Handfuls of Unrelated Forms

[Rich Alderson]

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 <i:os> 'arrow' referred by L&S to the root of <ienai> 'to
>> go'...

> (<ienai> is th infinitive form of <eimi/ion>.)

> 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 <ios> (accus., <ion>.)
> One important and early word for 'poison" in Greek was <ios.> The connection
> may have been animals with fangs or that shot venom.  The word seems a bit
> transparent, <ion> being a participle for <eimi> (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 <ios>, arrow, to <eimi>, go through, was hardly of much
> matter to my point, which has little to do with where <ios> 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 <ion> and <eimi>, 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 <i:on>
> arrow, neuter, nom, accus, voc [passed through?], from <ion>, passing
> through, pres part, nom, accus, voc.  I should also point out that there are
> forms of <eimi> that show an -m- <epic, <iomen>) and that there are forms of
> <i:on> arrow that appear not to have the long i-, <ioin>, 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
<eta-subscript iota>).  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