughter" languages. Really? How do you know that? Can you cite a single example of such a thing? I'm pretty sure you can't. However, if such a thing ever did happen, then the resulting languages would not constitute a language family; they would not exhibit the required systematic correspondences; and nothing could be reconstructed. > There does not have to be a > single language intervening, only original unitary ancestor forms coming > from different earlier languages. Fantasy, I'm afraid, so far as anybody knows. Look, Steve. Do you remember the technique we all learned in school for extracting the square root of a number with pencil and paper? (Well, at least my generation did.) Now, take the number and try to extract its square root by the familiar technique. You will fail, and any result you get will be gibberish. Why? Because, if we start with a negative number, then the conditions for applying the familiar technique are not satisfied, and any attempt at applying it anyway will return nothing, or at least nothing but rubbish. Well, the same is true of your scenario. If you take a bunch of languages which do not descend by divergence from a single common ancestor, then the conditions for applying the comparative method are not satisfied, and any attempt at applying it will return nothing -- or at least nothing but rubbish. Why is this so hard to understand? [LT] > << The comparative method has nothing to say about the origin of a > proto-language, unless there are yet further languages that can be > compared with it normally.>> > But that's not true, for a number of reasons. One is that the "further > languages" may be forced into a single parent based on a particular > method of family tree construction. Steve, I simply despair of you. > In fact, when the comparative method has "nothing to say" about the > origin of certain forms, the tree model has often taken over and > assigned those forms to the parent in any case. Steve, your postings are becoming wilder and wilder. Before now, I could at least see where your misunderstandings lay -- I think. But this time I can't. This passage strikes me as perfectly demented. > So that Prof Trask's > "further language" will actually not be recognized as evidence of "the > origins of the > proto-language." All I meant was this. If we have some Germanic languages, then we can reconstruct Proto-Germanic. But we can't go any further than Proto-Germanic, unless we have some relatives of Proto-Germanic -- say, Proto-Celtic and Proto-Slavic. If we have these too, then we can perform comparative reconstruction again and get Proto-Indo-European. If we don't, though, we can't, and Proto-Germanic is as far as we can go. [much snipping] > It is the assumption of single parentage that turns "other" genetic > strains into non-genetic forms. This is the circular effect that can > erase the possibility of multple ancestors, even if it is there. But > the comparative method itself might possibly support EITHER conclusion. No, Steve. This is false. I'm afraid you simply do not understand the comparative method at all. You still regard it as some kind of Ibistick. Well, I've done my best, to no avail. I'm signing off from this thread now. I'll leave it to others to pursue this fruitless discussion, if they want 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 acnasvers at hotmail.com Sat Jul 28 09:28:59 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2001 09:28:59 +0000 Subject: The Single *PIE Village Theory Message-ID: Steve Long (21 Jul 2001) wrote: >First of all, the arrowwood example - which you [DGK] dismissed - is how I >must understand the ordinary behavior of tree-naming on a local level - before >science, trade or dictionarians intervene. All our historical experience with >"common names" for trees and plants is that they are highly local and >irregular. The arrowwood example was not given with any illustrations of correspondences to the yew-name problem, and that's _your_ job. It's not up to me to point out that Gk. , like , can refer to several distinct plants, or that yews are indeed known by different words and phrases in different parts of S Europe (you might have drawn a parallel between "high-bush cranberry" and "albero della morte", pace Euell Gibbons). Simply shoveling a big pile of data into a reader's face isn't the best way to make a point. Also, I don't believe your sweeping generalization is correct. _Some_ of our historical experience points to "highly local and irregular" phytonyms. _Other_ experience indicates widespread and highly stable ones. Both extremes may characterize names for the same plant, as is indeed the case with Taxus baccata. Some Mediterranean areas show your "highly local and irregular" behavior, but a large part of N Europe is content with reflexes of *eiwo-, and has been for a long time. >I cannot with any integrity accept the idea that most *PIEists even knew the >name for a yew tree or most other trees. And that is because when we look at >pre-lierate societies we see that such comprehensive distinguishing between >flora is limited to a specialized group within the group, if it is anyone's >job at all. This is likely to be true of all societies having specialized groups, literate or not, which takes us back at least to the upper Palaeolithic. I'm neither a botanist nor a woodworker, and I couldn't tell you the difference between a mulberry and a sycamore without help. But as long as society contains recognized experts (which in this case might simply be "lumberjacks"), it is probable that most members of a speaking community will defer to those experts in naming trees, and there is no reason to expect a chaotic outcome. >So, if I were to look for the source of the names of the yew, it would not be >*PIE speakers. It would be linguistic communities that would have some real >vested interest in finding a common name for the yew among themselves. These >would be people who made a living out of trees and wood - especially those >along the intergroup supply chain who were trading wood in a manner that what >tree the wood came from would make a difference. I have no quarrel with this paragraph. It fits well with the notion that PIE *takso- originally referred to yew-wood. This word might well have been borrowed into PIE from non-PIE-speakers along the intergroup supply chain, which harmonizes with my original claim that PIE-speakers lived in a yewless environment. >We have evidence that stone and metal workers were specialists at a very early >date. We have evidence of trade in worked goods ranging several hundred miles >and that evidence extends from Cro-Magnon to the mesolithic obsidian cutters >of the Italian coast - even the Iceman's arrow points were from a site 300 >miles from his home. Workers in wood, bone, tusk and antler would have looked >to extend their markets beyond a few local customers - the other trades were >doing it. This means they needed to identify the raw materials they needed to >tree-cutters and describe the wood they used to traders and customers. And >the primary "name" standardizers would be those who moved goods from market to >market, buying and selling raw materials and finished products. Again, no quarrel, and I see no discrepancy with the "yewless PIE homeland" proposal. >That is the primary way I see a standard name coming about, reconciling the >highly observable inconsistency of local names - and that would include early >IE speakers. Scientific botany is comparatively recent - its an anachronism. >If this has any possible connection with "a recognized PIE tree with a >European naming pattern," then I might be able to answer your question. Allow me to be more concrete. We have Lat. 'beech', Gk. 'type of oak', and Germanic forms (e.g. OE 'beech', 'carved beech-staff, document, book') pointing to PGmc *bo:k-, all of which presuppose PIE *bha:go-. This is what I mean by a "recognized PIE tree". Yes, scientific nomenclature is recent, and I don't envision prehistoric Linnaei running through the woods insisting on "one genus, one name". PIE *bha:go- didn't necessarily denote a single genus in the Linnaean sense; it might have referred to any member of the beech-family Fagaceae, or (conceding one of your points) to trees having dense, fine-grained wood. At any rate, trees called *bha:go- appear to have actually _grown_ in PIE-land. The nature of prehistoric societies with respect to the use of dendronyms could be argued ad infinitum. That is why I am asking you to find another tree (not necessarily a Linnaean taxon) whose behavior in European IE languages resembles that of the yew, and which beyond a reasonable doubt was known in living form to PIE-speakers. Whatever questions we have about the speaking communities, at least in regard to the matter of "standard" naming, should be canceled out by the fact that we are dealing with the same speakers, places, and migrations. DGK From bronto at pobox.com Thu Jul 26 15:06:06 2001 From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 08:06:06 -0700 Subject: The Single *PIE Village Theory Message-ID: X99Lynx at aol.com wrote: > . . . We have evidence of trade in worked goods ranging several > hundred miles and that evidence extends from Cro-Magnon to the > mesolithic obsidian cutters of the Italian coast - even the > Iceman's arrow points were from a site 300 miles from his home. . . . Pardon my ignorance - Do we know where the Iceman's home was? -- Anton Sherwood -- br0nt0 at p0b0x.com -- http://ogre.nu/ From dlwhite at texas.net Thu Jul 26 12:32:15 2001 From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 07:32:15 -0500 Subject: Descent vs. Influence Message-ID: > So, is that what you consider the difference between descent and influence? - > sound-meaning correspondences = descent > distinctions made, ordering of elements and so on = influence > So where one finds systematic "sound-meaning correspondence", are those forms > indicative of "descent?" No. Sometimes elements from a foreign source have been incorporated into a native frame, as in the French element in English. So I was defining what is not even potentially descent. As for other things, I would be moderately happy to have Hungarian "goulash" described as Hungarian "lexical influence" (however minor) in English. I would not be happy to have "goulash" make English a mixed language that is one-millionth (or whatever) Hungarian, by descent. The limits of when the concept of incorporation may be applied were, by the way, what Dr. Trask and I were arguing about (or should have been) before my Aug 1 deadline (closely followed by an Aug 15 deadline) intervened. I think Michif can be seen as French incorporated into Cree, Anglo-Romani as Romani incorporated in English, etc. Not everyone agrees. I will get back to it. Dr. David L. White From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi Sun Jul 29 13:19:09 2001 From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting) Date: Sun, 29 Jul 2001 16:19:09 +0300 Subject: UP and lexicon size In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 21 May 2001 Douglas G Kilday wrote: >Robert Whiting (17 May 2001) wrote: >>In fact there is a sort of Zipf's Law for this because function >>words are relatively few in number but are used very frequently >>while the number of content words is huge (and growing >>constantly) but the individual words are much rarer in use. >Excuse my skepticism, but I can't believe the _net_ number of >contentives in a given language is growing constantly. As new >contentives enter a language, others exit. Lexica don't have >rubber walls. And I (Robert Whiting) would have replied: [I say would have replied because I already had this written as part of a larger response that I had not had time to finish] Sure they do. Ask any lexicographer. In fact, you don't have to ask a lexicographer; they will tell you without asking unless you can figure out a way to stop them. It is known locally as the "lexicographer's lament." Here is a quotation from Frederick C. Mish, Editor in Chief of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary Tenth Edition (2000), taken from the preface (p. 6a): The ever-expanding vocabulary of our language exerts inexorable pressure on the contents of any dictionary. Words and senses are born at a far faster rate than that at which they die out. He then goes on to provide some statistical data of the kind that a professional lexicographer in his position might easily have access to that back up his statement. So lexica do have rubber walls. The lexicon of any language expands to allow its speakers to talk about whatever they want or need to talk about. But I see from your subsequent postings that you consider all lexicographers to be pathological liars and that they are just in league with their publishers to get people to believe that there are so many new words in the most recent dictionary that everyone has to buy a copy. But then you go on to disprove your own point by establishing that it is easy to see when a new word enters the language, but very difficult to establish when an old word leaves. Therefore, by your own reasoning, new words and senses enter the language faster than they die out, just because you can never be sure that the old words are really gone. What makes the difference, of course, is writing. If you don't have writing, once a word is gone, it is gone. If it isn't used for three generations, no one knows it, or even that it once existed (unless it is preserved in a compound that continues in existence). Without writing, there is no record of the word so it can't be revived. Writing simply provides external storage for the lexicon of the language. Without writing, there is no place to store the lexicon except in the memory of speakers. Speakers know the words that they know, and that's it. If they hear an unfamiliar word, they can't look it up in a dictionary -- they can only ask someone else what it means or try to guess by analogy or from context. Now it is quite possible that internal storage is limited. That is, if you want to learn a new word you have to forget some word that you already know. Since you claim that this is the way that lexica work, your mind would seem to work this way. If RAM is getting full, you will have to write something to the hard disk before you can put something else in. If your hard disk is getting full, you have to delete something before you can add a new file. But, by analogy with writing, it is possible to transfer the old file that you don't need at the moment to external storage by copying it to a diskette before deleting it. Then if you find that you need it later, you can always recover it from the diskette (provided you can remember what diskette it is on and where you put the diskette). So there is a difference between the individual's lexicon and the lexicon of the language. The individual's lexicon may well be limited by internal storage (and the amount of internal storage may well vary by individual). There are different kinds of vocabulary, which require different kinds of storage. Active vocabulary consists of words that the individual uses in his speech production. This must be kept in the equivalent of random access memory (constantly available). Then there is passive vocabulary. This consists of words that the individual recognizes and understands but that he does not use in his own speech production. This can be stored in a different location not requiring constant immediate access (on the hard disk, as it were). Finally, there is occasional vocabulary, consisting of rare, archaic, specialized, and even obsolete words, that can be kept in external storage (on a diskette = in a dictionary) and can be accessed in case of need (say to read Shakespere or Marlowe, or in case one wants to take up the study of medieval armor, collect coins, or take up falconry and so on). Now this analogy is not precise because we know exactly how much storage capacity our RAM, hard disk, and diskettes have and how and how much information can be stored there, but we don't know much about how things are stored in the human mind or what its storage capacity is. Perhaps the human mind does work like a computer -- but since computers are not capable of the same things that the human mind is, there is reason to doubt this. Developing a computer that works like the human mind is the goal of the AI people (and I wish them luck). The human mind is capable of intelligence (well, some human minds are), that is, it can analyze data and reach a conclusion that it has not been previously programmed with. But to get back to the size of the lexicon, it doesn't really matter what one believes about it. Professional lexicographers say that the lexicon of English is constantly expanding; semi-naive native speakers say that the size of the lexicon is constant. Which one are you going to believe? (I know where I'd put my money.) But as I say, it doesn't really matter what you believe. Some people believe that the universe is constantly expanding; some believe that it is in a steady state. What people believe about it doesn't affect the way it works. It will continue to work the way it does, regardless. So it is with the lexicon of a language. It will work the way it does regardless of what people believe about it. There will always be words to let its speakers talk about whatever they need or want to talk about. If there is no word for something that they need or want to talk about, let's say computers and computer applications, then they will create one: by borrowing one from another language (can't think of any computer terminology that has been borrowed from other languages offhand; since most computer development was done by English speakers, the terminology has generally been exported to other languages); or by using an old word with a new sense (mouse, disk, bug, virus); or by new compounds (software, internet, floppy disk); or by abbreviation (RAM, ROM, DOS, modem, univac, awk, perl); or by free invention or neologisms (glitch, ergonomics); or by expropriating personal names (baud, Turing machine); etc., etc. The top-end dictionaries of computer terminology claim to have around 13,000-15,000 entries. Even allowing for a reasonable amount of exaggeration, double-counting, etc., I think we could safely assume around 10,000 words, expressions, and senses that have been added to the language in the last half-century in this one field alone. So to make your claim reasonable, you will have to come up with a list of 10,000 words, expressions, and senses that have been lost from the English lexicon in the past 50 years. And once you find your first 10,000 lost words, then we can look at things like aeronautics, microbiology, and nuclear physics to see how many more you need to keep up. So I'll excuse your skepticism. Skepticism is a healthy way to look at things. But if you want to be known as a wise man rather than just a skeptic, you would do well to have evidence to back up your intuitions and beliefs. [Anyway, that's what I would have said, had not a number of other people, such as Larry Trask and Jim Rader, pointed out the fallacies in the reasoning that led to your conclusion, posted on Monday, May 28, 2001, that "All things considered, net stasis of lexical size makes more sense than continuous expansion." But actually, neither one makes particular sense. There is nothing that I can think of that *requires* continuous expansion of a language's lexicon. The factor that controls lexicon size is the number of things (objects, phenomena, and processes), real or imagined, that the speakers of a language need or want to talk about. If this number has net growth, then the size of the lexicon will increase; if it declines, the lexicon will shrink. If it is constant, the lexicon will tend to stay about the same size. It has simply been observed by lexicographers (and some linguists) that, historically, the lexicon of English has been constantly expanding. On the other hand, if net stasis of lexical size is a linguistic *requirement*, then it must be a linguistic universal. Even among the most fervent seekers after linguistic universals I have never seen "net stasis of lexical size" proposed as one. Furthermore, such a requirement raises immediate questions that I have never seen addressed. Such questions include: Is the fixed size of the lexicon the same for all languages? If so, what is the size of the lexicon of every language? If not, how is the fixed size of the lexicon for a given language determined? What factors enter into this determination? Are all these factors linguistic, or can they be socially or culturally determined? How is it determined when the lexicon is full and some words must be removed? What happens if the required maximum size of the lexicon is inadvertently exceeded? Do the speakers get a certain amount of time to remove the excess words or does the system crash? What happens to speakers who don't know that the allowed size of the lexicon has been exceeded? When you have answers to questions like these, it might be possible to consider "net stasis of lexical size" seriously. Of course, if the answer to the last question is "nothing", then there is no basis for the concept because it is undetectable. That is to say, the *requirement* can't be taken seriously because there is no penalty for ignoring it.] But then, on Sat, 14 Jul 2001 Douglas G Kilday wrote Re: Uniformitarian Principle: >Several list-members have invoked a linguistic UP, usually >without any clear statement, and not always consistently. Larry >Trask has been the staunchest advocate of the UP on this list, >yet he has attacked the principle of net lexical stasis, >apparently believing that the inventory of contentives in a >language grows continuously (as claimed by Robert Whiting). First, as I said above, it's not particularly my claim. Ask any lexicographer of English. I just happen to think that it is obvious that the lexicon of a language can expand to any size that its speakers want or need. The lexicon of the individual may be limited in size, but not that of the language. Fortunately, not all speakers of the language want or need to talk about all of the same things. No speaker can know the entire vocabulary of the language, but he doesn't have to. He needs a core vocabulary to use for general communication purposes and if he wants to communicate in a specialized field then he needs additional vocabulary particular to that field. But the lexicon of the language contains not only the core vocabulary, but also *all* of the specialized vocabularies. It may be possible that the core vocabulary is more or less static (this was the assumption of the glottochronologists -- but that didn't work either), but it may be possible that it isn't. Second, the UP doesn't restrict what happens (events), but rather how things can happen (processes). Lexicon size is not a process, so the UP doesn't have anything to say about it. What the UP says is that the processes by which the size of the lexicon changes will always have been the same. Thus we can expect that languages have always been able to add words by borrowing, by coining new words (free invention), by compounding, by analogy, by reanalysis, etc. That is, we should not postulate any mode of word formation in prehistory that cannot be observed today. However, saying that the UP requires that the size of the lexicon of PIE had to be the same size as the lexicon of modern English is a non sequitur worthy of someone with considerably less linguistic training. >Now, if the UP and LT's view of lexical growth are both correct, >the alleged present inflationary situation has _always_ >characterized languages, all of which are therefore, in >principle, traceable back to a single word. (So was that word >/N/, /?@N/, /tik/, or /bekos/? Never mind ... rhetorical >question.) Non sequitur. The UP doesn't have anything to say about the size of lexicons, or of any other population. Population size is not a process but a summation over events (births and deaths). If total births exceed total deaths then the population is growing; if deaths exceed births then it is declining; if they are equal then it is static. What the UP says is that the methods of birth and death will have always been much the same, not that the population size has always been constant. >For the purposes of this list, I would suggest a statement of >the UP roughly as follows: "The history and prehistory of >languages used by anatomically modern humans involve no >fundamental processes not occurring today." Adequate, if somewhat wordy. My professor always expressed it as: "Anything that happens later could have happened earlier." What this means is that the processes that have led to an observed event (even if that event is unique) could have led to that event when it wasn't observed because the processes don't change -- they have always been there. Note the use of "could have happened." This does not mean that such an event "must have happened." This limits the value of historical parallels. Historical parallels only show that a particular event could have happened at some other time, not that it must have happened. Showing that it must have happened requires a different kind of evidence. For example, the observed breakup of Latin into the Romance languages does not prove that there was a PIE language that broke up into the modern IE languages. It just proves that there could have been such a language and such a breakup. But the fact that from the Romance languages can be reconstructed a proto-language (proto-Romance) that matches in detail the known parent (Latin) and that by using the same methods a proto-language of the modern IE languages can be reconstructed in great detail makes it much more convincing that there was a PIE language that broke up into the modern IE languages in the same way that Latin broke up into the modern Romance languages. By contrast, for the Altaic languages, the inability to reconstruct a convincing proto-language for this group means that the historical parallel of the breakup of Latin into the Romance languages is not available as evidence of the existence of an Altaic language family. Some other mechanism must be invoked to account for the (mostly typological) similarities of this group of languages. >This leaves rather vague the matter of what "fundamental >processes" are, like "physical forces" in geology. Specific >examples of results might well be unique, so the UP is _not_ >equivalent to the rather crude synchronic typological arguments >often encountered in reconstructive debates. It deals with >dynamics, not statics. Ah, then you actually realize that the UP has nothing to do with a static lexicon size. >An example to which the UP might be applied is the proposal that >pre-PIE had ergative-absolutive case-marking. If the proponents >can give clear examples of E-A languages turning into >nominative-accusative languages during historical times, and in >the process today, then the proposal is credible. If OTOH the >record, and current behavior, show that E-A case-marking tends to >develop out of N-A structure, then the ergative pre-PIE >hypothesis is in trouble. No, this is a misuse of negative evidence and the UP. All the UP says is that if historical examples of E-A > N-A can be shown then E-A > N-A could have happened in pre-PIE. It does not say that it must have happened nor does it say that N-A > E-A cannot happen nor does it imply that either E-A > N-A or N-A > E-A has to happen. Now admittedly, if there are hundreds of examples of N-A > E-A and none of E-A > N-A, that makes E-A > N-A in pre-PIE a much more difficult row to hoe, but it still doesn't make it impossible. It just means that convincing evidence has to come from elsewhere. This is exactly like Dr. David L. White's contention that finite verbal morphology can't be borrowed, based on hundreds of examples of the borrowing of nominal morphology and no clear examples of the borrowing of finite verbal morphology. This may make for a strong presumption -- a heuristic -- but is not convincing. Evidence has to come from someplace else. But his contention that verbs are higher up in the food chain than nouns are and eat nouns for breakfast is not evidence, it is just a plausible story. And, a priori, it is not even particularly plausible, since there is no a priori reason that speakers should view nouns and verbs with different levels of awe. If it is true then, it must be part of the fabled Universal Grammar, something that every human being is born knowing. I'm not saying that he should give up his idea (just like people shouldn't give up working on Universal Grammar). If he keeps working on it and succeeds in proving that finite verbal morphology can't be borrowed, he may someday be canonized by the Chomskians as one of the first people to identify a concrete feature of Universal Grammar. But to see if you have grasped the point about negative evidence, here is a multiple choice historical question to test your comprehension: There is no evidence that Richard Nixon was involved in the Watergate conspiracy. This means that: a) Nixon was not involved in the Watergate conspiracy. b) All evidence that Nixon was involved in the Watergate conspiracy has been lost, destroyed, or suppressed. c) Either a or b could be true. (Never mind ... rhetorical question. :>) Bob Whiting whiting at cc.helsinki.fi From sarima at friesen.net Thu Jul 26 13:50:23 2001 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 06:50:23 -0700 Subject: Uniformitarian Principle In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 09:47 AM 7/20/01 +0000, Douglas G Kilday wrote: >That wouldn't be a very intelligent assumption. Nature is full of >discontinuous processes like earthquakes, landslides, and lightning bolts >which do _not_ involve any change in physical laws. However, processes involving cross-generation transfer rarely are so. It takes time to learn a language, and too much change between generations is prevented by the requirement of communication between parent and child. >It has been tacitly assumed that a _single_ rate of change is valid. No, it has been concluded that a *range* of rates is valid - probably following something resembling a normal curve, with the larger outliers progressively rarer. >Larry Trask's example of Basque, John McLaughlin's example of Comanche, >and the well-known Great Vowel Shift of Middle English have two things in >common. They involve systematic shifting of phonemes over a finite >interval (50-100 years) and no apparent correlation with external >(non-linguistic) factors. And these are probably close the maximum possible rates of change possible without isolating the children from their parents. Changes much faster than these would seriously disrupt communication. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Jul 26 06:11:51 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 02:11:51 EDT Subject: Uniformitarian Principle Message-ID: In a message dated 7/25/01 11:40:01 PM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes: << Someone has used the term "punctuated equilibria" from the Eldridge-Gould model of speciation, which in my opinion doesn't belong here. Analogies between evolutionary biology and linguistic change are very poor, not least because language is inherently incapable of reaching equilibrium. Instead, phonemic shifting suggests classic stick-slip behavior, or Reid's elastic-rebound theory of earthquakes. >> Another quick note. If I remember rightly, Dixon applied punctuated equilibrium to the language diversity issue -- dialects in the manner of organisms splitting off and diversifying until they reach a point where the diversity is no longer adaptive. There's a shaking out that follows, resulting in greater linguistic uniformity among speakers (or organisms.) The question that PE addressed in natural selection does seem to have some clear analogies to languages - if groups of speakers (like organisms) have a tendency to split off into dialects that develop into languages, why aren't there ten million languages by now? Obviously, there is a functional factor - even in preliterate societies - that "pulls" back on all the regional, subcultural and other diversity and tends to uniformity. The "punctuation" happens, on the other hand, because uniformity and equilibrium are not in the end effectively adaptive to a constantly changing environment. When a species becomes very uniform and specialized to a specific environment, that necessarily increases its vulnerability to inevitable environmental change. (E.g., the near extinction of the lazy, carefree giant rabbits that evolved on predator-free Pacific islands before sea-going European cats landed.) Thus the equilibrium falls apart, diversity returns and the cycle starts again. PE would therefore be an attempt to explain the wavering balance between everyone speaking their own private dialect (clearly dysfunctional) and everyone speaking the exact same dialect/language (perhaps equally dysfu nctional.) What perhaps justifies the analogy between linguistic and biological diversity and the attendent processes is the assumption that they are both are "preemptively adaptive" systems. Some part of them changes constantly, which keeps life - and perhaps language - a step ahead of inevitable environmental change. (Hmmm. This turned out longer than I had hoped.) <> A friendly correction. I am not trying "to beat professional comparativists at their own game." (Lord knows, Prof Trask is sure to take that and run with it.) My point about quantification is purely defensive. (And my goals are much more modest.) The assertion has been made that some measure of linguistic 'rate of change' can be used in some way to date *PIE. My point was - and it still stands - that there is no scientific basis for that assertion. Quantification is just what science uses to keep everyone accurate and on the same page. And quantification is therefore essential when you attempt to describe the "rate" of anything. If you can't measure (or really even DEFINE, it turns out) a concept as "quantified" as rate of change, then the concept is not objective or checkable. This is equivalent to legally making the speed limit be a speed that just overall "feels too fast." It is a purely subjective standard. And whatever else it is, it is not science. Regards, Steve Long From acnasvers at hotmail.com Mon Jul 30 11:49:26 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2001 11:49:26 +0000 Subject: The Iceman's Berries Message-ID: Stanley Friesen (5 Jul 2001) wrote: >Thus, there is a large class of roots in Pokorny, and elsewhere, that are >only attested anciently from northern Europe and immediately adjacent >areas. These form a substantial corpus of words that, while locally >shared, cannot be confidently reconstructed for PIE proper. One >interesting factoid about this corpus is that it includes most of the roots >in Pokorny with a reconstructed *a that is not traceable to an a-coloring >laryngeal. (Note, this is not an identifying characteristic, it is an >observation). >Now, my *hypothesis* about many of these words is that they are borrowings >from a non-IE language family formerly wide-spread in northern Europe, but >now extinct. I wish I could figure out how to test this idea. I would look first at hydronyms. Much of the leg-work of collecting old hydronyms in W Europe and determining their constituents has been done; the results are mostly in the German literature. I am thinking particularly of Hans Krahe's papers in the old series of Beitraege zur Namenforschung. Krahe summarizes his system in "Indogermanisch und Alteuropaeisch" (Saeculum VIII, 1957, pp. 1-16). He identifies suffixes such as -na, -ma, -ra, -antia and roots such as Alb-, Ar-, Av-, Var-. As a series of Old European hydronyms based on the root Al-, for example, he gives Ala (Norway), Alma (Etruria), Almana (mod. Alme, NW Germany), Alara (mod. Aller, W Prussia), Alantia (mod. Elz, SW Germany), and *Almantia (mod. Aumance, France). Krahe interprets his Old European system of hydronyms as the relic of an early stage of IE, and assigns meanings to some of the roots on the basis of "cognates": hence Al-, Av-, and Var- are supposed to mean simply 'water, stream' vel sim.; Alb- is supposedly 'white'; the Neckar allegedly means 'black'. Krahe notes the problem that many of the roots and "unsuffixed" names contain short [a] and resemble non-IE forms, but argues that the suffixes are IE, so the entire system must be IE. Hans Kuhn in "Ein zweites Alteuropa" (Namn och Bygd LIX, 1971, pp. 52-70) presents a more sophisticated analysis. He notes that hydronyms and other toponyms in -ur-, -ar-, and -ir- constitute a deep stratum found throughout W Europe but best preserved in the upper Po valley, N Switzerland, and part of S France. In much of NW-NC Europe, these roots commonly take the suffixes -s-, -k/g-, -n-, and -apa. Kuhn doubts the validity of IE "cognates": the river Suhre might seem to invite explanation in terms of *su:ro- (IEW 1039) 'sour; salty; bitter', but this etymology can hardly apply to the Norwegian island Surno/y, which appears to have the same root. Kuhn regards his -ur/ar- stratum as definitely non-IE, and Krahe's stratum as a later Indo-Europeanizing intrusion which incorporated many of the pre-IE names, commonly adding suffixes. Krahe considered -apa to be a form of *akwa:- (IEW 23), though it should be noted that Pokorny also required *ap- (IEW 51) to handle some Indo-Iranian forms. Either way, it is plausible that IE-speakers could add 'water' to pre-IE hydronyms. Kuhn observes that representatives of his -ur/ar- stratum are almost completely absent from E Denmark, where Megalithic monuments occur. It appears that the intrusive Megalithic society (which is plausibly the source of the Germanic Seewoerter like , , , , , ) obliterated the earlier stratum here in the early second millennium BCE. Krahe's estimate of 1500 BCE for _his_ stratum fits this chronology. The early IE-speakers must have absorbed the Megalithians. On these matters W.P. Schmid in "Alteuropaeisch und Indogermanisch" (Mainz 1968) and "Baltische Gewaessernamen und das vorgeschichtliche Europa" (Idg. Forsch. LXXVII, 1972, pp. 1-18) has positioned himself as the anti-Kuhn. He regards all the "Old European" hydronyms as resulting from undifferentiated old IE, and goes far beyond Krahe in supplying IE etymologies for the roots. For example, he refers Atese~ and Atesy~s (Lithuania), Ata (Latvia), Attersee (Austria), Odra (Ukraine), and Adria (i.e. the Adriatic!) to *at- (IEW 69) "ein Verbum der Bewegung". Now I can imagine how Bewegung connects the concept of 'year' (Lat. < *atnos, Goth. ) to 'river', but 'lake' or 'sea'? Also an arbitrary "d/t-Wechsel" is introduced which thumbs its nose at established comparative IE. Schmid's underlying philosophy of a pan-IE Alteuropa leaves no room for determining the actual stratification, and in my opinion Kuhn's model makes a lot more sense. Schmid places the Old European "center of gravity" (Schwerpunkt) in the Baltic region, and observes that the Slavic homeland (das Gebiet der Urslaven) lacks Old European hydronyms, which he explains by the loss of the pre-Slavic system. In my view, Schmid's "center of gravity" is a phantom based on the preconception of a Baltic IE homeland which is unwarranted by the facts. The logical place to put the IE homeland is where one does _not_ find pre-IE hydronyms, and that excludes the Baltic in favor of the Slavic Urheimat. Anyhow, what I would do (if I didn't have my hands full with S European matters) is to compare the corpus of "Old European" hydronomastic elements (found in Krahe's BzN papers) with that corpus of N European IE roots, looking mainly for systematic phonetic similarity. The results would likely suggest further directions of investigation. DGK From sarima at friesen.net Fri Jul 27 00:56:57 2001 From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 17:56:57 -0700 Subject: About the Yew1 In-Reply-To: <013b01c1115b$d77a57e0$3e564341@swbell.net> Message-ID: At 03:37 PM 7/20/01 -0500, proto-language wrote: >Dear Douglas and IEists: >The example you give, capis, seems to me to be different. if R = root vowel, >it is CRCid-. >pe:s, of course, would be CRd-. >This could, of course, be a Dehnstufe but does not the absence of /d/ make one >question that a bit. Furthermore, gradation is normally associated with >syntactic or grammatical usages. What function would the Dehnstufe serve here? I have seen no convincing (to me) cases which require a true Dehnstufe in PIE proper. Just about every lengthened grade I have seen can either be traced to some form compensatory lengthening (often, but not always, due to loss of laryngeals), or is a reasonable analogical extension of such a lengthening. This leads me to suspect that grammatical lengthened grades are analogical extensions of compensatory lengthened grades that developed in the individual dialects. Note, in this model I treat lengthening due to loss of laryngeals as simply one particular (and common) type of compensatory lengthening. -------------- May the peace of God be with you. sarima at friesen.net From acnasvers at hotmail.com Sun Jul 29 09:27:24 2001 From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday) Date: Sun, 29 Jul 2001 09:27:24 +0000 Subject: About the Yew1 Message-ID: Patrick C. Ryan (20 Jul 2001) wrote: >> [DGK] >> Regarding PCR's objection that the long vowel in Lat. 'foot' arose by >> compensative lengthening from *peds instead of gradation: Palmer gives this >> as an example of gradation. Apart from this crude appeal to authority, we >> may note 'one-handled sacrificial vessel', gen. , which >> shows that Latin d-stems did _not_ regularly undergo compensation of *-ds in >> the nom. sg. >[PCR] >The example you give, capis, seems to me to be different. if R = root vowel, >it is CRCid-. >pe:s, of course, would be CRd-. >This could, of course, be a Dehnstufe but does not the absence of /d/ make one >question that a bit. Furthermore, gradation is normally associated with >syntactic or grammatical usages. What function would the Dehnstufe serve here? [DGK] Given the structural difference between and , my argument was rather weak. A better one occurs to me. Latin -ds- is normally assimilated to -ss-, and this has occurred with in 'worst' < *ped-simos lit. 'lowest, humblest'. Therefore, we should expect *peds > *pess. But the nouns gen. 'unit' and gen. 'bone' show that the nom. sg. degeminates the final in Latin ss-stems. Hence, if all cases of Lat. 'foot' had normal grade, we should expect nom. sg. *peds > *pess > *pes, not . Gradation explains the observed form better than compensation. Our presumably represents *pe:ds. Aren't cases associated with syntax and grammar? Don't we have the same phenomenon of Dehnstufe restricted to the nom. sg. in other IE words? Palmer gives , , , and Gk. as examples. The original "function" must have been to accommodate changes in the stress and timing of syllables, for IE Ablaut is broadly parallel to the vowel-alternations of modern Spanish, e.g. 'I sleep', 'I slept', 'he/she slept'. Short /o/ and /e/, stable in Classical Latin, underwent severe changes in Vulgar Latin and Continental West Romance depending on their position with respect to the word-accent, but original /u/ and /i/ remained relatively stable. A similar episode must have taken place in late pre-PIE (or whatever you choose to call it). From petegray at btinternet.com Fri Jul 27 07:15:36 2001 From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray) Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 08:15:36 +0100 Subject: Genetic Descent Message-ID: > What do you call it when Hebrew or Swahili verbs are inflected for > person etc? I call it different from IE. And Hebrew does indeed inflect a verb to show the feminine, with exactly the same suffix as it uses on adjectives and some nouns - this would be exactly parallel to using -ess on verbs. Peter From rao.3 at osu.edu Sun Jul 29 22:29:45 2001 From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao) Date: Sun, 29 Jul 2001 18:29:45 -0400 Subject: Anglo-Romani (Long, was Re: Genetic Descent) Message-ID: "Rick Mc Callister" wrote, in a message dated July 14, regarding calo: > The big problem is the actual origin of the lexicon [...] > So, Professor Rao, I'd appreciate it if you'd take a look at calo/ I prefer not use any titles in this list, as I am not a linguist. My primary interest is Sanskrit, and IE studies as impacting on it. I have done a bit reading on bilinguals due to personal reasons. What was being said on the original thread seemed, at times, to be at odds with my unerstanding. I am not really qualified to go beyond that, especially Romani etymology, as that would require knowledge of East/Central European languages that I do not have. All I can suggest is to consult Turner's Comparative Dictionary of Indo-Aryan Languages if Indic origin of a word is suggested: Romani words must be from late MIA stage, and a Sanskrit dictionary is not really suitable for this. In other respects, Calo seems to be in the same boat as Anglo-Romani. --- H. W. Hatting wrote >The central question for me would be: > is Anglo-Romani *now* > (a) a different language influenced to a big extent by English lexicon and > grammar or > (b) a group-language variant of English using lexicon from a non-English > source? > V. Rao has clearly shown that Romani went through a stage of strong English > influence in the past. For me, the question to answer in order to classify > Romani as (a) or (b) is whether there is an uninterrupted chain of > "Romani-as-a-first-language" speakers which leads to the speakers of "old" > Anglo-Romani to its speakers today (which means (a)), or whether the chain > was broken, and Anglo-Romani became a dead language, learnt by its speakers > when being initiated into the Romani community by elder people, The latter is asserted to be the case at least since 1960. Unfortunately, 19c writers do not seem to address this question. Leland cites one instance of a mother correcting her child when he used a wrong Romani word. But he also cites a case of a knife-sharpener telling his companion some Romani words the latter did not know. Clearly there was a great deal of person-to-person variation that makes any further analysis impossible. [And the possibility of words being 'borrowed' from Continental Gypsies would make it worse.] My position is that in 1800 Romani (of some sort) was still being spoken in England. By 1900 (1850?), Gypsies of England (but not Wales) were speaking basically English that could be mixed with Romani based jargon. Any attempt to draw a finer line would be pointless. From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Jul 26 18:01:56 2001 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 14:01:56 EDT Subject: *Leo Connolly Message-ID: Leo Connolly makes an analogy here between language and human descent that is worth considering: In a message dated 7/20/01 6:26:10 AM, connolly at memphis.edu writes: << My biological child is by nature always my child, even if I leave all the nurturing to other people. While a nanny or day-care person may nurture him, that is influence, not descent. So too with language, and I'm as amazed as David White that anyone should confuse the two. >> BUT, unless something special has gone on here, your biological child is NOT ONLY your child. It's also someone else's. And the relationship of that someone else has nothing to do with "influence" or "nuture." How could we forget the OTHER parent - especially a mother - in this analogy? And if the analogy holds, doesn't that at least bring up consideration of what it would mean in terms of IE reconstruction. (Unless we're going back to those early cultures where - according to Robert Graves - the women of the tribe could deny the connection between sexual relations and pregnancy.) Take that child you mentioned and eleven of it's siblings. Do up comparative tables of gender, eye color, hair color, right or left-handedness, etc. Now, RECONSTRUCT THE SINGLE "PARENT" of those kids. Unless something special happened - that reconstruction will not be Leo Connolly. Though it may be *Leo Connolly. In fact, it will be some blending of two parents melded into one. This is the problem - plain and simple - with Larry Trask's claim that the comparative method cannot reconstruct a language that did not exist. Because it can - under these circumstances - create a single-parent *Leo Connolly that does not exist. Of course, one can irradicate the existence of this problem by denying the genetic contribution of a mother. We can call that "influence," because dad contributed finite verbal morphology and finite verbal morphology wins when it comes to establishing "true" genetic descent. Looking back at Dr. White's posts, that is pretty clearly the position he took. So, the question remains - stronger than ever given the analogy. Why are some systematic correspondences denied the status of being "genetic" for no other reason than the assumption that there can only be one parent? Regards, Steve Long From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jul 26 08:16:37 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 03:16:37 -0500 Subject: Lehmann's Syllabicity Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" To: Sent: Friday, July 20, 2001 11:49 AM Subject: Re: Lehmann's Syllabicity [PRp] >> the unusual fact that most IE >> roots display a front-back vowel (also, potentially no vowel) contrast, >> which indicates morphosemantic differences only --- not lexicosemantic >> ones. ... >> I would first like to learn what list-members consider to be the better >> alternatives for an explanation of this phenomenon. [PG] > A similar case can be made for Sanskrit, where we do have some information > about its origin. Sanskrit can (almost) be described as a one-vowel > language in the same way as PIE almost can - we had this suggestion about a > year ago on the list, I believe. In Sanskrit it is due to the collapse of > original short *e, *a and *o into the single vowel . There are > sufficient traces of both *e and *o for us to be sure that it is not a > continuation of a one-vowel system from PIE, but is properly derived from a > situation with at least a three-way distinction. [PCR] This interests me greatly. What do you consider to be the "sufficient traces"? [PG] > We might therefore wonder if the so-called PIE one-vowel system is due to > collapse from an earlier situation. This is what is argued by the > Nostraticists. Kaiser & Shevoroshkin suggest a complete collapse of short > vowels in "West Nostratic" while they are kept separate in Uralic and Altaic > and Dravidian. Bomhard's view (1996) is rather more complicated, and > therefore more nuanced. In essence he avoids the idea of vowel collapse, > but does allow certain diphtongs and simple vowels to merge into a PIE > system from which IE could develop through further changes. [PCR] I think it is obvious that the view of Kaiser and Sheveroshkin is identical in this respect to my own: three vowels become ^, Lehmann's syllabicity. [PG] > We must also add in here two theories that affect vowels: > Firstly, that a < *eH pushed an original **a to *e in some IE dialects. > Secondly, that an original **ka, **ke, **ko collapsed inot the ke, k'e, > kwe we see in PIE. [PCR] Regarding the first theory, it seems totally unnecessary if we assume that all short vowels collapsed in ^, from which, for morphological (perhaps combined with phonological) reasons, *e/*o developed. ^ from *a does not need any more impetus than ^ from *o. On the second one, I cannot accept the idea that IE labiovelars developed from pre-PIE dorsal stops + *o, presumably later *w^ because they corresponds to fricatives in other languages derived from Nostratic. I believe at an early stage, *C+o did result in *Cw^ but that these glides were lost without trace in all branches. But, I do believe that pre-PIE dorsal stops + *e did develop into dorsal stops + *y^, and that this glide, rather than the quality of the vowel which followed it (with some exceptions), determined the palatality of the dorsal stop in satem-languages. 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, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jul 26 08:32:02 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 03:32:02 -0500 Subject: Lehmann's Syllabicity Message-ID: Dear Jens and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen" Sent: Friday, July 20, 2001 10:50 AM > On Fri, 13 Jul 2001, proto-language [i.e., Pat Ryan - JER] wrote: >> [...] >> Let us assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that some unspecified >> language earlier than but ancestral to IE had a structure in which >> differences of vowel-quality signaled lexical differences: *men- /= *man- >> /= *mon-. This is certainly justifiable on typological grounds. >> First, I would like to know how list-members believe these lexical >> differences were maintained in IE. [JER] > In Indo-Iranian where this actually happened, the various sources just > merged. I see no objection to the view that the widely monotonous vocalism > of PIE has passed through a comparable collapse. The actual event of > merger apparently antedates the protolanguage quite a bit, for there has > been at least time to create - or borrow and retain - words with other > vocalisms than /e/. It would also be reasonable to suppose that the many > vocalic alternations (ablaut "grades") depart from an already-collapsed > unitary /e/ than from a retained diversity of vowel timbres that just > ended up parallel even after the mergers. This pushes unitary /e/ back > into pre-ablaut pre-PIE and leaves ample time for later developments that > blurr the picture a bit. One may also note that the IE ablaut types can > even be detected on the sole basis of a single IE language as, say, Greek > which is certainly not contemporaneous with the protolanguage. [PCR] If we assume that a previous front-mid-back vocalism collapsed into a single vocalism, which we might term syllabicity, and indicate by ^ as Lehmann does, OR indicate as (pre-Ablaut) *e, bearing in mind that [e] may not have been its phonetic realization; we end up, temporarily, with one lexico-semantic vowel. Typologically, languages with one (if any) or two lexico-semantic vowels show highly developed consonantism; frequently, consonants are present with no glide, and palatal and velar glides. Does this suggest to you, as it does to me, that pre-PIE *men, *man, *mon, went through an early phase of *my^n, *m^n, *mw^n on their way to becoming *m^n, eventually *me/on//*mN? 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, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jul 26 08:58:39 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 03:58:39 -0500 Subject: Lehmann's Syllabicity Message-ID: Dear Leo and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Leo A. Connolly" Sent: Friday, July 20, 2001 10:48 PM > Pat Ryan wrote: >> There are a number of IEists who do not subscribe to Lehmann's theory of >> "syllabicity", > I don't, of course, but I think we've been through that already. >> which he originated to explain the unusual fact that most IE roots display a >> front-back vowel (also, potentially no vowel) contrast, which indicates >> morphosemantic differences only --- not lexicosemantic ones. >> Unusual because in the great majority of languages around the world, varying >> root-vowels indicate lexical rather than morphological differences (Semitic >> sharing this peculiarity though perhaps not its parent PAA). > ....... >> Let us assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that some unspecified >> language earlier than but ancestral to IE had a structure in which >> differences of vowel-quality signaled lexical differences: *men- /= *man- >> /= *mon-. This is certainly justifiable on typological grounds. > I have absolutely no evidence for what I'm about to say, so please: it is > mere speculation -- Gedankenlinguistik, wenn man's so nennen will. It is the > merest possibility and for that reason not worth flaming in a refutation. [PCR] I will try never to flame you, Leo. > 1. The proposed men- *man- *mon- opposition is somewhat weird in that > it has three non-high vowels: where are *min- and *mun-? > 2. This suggests that an original distinction was restructured when /e/ > and /o/ were used to signal certain morphological categories. They > could replace each other as required. They could also be added to /i/ > and /u/, producing the diphthongal ablaut series we know and love. > 3. It is well known that [a] is at least extremely rare in indisputably > IE roots, except in proximity to an "a-coloring laryngeal". There has > recently been a discussion on this list proposing that non-laryngeal [a] > in Northern European forms means that these are not PIE in origin. This > could mean either that (a) an earlier > *man- merged with something else (*men- and/or *mon-) in most > environments, or (b) that there was no earlier /man-/. Since > four-vowel, a-less systems exist, neither possibility seems better than > the other. >> First, I would like to know how list-members believe these lexical >> differences were maintained in IE. > My speculations suggest that many such lexical differences were > precisely *not* maintanied. They entail that the root types /men-/ and > /mon-/ (and /man-/, if it existed), merged as what we might call /men-/ > or even /mVn-/. And if the analysis was /mVn-/ (/V/ a non-high vowel > with features to be added by morphology), extension of the morphological > e:o ablaut to stems with original /i u/ would be readily understandable. [PCR] Why do you think that might be preferable to simply regarding /i, u/ as allophones of /y, w/? > Two final comments: > 1. These speculations apply independent of whether PIE was a descendant > of Proto-Nostratic or even Proto-World. They are triggered by internal > IED phenomena. > 2. Again, they are *SPECULATIONS*. Please don't pounce too hard on > such a tempting target. [PCR] Never. 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, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138) From proto-language at email.msn.com Thu Jul 26 09:10:32 2001 From: proto-language at email.msn.com (Patrick C. Ryan) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 04:10:32 -0500 Subject: Lehmann's Syllabicity Message-ID: Dear Peter and IEists: ----- Original Message ----- From: "petegray" Sent: Friday, July 20, 2001 11:33 AM [PCRp] >> ... the unusual fact that most IE >> roots display a front-back vowel (also, potentially no vowel) contrast, >> which indicates morphosemantic differences only --- not lexicosemantic >> ones. [PG] > The word "vowel" needs defining here! Would you count a sequence "eu" as > the same as, or different from, the vowel "e"? If (as I believe we must) we > count it as different, then your problem disappears. Ignoring the e/o/zero > ablaut, PIE shows: > e > eu > ei > er > el > em > en > eH 1 -2 -3 - etc > All of these carry lexicosemantic differences. [PCR] Interesting. But does not directly address my question. Supposing that a language ancestral to PIE could distinguish between *mad, *med, and *mod _lexically_, how might these lexical differentiation have been maintained in earliest PIE when they would all eventually end up as *me/od-. My feeling is that glides are the typologically correct hypothesis. After glides were lost, root-extensions filled in for the lack of differentiating features. I was just wondering if anyone had another (possibly better) idea? [PG] > Even if we don't like the sequences er, el, em, en as diphthongs, we must > still recognise the zero grades as vocalic elements - vowels - with > lexicosemantic significance. [PCR] I'll bite. Why should *er be regarded as a diphthong rather than a sequence of vowel + consonant? Incidentally, I am not so sure that *R should be regarded as a vowel. Why is it not just simply a sonorous consonant that can, in certain circumstances, appear in typically vocalic positions? 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, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138)