From Enrikay1 at aol.com  Fri Jun  1 00:58:50 2001
From: Enrikay1 at aol.com (Enrikay1 at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 20:58:50 EDT
Subject: SV: PIE
Message-ID: <THU.31.MAY.2001.205850.EDT.>

Takk for alle hjelpen din!

I will see what I can do with those references and let you know how your
suggestions have helped my progress.

Thanks again,
Eric


From Georg-Bonn at t-online.de  Fri Jun  1 07:49:59 2001
From: Georg-Bonn at t-online.de (Stefan Georg)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 09:49:59 +0200
Subject: PIE
In-Reply-To: <004401c0e618$39d46bc0$e45f073e@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.094959.0200.>

>Rami & Rami

Ramat & Ramat

(sorry, but the authors' names are essential in these days of
online-shopping and search engines)


>"The Indo-European Languages"  (Routledge)
>    Overpriced, but excellent.  A brief intorduction to PIE, then a very good
>discussion of each of the dialect groups, and how it got to be what it is.
>
--
Dr. Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn


From cbh at transmeta.com  Fri Jun  1 05:10:28 2001
From: cbh at transmeta.com (Colin Hunter)
Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 22:10:28 -0700
Subject: Linguistic Succession in Historic Comparison:
In-Reply-To: <f6.a793dae.28408e1b@aol.com>
Message-ID: <THU.31.MAY.2001.221028.0700.>

> For example, the dispersal of the Nguni language in early 19th
> century Africa saw speakers of Nguni moving out from a small nuclear
> area in what's now Kwa-Zulu/Natal as far north as Lake Victoria --
> 6000 miles, the equivalent of travelling from the Rhine to China.

On my map, the distance from Natal to Lake Victoria is more like 1600
miles than 6000 miles.


From edsel at glo.be  Fri Jun  1 09:31:44 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 11:31:44 +0200
Subject: Linguistic Succession in Historic Comparison:
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.113144.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: <JoatSimeon at aol.com>
Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2001 6:42 AM

> It's important to keep historic movements of languages and/or peoples in mind
> to show the sort of thing that _does_ happen.

> For example, the dispersal of the Nguni language in early 19th century Africa
> saw speakers of Nguni moving out from a small nuclear area in what's now
> Kwa-Zulu/Natal as far north as Lake Victoria -- 6000 miles, the equivalent of
> travelling from the Rhine to China.

[Ed]
You mean 3000 kilometers, I suppose? Or 2000 miles? (Brussels-Athens by road -
via Belgrade, when former Yugoslavia was still a touristic region).

> The number of actual original Zulu-speakers was tiny -- no more than a few
> thousand, probably less; possibly only a few hundred.

> In the course of 40 years, they moved 1000 miles from their original homeland
> and linguistically and culturally assimilated something hundreds of times
> their own numbers.

[Ed]
But the Zulus were fierce warriors who actually built a kind of empire.

> The Turkic expansion through Central Asia and the Eurasian steppe zone is
> another example; or the massive expansion of Germanic at the expense of
> Celtic in Central Europe.

[Ed]
I don't think Germanic expanded all that much, and the Celtic fringe (along the
Danube, mainly) that was colonized was probably no larger than the Slavic one.

Ed Selleslagh


From mcv at wxs.nl  Fri Jun  1 07:40:02 2001
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 09:40:02 +0200
Subject: FYI (pre-IE reconstructions)
In-Reply-To: <000e01c0e6c1$fa0b6020$05821dc3@219.205.255.5>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.094002.0200.>

On Sun, 27 May 2001 17:29:43 +0200, "Mate Kapovif"
<jozo.kapovic at zg.tel.hr> wrote:

>Just a brief note. In the MCV's text on pre-Indo-European there is a claim
>that Hittite ablative -az comes from PIE *-od-s. Considering the Luwian form
>of ablative -ati it can safely be assumed that the protoform of these two is
>*-oti.

>*o > a in both lgs, *t is palatalized to z in Hittite in front of *-i which
>is later omitted.

This interpretation is of course the generally accepted one, but I
have a few problems with it.  Luwian does not distinguish Abl. and
Ins., and the ending -ati (Lydian -(e)di) serves both functions.  It
should be compared to both Hitt. Abl. -az and Ins. -it.  While it is
true that Hitt. palatalizes *ti to (z)zi (e.g. the 3sg. vb. ending
-(z)zi), there is no rule that Hittite drops final -i (e.g. the 3sg.
vb. ending -(z)zi).  Within Hittite, it is preferrable to derive -az
regularly from *-od-s or *-ot-s, rather than irregularly from *-ot-i.
The comparison with Luwian strengthens the case for *-oti, but there
are alternatively explanations which are equally likely.  The evidence
from non-Anatolian Indo-European points to an Abl. *-od ~ *-ed (or:
*-ot ~ *-et, one cannot tell) and an Ins. *-eh1, with plural forms
*-[bhi-]os / **-[oi-]os and *-[bhi-](h1)s / *-[oi-](h1)s.  This
suggests to me an original distinction between Abl. **-od and Ins.
**-et, which was maintained in Hittite (albeit with Abl. -az instead
of expected -at, possibly from the plural form **-ods, which gives
*-os elsewhere [merging with Dat.pl. *-os]) and in "non-Anatolian"
(albeit with a proposed regular development *-t > *-h1 in the Ins.).
In the Luwian group, Abl. and Ins. added what is probably the same *-i
as we find in the Dat. (*-o-i) and Loc. (*-0-i), giving **-od-i and
*-et-i, which then merged (Luw. -ati, Lyd. -edi).  Within this
analysis (where the Abl. must have a different consonant from the
Ins.), deriving Hitt. -az < **-odi becomes doubly irregular: not only
is the loss of -i inexplicable, but *-di should palatalize to **-si,
not *-z.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl


From connolly at memphis.edu  Fri Jun  1 16:01:38 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 11:01:38 -0500
Subject: FYI (pre-IE reconstructions)
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.110138.0500.>

Mate KapoviÊ wrote:

> Just a brief note. In the MCV's text on pre-Indo-European there is a claim
> that Hittite ablative -az comes from PIE *-od-s. Considering the Luwian form
> of ablative -ati it can safely be assumed that the protoform of these two is
> *-oti.

> *o > a in both lgs, *t is palatalized to z in Hittite in front of *-i which
> is later omitted. So the *-ods > -az etymology is not correct.

Problem: doesn't PIE 3sg. -ti yield Hittite -zi i.e. [-tsi]?  Why should
-i have dropped in the ablative but not in the verb ending?  Does final
-i *ever* drop in Hittite?  (Just asking on this last matter.)

Leo Connolly


From sarima at friesen.net  Fri Jun  1 13:05:55 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 06:05:55 -0700
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <B739F10C.DD4%xavier.delamarre@free.fr>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.060555.0700.>

At 12:37 AM 5/30/01 +0200, Xavier Delamarre wrote:
>     But in a flexional language, especialy of the old IE variety, they are
>of secondary importance. They belong to stylistics, not to grammar.

Not quite - word order in such languages belongs mostly to pragmatics,
which *is* part of the grammar.  There are rules, even if some of them are
optional.

>     Even in modern French the difference of meaning between 'une tres grande
>maison' and 'une maison tres grande' is minimal ; you can use both sentences
>freely to express exactly the same thing (no difference in style or
>emphasis).

Actually, those look like fragments to me, not sentences.

But, even so, I suspect they are only interchangeable in some contexts.  In
others, one or the other is probably atypical or improper.  Are there not
certain questions for which one or the other is a more appropriate response?

>     I maintain that the problem of word-order is irrelevant to the study of
>PIE grammar, as much as declension in Chinese or gender in Finnish.

Not quite - word order is always part of the grammar, inflection is not.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Fri Jun  1 17:58:12 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 13:58:12 -0400
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <F194TijlqzUrIz8Ut6500013f49@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.135812.0400.>

> To us it may look strange that the pronoun would have come after the verb and
> not before, but this may happen, and it is standard in modern Irish, isn't
> it?  E.g.: Scri'obhann SE' litir (he writes a letter).

but thats because Irish is VSO, i.e. subjects in general follow the
verb, whether they are pronouns or full NPs.  what you seem to be arguing
for here is that in PIE full NP subjects preceded the verb, while prnonoun
subjects followed it.  that's a very different thing, and would be rather
surprising, i think.  again, does anyone know of such a lanuage that is
actually attested?  pointing out (as you do below) that languages commonly
have postpositions on nouns is sort of orthogonal to the question.  of
course the fact remains that the personal endings
look a heck of a lot like the pronouns, so maybe the idea will turn out to
be right after all, i just think it should be regarded with
skepticism.  one alternative possibility (and im just making this up off
the top of my head.  i wont claim that its a priori more plausible than
the NP-V / V-PRO hypothesis, just that its another way to get out of the
problem) is that the agreement affixes started out as clitics on the
beginning of the verb, first became prefixes and then ended up as suffixes
because suffixes were generally preferred in the language.  just a
possibility.  it just seems to me that the key to the mismatch between
preverbal subjects and postverbal agreement affixes is more likely to have
arisen through the weirdnesses of affixal morphology (especially the
general preference for suffixes) than through an extremely marked
prehistoric word order.  or we can of course consider again the idea
that Pre-PIE was VSO at the stage when its agreement affixes
developed.

or its possible that PIE really was SOV, but had the type
of freedom in its word orders that we've been discussing for Latin
etc., and the affixes actually developed from those sentence types
where the subject followed the verb, again because suffixes are
preferred, so affixes couldn't develop in the unmarked orders.  this
is not as crazy as it might sound.  consider a language like German,
which arguably has a basic SOV order that is disrupted by
topicalization and V2 and other things (this argument works even if
you think that German is SVO based on the order in main clauses
instead of that in subordinate clauses).  in any case, you get a lot of
sentence types where an object or some other non-subject element precedes
the verb, and the subject follows it.  these orders have, arguably, had
their effect on some of the personal endings.  some have explained the
2sg. -st as being a resegmentation of forms like bistu as bist du < bis du
(although others have argued that the -st is from preterite-presents with
a dental final stem).  in the Bavarian dialects the 2pl. ending is -ts, as
opposed to -t in the standard language.  again this has two possible
explanations, one is that it is the preserved 2du. ending as in Goth. -ts
(wouldn't be surprising since in Bavarian the 2pl. pronoun is Nom. es/oes
Acc./Dat. enk, clearly the old dual).  the other possibility that has been
suggested is that the -ts is the inherited -t plus the cliticzed pronoun
's from es.  even if in both cases the other explanation turns out to be
right, it is clear that a variant that arises from cliticization in a
marked VS order in an otherwise SV language can be grammaticalized and
generalized to all orders.  again in Bavarian German (and a number of the
dialects and even to a certain extent in colloquial forms of the standard
language) the 1sg. pronoun in the nominative is mia, clitic ma both < mir
in place of standard wir.  this is transparently from the case where it
appears postverbally.  since the 1pl personal ending is -en, the following
wir assimilated to the nasal (and this pronunciation is common even in
fairly standard spoken forms when the pronoun is postverbal).  crucially,
this nasal-initial pronunciation was extended to all positions in the
relevant dialects, so that even sentence-initially this is what you get.

these are just a few possibilities.  it seems to me that the key to
the mismatch between preverbal subjects and postverbal agreement affixes
is more likely to have arisen through the weirdnesses of affixal
morphology (especially the general preference for suffixes) than through
an extremely marked prehistoric word order.  what we need is a language
where suffixal agreement markers are a more recent innovation, where maybe
we could actually trace their development.  any ideas?

Tom McFadden


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Fri Jun  1 18:06:51 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 14:06:51 -0400
Subject: No Proto-Celtic: word order
In-Reply-To: <E153iU1-0006St-00@virgo.cus.cam.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.140651.0400.>

> 2) Explanations based purely on pragmatic criteria risk being logically
> circular (first position is emphatic: therefore what is in first position
> must be emphatic; similarly for theme-first). Pragmatic analyses might be
> more informative if they attempted to integrate surrounding clauses in their
> explanations: for example, a following relative clause modifying the main
> clause subject will encourage VS, while a complement may encourage VO.

of course this is absolutely correct.  good recent work in pragmatics is
actually primarily concerned with how a sentence fits into the
discourse.  so for example using newness/oldness of a particular NP to
help explain its position in the clause implies that you read the
surrounding sentences to determine whether the referent of the NP has
already been mentioned in the discourse.  work of this type does not start
with assumptions like `first position is emphatic', but rather tries to
figure out, based on corpus data, what characteristics first position
has in a particular language under particular circumstances.  circularity
is not a danger if the work is done with a bit of care.

> In sum, word order appears to reflect 'weight to the right' (cf. Behaghel
> 1909 and many subsequent commentators).

absolutely.  another argument for the position that `free-word' order is
flexible, but principled.


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Fri Jun  1 18:27:08 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 14:27:08 -0400
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <B739F10C.DD4%xavier.delamarre@free.fr>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.142708.0400.>

>> Only that is not true.  Even a free word order language has a preferred,
>> *neutral* order.  In Latin that order was SOV.  Word order variations in
>> such languages are used to encode variations in emphasis and attitude -
>> they are *not* meaningless.

>     But in a flexional language, especialy of the old IE variety, they are
> of secondary importance. They belong to stylistics, not to grammar.

>   Even in modern French the difference of meaning between 'une tres
> grande maison' and 'une maison tres grande' is minimal ; you can use
> both sentences freely to express exactly the same thing (no difference
> in style or emphasis). Modern Slavic languages could provide many more
> examples.

of course it depends on what you mean by grammar, but under my conception
of the term i have to disagree with you strongly on this.  flexibility in
word order is actually regulated rather tightly by the grammatical system
of a given language, it seems.  take the French example you gave.  French
grammar allows the two possibilities that you gave, but not, e.g. `une
maison grande tres', or any number of others that are possible e.g. in
Greek.  German is another great example.  there is a great deal of
flexibility in what element comes first in a sentence, but once that has
been decided, the order of the rest of the elements is pretty rigidly
determined.  note also in comparison to French that German allows 'ein
sehr grosses Haus' but not 'ein Haus sehr grosses'.  it seems to me you
have to encode these possibilities in the grammar, rather than leaving it
up to something called stylistics outside the grammar.  if stylistics is
outside the grammar then it shouldn't be specific to a language, it should
be the same for all people, or maybe it could be culturally determined or
something like that, but those possibilities are clearly falsified by the
word order possibilities of world's languages.  each language has its own
distinct pattern of word order flexibility, so we can't say that such
flexibility results from a common human `stylistics'.  furthermore, a
person who grows up in a bilingual culture will not use a single
stylistics for the two languages that could be attributed to his culture
or his upbringing, i.e. a person in, say Alsace-Lorraine who is bilingual
French-German will have no trouble following the rules for the individual
langauges properly that are mentioned above.  the word order possibilities
are a part of the language itself.  of course what variant a person
produces at a particular moment will depend on external factors, but the
possibilities that are available to him are language-specific.

and for this argument its actually not crucial whether a big semantic or
pragmatic difference is tied to the choice between two variants like 'une
maison tres grande' and 'une tres grande maison'.  whats important is that
while these two variants exist in French, a whole bunch of others
don't.  and in most cases where multiple variants exist, there is an
identifiable difference, even if its hard to find.  usually it's not a
difference in the truth-conditional semantics, but there's perhaps a
difference in what is implied, or in the conditions where you would say it.


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Fri Jun  1 18:59:33 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 14:59:33 -0400
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <B739F10C.DD4%xavier.delamarre@free.fr>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.145933.0400.>

>     I maintain that the problem of word-order is irrelevant to the study of
> PIE grammar, as much as declension in Chinese or gender in Finnish. But of
> course you can write a monography on 'how to express gender in Finnish'.

again i don't think it's irrelevant, but it is incredibly hard (maybe
impossible) to reconstruct, in distinction to phonology and
morphology.  and it probably is irrelevant to the study of PIE phonology
and not terribly relevant to the study of PIE morphology.  so for all
intents and purposes arguments over PIE word order haven't and won't
have much of an effect on the general study of PIE, which is after
all largely restricted to phonology and morphology and the parts of
syntax that interface closely with the morphology, like case marking and
agreement.  but writing about PIE word order is not like writing about
Chinese declension.  PIE word order clearly existed, and it was relevant
to the grammar because it was a part of the grammar.  and the
counterargument that highly inflecting languages are different in this
respect simply doesn't go through.  note that German is more restricted
than French in the possible orders of nouns and adjectives, but German
has much more extensive agreement morphology than French.  note also
again that Finnish, a very highly inflecting language, allows a
considerable degree of word order variation, but not total freedom.  the
possibilities are constrained in a number of ways by the grammar.

writing about PIE word order is maybe a little more like writing about
what color the dinosaurs were.  it's interesting and relevant, and we can
make guesses based on what we know about similar animals in the present,
but it's really hard to do with any claim to certainty at this point, so
any hypothesis is going to be very tentative.


From edsel at glo.be  Fri Jun  1 10:58:50 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 12:58:50 +0200
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.125850.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: <X99Lynx at aol.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2001 9:47 AM

[snip]
> Damate:r - Dor., Arc., Thess. and Boeot. form of goddess Demeter

[Ed Selleslagh]
Don't exaggerate: isn't that 'god(dess)-mother'? (Cf. Jupiter: 'god-father')

> AND finally, starting with Homer -

> dama:r - wife, spouse

> NOTE that most of the early references above are to a variety of mostly
> domestic animals, but in the <damal-> form, specifically to cattle.

[Ed]
Wife = domesticated animal??????  I know those were backward times, but
still....

[snip]
> domo, domui, domitum (domtavi) - to tame, to break in

> COMPARE <domesticus> - of or belonging to the house (domus)

> Cf., Grk, domos - in Homer, often enclosure or abode for animals, e.g.
> sheepfold (Iliad 12:301); "Sanskrit root, dam-, da:m - ya:mi, to be tame."

> Regards,
> Steve Long

[Ed]
Is there really a relationship? What do the PIE etymologists say?

Ed.


From edsel at glo.be  Fri Jun  1 10:43:12 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 12:43:12 +0200
Subject: Pelasgian/was Etruscans
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.124312.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas G Kilday" <acnasvers at hotmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2001 4:29 PM

[snip]
> Heb. <ko:pher> lit. 'covering' (also
> 'village', 'pitch', 'ransom') was applied. The resemblance between this and
> <go:pher> seems fortuitous.

[snip]
> DGK

[Ed Selleslagh]
It doesn't look so fortuitious to me: pitch is also used to impermeate walls or
roofs (also in Antiquity, e.g. in (Semitic) Babylonia, according to a Latin
writer I once read), and is thus a 'covering'.

Villages consist of houses with a roof, and in the oldest villages, you could
walk over the roof from one house to the other (e.g. Kül Tepe), making it
look like 'one' roof; in Mediterranean countries, even today, the roof is often
more of a terrace (Sp. tejado<>techo) than in northern climates. A roof is a
'covering' (Cf. Lat. tectum/tegere).

As to 'ransom' : it 'covers' certain (unwelcome) obligations, doesn't it?

If <ko:pher> can mean 'pitch', and <go:pher> 'sticky stuff', couldn't there be
some semantic link, leading either to convergence of two originally different
words, or to two variants of the same original word?

Ed.


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Jun  1 15:01:24 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 16:01:24 +0100
Subject: Deer and Yellow words
In-Reply-To: <7c.1659b843.2840a917@aol.com>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.160124.0100.>

--On Saturday, May 26, 2001 2:37 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> 2. Based on some good evidence, I have an honest belief that there were no
> independent color words in *PIE.  All such words were similes, metaphors
> or by analogy with particular objects, materials or processes.  As some
> early Classicists pointed out, there was no word for "color" in Homer.
> The idea of independent colors was probably a later invention.  There
> were only very specific colored objects of specific hue to use by
> analogy, along with specific stains and natural pigments, few or none of
> which were modern primary colors.  References to reflected color waves,
> surface textures and brightness were all combined.  (The possible
> exception is the black/brown color word that may have been a modern-style
> color word in the Iliad.)

> Even Berlin & Kay, who I think go much too far in assuming consistency in
> pre-Newtonian color terms, say that Homeric Greek was a mere "3b stage
> level" language, with only four "basic color terms" versus more modern
> languages with as many as 14.  My assumption is that the Greeks were more
> advanced in standardizing color terms than PIE speakers and their
> dispersed immediate descendants.  From the Aegeanet and elsewhere, I've
> help collect large folders of notes over the past two years where serious
> analysts verify again and again that color terms cannot be identified
> with any confidence in Near Eastern and Linaer B texts

I'd like to draw attention to the following article on color terms, which I
suspect is little known, but which deserves to be read by anyone interested
in the topic:

John Lyons (1995), 'Colour in language', in Trevor Lamb and Janine Bourriau
(eds), Color: Art and Science, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 194-224.

After a survey, Lyons reaches a number of conclusions which are broadly
consistent with Steve Long's thinking.  Among his conclusions are these:

1. Color reference is far more prominent in some cultures than in others.

2. Color-term systems are typically more richly developed in languages
having a term for 'color', but are not necessarily absent from languages
lacking such a generic term.

3. In spite of its seeming salience, color is typically far less
universally , and far less richly, embedded in languages than are space,
time, size, shape, and other things.

4. The elaboration of color-term systems is undeniably a product of culture.

5. Many languages lack color terms altogether, as we understand them, but
nevertheless possess a number of strongly context-bound words for labeling
colors.

This article also has some interesting things to say about the troublesome
color terms of ancient Greek.

While I'm here, I might mention two other recent publications on color
terms; the first is probably well-known, while the second may not be:

Anna Wierzbicka (1996), Semantics: Primes and Universals, Oxford: Oxford
UP, ch. 10, 'The meanings of colour terms and the universals of seeing'.

C. L. Hardin and Luisa Maffi (eds) (1997), Color Categories in Thought and
Language, Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

The second contains articles on the linguistics, psychology and physiology
of color.

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  Fri Jun  1 17:26:01 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 12:26:01 -0500
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.122601.0500.>

--On Wednesday, May 23, 2001 11:48 am -0500 "David L. White"
<dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

[from Thomason and Kaufman]

>         Well, I can, on p. 14:  "... any linguistic feature can be
> transferred from any language to any other language."  No restrictions are
> mentioned, and TK consistently fail to note that not everything that could
> conceivably occur actually does.

LT:  Ah, I see.  But this statement seems very different from the position you
imputed to T and K: "Anything goes."  This quote plainly does not say that
anything can happen at all, but only that there are no linguistic features
that cannot be borrowed.  Are you aware of any features that cannot be
borrowed?

DLW:  There are apparently no cases of things like 1) singular personal
endings being borrowed without plural personal endings being borrowed, or 2)
past morphemes being borrowed without future morphemes.  Whether TK meant
"anything goes" or not depends on how strong a reading we give to their
statement.  They certainly did not exclude it.  It should be noted that
whether finite verbal morphology gets borowed at all is a matter of
definition, because if it is never mixed, then it could (or could not) be
taken as an indicator of genetic descent.

[on Thomason's agreement that Anglo-Romani is a variety of English]

>         So even the mixed language crowd now admits that a language which
> has grammar from source A and (non-grammatical) lexicon from source B is a
> form of language A?  That is pretty much what I have been saying.

TK: No; this is not at all what Thomason is saying.

DLW:  I am afraid that, given the nature of Anglo-Romani, that is what she
is saying.

TK:  She is saying that Anglo-Romani is a form of English, and no more. She is
not conceding or asserting any general point at all.  And it seems quite clear
that, in other cases, such as that of Laha, she concludes that a language with
grammar from source A but lexis from source B is in fact a variety of B.

DLW:  Which just goes to show that she has no clear standard, and might as
well be tossing coins.

LT:  By the way, I am troubled by this seemingly dismissive expression "the
mixed-language crowd".  Are you suggesting that no mixed languages can
exist at all?

DLW:  Yes, if the evidence in TK is all there is to support the idea.  But
recall that I have always held open the possibility that mixed languages do
exist.  I just said I had not yet seen any.  The Greek/Arabic example cited
below seems to be one.  (This example is also mentioned in TK, but the facts
given were, a usual, too vague to enable a critical observer to determine
what was going on.)

LT:  If so, let me ask this: in what respect does Michif fall
short of being a mixed language?  It looks to me like a paradigm case of a
mixed language.  If we encountered, or imagined, a real mixed language,
what features would it have that Michif lacks?

DLW:  The finite verbal morphology of Michif is all Cree.  Therefore, by the
Davidian standard, it is Cree.  That also answers the scond question.

>> [on my example of Takia, which has retained Austronesian morphemes but
>> borrowed grammatical patterns wholesale from the Papuan language Waskia]

>>>         It is Austronesian, and not much of a puzzle, except for TK, who
>>> must try to figure out, without any very clear standard, whether it is
>>> 1) Austronesian, 2) Papuan, or 3) a new "mixed" language.

[LT]

>> First, why is it Austronesian?  By what criterion does the origin of
>> morphemes wholly outweight the origin of morphological patterns?  Isn't
>> this rather arbitrary?

>         Categories can be transferred rather easily.  We do not call Old
> Lithuanian a mixed langage between Baltic and Finnic, or a form of Finnic,
> merely because it created (if I am remembering correctly) an allative.
> All this means is that the language was evidently imposed on a large
> number of Finnic speakers at some point.  (That there is substantial
> Finnic or Uralic sub-stratal influence in Baltic and Slavic is asserted
> by TK, by the way, though I do not recall that they mention this
> partiuclar example.)  Mere borrowing of categories does not affect
> genetic descent.

LT:  But the Takia case is not similar to that of Lithuanian.  Takia has not
merely acquired a single new grammatical form by contact:

DLW:  Old Lithuanian did not borrow a single new grammatical form.  A
re-read of the relevant section of TK, which does in fact treat this matter,
is advised.  Otherwise, the case for declaring Lithuanian a mixed language
will turn out to be distressingly strong.

That is the problem (or one of them) with TK's approach: it (mixing
metaphors more than a little bit) opens the Pandora's Box to sliding down
the slippery slope of declaring all cases of significant external influence
cases of language mixture.  Things like the current "No Proto" movement,
which you quite right decry, are the inevitable result.  TK's idea seems to
be that it takes "a lot" of external influence before a language can be
declared mixed, but how much is "a lot".  There are, predictably enough,
intermediate cases.

It is ironic, by the way, that TK should wind up in effect declaring that
all cases if significant external influence are cases of language mixture,
for they quite rightly heap scorn upon earlier attempts to regard all cases
of significant external influence as "creolization".  Substituting "language
mixture" for "creolizaton" is not progress:  it just lands us in the same
conceptual swamp under a new (and newly trendy) name.

LT:  instead, it has
imported the *entirety* of the Waskia morphological system, leaving behind
no original Takia morphological patterns at all.  In a strong sense, it has
imported the entire verbal (and nominal) morphology of Waskia, even though
it has not borrowed any morphemes.  Does this not make a very big
difference?

DLW:  Not really, no.  For L2 language learners to model L2 on L1 as much as
they can get away with is commonplace.  For (hypothetical) example, English
high-school learners of German who used natural gender, made all clauses
verb-medial, ignored final devoicing, etc., would still have to considered
as speaking German, however badly, because what they said would be
comprehensible as German, not as English.  The severity of influence does
not matter, unless we enjoy slipping down slopes, not to mention tossing
coins.

LT:  Consider a similar but hypothetical case.  Suppose English-Navaho
bilinguals were to create a new speech variety, consisting wholly of
English morphemes arranged wholly in Navaho grammatical patterns, with
Navaho grammatical distinctions but not English ones, and the long Navaho
sequences of morphemes but no English sequences.  By your reasoning, the
result would be clearly a form of English and not a form of Navaho.  Is
this reasonable?

DLW:  Obviously it is to me, or I would not have proposed it.  Foreign
accents (in all apsects) can occasionally be severe enough to preclude
native understanding, but this does not affect genetic descent.  Indian
English, for example, is often difficult or impossible for non-Indians to
understand, but this does not render it not English.

>> Second, why is it incumbent upon T and K to classify Takia, or any
>> language, in such a rigorous way?  Why aren't they free to decide "none
>> of the above"?

>         What would "none of the above be"?  The three possibilities given
> above exhaust those that are reasonable.

LT:  The missing possibility is this: it makes little sense to ask the question
in the first place.  It may well be that rigid categorization is not
appropriate for (some) mixed languages.  The choice among asserting that Takia
"is" Austronesian, or "is" Papuan, or "is" neither may simply be inadequate to
capture linguistic reality.

DLW:  Possibly, but I see not reason to believe it in this case.  If the
finite verbal morphology (morphemes, not categories) is Takia, it is Takia.
That may well seem arbitrary, but it is not.  Verbs are more basic than
nouns, and what is more basic is more indicative of descent.  For English,
it is easy to demonstrate this by considering the following sentence:

 The tanks crossing the bridge was/were not ideal.

 With "were", this is a statement (improbable as it may be) about the tanks.
With "were", it is a statement about the proposition in general.  In the
more normal reading, with "was", it is easy to see that the verb agrees with
"crossing", not with "tanks", and that therefore "crossing" is the head of
the NP. (Not to mention being a gerund, not a participle.)  If it is the
head of the NP, it is reasonable to suppose that it is also in some sense
the head of the corresponding sentence "The tanks crossed the bridge".  We
may also note that things that might be held to apply to an entire
proposition, like negation, are typically attached to or associated with
verbs, and that though there is a type of language, polysynthetic, in which
the verb and its mandatorily associated elements form a complete sentence,
there is no corresponding type of language where the subject noun and its
mandatorily associated elements form a complete sentence.  Thus upon
examination it is not arbitrary to regard vebal morphology as more basic
than nominal morphology.

 Consider the alternative:  if it is true that mixed nominal morphologies
occur but mixed (finite) verbal morphologies do not, this should be
explained, but how?  The Chomskyite "solution", no doubt, would be simply to
declare this an arbitrary "aspect of Universal Grammar", presumably coded
for by one of those many "grammar genes", the possession of which exalts us
above lower creation (thus repairing to some limited extent the damage done
to our collective self-esteem by Darwin).  In other words, declare victory
and go home.   Does this really get us anywhere?  I don't think so.

LT:  We've just had the census here in Britain.  The census form tries
desperately to classify every individual into one ethnic group or another.
But not everybody fits very well.  What ethnic group does Tiger Woods
belong to?  In fact, I understand, Mr. Woods, who clearly has a sense of
humor, has invented a new ethnic group for himself -- an ethnic group of
which he is possibly the only member.

Why should languages be simpler than people?

DLW:  Mis-formed question, does not compute.  Linguistic descent is only
vaguely and very abstractly relatable to genetic descent.

> And since when is the equivalent
> of a mental coin toss to be preferred to a clear standard?

LT:  No one is proposing a coin toss.

DLW:  In the absence of a clear standard, and in the presence of
intermediate cases, they might as well be.

LT:  Anyway, what is the value of having "a
clear standard" if that standard forces us into conclusions which fly in
the face of the facts?

DLW: Facts like what?

LT:  You have picked verbal morphology as your standard,
and now you have further selected the etymology of morphemes in preference
to the origin of morphological patterns.  All those seems wholly arbitrary
to me, and in no way to be preferred to any other arbitrary criterion.

DLW:  Reasons that neither is arbitrary have been given above.

But now consider another case discussed by Thomason: Kormakiti Arabic.
This variety is the mother tongue of the people in one village in Cyprus.
It is descended from the Arabic brought to the island in the twelfth
century.  It consists of a complex mixture of Arabic and Cypriot Greek.
The lexicon, based on a sample, is about 62% Arabic and 38% Greek, with the
Greek component including many items of basic vocabulary.  Arabic words are
built from Arabic phonemes and take Arabic morphology and phrasal syntax.
Greek words are built from Greek phonemes and take Greek morphology and
phrasal syntax.  Phrases are combined into sentences by rules which are a
mixture of Arabic and Greek.

So, in this language, Arabic verbs take Arabic verbal morphology, while
Greek verbs take Greek verbal morphology.  What does your "clear standard"
say about this case?

DLW:  That it is, if the facts are in order, a true mixed language.  But
note that even here the mixed verbal morphology is mixed according to the
origin of the verb, and does not involve a true across the board mixture. We
see nothing like Arabic third person endings and Greek 1st and 2nd person
endings.
>> Therefore, using David White's criterion, Laha has changed from being a
>> language entirely distinct from Malay to a mere variety of Malay.

>         If the fantasy scenario envisaged above is to be taken as a fact.

LT:  Who says this is "a fantasy scenario"?  The investigator has looked
carefully at Laha and concluded that it arose by massive replacement of the
original Laha grammar by Malay grammar.  Why does this unremarkable
conclusion bother you so much?

DLW:  Are the posited intermeidate stages attested?  If not, the term
"fantasy scenario", though a little harsh, is not unjustified.  More
critically, the whole case is in fact circular, for what Thomason asserts is
that if her view of how languages mix, apparently shared by Collins, is
correct, then her view of how languages mix is correct.  No kidding.

>> So, the possible conclusions:

>> (1) The speech variety called 'Laha' has indeed changed from being one
>> language to being another.

>> (2) Laha has always been, and remains, a language distinct from Malay,
>> even though it has imported almost the entirety of Malay grammar.

>         It is a language distinct from Malay but descended from Malay.
> Sudden re-lexification, as probably happened in both Anglo-Romani and
> Mednyj Aleut, can create this.

How do you know there was "sudden relexification"?  Isn't this just another
"fantasy scenario"?

For Laha, yes, but it is no longer disputed for Anglo-Romani.  Since
Thomason has changed her mind about this case, which in TK was presented as
if proof positive of language mixture, I suppose that the linguistic
equivalent of a doctrine of papal infallibilility is not to be applied.

> Such developments are unusual and should
> be recognized as distinct from the more normal sort of genetic descent,
> where mutual intelligibility across generations always exists, but, as
> Thomason in effect admits in her interpretation of Anglo-Romani, do not
> constitute non-genetic descent.

LT:  Now you are proposing that a language can arise so suddenly that there
is no mutual comprehensibility across generations?  This strikes you as more
plausible than gradual regrammaticalization?  Whew.

DLW:  What happened in Anglo-Romani?  Abrupt re-lexification created a form
of English that was not mutually comprehensible with other English.  More
technically, within the small world of the English Gypsies mutual
comprehensibility across generations did exist (lets not exaggerate), but
was made possible only by bilingualism.  I am not proposing that a situation
existed where parents and children could not understand each other.  With
regard to "gradual regrammaticalization", I have stressed above that the
presumed intermediate stages of mixed finite verbal morphology do not exist.

>> (3) Collins and Thomason are completely wrong in their interpretation,
>> and Laha must have had some other origin.

>         Probably.  If piecemeal borrowing of parts verbal morhpology,
>         which would seem to be possible under Thomason's scenario, is
> possible, we should (hopefully) be able to find some examples of the
> process caught in the act, resulting in mixed verbal morphology.  Unless
> Laha is one (and so far I have seen no evidence to show that it is), I
> can still assert that there are not any.

LT:  All right -- Kormakiti Arabic, then.

DLW:  This has been treated above.  Though it is an example of a mixed
language, it is not an example of mixed borrowing of finite verbal
morphology.

>         The scenario envisaged by Collins and Thomason is just that:  a
> scenario envisaged.  It is not a fact.  I would need to know what the "few
> bits of Laha grammar" are.  If they involve finite verbal morphology, then
> what I have been saying is wrong.  (Though pointing out that TK's examples
> did not in fact show this would still hardly be an outrage.)  If they
> involve nominal morphology, derivational or non-finite verbal morphology,
> or (worse yet) mere categories, then what I have been saying is not wrong.

LT:  I regret that I can't answer this, since Thomason doesn't provide that
much detail, and since our library doesn't take the journal in which Collins's
article appears.  However, I'm intrigued about this case now, so I'll see if I
can find out.  Unfortunately, I am now buried in the annual ordeal of exam
marking, so I won't be doing anything quickly.

DLW:  Obviously we need more real facts here.

> Malay, by the way, is by typology if not history a semi-creole, so I would
> also like to know what the parts of "Malay grammar" that have supposedly
> been imported supposedy are.

LT:  To be honest, I can't see why this is relevant.

DLW:  Well I can.  If Malay has no finite verbal morphology, then looking
for signs of it in Laha is obviously pointless, and Laha cannot possibly
provide counter-evidence to my main assertion, which has always been not
that mixed languages do not exist, but that mixed borrowing of finite verbal
morphologies does not occur.  (And that this can be used to trace genetic
descent.)

To back up a bit, my main point is that the genetic descent of any given
language is to be traced through the frame morphemes.  This is, after all,
how we demonrate to the naïve natives that Englsh is not a Romance language:
the Romance words are always in a Germanic frame.  In situations where
external influences are more severe, the frame can be accordingly reduced.
The bare minimum that it is reduced to is finite verbal morphology, for this
is what is most basic to the sentence frame.  For example, if we say
"Revision necessitates significant re-conceptualization", the only thing
Germanic in there is the third person singular /-s/.  Not a coincidence.

Dr. David L. White


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Fri Jun  1 18:13:24 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 13:13:24 -0500
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.131324.0500.>

Dear Rich and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rich Alderson" <alderson+mail at panix.com>
Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2001 11:12 AM

> On 24 May 2001, Pat Ryan wrote:

>> 1. the opinion was expressed that the root should properly be reconstructed
>> as *g^enH(1)- rather than *g^en-; is this a majority opinion?

> Yes.  Its appearance in Sanskrit as _ja:-_ ~ _jani-_ and in Greek as _gene-_
> require it.

[PCR]
So they do, which I have never doubted.

Are you also asserting that, therefore, there is
no *g^en-?

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 Jun  1 18:16:00 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 13:16:00 -0500
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.131600.0500.>

Dear Pete and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "petegray" <petegray at btinternet.com>
Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2001 1:57 PM

>> 1. the opinion was expressed that the root should properly be reconstructed
>> as *g^enH(1)- rather than *g^en-; is this a majority opinion?

> Absolutely.  The laryngeal (h1) is very well established.
>   (a) set. (i.e. not anit) forms exist in Sanskrit:  janitos, janitvi, etc;
> janisyati etc;
>   (b) non-lengthening in Sanskrit causative:  janayati (suggests a closed
> syllable, *genH-eye-ti.   Likewise the desiderative jijanis.ate.
>    (c) Forms with syllabic n (zero grade before consonant) show reflexes in
> Sanskrit of long syllabic n, which implies nh.  eg ja:yate, ja:ta etc.
>   (d) Latin perfect genui (from gigno) is an absolute give-away for a
> laryngeal.

I will ask you the same question I asked Rich:

does that, in your opinion, mean there was no *g^en-?

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 philjennings at juno.com  Fri Jun  1 21:34:09 2001
From: philjennings at juno.com (philjennings at juno.com)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 16:34:09 -0500
Subject: European Genetics/IE
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.163409.0500.>

My fondness for half-assed pronunciamentos has served me well, as I grow
educated thanks to the kindly and informative rebuttals of people like
JoatSimeon and Steve Long.  I have read the two papers that Steve Long
mentioned a few steps back along this topic and now realize that the same
genetic information can be used to argue that the neolithic Anatolian-
farmer contribution to the European gene pool amounts to (1) ten percent
and (2) two-thirds.  Since experts draw such varied conclusions from the
same body of data, perhaps we're not yet ready to use their findings in
support of one origins-theory or the other.  My inclination, therefore, is to
take back much of what I've said recently on this topic.  Someone better
equipped than I to sort among genetics papers may return to enlighten us
all, and I will be very interested when that happens.

I find the JoatSimeon emails very interesting, esp. the one regarding
memes and their reproduction/progression from phratry A through
bruderbund Z.  I would guess that linguistic rate-of-change would be at a

maximum during the process he describes.  How could it be otherwise?
Yet the end result consists of IE daughter dialects still mutually
intelligible
in many cases.  Could we possibly agree that before this process began,
when PIE was a genetic language (comparatively unexposed to outside
factors) rather than a radical way-of-life language, it may have loitered

along at a much slower rate of change?  And this must have been
s-l-o-o-o-w indeed, given that even during the meme-transmission era,
battle-axes and such, the rate of change doesn't seem to have been all
that fast.  Warp two versus warp one.  Warp three during the iron age
and into classical times?  Warp four thereafter until the spread of
nation-
states and printing-press literacy?

(Things get clouded afterward.  Linguistic innovations bring languages and
cultures together as much as they set them apart, we get meldings and
French Academies as well as schisms.)

I am still curious whether any proto-language requiring reconstruction, has
ever been reconstructed as a creole?  Not PIE, JoatSimeon says, but what about
proto-Sino-Tibetan, or proto-Dravidian, or any of the other protoi?  Because if
the answer is a universal no, is that really likely?  The world must have been
a different kind of place than it is now.  But that's the idea I'm toying with
in the paragraphs above, with all that talk about "warp factors."  The world
was different, and rates-of-change were slower.


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Jun  2 03:20:54 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 23:20:54 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.232054.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/1/2001 1:34:38 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com writes:
<< -- well, this is a little odd, considering your argument is that a language
spoken in 7000 BCE and spread over three-quarters of Eurasia was still so
undifferentiated in and around 1000 BCE that whole sentences from Celtic,
Italic, Greek, Slavic, Baltic and Indo-Iranian were still mutually
comprehensible.>>

First of all, I still know enough Greek and Latin and heard enough Greek and
Latin a long time ago to know that the two languages were 99.9%
unintelligible to one another.  Except of course for what they overtly
borrowed from one another.

Your "whole sentences" logically prove nothing when those sentences are few
indeed compared to whole languages.  If there were no close resemblances at
all, no one would dare claim that these languages were even related in
anyway.  There has to be some, but there are very very few.

If you compare the actual corpus of what we have in Latin and Greek from
before the current era - and that is hundreds of thousands of sentences -
actual matching sentences are pathetically minuscule, even if you include
clearly borrowed phrases.

<<so undifferentiated in and around 1000 BCE that whole sentences from Celtic,
Italic, Greek, Slavic, Baltic and Indo-Iranian were still mutually
comprehensible.>>

This is the kind of statement that would embarrass any serious scientist.
You have no evidence of what Italic or Slavic or Baltic was like in 1000BC.
To go on and say they were mutually comprehensible is unprovable and
unfortunately typical of the things you write.

<<After 5000 years and 7000 miles of separation.>>

We've been through this before.  You have never given any rational measure of
rate of language change.  I don't believe there can be any real certainty
about the rate of change among the IE languages.  I respect the opinions of
real linguists on this list regarding their insights about such things, but I
must note that there has been differences in the past between qualified
opinions.

An objective observer would have to conclude this is something not yet
solvable scientifically.  And it is something about which reasonable persons
may differ.  Reasonably.

You normally compare "cognates" and an isolated (typically religious) phrase
to show how "close" the IE languages are.  I've been reading up on the work
of the Australian linguists and there was something relevant to all this
mentioned by Harold Koch at ANU.  He wrote the following regarding work where
the comparative method had been used to reconstruct languages in various
parts of Australia [Western Australia (O'Grady 1966, Austin 1981), Cape York
Peninsula (Hale 1964, Sutton 1976, Black 1980, Dixon 1991), New England
(Crowley 1976 and This volume), and Central Australia (Koch )]:

----"In many of these cases, certain languages had undergone radical sound
changes while close relatives remained unchanged. Thus the proto-forms for a
subgroup often turn out to be identical to forms surviving intact in other
languages of the subgroup." (from "Comparative linguistics and Australian
prehistory" in "Understanding ancient Australia: perspectives from
archaeology and linguistics." Melbourne: Oxford University Press (1997))

To my surprise, I was told the time of separation between some of those
related language subgroups were estimated as being as much as 3000 years or
more.

This would be equivalent (given a final dispersal date of 4500BC for PIE or
*PIE) to a language containing duplicate of PIE forms co-existing along side
of, say, Mycenaean in 1500BC.  How is it possible to be confident about
estimating rate of change considering such information?

<<Or are words uncannily stable when it suits your argument, but change like
bandits when that's convenient? >>

No.  And I know you know what I'm talking about.

Meanings can change radically.  Phonology seems to be a very different story.

Regards,
Steve Long


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Jun  1 15:05:28 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 16:05:28 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <l03130322b735c0ac564b@[209.147.211.33]>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.160528.0100.>

--On Saturday, May 26, 2001 3:22 pm -0500 Rick Mc Callister
<rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu> wrote:

[quoting]

>> English speakers
>> have no trouble with names like Vladivostock or words like zloty.

> I don't know about that. Most Americans pronounce zloty /zl-/ rather than
> /zw-/

Yes, but the point is that we have no trouble pronouncing /zl-/ in this
word even though this initial cluster occurs in no native or ordinary
words, and perhaps in no word at all apart from this one.  Anyway, the
choice of /zl-/ is determined by the spelling.  We have no trouble with the
alien /zw-/, either: we use this in 'zwiebach' and in the chemical term
'zwitterion',
even though the German originals have /tsv-/.

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 connolly at memphis.edu  Fri Jun  1 15:54:29 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 10:54:29 -0500
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.105429.0500.>

Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Leo A. Connolly" <connolly at memphis.edu>
> Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2001 6:04 PM

>> ERobert52 at aol.com wrote:

>>> In a message dated 20/05/01 10:35:02 GMT Daylight Time,
>>> connolly at memphis.edu writes:

>>> [referring to [c,] and [x] in German]

>> I checked in the Duden Aussprachewörterbuch of 1962 and found Chaldi
>> [xaldi], Chalid [xali:t], Chalil [xali:l], and Charga [xarga], all with [x-]
>> rather than [ç], while Chamaphyte [çamEfy:t] (!), Chamäzephalie
>> [çamEtsefali:], Chasma [çasma] with [ç].  I also found Chatte
>> ([çat@] beside [kat@]) but Chatti [xati].  So no, if these pronunciations
>> are factually correct, your rule doesn't work.  It would in any event be
>> very strange for the pronunciation of a consonant in a Germanic language to
>> be determined by a noncontiguous consonant.

>> Leo Connolly

> [Ed Selleslagh]

> All these are 'foreign' words. It looks like German tries to
> imitate/approximate the original sound: [x] e.g. in (Arabic and oriental)
> Chalid, Chalil, and [ç] e.g. in words perceived to be French or introduced
> via French ( for [S]). I think the choice between [ç] and [x] , or the
> choice for following the general rule ([ç] with front vowels) or not, is
> mainly determined by a word's history. Note that <ch> is often pronounced
> [k], also historically determined.

Oh, indeed they are foreign.  It's only in Schwyzer Düütsch that we find
initial [x] in native words, and no variety has initial [ç] in them.
But that's beside the point.  If Duden's pronunciations are factually
correct -- a rather large assumption -- then [x] and [ç] do contrast in
initial position and must therefore be assigned to different phonemes.
Unless we want to say that foreign words *as foreign* have a different
set of phonemes than native ones, quod Deus avertat. -- I would note,
BTW, that Swiss German lacks [ç] completely, so that whatever analysis
of standard German proves correct, Swiss has only one phoneme, viz. /x/.

Leo Connolly


From lmfosse at online.no  Fri Jun  1 15:03:16 2001
From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 17:03:16 +0200
Subject: SV: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.170316.0200.>

petegray [SMTP:petegray at btinternet.com] skrev 26. mai 2001 20:43:
> be very quaint, if understood at all.  It also contains words such as:
>    Bayard
>    hoodman-blind
>    kinnikinic
>    kinkajou
>    kino
>    kintal
>    rahat lakoum
>    raff
>    sleuth-hound
>    ubiety
>    xoanon   etc.

Have you any way of supplying us with meanings? I am an Indologist, and I
hardly understand a word of this. However, "ubiety" sound like a word to
have fun with. ("Have you seen my ubiety", "what in ubiety is that supposed
to mean", "did you remember your ubieties" etc.

Lars Martin Fosse

Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse
Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114,
0674 Oslo
Norway
Phone: +47 22 32 12 19
Mobile phone: +47 90 91 91 45
Fax 1:  +47 22 32 12 19
Fax 2:  +47 85 02 12 50 (InFax)
Email: lmfosse at online.no


From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com  Fri Jun  1 18:18:57 2001
From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 14:18:57 -0400
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <004201c0e618$3714fda0$e45f073e@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.141857.0400.>

I won't comment on the others, but <kinkajou> is the ordinary
vernacular English name for the Meso- and South American
mammal _Potos flavus_.  It's in the 6th edition (1999) of _Walker's
Mammals of the World_, a standard zoological reference, and in all
four of the competing American 1-vol. desk dictionaries I've
checked (Merriam-Webster, Random House, Webster's New
World, American Heritage).  Etymology is curious--a
misapplication of a North American French word for the wolverine,
borrowed from Algonquian languages.

Jim Rader

> Undoubtedly true, but wastage still occurs.  My copy of the Concise Oxford
> of 1911, 3rd edition 1934, contains many Anglo-Indian words which would now
> be very quaint, if understood at all.  It also contains words such as:
>    Bayard
>    hoodman-blind
>    kinnikinic
>    kinkajou
>    kino
>    kintal
>    rahat lakoum
>    raff
>    sleuth-hound
>    ubiety
>    xoanon   etc.
> I have no way of checking if these are in the modern editions, but I don't
> mind guessing that many of them are not.

> Peter


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Fri Jun  1 21:24:18 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 16:24:18 -0500
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <004201c0e618$3714fda0$e45f073e@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.162418.0500.>

	kinnikkinnik, kinnickkinnick, etc. --a type of smoking mixture, is
from a North American Indian language. I think it's Algonquin. Unless, of
course, there was a homonym in Anglo-(Asian) Indian

[snip]
>Undoubtedly true, but wastage still occurs.  My copy of the Concise Oxford
>of 1911, 3rd edition 1934, contains many Anglo-Indian words which would now
>be very quaint, if understood at all.  It also contains words such as:
>   Bayard
>   hoodman-blind
>   kinnikinic
>   kinkajou
>   kino
>   kintal
>   rahat lakoum
>   raff
>   sleuth-hound
>   ubiety
>   xoanon   etc.
>I have no way of checking if these are in the modern editions, but I don't
>mind guessing that many of them are not.

>Peter

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sat Jun  2 16:29:23 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2001 17:29:23 +0100
Subject: thy thigh, etc. (external sandhi in English)
Message-ID: <SAT.2.JUN.2001.172923.0100.>

Quite how we got onto biology I don't know, but while we're there, can I ask
when cattle began to be fed hay?   In some countries even more blessed by
nature, there is no period when cattle have to be fed hay - the grass grows
in winter.   So if we are projecting hay-feeding back into PIE times, where
is the evidence for it?

Peter

> As regards the farting of the bucks, in springtime the diet of herbivores
> changes with the coming of new grass.  You will probably notice (if you
> are a milk drinker) that suddenly the flavor makes a switch when the cows go
> off hay and out into pasture.  As with any dietary change, the colon takes
> time to adjust, and during the transition, unpleasant phenomena are noticed.

> One of the proofs of the benignity of nature is that by the time the ground
> is dry and you have to yoke your oxen to the plow, this transition period has
> run its course.

> I'm sure with deer the farting is not uncommonly loud, although any sound
> at all would be worth notice.  Deer are remarkably silent.


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sat Jun  2 16:32:49 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2001 17:32:49 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc. (external sandhi in English)
Message-ID: <SAT.2.JUN.2001.173249.0100.>

>> English speakers
>> have no trouble with names like Vladivostock or words like zloty.

> I don't know about that. Most Americans pronounce zloty /zl-/ rather than
> /zw-/

We were talking about initial fricative + /l/, and I offered the English
pronunciation of zloty as an example.  The "proper" pronunciation is not
relevant - my point is that English speakers have no trouble pronouncing
/zlOti:/, so the combination /zl-/, although not found in English words, is
not impossible for an English speaker.

Peter


From dlwhite at texas.net  Fri Jun  1 17:35:51 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 12:35:51 -0500
Subject: Phonemes of New York Dialect
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.123551.0500.>

----- Original Message -----
From: Leo A. Connolly <connolly at memphis.edu>
Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2001 8:41 PM

> Sombody wrote:

>>> An example that I am very familiar with concerns the tensing and raising of
>>> [ae] (that is "ash") in the New York City area.  ...

> David White replied:

>> Perhaps I am missing something here (other than the opportunity for more
>> dutiful slogging), but it seems to me that the facts may be acounted for if
>> we posit 1) that tensing/raising always occurs before two moraic consonants
>> (as in "can't, presumably even under high stress), and 2) that otherwise
>> tensing/raising occurs before one moraic consonant (save voiceless plosives)
>> in words of middling stress ("can", unlike "can't", always has either high
>> or low stress, or so it seems to me).  (The second phenomenon might happen
>> because words of high stress tend to have a sort of circumflex tone, which
>> in its end part, the part that is relevant when we are dealing with
>> following consonants, is similar to un-stress.  Thus high and low stress
>> might pattern together, against middling stress.)  Under this scenario,
>> agentive "adder" would have to be syllabified as /aed.R/ (or whatever /R/ is
>> in this dialect), as opposed to /ae.dR/.  This is a bit odd, but I do not
>> see any way around it, if a remotely unified account is to be attempted.
>> The question is whether such a syllabification is permitted.

> This solution seems wrong, since with the sole exception of non-standard
> _yeah_, raised and tensed [E:] and normal [ae] both occur only in closed
> syllables.  Neither do I see what morae have to do with it.

        Since every word that ends with a consonant ends with a moraic
consonants, bringing moras in permits a unified account.

> Stress?  Maybe, since it is contrastive stressing of the normally unstressed
> modal that underlies such forms as _if I [kaen]_ ('am able') beside _if I
> [kE:n] (put up tomatoes).  A neat minimal pair, that,. since the stresses on
> the two forms are equal.

        If the two "can"s contrast under high stress, then they are indeed a
minimal pair.  I do not know how any other interpretation could be taken.
But I also do not know if they do.  Beyond all this, there is the question
of how the contrast ever arose (what was going on the pre-phonemic phase),
and here I think moras are unavoidable.

Dr. David L. White


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Fri Jun  1 18:41:51 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 13:41:51 -0500
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.134151.0500.>

Dear Bob and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Whiting" <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2001 10:15 AM

> On Mon, 21 May 2001, Larry Trask wrote:

>> --On Thursday, May 17, 2001 2:17 pm +0300 Robert Whiting
>> <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:

>>> I'm perfectly happy to accept 'thy' as a ModE word.  But
>>> 'thigh' and 'thy' are as perfect a minimal pair as German
>>> 'Kuhchen' and 'Kuchen' or 'Tauchen' and Kuchen'.

<snip>

[PCR]
A very impressive argument, one ro which I subscribe, and not the least
impaired by the following small inaccuracy.

> Otherwise, <dh> usually represent the phryngeal [d.] (sometimes referred to
> as "emphatic") in Arabic transcription, as in the place name 'Riyadh'.

[PCR]
In my experience, /dh/ (dha:l) is never used to represent Arabic emphatic /d./
(d.a:d). They are two separate sounds and letters. Riyadh has dha:l.

<snip>

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  Fri Jun  1 20:31:18 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 22:31:18 +0200
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.223118.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Whiting" <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2001 5:15 PM

> Now for the interesting part.  The Latin alphabet did not have a
> sign for the [w] sound (mostly because it disappeared from Greek)
> and used the <u/v> graph instead.

[Ed Selleslagh]
I doubt that: the Romans didn't have the English v-sound, and the letter u
(written as v) was used as a semi-vowel close to w, or as a vowel. So they
didn't need an extra letter to transcribe Greek wau, if they had had to.

They did introduce Greek z and y [ü] in their alphabet, because these sounds
didn't exist in Latin. Other letters were assimilated to existing Latin ones,
like eta > (long) e:, or represented by combinations like ch, th, ph resulting
in approximately the same sound.

BTW, the Greeks had their own problems with transcription of Latin: I think it
was in Delphi (or was it Olympia - now Olimbía - ?) where I saw AKOAI on an
ancient bath house, for Latin AQUAE.

> Much later, the medieval Norman scribes began writing the u/v graph doubled
> (uu/vv) to indicate the English [w] sound because they were unfamiliar with
> the English letter wyn or wen.  This Norman double-u (or to the French,
> double-vay) became the normal sign for the [w] sound and once again, this is
> the only letter whose name reflects its shape rather than its sound.
> Outrageous coincidence that the old <w> and the new <w> are the only letters
> in their alphabets named for their shapes?
> <snip>
> Bob Whiting

[Ed]
For your information: in Dutch, w is called 'we', pr. like Eng. 'way' (some
Dutchmen will say 'vay').

And Double-U (pr. Dub'ya) is still another thing, nothing to do with its shape
either :-)

Ed.


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Sun Jun  3 07:10:18 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2001 07:10:18 -0000
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
Message-ID: <SUN.3.JUN.2001.071018.0000.>

Robert Whiting (29 May 2001) wrote:

>Now for the interesting part.  The Latin alphabet did not have a
>sign for the [w] sound (mostly because it disappeared from Greek)
>and used the <u/v> graph instead.  Much later, the medieval
>Norman scribes began writing the u/v graph doubled (uu/vv) to
>indicate the English [w] sound because they were unfamiliar with
>the English letter wyn or wen.  This Norman double-u (or to the
>French, double-vay) became the normal sign for the [w] sound and
>once again, this is the only letter whose name reflects its shape
>rather than its sound.  Outrageous coincidence that the old <w>
>and the new <w> are the only letters in their alphabets named for
>their shapes?  Not really -- if the [w] sound hadn't disappeared
>from Greek, the letter would probably have made its way into the
>Latin, and thence into the English alphabet with a name
>reflecting its sound and wouldn't have had to be reinvented.
>What it shows is that what goes around, comes around.

What goes around may also take a "disastrously wrong turn". The Greek letter
for [w] _did_ make its way into Latin as the letter F, and the loss of [w]
from the Attic and Ionic dialects has nothing to do with it. The Italian
alphabets are derived from the Chalcidian, whose dialect retained [w]. The
key player here is [f], which occurred in Etruscan and the IE Italic
languages, but not in ancient Greek. Early Archaic Etruscan used the digraph
FH or HF (transcribed <vh>, <hv>) for this sound. Late Arch. Etr. introduced
the symbol 8, which superseded the digraph for writing [f]. By this time,
the Latins of Praeneste had acquired the alphabet from Etruscans, including
the convention of writing FH for [f]. As the Latin alphabet went its
separate way, FH was reduced to F, and the less common usage of F for [w]
was replaced by V, which now stood for [u] or [w] in Latin.

As for W being the only (English) letter whose "name reflects its shape
rather than its sound", what about H? The etymology of ModE <aitch> is
disputed, but derivation from MFr or OFr <hache> is hardly questioned, and
this word also means 'battle-axe'. It seems better IMHO to posit naming the
letter in OFr on the basis of resemblance to the double blade of a
battle-axe, rather than referring it to an unattestable VL *hacca or *accha,
supposedly invented out of nothing to exemplify the former sound of a silent
letter (among illiterates).

DGK


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Fri Jun  1 21:33:40 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 16:33:40 -0500
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <177041807.3200291392@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.163340.0500.>

/da:k at rti:/ is common in the Northeast, i.e. where more recent arrivals
from Ireland are found
but /do:@rti:/ & /dorti:/ are more common elsewhere in the US --where the
most common spellings are Doherty and Dougherty

[snip]

>I've just checked the pronunciations of a couple more of these troublesome
>Irish names in John Wells's pronouncing dictionary.  For 'Docherty', Wells
>gives the pronunciation with [x] (a velar fricative) as usual in Britain,
>and the pronunciation with /k/ as usual in the US and not uncommon in
>Britain, but he doesn't recognize a variant with /h/, even though I'm
>pretty sure I've heard this on occasion.  I use [x], just as I do in
>'Bach'.
[snip]
> Do any of you Yanks out there *really*
>pronounce an /h/ in 'vehicle'?

	Only when I'm plowing the back forty ;p

>Larry Trask

[ moderator snip ]

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From connolly at memphis.edu  Fri Jun  1 21:57:27 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 16:57:27 -0500
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.165727.0500.>

Larry Trask wrote:

> Incidentally, I've just noticed that John Wells reports that 33% of his
> American panel preferred the pronunciation of 'vehicle' with /h/, and a
> further five percent actually put the main stress on the second syllable.
> Sheesh.  Either John is using a remarkably catholic panel, or something has
> happened here since I left home.  Do any of you Yanks out there *really*
> pronounce an /h/ in 'vehicle'?

Lord knows I don't, but I live in Memphis, and Lord knows, the majority
of the folks here think it's quite the elegant thing to do.  But it's
the first syllable that has primary stress, though the second has a
strong secondary stress.  For some speakers, the effect is like the
classic southern American accent retraction seen in "U-nited States" and
"PO-lice". But in my native New Jersey, there is no [h] in the word.

Leo Connolly


From alrivera at southern.edu  Sat Jun  2 12:58:39 2001
From: alrivera at southern.edu (Muke Tever)
Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2001 08:58:39 -0400
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <SAT.2.JUN.2001.085839.0400.>

From: "Robert Whiting" <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
> And no English speaker who doesn't speak Arabic would ever pronounce
> 'dhal' with [D] unless he looked it up in the dictionary.  It would
> simply be pronounced with [d] because that is how English <dh> in
> initial position is reallized.

That, by the way, is a rule I was never taught.  I always had the spelling
pronunciation [D] for <dh> words before I learned about Sanskrit.  (It took
me a while to link [dArm@] with <dharma>...)  Even now I still have
dental/interdental [d] in those words (instead of the regular alveolar or
whatever), and in words like <dhole>, the [D] still persists.


From mclasutt at brigham.net  Sat Jun  2 18:50:15 2001
From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin)
Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2001 12:50:15 -0600
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <l03130321b735bf680a3c@[209.147.211.33]>
Message-ID: <SAT.2.JUN.2001.125015.0600.>

[From Rick Mc Callister, giving Larry Trask some Scrabble words]
	Another <dh-> word that should be acceptable in Scrabble is dhole.
Perhaps dhoti

[From me]

Before 'dhole' gets mixed up in the [D]/[T] discussion, 'dhole' is
pronounced with initial [d] (it's from some Indian voiced aspirate), not
[D].

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 RAHammitt at aol.com  Sat Jun  2 19:00:50 2001
From: RAHammitt at aol.com (RAHammitt at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2001 15:00:50 EDT
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <SAT.2.JUN.2001.150050.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/1/2001 2:12:53 PM Central Daylight Time,
larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:

> In my vernacular, even in proper names, I absolutely can't have /h/ before
> schwa or before unstressed /I/.  I might also point out that, in the US,
> the word 'vehicle' is a traditional shibboleth for spotting country
> bumpkins: if you pronounce an /h/ in 'vehicle', you're a bumpkin.  Even the
> folk singer Arlo Guthrie, hardly the personification of cosmopolitan
> sophistication, used this word to great effect on one of his records to
> identify a southern policeman as a bumpkin.  But this pronunciation
> nevertheless forces the presence of a stress on the second syllable, and
> /h/-schwa is still impossible.

> Incidentally, I've just noticed that John Wells reports that 33% of his
> American panel preferred the pronunciation of 'vehicle' with /h/, and a
> further five percent actually put the main stress on the second syllable.
> Sheesh.  Either John is using a remarkably catholic panel, or something has
> happened here since I left home.  Do any of you Yanks out there *really*
> pronounce an /h/ in 'vehicle'?

       Ok, I'll bite.  I was raised in Texas (but have travelled extensively
throughout the eastern half of the U.S.) and have spent as much time with
rural folks ("bumpkins") as I have with urban folks.  I do not pronouce the
h, and I have never heard anyone pronounce the h (except in movies where
someone was portraying "bumpkins").
       Of course, my exposure to the word is limited; the word is just not
used so much anymore.  In its place, people I talk to approximate by using
"car", whether referring to a car, a truck, a van, or any other 4-6 wheeled,
motorized vehicle.
       As for what you said about not tolerating /h/ before schwa, my speech
agrees except with the h in word-initial position.  I pronounce the word
"hull" with a schwa.  That being said, when I add syllables (ending in many
different consonants or vowels) before it in hypothetical words, I keep
dropping the h.

Richard Hammitt


From semartin at pacifier.com  Sun Jun  3 02:59:54 2001
From: semartin at pacifier.com (Sam Martin)
Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2001 19:59:54 -0700
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <177041807.3200291392@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SAT.2.JUN.2001.195954.0700.>

On Larry's inquiry about American speakers and their vehicular
(vee-HICK-y at -l@r) haitchiness:

I have always pronounced "vehicle" as VEE-hick- at l.
The first eighteen years of my life were spent in Kansas.
Since then many words have changed pronunciation in my speech as I
moved around the US, but "vehicle" remains untouched. I have become
familiar with the h-less version; it strikes my ear as remarkably
close to collapsing into VICK- at l.


From g_sandi at hotmail.com  Sun Jun  3 09:21:41 2001
From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi)
Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2001 09:21:41 -0000
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <SUN.3.JUN.2001.092141.0000.>

> From: Robert Whiting <WHITING at CC.HELSINKI.FI>
> Reply-To: Indo-European at xkl.com
> To: <INDO-EUROPEAN at XKL.COM>
> Subject: Re: Return of the minimal pairs
> Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 14:14:06 +0300 (EET DST)

> As for 'duinhewassel', OED seems to have missed this pronunciation,
> although they have the spelling. I wouldn't be surprised that this
> comes from Chamber's which is well known for its Scottish bias. But
> the word is Gaelic in origin where initial [d] and [D] vary depending
> on the phonetic environment (external sandhi). Scots dialects can't
> really be used to define English phonology (otherwise English has to
> have a phoneme [x] as in 'loch' contrasting with 'lock').

I do not know how Scottish Gaelic has entered the discussion, or how it could
have any possible relevance.

In Scottish Gaelic, just as in Irish, the grapheme <dh> is pronounced (insofar
as it is pronounced at all, as quite often it is silent) as the voiced velar
fricative [G] in "broad" environments (i.e. next to written a, o, u), and as
the approximant [j] (like English y in yet) in "slender" environments (i.e.
next to written e, i). If you want a reference, see Mackinnon, R.: Teach
Yourself Gaelic (Hodder &amp; Stoughton, 1971), p.1, and Calder, George: A
Gaelic Grammar (Glasgow: Gairm, 1972), p.60.

The only Celtic language that has kept the voiced interdental fricative [D] is
Welsh, which spells it <dd> . The only Welsh loanword containing this that I
can think of is "eisteddfod" (a congress of Welsh bards, according to the OED).
The OED does say that this is pronounced as /eisteDv at d/ - but I doubt that any
English speaker would pronounce the word like that except when consciously
imitating Welsh.

On the broader issue, I am with you when you wish to exclude marginal, recently
borrowed, words from the analysis of English phonology. What I don't understand
is why you wish to exclude a phoneme because its initial occurrence is limited
to a semantic subclass of words.

Best wishes,
Gabor Sandi


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Jun  4 13:42:26 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 14:42:26 +0100
Subject: Rate of Change
In-Reply-To: <25.161a477f.2849b596@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.144226.0100.>

--On Friday, June 1, 2001 11:20 pm +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

[replying to Joat Simeon, on similarities among early IE languages]

> Your "whole sentences" logically prove nothing when those sentences are
> few indeed compared to whole languages.  If there were no close
> resemblances at all, no one would dare claim that these languages were
> even related in anyway.  There has to be some, but there are very very
> few.

I'm sorry, but I can't agree.  Resemblances, close or otherwise, have
nothing at all to do with comparative linguistics.  The evidence for
genetic relationship consists wholly of systematic correspondences, and
resemblances are irrelevant.  Of course, the presence of resemblances aids
human beings in spotting possible genetic links.  And, in practice,
languages seldom undergo such dramatic phonological changes as to
obliterate resemblances while preserving correspondences.  But, if we did
find a case of this, we could cope with it.

And some of the Australian languages discussed below come tolerably close
to this state of affairs.  Certain of the Pama-Nyungan languages have
undergone such dramatic phonological changes that words in them look very
little like their cognates in related languages that have not undergone
such dramatic changes.  Australianists were at first baffled by the
position of these strange-looking languages, but then Barry Blake -- in an
undergraduate dissertation -- spotted the clear patterns underlying the
superficial absence of resemblances, and the problem languages then proved
to be easily assignable to Pama-Nyungan.  The main casulaty here was our
ideas about possible phonological changes, which took something of a
hammering.

> You normally compare "cognates" and an isolated (typically religious)
> phrase to show how "close" the IE languages are.  I've been reading up on
> the work of the Australian linguists and there was something relevant to
> all this mentioned by Harold Koch at ANU.  He wrote the following
> regarding work where the comparative method had been used to reconstruct
> languages in various parts of Australia [Western Australia (O'Grady 1966,
> Austin 1981), Cape York Peninsula (Hale 1964, Sutton 1976, Black 1980,
> Dixon 1991), New England (Crowley 1976 and This volume), and Central
> Australia (Koch )]:

> ----"In many of these cases, certain languages had undergone radical sound
> changes while close relatives remained unchanged. Thus the proto-forms
> for a subgroup often turn out to be identical to forms surviving intact
> in other languages of the subgroup." (from "Comparative linguistics and
> Australian prehistory" in "Understanding ancient Australia: perspectives
> from archaeology and linguistics." Melbourne: Oxford University Press
> (1997))

I think there may be a misunderstanding here, resulting from Koch's
unfortunate choice of words.  Koch is not, I'm pretty sure, claiming that
certain languages have changed dramatically while other and closely related
languages have not changed *at all*.  Rather, he is only reporting that
some related languages have failed to undergo the rather dramatic changes
observed in their relatives, and that certain *individual* words may remain
unchanged in one language while undergoing dramatic changes of form in a
close relative.

This is hardly new.  Recall Merritt Ruhlen's favorite example: Romanian
<nepot> 'nephew', virtually unchanged from PIE *<nepo:t-> 'nephew'.  But
this is probably the only Romanian word which has remained unchanged since
PIE.

> To my surprise, I was told the time of separation between some of those
> related language subgroups were estimated as being as much as 3000 years
> or more.

I am puzzled by this.  I can find no such statement in Koch's article.
Moreover, Evans and Jones, in an article in the same volume, conclude that
Proto-Pama-Nyungan cannot be assigned a time depth greater than 5000 BP,
and so a figure of 3000 years for the time depth of a rather low-level
branch of the family does not look plausible.

> Meanings can change radically.  Phonology seems to be a very different
> story.

Er -- what?  Phonology can't change radically?  But Koch's very point,
cited above, is that certain Australian languages have undergone such
dramatic changes in phonology that their words no longer even appear to
resemble their cognates in closely related 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 alderson+mail at panix.com  Mon Jun  4 18:30:57 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 14:30:57 -0400
Subject: Rate of Change
In-Reply-To: <25.161a477f.2849b596@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com)
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.143057.0400.>

On 1 Jun 2001, Steve Long wrote:

> I've been reading up on the work of the Australian linguists and there was
> something relevant to all this mentioned by Harold Koch at ANU.  He wrote the
> following regarding work where the comparative method had been used to
> reconstruct languages in various parts of Australia [Western Australia
> (O'Grady 1966, Austin 1981), Cape York Peninsula (Hale 1964, Sutton 1976,
> Black 1980, Dixon 1991), New England (Crowley 1976 and This volume), and
> Central Australia (Koch )]:

> ----"In many of these cases, certain languages had undergone radical sound
> changes while close relatives remained unchanged. Thus the proto-forms for a
> subgroup often turn out to be identical to forms surviving intact in other
> languages of the subgroup." (from "Comparative linguistics and Australian
> prehistory" in "Understanding ancient Australia: perspectives from
> archaeology and linguistics." Melbourne: Oxford University Press (1997))

> To my surprise, I was told the time of separation between some of those
> related language subgroups were estimated as being as much as 3000 years or
> more.

> This would be equivalent (given a final dispersal date of 4500BC for PIE or
> *PIE) to a language containing duplicate of PIE forms co-existing along side
> of, say, Mycenaean in 1500BC.  How is it possible to be confident about
> estimating rate of change considering such information?

No, it's equivalent to finding forms in Old Lithuanian (c. 1500 CE) which
correspond to Vedic Sanskrit (c. 1200 BCE)--which, of course, no linguist will
argue we do not.

You have taken a _pars pro toto_ approach here:  Koch says "forms" and you have
understood him to mean "entire languages".  I sincerely doubt that linguists
studying the Australian languages have found what you want them to have found;
if they have, I would first have to suspect them of a pre-Schleicher style of
reconstruction methodology, rather than to throw out what we *do* know about
the Indo-European languages.

[ here quoting from "a message dated 6/1/2001 1:34:38 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com" ]

> <<Or are words uncannily stable when it suits your argument, but change like
> bandits when that's convenient? >>

> No.  And I know you know what I'm talking about.

> Meanings can change radically.  Phonology seems to be a very different story.

Meanings do not change as fluidly as you want them to:  You wish to have the
word which means "red deer" in all daughter languages, even those spoken where
the fallow deer is present, to have once meant "fallow deer", because the red
deer is not present in Anatolia.  (Mr. Stirling has pointed out that words for
horse, ox, yoke, etc., have not undergone any such radical change.)  Ockham
calls for a simpler explanation, such as "The fallow deer was not present in
the IE homeland".

								Rich Alderson


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon Jun  4 15:06:32 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 11:06:32 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.110632.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/4/01 4:48:13 AM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com
writes:

> First of all, I still know enough Greek and Latin and heard enough Greek and
> Latin a long time ago to know that the two languages were 99.9%
> unintelligible to one another.

-- actually, in their earliest attested forms, the languages are
transparently quite closely related, both lexically and in terms of syntax;
it's much more easily apparent than, say, for instance, the relationship
between modern English and German.

Try doing a list of basic vocabulary (kinship terms or numerals, for
instance).  Or sentences having to do with elementary activities; "Ten horses
of my father are pregnant", or "My mother gives me cows to plow the field",
"I eat porridge with my teeth", etc.

And Italic and Greek aren't even particularly close _as early IE languages or
language-families go_.

> You have never given any rational measure of rate of language change.

-- What you are asserting is that for 5000 years, _all_ areas of changed more
slowly than _any_ IE language has in the time we can observe them directly.

Ie., you are claiming that _all_ IE languages before a certain date changed
more slowly than the _most_ conservative IE language of which we know,
Lithuanian.

This is roughly equivalent, to use an analogy, to claiming that the freezing
point of water was different back then and then challenging people to prove
that it wasn't.

You can't just say "well, because linguistic change is uneven over time, maybe
the languages all changed very very slowly back then" and expect to be taken
seriously.

>I don't believe there can be any real certainty

-- you're confusing certainty in terms of knowing exactly what happened in
_each_ IE language and comparative ranges using _all_ the IE languages.  The
fact that one languge is at the extreme end of a curve says nothing as to the
distribution of the others on the curve, nor to the implications of that.

We can't say "lexical items are lost at a rate of X per millenium"; we can
say "change occurs roughly with the range of X", and then compare this to a
postulate or hypothesis and determine whether or not it correponds to the
general range of the possible.

As opposed to blithely assuming that you can arbitrarily assume rates of
change in prehistory completely outside the _range_ of rates of change
observed since.  1000 years is 1000 years, whether it occurs from 6000 to
5000 BCE, or from 0 to 1000 CE.

> An objective observer would have to conclude this is something not yet
> solvable scientifically.  And it is something about which reasonable persons
> may differ.  Reasonably.

-- not to the degree you're doing, which is unreasonable.

> You normally compare "cognates" and an isolated (typically religious) phrase
> to show how "close" the IE languages are.

-- false statement.  Actually I usually prefer items related to family
relationships and basic technologies.

Incidentally, by putting "cognates" in quotation marks, are you trying to
imply that there is something questionable about the concept of cognates?

This would be exceedingly strange.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon Jun  4 15:08:15 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 11:08:15 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.110815.EDT.>

>steve long says

> ----"In many of these cases, certain languages had undergone radical sound
> changes while close relatives remained unchanged. Thus the proto-forms for a
> subgroup often turn out to be identical to forms surviving intact in other

-- ah... you _are_ aware that this is a commonplace of linguistics and has
been for a very long time?

In fact, it's one of the basic features of linguistic development which
underlies the comparative method.

Eg., the Germanic languages change PIE initial *p ==>f, (*phater ==> fadir)
and the Celtic languages drop initial *p altogether (*phater ==> athair),
while most other IE languages preserve the *p.  (*phater ==> pater, patros,
pitar, pacer, etc.)

That's precisely how we know that there _was_ a PIE *p, by observing "the
proto-forms for a subgroup often turn out to be identical to forms surviving
intact in other
languages of the subgroup."

By this we determine consistent patterns of change.  As 'enry 'iggins found
out when looking at Cockney.

Try looking at Latvian and Lithuanian, for instance; Lithuanian serves rather
well as a "proto-language" for Latvian.

Again, your argument requires a terminus ad quem for PIE of around 7000 BCE;
and that simply isn't compatible with the observable data and the basic
assumption of uniform causation.

>>Baltic and Slavic

-- Proto-Slavic is one of the better-established reconstructions, since the
Slavic languages are so similar, and the process of their dispersal and
differentiation is so recent and so well-attested historically.

It seems you have a problem not with my arguments, but with the comparative
method itself.

I'm simply repeating the commonplace, consensus positions.


From edsel at glo.be  Mon Jun  4 09:57:12 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 11:57:12 +0200
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.115712.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Thomas McFadden" <tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu>
Sent: Friday, June 01, 2001 7:58 PM

[snip]

> Again in Bavarian German (and a number of the
> dialects and even to a certain extent in colloquial forms of the standard
> language) the 1sg. pronoun in the nominative is mia,

[Ed Selleslagh]
Isn't that just an Anglo-Saxon perception of the pronunciation (cf. British
English pronunciation -a < -er)?

> clitic ma both < mir
> in place of standard wir.  This is transparently from the case where it
> appears postverbally.  Since the 1pl personal ending is -en, the following
> wir assimilated to the nasal (and this pronunciation is common even in
> fairly standard spoken forms when the pronoun is postverbal).  Crucially,
> this nasal-initial pronunciation was extended to all positions in the
> relevant dialects, so that even sentence-initially this is what you get.

[Ed]
I have serious doubts about this explanation: isn't w<v<m , cf. the 1sg marker?
Cf. Eng. 'with' <> Ger. 'mit', Du. 'met'.

I don't mean that the assimilation you describe doesn't actually happen in the
modern language, only that it is not related to the problem of the genesis of
the 1pl marker.

BTW, e.g. Latin and Greek have a m-type 1pl verbal marker: habeMus, echouMe .

In Brabant Dutch dialects, e.g. 'Wat doen we?' (What do we do?) is pronounced:
[watu:~ m@]. (~ = nasalization of [u]). This is very similar to German.


From g_sandi at hotmail.com  Mon Jun  4 10:24:10 2001
From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 10:24:10 -0000
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.102410.0000.>

From: Gabor Sandi g_sandi at hotmail.com
Reply to: Thomas McFadden <tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu>
Subject: Re: No Proto-Celtic?

>> To us it may look strange that the pronoun would have come after the verb
>> and not before, but this may happen, and it is standard in modern Irish,
>> isn't it?  E.g.: Scri'obhann SE' litir (he writes a letter).

>but thats because Irish is VSO, i.e. subjects in general follow the
>verb, whether they are pronouns or full NPs.  what you seem to be arguing
>for here is that in PIE full NP subjects preceded the verb, while prnonoun
>subjects followed it.  that's a very different thing, and would be rather
>surprising, i think.  again, does anyone know of such a lanuage that is
>actually attested?

Actually, I don't think that I said anything about the position of full NP
subjects relative to verbs. Still, having a different order for personal
pronouns is not that unusual, is it? In the Romance languages the direct
object of the verb normally comes after the verb if it is an NP (Je vois le
chien), but before the verb if it is a personal pronoun (Je te vois).

Whether a similar switchover can happen with the subject is another
question. I don't think that there is a theoretical reason why it can't.

For pre-PIE there is also the possibility that it was an ergative language,
with the subject of an intransitive verb behaving differently from that of a
transitive one (and like the object of a transitive verb).

For the sake of argument, let us say that *me *se *te are the singular
pronouns serving as the subject of intransitive verbs and as the object of
transitive ones, and that they normally follow the verb.

According to this hypothesis, *es me, *es se, *es te are normal for "I am",
"thou art", "(s)he/it is". If, for the sake of argument again (I am really
sticking my neck out here), we hypothesize a particle *so (coincidentally
identical to the ergative 3rd person pronoun) as the ergative particle, the
phrases "the bear sees me/thee/him" would have been sg. like *harkto-so weid
me/se/te. Here the pronoun (in the accusative) still comes after the verb
(which would be unmarked for person in the 3rd pers.sing.), i.e. the normal
word order would have been transitive EVS (with E for ergative case and S
for the case functioning as object of a transitive and subject of an
intransitive verb) and intransitive VS.

Admittedly there are problems here, including the fact that older IE
languages definitely favour VSO word order, and the PIE second person
pronouns begin with a *t, but I shall leave discussion of these issues to
another time.

All the best,

Gabor


From sarima at friesen.net  Mon Jun  4 13:46:52 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 06:46:52 -0700
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.4.21.0106011407510.12722-100000@babel.ling.upenn.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.064652.0700.>

At 02:27 PM 6/1/01 -0400, Thomas McFadden wrote:

>of course it depends on what you mean by grammar, but under my conception
>of the term i have to disagree with you strongly on this.  flexibility in
>word order is actually regulated rather tightly by the grammatical system
>of a given language, it seems.

I am with you here.

>don't.  and in most cases where multiple variants exist, there is an
>identifiable difference, even if its hard to find.  usually it's not a
>difference in the truth-conditional semantics, but there's perhaps a
>difference in what is implied, or in the conditions where you would say it.

The last is quite frequent.  Often one way to get at this sort of thing is
by asking what question each of the variants might be an answer to.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From sarima at friesen.net  Mon Jun  4 13:49:29 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 06:49:29 -0700
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.4.21.0106011445050.12722-100000@babel.ling.upenn.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.064929.0700.>

At 02:59 PM 6/1/01 -0400, Thomas McFadden wrote:

>> I maintain that the problem of word-order is irrelevant to the study of
>> PIE grammar, as much as declension in Chinese or gender in Finnish. But of
>> course you can write a monography on 'how to express gender in Finnish'.

>again i don't think it's irrelevant, but it is incredibly hard (maybe
>impossible) to reconstruct, in distinction to phonology and
>morphology.  and it probably is irrelevant to the study of PIE phonology
>and not terribly relevant to the study of PIE morphology.

I would not be that certain - PIE probably had sanddhi phenomena , which
require some knowledge of word order to completely reconstruct.  Certainly
I suspect that some of the apparent irregularities in word endings may be
due to such a thing.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Mon Jun  4 17:27:28 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 13:27:28 -0400
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.4.21.0106011317460.12722-100000@babel.ling.upenn.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.132728.0400.>

woops, that should of course be '...the 1st plural pronoun in the
nominative is mia...'

> generalized to all orders.  again in Bavarian German (and a number of the
> dialects and even to a certain extent in colloquial forms of the standard
> language) the 1sg. pronoun in the nominative is mia, clitic ma both < mir
> in place of standard wir.  this is transparently from the case where it


From xavier.delamarre at free.fr  Mon Jun  4 20:43:28 2001
From: xavier.delamarre at free.fr (Xavier Delamarre)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 22:43:28 +0200
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010601055853.00b29d10@getmail.friesen.net>
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.224328.0200.>

le 1/06/01 15:05, Stanley Friesen à sarima at friesen.net a écrit :

XD :
>> Even in modern French the difference of meaning between 'une tres grande
>> maison' and 'une maison tres grande' is minimal ; you can use both sentences
>> freely to express exactly the same thing (no difference in style or
>> emphasis).

SF :
> Actually, those look like fragments to me, not sentences.

> But, even so, I suspect they are only interchangeable in some contexts.  In
> others, one or the other is probably atypical or improper.  Are there not
> certain questions for which one or the other is a more appropriate response?

You suspect wrongly. Here is your sentence :

1/ Hier j'ai achete une maison tres grande a Vaucresson

2/ Hier j'ai achete une tres grande maison a Vaucresson

Absolutely no difference in meaning, style or emphasis. I am sorry.

But this is not PIE, only a late IE language with a fairly fixed word-order,
with some pockets of freedom in this matter.

I am convinced that a more intimate practice of old IE languages like Latin,
Greek, Sanskrit,or Lithuanian would convince you that word-order is not an
essential part of their grammar.

In the previous posting, I made the (nasty) supposition that the obsession
for word-order in some circles was due to the mother-tongue of their
scholars. In fact I suspect that the reason is of a more general type : the
overinterest for general linguistics with its theoretical fashions,
generativism among others. It is always easier to build a general theory on
something (e.g. word-order) than to be confronted with facts, i.e. existing
languages.

gloria inuidiam uicisti
inuidiam gloria uicisti
uicisti inuidiam gloria
gloria uicisti inuidiam

etc.

X. Delamarre
Vaucresson (France)
in a not so big house.

>
> --------------
> May the peace of Syntax be with you.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon Jun  4 03:59:42 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2001 23:59:42 EDT
Subject: Linguistic Succession in Historic Comparison:
Message-ID: <SUN.3.JUN.2001.235942.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/3/01 9:56:42 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
cbh at transmeta.com writes:

> On my map, the distance from Natal to Lake Victoria is more like 1600
> miles than 6000 miles.

--- ooops!  Just checked; it's around 2000 miles.  I'm more wrong than you!
That'll teach me to check before I work from memory.


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Mon Jun  4 09:31:56 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 09:31:56 -0000
Subject: About the Yew1
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.093156.0000.>

Steve Long (21 May 2001) wrote:

>One will note there that at the end of the Younger Dryas (7000-6000BC), the
>tree distribution in Europe was completely different than it is today.  In the
>north, we appear to have steppes.  In the south as far as Crete, "'northern'
>deciduous species (e.g. hornbeam - Carpinus, deciduous oaks) were either
>dominant or abundant in what is presently savanna evergreen oak woodland, pine
>woodland or scrub."  In the north, the steppes were gradually replaced by
>conifers where there are deciduous trees today.  The yew mainly occurs as
>groves in oak forests (sub-oceanic, moisture wise) and this should be relevant
>to where the yew was back then.  (The famous "iceman" of the Alps is carrying
>yew bow and axe handle in a region where the yew is rare today.)

You wouldn't need much yew-wood for that, would you? The bow and axe weren't
necessarily manufactured in the region where the "iceman" was found.

If memory serves, Taxus baccata has a strong preference for calcareous
substrates. The amount of lime in the soil is an important factor in its
distribution, probably more so than the co-occurrence of oaks.

>In "The archaeology of wood", in the S. Econ. Botany newsletter (1998:1), Jon
>Hather wrote:  "The postglacial colonisation of Northern Europe - by trees
>such as oak, elm, lime, beech, pine and spruce - was more than just an
>ecological event.  From well before the advent of agriculture, and some 5500
>years ago, the long straight dogwood and hazel struts of a fishtrap found in
>Zealand, Denmark, are some of the earliest evidence of woodland management....
>Woodland ecology and local culture were evolving together...  A strange find
>by the Thames in east London has been yew - a wetland situation quite unlike
>its current habitats.... Evidence for the gradual disappearance of large trees
>can be gleaned from the carving of bowls sideways, i.e. not from transverse
>sections."

What kind of "management" is that? Today, similar evidence can be gleaned
from the ousting of plywood by pressed-chip "boards" at construction sites.

>I am not clear on this, but I suspect that 6000 years ago, most of the
>Ukraine's pine forest would have been deciduous oak and therefore may have
>included yew.  This might suggest that the yew premise either puts PIE on the
>steppes with no tree names at all.  Or farther to the north in tall pine
>Russia.  Or -- of course -- in Anatolia or along the Danube.

Obviously, we need more palynological data from 4000 BCE to address this
matter, and I am guilty of blithely assuming that today's yew-free zones
were yew-free back then.

>My real problem with all this is that the "yew" is not really that
>recognizable as a tree or as a wood.  And there is evidence that the name was
>not altogether that stable, even among cultures that had writing and could
>communicate long-distances about something as local and variable as the
>appearance of a tree.  Even if PIEists knew the tree, chances are they would
>have soon confused it with other trees.

I'm well aware that cognate dendronyms can refer to different trees in
different languages, and examples from IE and Semitic occur in my own
postings. But in fact Taxus baccata _is_ quite distinctive as trees go.
First, it has prominent red berries. Second, its wood is prized for making
bows and arrows. Third, its leaves are highly toxic (unusual, if not unique,
for a tree native to Europe). The Belgic king Catuvolcus took his own life
with yew-poison (Caes. B.G. VI.31). A persistent superstition (Diosc. IV.79)
holds that anyone sleeping under a yew will die: hence the epithet "albero
della morte". It is very unlikely that a name for this particular tree, once
established among a body of speakers, would be applied by those speakers to
any other tree. They could, of course, migrate out of its habitat and forget
the name.

>The main problem I think with using the yew word to locate PIE is, of course,
>that the "yew" was not always a "yew."  And this only makes sense, since trees
>don't move and that means what you call a yew or don't call a yew and what I
>call a yew in the next valley could be two different trees -- up until such
>time as we obtain Polaroid cameras. Or up until we get around to cutting them
>down and selling the wood, scrapping their bark for extract or perhaps in the
>case of the yew, eating their berries.  It would be the by-products, not the
>tree, that we could discuss in common.

I don't see that Polaroid cameras are necessary. If you and I belong to the
same tribe, and we don't agree on what to call trees in the next valley,
then our use of language is dysfunctional. Do you really believe that
prehistoric humans were linguistically incompetent?

I don't think any serious objections have been presented to the thesis that
PIE-speakers didn't know the yew. As I mentioned before, "yew" itself has
ancient congeners only in Celtic and Germanic, plausibly derived from PIE
*eiw- 'berry'. Latv. <ive> and Old Pr. <iuwis> are from MLG <i:we>, not
Proto-Baltic. Evidently northern IE-speakers _did_ name the tree after its
distinctive "by-products" when they encountered it by moving west. Other
groups of IE-speakers entered yew-country by other routes and either adopted
pre-IE names or fixated on other features.

Celtic has preserved pre-IE *ebur- 'yew' rather extensively in toponyms,
ethnonyms, and personal names, and also Irish <ibhar> 'yew; bow' beside <eo>
'yew'. The stem *ebur- also appears in toponyms in Iberia, Liguria,
Campania, and probably Greece (Ephura:, old name of Corinth and other
places). In my opinion *ebur- belongs with the Old European substrate
associated with the expansion of Neolithic farmers across Europe (ca.
5500-4000 BCE). If you believe, like Renfrew, that these farmers (who
entered Europe from Anatolia) spoke PIE, then you must explain why "IE"
*ebur- should have been superseded by *eiw- in the north and by other words
in the south and east. This can be done if you posit movement of IE-speakers
out of Anatolia and east of yew-country, then back into Europe. But then
we're begging the question of what IE and non-IE are. It is pointless IMHO
to extend "Indo-European" back to the first European farmers, and equally
pointless to regard PIE as arbitrarily old.

It should be noted that Hans Krahe, whose research did much to substantiate
the Old European substrate, regarded this substrate as IE. I think Krahe
succeeded in showing that Old European shares a few suffixes with PIE and is
probably related, but again I disagree with the characterization of
something this old as "Indo-European".

DGK


From alderson+mail at panix.com  Mon Jun  4 18:10:23 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 14:10:23 -0400
Subject: *G^EN-
In-Reply-To: <003601c0eac6$8d497680$fbf1fea9@swbell.net>
 (proto-language@email.msn.com)
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.141023.0400.>

On 1 Jun 2001, Patrick Ryan wrote, with respect to *gen{H_1}:

> Are you also asserting that, therefore, there is no *g^en-?

Yes.

And don't come at me with arguments about Wurzeldeterminativa usw.  If such are
not simply the result of over-analysis of the data, they are clearly so early
in the prehistory of the IE language that they may well be Nostratic, and in
any case are irrelevant to the question as posited.

								Rich Alderson


From douglas at nb.net  Mon Jun  4 02:27:26 2001
From: douglas at nb.net (Douglas G. Wilson)
Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2001 22:27:26 -0400
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.4.30.0105261300260.17830-100000@vesuri.Helsinki.FI>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.JUN.2001.222726.0400.>

>... they don't don't much affect the Engish initial [T] - [D] situation.

"Dhal" and "duinhewassel" were my "contributions". I don't claim any
particular effect. But I think Larry Trask's point was that English would
accommodate adopted lexical words beginning in /D/ -- or perhaps even
"native" words, although I can't think of any -- and these are valid
examples using what I think is a reasonable criterion (inclusion in
dictionaries). If it is "arbitrary" which words appear in a dictionary, I
guess it isn't a very good dictionary ... and I will submit that the
dictionary criterion is much less arbitrary than one which refers to
whether or not a word elicits a derogatory response from one or another of
the esteemed scholars subscribing to a certain list. "Dhal" is from the
Random House Unabridged (RHUD), the other word from Webster's Second (M-W).
If my criterion is considered unsatisfactory, one should attack the
criterion and propose an improved one rather than making special objections
for each proposed word: for example, one could assert that only the OED is
a valid reference, or that only words correctly pronounced by a majority of
a standard sample of 8-year-olds should be permitted, or that only those
words having an indisputable reflex in Old English are "English words".

>... If this makes it an English sound, so then are all the names of Arabic
>letters English sounds.

By my criterion, these letter-names are all English words if they're all in
a standard English dictionary. I haven't checked them all.

>Since other alphabets have names for their letters as well, then all the
>sounds that these alphabets represent become English sounds simply by
>including them in an English dictionary.

No. I refer to words (i.e., dictionary entries), not "sounds". I believe
that the RHUD, for example, includes Greek letter-names (but not, e.g.,
Thai letter-names) for a reason ... although one is free to disagree with
the reasoning. Apparently at least some Arabic letter-names are English
words by my criterion, since they're in the RHUD. Note that the RHUD does
not include "delta" with /D/; it shows the English pronunciation only ...
but for "dhal" only /Dal/ is shown (thus this is an English pronunciation
by my criterion!).

>... And no English speaker who doesn't speak Arabic would ever pronounce
>'dhal' with [D] unless he looked it up in the dictionary.

The majority of the words in the English language are unknown to me, and I
wouldn't be sure how to pronounce any of these unknown words except by
looking in a dictionary. In some cases I would make a guess, but not in
this one. Some might be more willing than I to make a guess, but I would
not like to think that the English language is defined ONLY by the wild
guesses of the ignorant and careless.

>... So 'dhal' is no more of an English word than 'ghayn' is despite the
>fact that the former is in the dictionary as an entry and the latter only
>appears in the table of alphabets.

The same dictionary showing "dhal" also shows the entry "ghain" /Rein/.

>... (otherwise English has to have a phoneme [x] as in 'loch' contrasting
>with 'lock').

And it does, according to my judgement. That's why I pronounce "loch" with
/x/ when speaking English (and at least some of the dictionaries support me
in this). Are Scots words English words? Referring again to my criterion,
at least some of them are: those which are in the English dictionaries. [I
might not argue too strongly against the proposition that they all are ....]

>This is really scraping the bottom of a very shallow barrel.

True. If there were hundreds of common lexical items beginning with /D/,
the discussion would never have occurred. Perhaps someone has a better
example than "dhal" or whatever that other monstrosity was ....

-- Doug Wilson


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Jun  4 09:14:38 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 10:14:38 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <F15KlnVwQyUBcwgwhli00015af6@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.101438.0100.>

--On Monday, May 28, 2001 3:19 pm +0000 Douglas G Kilday
<acnasvers at hotmail.com> wrote:

[on my objection to his assertion that the lexicon of English is remaining
roughly constant in size, and my observation that desk dictionaries get
bigger with each edition]

> The tendency to equate the physical size of desk dictionaries with the
> size of the underlying lexicon (or "lexis" if you prefer) should be
> avoided. Several factors favor the continued growth of desk dictionaries
> (with the literary exception of the Newspeak dictionary in Orwell's
> "1984", which got smaller every year).

> First, and most importantly, it's much easier to attest a word than it is
> to "unattest" it. Someone once said "it's hard to write an epitaph for a
> word". I'd say "hard" is understated; it's comparable to proving the
> extinction of an obscure tropical bug. If a lexicographer asserted that a
> given word was extinct, resulting in its being pruned from the desk
> dictionary, and the word reappeared in actual use, the publisher could
> have considerable egg on his face. What sane lexicographer would
> jeopardize his job in this manner? Unless he managed to break into the
> ranks of professional Scrabble, an unemployed lexicographer (fired for
> cause) would be facing tough times indeed.

Indeed, but overly cautious.  Serious dictionaries these days are prepared
from corpora, and a word that failed to appear in the corpora for a long
time would be singled out for possible removal.  Of course, lexicographers
don't drop a word after failing to encounter it for three weeks.  Instead,
they start attaching usage labels, like 'rare', 'archaic' or 'obsolete'.
They do this for excellent reasons.  First, as you say, the word may come
back from the dead.  This seems to have happened with 'albeit', which was
virtually dead a decade or so ago (OED2 has no 20th-century attestations),
but which has suddenly reappeared with a vengeance.  Second, readers often
want to read works written fifty or a hundred years ago, and they may
encounter obsolete words which they want to look up.  A good dictionary
will try to cater to this demand as best it can, within its space
limitations.  A few dictionaries even adopt a policy of entering *all*
words found in Shakespeare, and one or two extend the same courtesy to
Milton and Spenser.

But eventually some of these words have to go.  For example, readers of
George Eliot will recall the quaint word 'pocket-pistol', denoting
something resembling a hip flask.  OED2 does not record this word later
than 1882, and not one of my desk dictionaries enters it.  It's gone from
the language, and now it's gone from the dictionaries, and readers of
19th-century fiction will have to cope as best they can, or get hold of the
OED.

> Nevertheless, words do become
> extinct (or "obsolete"). A hard-core dictionary like the OED or my
> ponderous Funk & Wagnalls Standard (1903) will give thousands of words
> marked as obsolete. It's not the job of a desk dictionary to track
> extinction.

Ah, but the OED is very far from being a desk dictionary.  Its task is to
record all the English words ever significantly attested, and nothing is
*ever* removed from later editions, apart from the odd blunder.  Nor is
(was) Funk and Wagnall a desk dictionary: it was what we Americans call an
"unabridged" dictionary: far too bulky and cumbersome to serve as a desk
dictionary.

I'm thinking of real desk dictionaries, like Collins in Britain and
Merriam-Webster in the US.  And these really do drop words after a while.
Ask a professional lexicographer.

> Second, consumers would feel short-changed if each edition were _not_
> larger than the previous one. If the new dictionary couldn't boast of
> being "new, improved, and _enlarged_", why would anyone buy it? If they
> didn't already have an older edition, they could find one at a garage
> sale. Publishers need to make money.

A fair point, but perhaps overly cynical.  Desk dictionaries really do get
bigger because there really are more and more words to be included.  I
really do not think that the total number of words pertaining to cars,
planes and spacecraft is about equal to the number of words pertaining to
oxcarts and buggies.

> Third, this enlargement can be made at marginal cost, since the core of
> the new dictionary already exists in the old one. Why bother paying
> lexicographers to tramp around the boondocks trying to verify the
> extinction of obscure words? Leave 'em in! Anyone using a _desk_
> dictionary is likely to regard it as a prescriptive authority (not as a
> bank of scholarly data, like the OED) and anything in it is _eo ipso_ a
> valid word.

Yes, but this is an attitude adopted by (many) users of desk dictionaries,
not a piece of truth.  For a linguist, a word exists if people use it,
regardless of whether it's in any dictionary at all.

I've just been marking a pile of final-year dissertations.  Some of our
students chose to write on such topics as text messaging, graffiti,
internet chat-rooms, the slang associated with drugs, and obscenities.  I
was startled to discover, in these writings, a very large number of words
which were wholly unknown to me, but which are apparently commonplace among
young people.  I haven't had the time to try looking these words up in a
couple of recent desk dictionaries, but I'll bet that quite a few of them
are not entered.

Anyway, lexicographers just *can't* "leave 'em in" all the time.  Cost, and
therefore size, is just too important, and something has to give.

Nor do lexicographers even rush to enter new words.  For example, the
language has recently sprouted a number of new formations in '-wise', such
as 'moneywise', 'clotheswise' and 'healthwise'.  These have been frequent
in speech for years, and they are not rare in journalistic writing.  But
they're still not entered in my desk dictionaries.

> It's easy enough to point to new words that don't replace anything. It's
> less easy to find extinct words that weren't replaced by anything, but
> they do (or did) exist: words pertaining to obsolete tools, equipment,
> manufacturing processes, agricultural practices, social groups, dishes,
> beverages, etc. They can be found in hard-core dictionaries which dare to
> mark words "obsolete" or give dates of final attestation. All things
> considered, net stasis of lexical size makes more sense than continuous
> expansion.

I'm afraid I can't agree.  A large and expensive dictionary can often
afford to make room for lots of obsolete words, and of course the OED must
do this by remit.  But an ordinary desk dictionary has to be cheap enough,
and hence small enough, to sell large numbers of copies -- and that means
that old words have to be pruned from time to time in order to make way for
new ones.

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 Georg-Bonn at t-online.de  Mon Jun  4 18:01:10 2001
From: Georg-Bonn at t-online.de (Stefan Georg)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 20:01:10 +0200
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <3B17BAB6.BDA9FD71@memphis.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.200110.0200.>

>Oh, indeed they are foreign.  It's only in Schwyzer Düütsch that we find
>initial [x] in native words, and no variety has initial [ç] in them.
>But that's beside the point.  If Duden's pronunciations are factually
>correct -- a rather large assumption -- then [x] and [ç] do contrast in
>initial position and must therefore be assigned to different phonemes.
>Unless we want to say that foreign words *as foreign* have a different
set of phonemes than native ones, quod Deus avertat.

Qua de causa avertat ? When I'm pronouncing /Chalid/ as /xali:d/ I'm
using a patch of Arabic in my German discourse, whether I know much
Arabic apart from that or not.

If Duden gave the "correct" pronunciation of /Xhosa/ with the correct
click, we would have a click phoneme in German. Give me a job in that
editors' board and I'll triple the number of phonemes in this
language.

Those pronunciations for /Chalid/ etc. are indeed artificial. Duden
people just want to be educational when they indicate how these words
should be pronounced, i.e. as close to the pronunciation in the
source language as possible. The set of words given to illustrate the
initial ç:x contrast is of a sort that I'm sure I've never met a
German speaker who can take an oath to have used each one of them at
least once in his life in some meaningful context. In English words
and names we try to (are told to) observe /th/, /w:v/ as in the
source language as well. I'm pretty sure Duden tells us to, too. So
what, is there a /w : v/ contrast in G. ? Not for sose vis a
Hollyvood G. accent, who still are se majorrity ...

StG
--
Dr. Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn


From jmott at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Mon Jun  4 22:23:09 2001
From: jmott at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Justin M. Mott)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 18:23:09 -0400
Subject: note on 'dhole'
In-Reply-To: <MABBIJNNPBOFHEBNBMEHCEKBCLAA.mclasutt@brigham.net>
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.182309.0400.>

On Sat, 2 Jun 2001, Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote:

> [From me]

> Before 'dhole' gets mixed up in the [D]/[T] discussion, 'dhole' is
> pronounced with initial [d] (it's from some Indian voiced aspirate), not
> [D].

> John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
> Associate Professor, English
> Utah State University

It's a minor point, but there is no evidence that the etymon of this word
had an initial voiced aspirate.  There are no clear sources for it from
any of the (major) Indo-Aryan languages; the most plausible source for it
is rather Kannada 'tola' "wolf".  Kannada, being Dravidian rather than
Indo-Aryan, lacks voiced aspirates.  If this etymology is correct, the
initial <dh> may just be a spurious (and isolated) spelling of initial
/t/ (which, and I may be mistaken, could surface as [d]).

-Justin Mott


From hstahlke at gw.bsu.edu  Wed Jun  6 17:50:07 2001
From: hstahlke at gw.bsu.edu (Herb Stahlke)
Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2001 12:50:07 -0500
Subject: Chronology and history of Germanic Consonant Shift
Message-ID: <WED.6.JUN.2001.125007.0500.>

Prokosch, in his Comparative Germanic Grammar (Secs 16-24), lays out a
linguistic and historical chronology of the Germanic Consonant shift, stating
(. 56) that "it began several centuries B.C. and ended about 500 A.D."  In the
various histories of English and more recent standard surveys of Indo-European,
I haven't seen this matter dealt with much.  Where could I find current
discussion of this and the more general chronology of early Germanic.  The
recent discussion on the etymology of Goth was helpful to some degree.

Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN  47306
hstahlke at bsu.edu


From Enrikay1 at aol.com  Tue Jun  5 18:37:29 2001
From: Enrikay1 at aol.com (Enrikay1 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 14:37:29 EDT
Subject: PIE
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.143729.EDT.>

I'd like to thank you very much for the suggestion.  I checked that book out
on-line and it seems to be as good as you say it is.

Thanks again,
Eric


From edsel at glo.be  Tue Jun  5 07:58:40 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 09:58:40 +0200
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.095840.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: <JoatSimeon at aol.com>
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2001 5:06 PM

[snip]

> 1000 years is 1000 years, whether it occurs from 6000 to
> 5000 BCE, or from 0 to 1000 CE.

[Ed Selleslagh]

Although this is strictly true, it is highly debatable: you have to take into
account the rate of change of local society. E.g. during the Middle Ages
society hardly changed over 100 or more years; in more recent times, however...

Language is part of culture, and its rate of change is certainly influenced by
that of culture in general, e.g. technological evolution (new words), foreign
exposure, ...

How else could we have such conservative languages like Lithuanian or Basque,
as compared to e.g. English or German? (Phonetically, German is one step
further than e.g. Dutch), if rates of change weren't different. In very ancient
societies cultural rate of cheange was undoubtedly slower than in the last 2000
years, except in periods of upheaval, relatively sudden migrations etc.

Ed.


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Wed Jun  6 05:06:37 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2001 01:06:37 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <WED.6.JUN.2001.010637.EDT.>

I wrote:
<< If there were no close resemblances at all, no one would dare claim that
these languages were even related in anyway.  >>

In a message dated 6/4/2001 9:18:46 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:
<<I'm sorry, but I can't agree.  Resemblances, close or otherwise, have
nothing at all to do with comparative linguistics.  The evidence for
genetic relationship consists wholly of systematic correspondences, and
resemblances are irrelevant.  Of course, the presence of resemblances aids
human beings in spotting possible genetic links.>>

But what you're saying - up until the last sentence - seems to make out that
"systematic correspondence" come out of thin air.

Where a comparative analysis has to begin - not where it ends up - is
similarities and resemblances between two or more languages.  It HAS to be
that way, because at the beginning of the process, NO GENETIC RELATIONSHIP
has yet been established.  No "systematic correspondence" has been done.

At that point, there can be NO difference between resemblances that turn out
to show systematic correspondence and those that turn out not to.  Everything
is either a resemblance or no resemblance at all -- and that's all there is.

This has been a problem in understanding between us all along.  A proper and
objective audit of the comparative method should begin at the beginning of
that process.  At that point, logically, NOTHING can be presumed to be
genetic.  Because the analysis that calls something genetic or non-genetic
has NOT yet occurred.  And it is precisely at that point that resemblances
and similarities have everything to do with the process.

The whole history of Indo-European studies and the comparative method was
motivated by nothing but the unexplained similarities and resemblances in
European and Asian languages.

To say that I can't back up to that starting point, where everything is at
best similarities and resemblances -- before any judgments about genetic
relationships would have been made -- is to queer the game.  It makes the
comparative method immune to critical analysis.

The problem I perceive and have been getting at does not arise after a
judgment is made about "genetic" relationships.  It happens before.  Romani
and Anglo-Romani obviously resemble one another in some way.  Upon analysis,
one discovers a "systematic correspondence" between Romani and the lexicon in
Anglo-Romani.  But does that yield a genetic relationship? No, because one
only gets one genetic relationship per customer?  Why?  Because a language
can only represent one "system"?  But Anglo-Romani represents two systematic
correspondences, and therefore presumably two different systems.  In
Anglo-Romani, the problem is clear, because the language is historic.  In IE
languages, the problem is hidden in prehistory.

I suspect part of the problem begins back when no analysis has yet been done
and there can be nothing but resemblances between two languages.  That's
where the presumption starts that there WILL be only one genetic relationship
and therefore there should be only one original systematic correspondence
between the languages.  If you start by presuming that all "genetic"
relationships can only relate to one parent, than all your results will tend
towards that presumption, whether true or not.

(The Australian example you give -- Blake and "the clear patterns underlying
the superficial absence of resemblances,..." could only happen in a
historical and geographical context where relationships were already
expected, for extrinsic reasons.  I don't imagine you would have much
patience with anyone establishing a close genetic relationship between
Mexican and Phoenician despite "the superficial absence of resemblances"
between the two languages.)

I wrote:
<<To my surprise, I was told the time of separation between some of those
related language subgroups were estimated as being as much as 3000 years or
more.>>

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:
<<I am puzzled by this.  I can find no such statement in Koch's article.
Moreover, Evans and Jones, in an article in the same volume, conclude that
Proto-Pama-Nyungan cannot be assigned a time depth greater than 5000 BP,
and so a figure of 3000 years for the time depth of a rather low-level
branch of the family does not look plausible.>>

I'm pretty positive some of the languages listed by Koch were not
Pama-Nyundan.  I'm on the road and don't have my notes, but in one of the
actual studies themselves these dates are given.  It may have been Grady.
3000 years is not a long time at all for speakers in the Northern Territory
and northwestern Australia, where these languages have been spoken in situ
for a very long time.  Even if it was Pama-Nyundan and that particular
chronology is out of date now or not, any of the languages involved, even
low-level languages, could be old enough to make my larger point stand.  Of
course, if you anything that directly contradicts this,...

<<I think there may be a misunderstanding here, resulting from Koch's
unfortunate choice of words.  Koch is not, I'm pretty sure, claiming that
certain languages have changed dramatically while other and closely related
languages have not changed *at all*.  Rather, he is only reporting that
some related languages have failed to undergo the rather dramatic changes
observed in their relatives, and that certain *individual* words may remain
unchanged in one language while undergoing dramatic changes of form in a
close relative.>>

Certain *individual* words is all you need to make my point.  For all I know,
those were the very words that were used to establish relatedness.  How many
words do you need to establish relatedness?  Rate of change in this forum
always seems to be not how much entire languages change or don't change, but
how much cognates change.

I wrote:
<<Meanings can change radically.  Phonology seems to be a very different
story.>>

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:
<<Er -- what?  Phonology can't change radically?  But Koch's very point,
cited above, is that certain Australian languages have undergone such
dramatic changes in phonology that their words no longer even appear to
resemble their cognates in closely related languages.>>

We've been through this.  What you call often call "change" is actually
continuity to me, because you still call what remains "cognate", which means
there must be something that stayed the same.  If you can still recognize a
relationship, how much it has changed logically has no relevance to its
"relatedness."  On the other hand, how much a word has "changed" is always
relevant to "meaning."

How about this, then:  "Meanings often change unsystematically and therefore
radically.  Phonology seems to be a different story."

Regards,
Steve Long


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Jun  7 10:02:23 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2001 11:02:23 +0100
Subject: European Genetics/IE
In-Reply-To: <20010601.163410.-210143.0.PhilJennings@juno.com>
Message-ID: <THU.7.JUN.2001.110223.0100.>

--On Friday, June 1, 2001 4:34 pm -0500 philjennings at juno.com wrote:

> I would guess that linguistic rate-of-change would be at a
> maximum during the process [Joat Simeon] describes.  How could it be
> otherwise?

> Yet the end result consists of IE daughter dialects still mutually
> intelligible in many cases.  Could we possibly agree that before this
> process began,
> when PIE was a genetic language (comparatively unexposed to outside
> factors) rather than a radical way-of-life language, it may have loitered
> along at a much slower rate of change?  And this must have been
> s-l-o-o-o-w indeed, given that even during the meme-transmission era,
> battle-axes and such, the rate of change doesn't seem to have been all
> that fast.

We can imagine a lower rate of change, but there seems to be no good
evidence for it.  Without some hard evidence, we have no right to assume
that linguistic change was any slower in the remote past than it has been
in the historical period.  Such an assumption would violate our linguistic
Uniformitarian Principle: languages and speakers in the remote past behaved
much as languages and speakers have behaved in the historical period.

And consider the case of Basque.  With Basque, it is only for the phonology
that we can track the language back as far as 2000 years.  But we can do
this much, and the results are interesting.  Almost all of the big changes
in Basque pronunciation seem to have occurred in the early Middle Ages,
roughly AD 800-1200.  At that time, the Basque Country was a rural
backwater, largely cut off from the great political and social currents
sweeping across western Europe.  After 1200, though, most of the country
was absorbed by Castile.  It was at this time that the Basques began to
acquire their reputation as formidable seafarers, developing fishing,
whaling and trade.  They began to play an important role in Spanish
affairs, and they played a great part in the Spanish discovery and
settlement of the Americas.  Basque society was transformed by massive
emigration; Basque ports became bustling and prosperous; shipbuilding
became a great Basque industry, as did iron and steel, and eventually
manufacturing.  Yet, during all of these remarkable political, social and
economic transformations, the pronunciation of the language scarcely
changed at all.  Moreover, the scraps of evidence that we have suggest that
the rich and distinctive Basque morphology has not changed significantly
since the 9th century, at least.

So, in the Basque case, rate of social change does not appear to correlate
at all with rate of linguistic change.  It appears that the language
changed fastest when it was spoken in a stable and largely closed society,
but much less rapidly after it was caught up in dramatic social changes.

> I am still curious whether any proto-language requiring reconstruction,
> has ever been reconstructed as a creole?  Not PIE, JoatSimeon says, but
> what about proto-Sino-Tibetan, or proto-Dravidian, or any of the other
> protoi?

To the best of my knowledge, no language yet reconstructed looks like a
creole.  That doesn't mean that such an outcome is impossible, of course,
but so far it seems not to have happened.

> Because if the answer is a universal no, is that really likely?
> The world must have been a different kind of place than it is now.

Well, not necessarily.  Today there are nearly 7000 mother tongues.  Of
these, probably no more than a few dozen are creoles (I exclude pidgins),
even though the European expansion of several centuries ago created
exceptionally favorable circumstances for creole-formation in several parts
of the world.  If fewer than one percent of today's languages are creoles,
we should not be surprised to find that creoles were not exactly thick on
the ground in the remote past.

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  Tue Jun  5 09:35:21 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 10:35:21 +0100
Subject: Genetic Descent
In-Reply-To: <000901c0eabf$fdd93ea0$fa2863d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.103521.0100.>

--On Friday, June 1, 2001 12:26 pm -0500 "David L. White"
<dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

[on Thomason and Kaufman]

>>         Well, I can, on p. 14:  "... any linguistic feature can be
>> transferred from any language to any other language."  No restrictions
>> are mentioned, and TK consistently fail to note that not everything that
>> could conceivably occur actually does.

> LT:  Ah, I see.  But this statement seems very different from the
> position you imputed to T and K: "Anything goes."  This quote plainly
> does not say that anything can happen at all, but only that there are no
> linguistic features that cannot be borrowed.  Are you aware of any
> features that cannot be borrowed?

> DLW:  There are apparently no cases of things like 1) singular personal
> endings being borrowed without plural personal endings being borrowed, or
> 2) past morphemes being borrowed without future morphemes.

But these, even if they stand up, are not counterexamples.  T & K say
"anything can be borrowed"; you reply with "Y can only be borrowed after X
is borrowed".  There is no contradiction here.

Suppose I say the following to my students:

1. "You may read any book on IE linguistics you like."

2. "However, you may only read Szemerenyi if you have first read a more
elementary introduction."

Have I contradicted myself?  I think not.

> Whether TK
> meant "anything goes" or not depends on how strong a reading we give to
> their statement.

But why should we impute to them a position which they have never asserted
or endorsed?  Is this fair?

> They certainly did not exclude it.

Well, they also do not expressly exclude the possibility that some
languages were introduced to earth by Martians.  Should we therefore darkly
suspect them of harboring such beliefs? ;-)

> It should be noted
> that whether finite verbal morphology gets borowed at all is a matter of
> definition,

Sorry; I can't agree.  If language A gradually replaces most of its
inherited verbal morphology with morphology taken from language B, while at
the same time retaining much of its inherited lexicon and grammar, then
there is no definition about it: the language has borrowed verbal
morphology, and that is the end of the matter.  T & K's stance is that we
should consider this a possibility and look to see if there are any
examples of it.  Thomason now concludes that Laha, at least, is indeed an
example of this very thing.  Whether she is right in this is a matter for
empirical investigation, not a matter of definition.

> because if it is never mixed, then it could (or could not) be
> taken as an indicator of genetic descent.

Well, Laha is on the table.  The chief investigator, Collins, has concluded
that Laha has indeed borrowed almost all of its verbal morphology from
Malay.  What is there to discuss, apart from the possibility that Collins
may be in error?  We can't just wave the case away by invoking arbitrary
"definitions".  And why should we want to, anyway?

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  Tue Jun  5 09:42:57 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 10:42:57 +0100
Subject: Genetic Descent
In-Reply-To: <000901c0eabf$fdd93ea0$fa2863d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.104257.0100.>

--On Friday, June 1, 2001 12:26 pm -0500 "David L. White"
<dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

> LT:  If so, let me ask this: in what respect does Michif fall
> short of being a mixed language?  It looks to me like a paradigm case of a
> mixed language.  If we encountered, or imagined, a real mixed language,
> what features would it have that Michif lacks?

> DLW:  The finite verbal morphology of Michif is all Cree.  Therefore, by
> the Davidian standard, it is Cree.  That also answers the scond question.

OK.  My friend Homer is a specialist in nouns.  He loves nouns, and he
regards them as paramount in languages.  According to Homer, the ancestry
of a language is determined by the origin of its nouns.  Therefore, by the
Homeric definition, Michif is French.  End of discussion. ;-)

Why is Homer's position more arbitrary than yours?

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  Tue Jun  5 14:32:46 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 15:32:46 +0100
Subject: Genetic Descent
In-Reply-To: <000901c0eabf$fdd93ea0$fa2863d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.153246.0100.>

--On Friday, June 1, 2001 12:26 pm -0500 "David L. White"
<dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

[on Takia]

> If the
> finite verbal morphology (morphemes, not categories) is Takia, it is
> Takia. That may well seem arbitrary, but it is not.  Verbs are more basic
> than nouns, and what is more basic is more indicative of descent.

I'm sorry, but I cannot agree that verbs are more basic than nouns.  This
seems to me an arbitrary fiat.  Anyway, I've never seen a language without
nouns, and that suggests to me that nouns are about as basic as anything
can be in languages.  But I'll discuss this in terms of what follows.

A little quibble first, though.  Arguably, I possess no characteristic more
"basic" than my biological sex, which is male.  Does it therefore follow
that I am more closely related to my father than to my mother? ;-)

> For English, it is easy to demonstrate this by considering the following
> sentence:

>  The tanks crossing the bridge was/were not ideal.

>  With "were", this is a statement (improbable as it may be) about the
>  tanks.  [snip an incomprehensible sentence]

> In the more normal reading, with "was", it is easy to see that the verb
> agrees with "crossing", not with "tanks", and that therefore "crossing"
> is the head of the NP. (Not to mention being a gerund, not a participle.)
> If it is the head of the NP, it is reasonable to suppose that it is also
> in some sense the head of the corresponding sentence "The tanks crossed
> the bridge".

The position that the verb is the head of the sentence is embraced in
certain syntactic theories, especially in most dependency grammars and in
some relational grammars.  But it is rejected in other approaches,
including other relational approaches and all Chomskyan approaches.  The
Chomskyan view takes the head of the sentence to be an abstract element,
and not the verb.  I am not a Chomskyan, but I don't think it can simply be
taken for granted that the verb is the head of the sentence.  This is an
analytical stance, not a piece of truth.

There is also a fascinating counter-argument here.  Consider this example:

  'That Martians are green is well known.'

Now, the subject of 'is' is plainly the complement clause 'That Martians
are green'.  Fine.  Now, what is the head of this clause?  Is it the verb,
as David seems to be implying?  Then the head of the subject is 'are'.  But
-- whoops -- this is plural, and yet the whole clause takes singular
agreement.
Oh, dear. ;-)

> We may also note that things that might be held to apply to
> an entire proposition, like negation, are typically attached to or
> associated with verbs,

It is true that sentence operators, such as negation and tense, are most
typically associated with verbs.  But this is not true without exception.
For example, in Sanskrit -- I am told -- the negative marker can appear
anywhere in a sentence at all, and need not be attached to the verb.  (OK;
I'm ready for flak from the Sanskritists on this list. ;-) )

> and that though there is a type of language,
> polysynthetic, in which the verb and its mandatorily associated elements
> form a complete sentence, there is no corresponding type of language
> where the subject noun and its mandatorily associated elements form a
> complete sentence.

It is true that, in *some* languages, a sentence may consist entirely of an
affixed verb.  But it is equally true that, in *some* languages, a sentence
may consist entirely of nominal elements, with no verb-form present at all.
Both observations are interesting, but why should one be more "central"
than the other?

> Thus upon examination it is not arbitrary to regard
> vebal morphology as more basic than nominal morphology.

Ah, no -- for several reasons.  I've just mentioned two: it is not an
obvious truth that the verb is the head of the sentence, and it is not true
that verbs are universally more indispensable than nominals.  But there is
more, much more.

What David White is arguing, successfully or not, is that the *lexical
verb* plays a central role in sentence structure.  Even if we grant this,
it *does not follow* that verbal morphology is somehow more central than
any other morphology, such as nominal morphology.  Verbal morphology is not
the same thing as a lexical verb.

Moreover, David's arguments here seem self-contradictory.  Consider a
language with native verbal morphology but with many borrowed lexical verbs
-- such as English or Basque.  In such a language, it is the (borrowed)
lexical verb which serves as the sentential head, in David's account, and
which determines the syntactic properties of the sentence.  At the same
time, the native verbal morphology merely follows the requirements of the
lexical verb in a wholly passive manner.  But now consider David's
position: the (borrowed) lexical verb is the most central element in the
sentence, and its properties determine the structure of the sentence,
including the associated morphology.  Yet it is the native verbal
morphology which is somehow (I haven't followed this) more central in
identifying the genetic origin of the language, because this morphology is
now what is "central".
Have I missed something?  This line of thinking seems wholly inconsistent
to me.

Take a real example.  Basque, like English, has a native transitive verb
meaning 'like', as in English 'I like this.'  Spanish has no such verb, and
expresses the same notion with its intransitive dative-subject verb
<gustar> 'be pleasing (to)'.  As it happens, Basque has borrowed the
Spanish verb as <gustatu> 'be pleasing (to)'.  This borrowed verb is taken
over into Basque with wholly Spanish syntax, as a dative-subject verb, even
though dative-subject verbs are virtually nonexistent in Basque.  The
associated verbal morphology is, of course, wholly native Basque, since
Basque has borrowed almost no verbal morphology.  But that verbal
morphology is simply pressed into service to follow the dictates of the
borrowed lexical verb, producing things like <gustatzen zait> 'I like it'
(literally, 'it is pleasing to me'), entirely parallel to Spanish <me
gusta> 'I like it', and wholly at odds with the native construction
<atsegin dut> 'I like it', a simple transitive construction, like its
English equivalent.

It seems that David is telling us that, at one and the same time, the
borrowed lexical verb is paramount, while the native verbal morphology is
also paramount.  And I can't follow this.  Surely it has to be one or the
other, at best.

Finally, let me advance a counter-argument.  As David's own 'tank' example
illustrates, it is commonplace in languages for verbs to agree with nominal
arguments -- that is, for intrinsic features of nominals (person, number,
gender, maybe others) to be copied onto verbs.  But it is virtually unknown
-- perhaps entirely unknown -- for verbal features to be copied onto
nominals.  Is this not a splendid argument that nominals are more
autonomous, more central, more "basic", and that verbs are merely the
slaves of nominals? ;-)

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 petegray at btinternet.com  Tue Jun  5 19:20:14 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 20:20:14 +0100
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.202014.0100.>

>does that, in your opinion, mean there was no *g^en-?

One senses an unfriendly trap - which is fun - but I do prefer a more open
sharing of ideas.

Studiously trying to avoid your trap, I say that the existence of the root
(or roots) *g'enH / g'neH says nothing at all about the existence of *g'en.
I do however allow that I am not aware of any IE forms that would point to
such a root, rather than to *genH with loss of H.

Is that carefully enough worded for you?

Peter


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Tue Jun  5 16:15:28 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 11:15:28 -0500
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.111528.0500.>

Dear Rich and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rich Alderson" <alderson+mail at panix.com>
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2001 1:10 PM

> On 1 Jun 2001, Patrick Ryan wrote, with respect to *gen{H_1}:

>> Are you also asserting that, therefore, there is no *g^en-?

> Yes.

> And don't come at me with arguments about Wurzeldeterminativa usw.

[PCR]

I think that perhaps you missed, in my first statement of this question, the
advice that I was not planning to argue for one view or the other. I am merely
interested in reading what your (and others') opinion is on this question. I am
sure you could probably more eloquently argue the question than I could if you
had the opposite opinion so what would be served by rehearsing it?

[RA]

> If such are not simply the result of over-analysis of the data, they are
> clearly so early in the prehistory of the IE language that they may well be
> Nostratic, and in any case are irrelevant to the question as posited.

[PCR]

I have no problem with that opinion. Thus, *g^enH1- would constitute an
exception to the general proposition that IE roots have the form CVC-. Every
good "rule" needs an exception or two.

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 dcarswell at home.com  Tue Jun  5 03:17:20 2001
From: dcarswell at home.com (Douglas Carswell)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 23:17:20 -0400
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.4.21.0106011317460.12722-100000@babel.ling.upenn.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.231720.0400.>

Couldn't modern colloquial French be considered on its way to a Subject-Verb
and Verb-Pronoun language?  Since the original pronouns have become weak, many
speakers now append the emphatic pronouns to the verb.  I viens, lui.  You can
also append it after a noun is used, i.e. Jean viens, lui.  Even though the
pronouns looks like an afterthought, many French speakers always append the
pronoun now (especially when there is no noun phrase), so it is no longer used
for emphasis, but is normal.  Emphasis is created by shifting the pronoun to
the beginning of the sentence, i.e. Lui, i viens.  However, in the standard
language, it is currently not required after the verb, and is often interrupted
by a noun phrase object.  I'm not saying it is a Verb-Pronoun language yet, but
it certainly is looking like one.  I can't think of a "standard" language that
is, however.  Any other thoughts on this?

 -----Original Message-----
From: 	Indo-European mailing list [mailto:Indo-European at xkl.com]
	On Behalf Of Thomas McFadden
Sent:	Friday, June 01, 2001 1:58 PM
To:	Indo-European at xkl.com
Subject:	Re: No Proto-Celtic?

> To us it may look strange that the pronoun would have come after the verb and
> not before, but this may happen, and it is standard in modern Irish, isn't
> it?  E.g.: Scri'obhann SE' litir (he writes a letter).

but thats because Irish is VSO, i.e. subjects in general follow the verb,
whether they are pronouns or full NPs.  what you seem to be arguing for here is
that in PIE full NP subjects preceded the verb, while prnonoun subjects
followed it.

[ moderator snip ]


From sarima at friesen.net  Tue Jun  5 05:47:50 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 22:47:50 -0700
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <F371d66HcASHMZNNA8500001dfa@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.224750.0700.>

At 10:24 AM 6/4/01 +0000, Gabor Sandi wrote:

>Actually, I don't think that I said anything about the position of full NP
>subjects relative to verbs. Still, having a different order for personal
>pronouns is not that unusual, is it?

Yes, but when that is the case, the pronoun almost always comes *earlier*
in the sentence than a noun would.  What you are suggesting is the reverse,
with he pronoun coming *later* than the noun.  This is, at best, highly
unusual.

>In the Romance languages the direct
>object of the verb normally comes after the verb if it is an NP (Je vois le
>chien), but before the verb if it is a personal pronoun (Je te vois).

Yep, as I said, pronouns tend to come earlier than nouns.

>Whether a similar switchover can happen with the subject is another
>question. I don't think that there is a theoretical reason why it can't.

It can, but it would lead to VSO for noun subjects and SVO for pronoun
subjects.

One of the pragmatic factors that co-determines word order is constituent
weight, with heavier constituents being later and lighter ones being earlier.

>For pre-PIE there is also the possibility that it was an ergative language,
>with the subject of an intransitive verb behaving differently from that of a
>transitive one (and like the object of a transitive verb).

Not quite.  In an ergative language the subject of an intransitive verb
takes the *case* *marking* of the transitive object, but otherwise tends to
act like a subject, including position in the sentence (though there are
exceptions).

>For the sake of argument, let us say that *me *se *te are the singular
>pronouns serving as the subject of intransitive verbs and as the object of
>transitive ones, and that they normally follow the verb.

As stated, this would be highly unlikely.  Even if nominal subjects of
intransitive verbs followed the verb, pronoun subjects would still likely
precede it, by the weight rule (unless cliticized).

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From petegray at btinternet.com  Mon Jun  4 19:11:57 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 20:11:57 +0100
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.201157.0100.>

>.. note that German is more restricted
> than French in the possible orders of nouns and adjectives, but German
> has much more extensive agreement morphology than French.

"Much more extensive" seems to me an overstatement.  French adjectives will
normally indicate gender and number, while German adjectives may do neither
if the article is present. For example:
   Ich gebe es dem kleinen Mann   (masc)
   Ich gebe es der kleinen Frau       (fem)
   Ich gebe es dem kleinen Kind     (neuter)
   Ich gebe es den kleinen Kinder   (plural)
and:
   des kleinen Mannes (genitive)
   dem kleinen Mann (dative
   den kleinen Mann (accusative)
   die kleinen Maenner (plural, nominative & accusative)
   der kleinen Maenner (plural genitive)
etc.
If the article is not present, the adjective carries the morphological
burden of indicating gender, case and number, but even so, to claim much
more extensive morphological agreement is pushing it a bit, especially since
most nouns have very little, or no, morphological indication of case.

Peter


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Tue Jun  5 16:44:02 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 11:44:02 -0500
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.114402.0500.>

Dear Gabor and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gabor Sandi" <g_sandi at hotmail.com>
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2001 5:24 AM

> From: Gabor Sandi g_sandi at hotmail.com
> Reply to: Thomas McFadden <tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu>
> Subject: Re: No Proto-Celtic?

<snip>

> For the sake of argument, let us say that *me *se *te are the singular
> pronouns serving as the subject of intransitive verbs and as the object of
> transitive ones, and that they normally follow the verb.

> According to this hypothesis, *es me, *es se, *es te are normal for "I am",
> "thou art", "(s)he/it is". If, for the sake of argument again (I am really
> sticking my neck out here), we hypothesize a particle *so (coincidentally
> identical to the ergative 3rd person pronoun) as the ergative particle,

[PCR]

I certainly would support the idea that "nominative" *-s began life as a marker
of the ergative case but rather than terming it a "particle", I consider the
likeliest origin for it as a postposition corresponding to an IE *-so, 'with',
cognate with Slavic proposition *so.

[GS]

> the phrases "the bear sees me/thee/him" would have been sg. like *harkto-so
> weid me/se/te. Here the pronoun (in the accusative) still comes after the
> verb (which would be unmarked for person in the 3rd pers.sing.), i.e. the
> normal word order would have been transitive EVS (with E for ergative case
> and S for the case functioning as object of a transitive and subject of an
> intransitive verb) and intransitive VS.

> Admittedly there are problems here, including the fact that older IE
> languages definitely favour VSO word order, and the

[PCR]

I know that you are familiar with all the arguments which have been advanced to
"prove" a SOV word-order for IE but I would be greatly interested to learn your
arguments for VSO.

<snip>

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 tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Tue Jun  5 17:37:38 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 13:37:38 -0400
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <002501c0ecdf$c1f9a740$4401703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.133738.0400.>

>> Again in Bavarian German (and a number of the dialects and even to a certain
>> extent in colloquial forms of the standard language) the 1sg. pronoun in the
>> nominative is mia,

> [Ed Selleslagh]

> Isn't that just an Anglo-Saxon perception of the pronunciation (cf. British
> English pronunciation -a < -er)?

works on the Bavarian dialects generally say that coda r and l have been
vocalized (and in all but stage speech coda r has vocalized in standard
spoken German as well).  you can debate how the current pronunciation of
what was MHG -ir should be represented orthographically, -ia is just an
approximation (and is the usual one i think in representing the dialect
when special characters and diacritics arent used).  anyway it doesnt
matter here since im not talking about the coda of the word, but just the
initial consonant.

>> clitic ma both < mir
>> in place of standard wir.  This is transparently from the case where it
>> appears postverbally.  Since the 1pl personal ending is -en, the following
>> wir assimilated to the nasal (and this pronunciation is common even in
>> fairly standard spoken forms when the pronoun is postverbal).  Crucially,
>> this nasal-initial pronunciation was extended to all positions in the
>> relevant dialects, so that even sentence-initially this is what you get.

> [Ed]

> I have serious doubts about this explanation: isn't w<v<m , cf. the 1sg
> marker?  Cf. Eng. 'with' <> Ger. 'mit', Du. 'met'.

> I don't mean that the assimilation you describe doesn't actually happen in
> the modern language, only that it is not related to the problem of the
> genesis of the 1pl marker.

i wasn't being as clear as i should have.  i didnt mean to say that this
had any role in creating the 1pl agreement marker, i only meant to show
that variants of grammatical forms that are created by phonological
processes that are triggered only in marked word order configurations can
spread outside the environment where they are phonologically regular and
be generalized to all environments.  that is, an m-initial pronunciation
of the 1sg pronoun is only phonologically justified when the verb is
immediately preceding.  while examples VS are rather common in modern
forms of German, the unmarked order is SVO in main clauses and SOV in
subordinate clauses.  nonetheless, in some dialects, the pronunciation
of this pronoun that is at home in VS clauses has spread to ones that are
SVO and SOV.  if that can happen, it's not implausible that an agreement
affix created by phonological processes (ultimately from reduction of
subject clitics) operating in just such a marked VS environment could
have spread to the more common SOV/SVO orders.  and the only reason i gave
this example is that the only two i could come up with where we actually
had personal endings being affected in that environment admittedly have
other explanations.

> BTW, e.g. Latin and Greek have a m-type 1pl verbal marker: habeMus, echouMe .

> In Brabant Dutch dialects, e.g. 'Wat doen we?' (What do we do?) is
> pronounced:  [watu:~ m@]. (~ = nasalization of [u]). This is very similar to
> German.

yeah, just to be clear, im not arguing that the example of the 1sg pronoun
affected the 1sg agreement affix in this example, rather the opposite,
that the final -n of the agreement affix triggered assimilation in the
initial consonant of the pronoun, just as you point out has happened in
Brabant Dutch.


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Tue Jun  5 17:57:05 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 13:57:05 -0400
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010604064517.00aa7f00@getmail.friesen.net>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.135705.0400.>

>> don't.  and in most cases where multiple variants exist, there is an
>> identifiable difference, even if its hard to find.  usually it's not a
>> difference in the truth-conditional semantics, but there's perhaps a
>> difference in what is implied, or in the conditions where you would say it.

> The last is quite frequent.  Often one way to get at this sort of thing is
> by asking what question each of the variants might be an answer to.

yes, a very good point.  it's generally very difficult for people to
explain their intuitions about this sort of variation (like if you asked
somebody 'when would you say it like this and when would you say it like
that').  the best way to investigate this sort of stuff seems to be by
looking at corpora.  when you get 100 examples the one way and 100 the
other of how people actually use various constructions, the patterns, that
are hard for a speaker to describe, often become extremely clear.


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Tue Jun  5 17:52:50 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 13:52:50 -0400
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <F371d66HcASHMZNNA8500001dfa@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.135250.0400.>

> Actually, I don't think that I said anything about the position of full NP
> subjects relative to verbs. Still, having a different order for personal
> pronouns is not that unusual, is it? In the Romance languages the direct
> object of the verb normally comes after the verb if it is an NP (Je vois le
> chien), but before the verb if it is a personal pronoun (Je te vois).

> Whether a similar switchover can happen with the subject is another
> question. I don't think that there is a theoretical reason why it can't.

if you were arguing that PIE was VSO, no matter whether the subject was
full NP or pronoun, then fine, that's no problem if it can be
supported.  there's nothing at all implausible about the idea that clitic
pronouns in such a situation could have developed into agreement suffixes,
of course.  appologies.  and no, there's nothing unusual in personal
pronouns having a different order than full NPs, it is very common, but i
think the specific case where full NP subjects precede the verb and
pronoun subjects follow it would be very odd, simply because the examples
of ordering differences that im familiar with are like the one you mention
above, where full NP objects follow the verb and pronouns precede,
presumably because, being lighter elements, they're more susceptible to
cliticization.

> Admittedly there are problems here, including the fact that older IE
> languages definitely favour VSO word order,

i may be betraying a lack of important knowledge here, but what makes you
say this?  which older IE languages favor VSO?  i suppose this is why i
misinterpreted your previous post, because i didn't understand the
positing of VSO as the basic order.  (and i am honestly asking here, not
just looking for trouble!)

Tom McFadden


From edsel at glo.be  Tue Jun  5 08:09:08 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 10:09:08 +0200
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.100908.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Xavier Delamarre" <xavier.delamarre at free.fr>
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2001 10:43 PM

[snip]

> 1/ Hier j'ai achete une maison tres grande a Vaucresson

> 2/ Hier j'ai achete une tres grande maison a Vaucresson

> Absolutely no difference in meaning, style or emphasis. I am sorry.

[Ed Selleslagh]

Yes, but consider:
1) De Gaulle était un très grand homme.
2) De Gaulle était un homme très grand.

The meaning is completely different.

Of course, I speak only Belgian French.

Ed.


From sarima at friesen.net  Tue Jun  5 13:01:07 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 06:01:07 -0700
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
In-Reply-To: <B741BF90.E51%xavier.delamarre@free.fr>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.060107.0700.>

At 10:43 PM 6/4/01 +0200, Xavier Delamarre wrote:

>le 1/06/01 15:05, Stanley Friesen à sarima at friesen.net a écrit :

>> But, even so, I suspect they are only interchangeable in some contexts.  In
>> others, one or the other is probably atypical or improper.  Are there not
>> certain questions for which one or the other is a more appropriate
>> response?

>You suspect wrongly. Here is your sentence :

>1/ Hier j'ai achete une maison tres grande a Vaucresson

>2/ Hier j'ai achete une tres grande maison a Vaucresson

>Absolutely no difference in meaning, style or emphasis. I am sorry.

There are absolutely NO discourse contexts in which these are not
interchangeable??  There is nothing that could go before that would rule
out one of the alternatives? I find that rather surprising.

>But this is not PIE, only a late IE language with a fairly fixed word-order,
>with some pockets of freedom in this matter.

>I am convinced that a more intimate practice of old IE languages like Latin,
>Greek, Sanskrit,or Lithuanian would convince you that word-order is not an
>essential part of their grammar.

That would be practically impossible, since all of the grammar books I
trust on those languages say exactly the opposite.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Thu Jun  7 19:50:54 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2001 15:50:54 -0400
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
In-Reply-To: <B741BF90.E51%xavier.delamarre@free.fr>
Message-ID: <THU.7.JUN.2001.155054.0400.>

> You suspect wrongly. Here is your sentence :

> 1/ Hier j'ai achete une maison tres grande a Vaucresson

> 2/ Hier j'ai achete une tres grande maison a Vaucresson

> Absolutely no difference in meaning, style or emphasis. I am sorry.

this proves nothing.  as i think i said a few days ago, the type of
difference we expect in this type of variation can be very difficult to
measure based on a speaker's intuitions about a particular sentence.  they
are best studied by looking for patterns of how the variants are
actually used in texts.  note that i am insisting on consulting actual
texts here, in spite of what you imply in your remarks below.  but, as i
have also mentioned before, even if it turns out that you are right in
this instance, that there is absolutely no difference in the meaning,
implication or contextual conditions on the usage of the two variants you
list above, that still does not bear on the question of whether the
variation between them is regulated by the grammar.  no matter what they
mean, they are specified as possibilities in French, while a number of
other imaginable word orders are NOT possible in French.  this can NOT be
reduced to some vague notion of stylistics.  and the fact remains that for
the most part, word order variation within a language CAN be connected
with variation in meaning, or implication, or discourse context, at least
variation on the level involving subject verb and object.

> But this is not PIE, only a late IE language with a fairly fixed word-order,
> with some pockets of freedom in this matter.

of course.  it is obvious that word order is grammatically determined, it
is less obvious in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, etc.

> I am convinced that a more intimate practice of old IE languages like Latin,
> Greek, Sanskrit,or Lithuanian would convince you that word-order is not an
> essential part of their grammar.

and i am equally convinced that a detailed study of actual texts would
reveal consistent patterns of word order correlating in some way with the
discourse context.  hopefully i will be able to offer references to such
work very soon, so that i can do more than claim that i'm right.

> In the previous posting, I made the (nasty) supposition that the obsession
> for word-order in some circles was due to the mother-tongue of their
> scholars. In fact I suspect that the reason is of a more general type : the
> overinterest for general linguistics with its theoretical fashions,
> generativism among others. It is always easier to build a general theory on
> something (e.g. word-order) than to be confronted with facts, i.e. existing
> languages.

i let the original comment about obsession with word order pass, but you
continue to make prejudiced blanket statements that are non-arguments and
actually incorrect, so now i'm forced to respond.  argue against
generativism if you like, i won't mind, but there's no need to call it a
`theoretical fashion.'  it's been around too long and proved too useful
for that.  there is no question that a common flaw in generative work is
an exaggerated concern with terminology and the inner-workings of a
particular theory, and a concommitant relative ignorance of real
linguistic data.  but it's simply inaccurate to assume that this
characterizes all of generativism, or even most of it.  good
generative work constructs hypotheses about how language works based
on extensive real language data.  other theoretical
leanings have their own shortcomings too.  but what i have been talking
about here is not guilty of ignoring data.  (and by the way, i must
admit to being confused by your statement `It is always easier to build
a general theory on something (e.g. word-order) than to be confronted with
facts, i.e. existing languages.'  in what way are attested word-order
patterns from existing languages not facts??) i'm making no arguments
based on a specific theory, and in fact my position is not specifically a
generative one.   and i am insisting that what i am arguing for needs to
be tested on actual textual data, because what i know about effects on
word order in `free word order' languages comes from corpus-based studies,
not on native-speaker intuitions and not on argumentation from a
pre-existing theory.

please argue against what i am actually saying rather than slinging mud at
a distorted picture of a theory that you have associated me with.  if you
can convince me that Latin (or any of those other languages) does not have
its own language-specific patterns of word order that are conditioned by
semantics/pragmatics etc., then i'll admit i was wrong.

(i do realize that the burden of proof is on my side, since i'm the one
who's arguing for something.  i'm working on it.)

Tom McFadden


From petegray at btinternet.com  Mon Jun  4 19:23:51 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 20:23:51 +0100
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.202351.0100.>

>> dama:r - wife, spouse ...> Wife = domesticated animal... domo, domui,
>> domitum (domtavi) - to tame, to break in
...
>>  Cf., Grk, domos - in Homer, often enclosure or abode for animals, e.g.
>> sheepfold (Iliad 12:301); "Sanskrit root, dam-, da:m - ya:mi, to be tame."

Probably there are different roots here.  One of them refers to building,
the other to taming.

damar (short a) genitive damartos is clearly < *dam + rt, as Pokorny says.

Greek domos, Latin domus Sanskrit damas are the "building" root, while Latin
domo and Sanskrit dam- is the taming root.

Peter


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Wed Jun  6 04:54:03 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2001 00:54:03 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <WED.6.JUN.2001.005403.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/4/2001 2:30:01 AM, edsel at glo.be writes:
>> Damate:r - Dor., Arc., Thess. and Boeot. form of goddess Demeter

> [Ed Selleslagh]

> Don't exaggerate: isn't that 'god(dess)-mother'? (Cf. Jupiter: 'god-father')

Or Demeter, the goddess of domestication?  Sometimes I suppose the chicken
comes first.  Sometimes the egg.  But in the context of all those other
words, and with an open-mind, the possibilities do expand.

> dama:r - wife, spouse

> [Ed]
> Wife = domesticated animal??????  I know those were backward times, but
> still....

OR spouse.  Are you familiar with how the wildman Enkidu was tamed in
Gilgamesh, an epic that might predate the earliest IE texts by 1500 years?
(And then again there's "the taming of the shrew.")

And by the way, the word means "tame" or "break-in"- not necessarily
"domesticate."

Regards,
Steve Long


From bronto at pobox.com  Thu Jun  7 06:04:15 2001
From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood)
Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2001 23:04:15 -0700
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <WED.6.JUN.2001.230415.0700.>

> X99Lynx wrote

>> AND finally, starting with Homer -

>> dama:r - wife, spouse

>> NOTE that most of the early references above are to a variety of
>> mostly domestic animals [...]

Eduard Selleslagh wrote:
> Wife = domesticated animal??????  I know those were backward times,
> but still....

Or a domesticatING animal.
`Dame' is related to `domestic' as well as `dominate'...

--
Anton Sherwood  --  br0nt0 at p0b0x.com  --  http://ogre.nu/


From dlwhite at texas.net  Tue Jun  5 14:37:09 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 09:37:09 -0500
Subject: Red Deer in Anatolia
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.093709.0500.>

----- Original Message -----
From: Rich Alderson <alderson+mail at panix.com>

> You wish to have the word which means "red deer" in all daughter languages,
> even those spoken where the fallow deer is present, to have once meant
> "fallow deer", because the red deer is not present in Anatolia.

        Not that it matters greatly, but red deer are (or perhaps were?)
present in Anatolia.  They are one of the more successful recent species,
with a strikingly wide distribution.

Dr. David L. White


From sarima at friesen.net  Tue Jun  5 13:10:53 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 06:10:53 -0700
Subject: About the Yew1
In-Reply-To: <F113FutJLtosJ3Ih7jt00000100@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.061053.0700.>

At 09:31 AM 6/4/01 +0000, Douglas G Kilday wrote:

> I'm well aware that cognate dendronyms can refer to different trees in
> different languages, and examples from IE and Semitic occur in my own
> postings. But in fact Taxus baccata _is_ quite distinctive as trees go.

Very distinctive.  I would almost say unique among northern hemisphere trees.

>> The main problem I think with using the yew word to locate PIE is, of
>> course, that the "yew" was not always a "yew."  And this only makes sense,
>> since trees don't move and that means what you call a yew or don't call a
>> yew and what I call a yew in the next valley could be two different trees --
>> up until such time as we obtain Polaroid cameras. Or up until we get around
>> to cutting them down and selling the wood, scrapping their bark for extract
>> or perhaps in the case of the yew, eating their berries.  It would be the
>> by-products, not the tree, that we could discuss in common.

> I don't see that Polaroid cameras are necessary. If you and I belong to the
> same tribe, and we don't agree on what to call trees in the next valley,
> then our use of language is dysfunctional. Do you really believe that
> prehistoric humans were linguistically incompetent?

More than that, people who live close to nature are often very good at
identifying what they live among.   A good example of this can be found in
a monograph on rainforest trees of Borneo that I know of.  Guess how the
author identified the trees.  Yep, he used a native guide.  As I remember
it, he even discovered one or two new species based on the fact that his
native guide gave them different names.

A tribal people would have to be truly incompetent to mistake the yew for
anything else, or vice versa.

> Celtic has preserved pre-IE *ebur- 'yew' rather extensively in toponyms,
> ethnonyms, and personal names, and also Irish <ibhar> 'yew; bow' beside <eo>
> 'yew'. The stem *ebur- also appears in toponyms in Iberia, Liguria,
> Campania, and probably Greece (Ephura:, old name of Corinth and other
> places). In my opinion *ebur- belongs with the Old European substrate
> associated with the expansion of Neolithic farmers across Europe (ca.
> 5500-4000 BCE).

It has that appearance to me also.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From PolTexCW at aol.com  Wed Jun  6 03:18:36 2001
From: PolTexCW at aol.com (PolTexCW at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 23:18:36 EDT
Subject: About the Yew1
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.231836.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/5/1 3:55:01 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:

<< I don't see that Polaroid cameras are necessary. If you and I belong to the
same tribe, and we don't agree on what to call trees in the next valley,
then our use of language is dysfunctional. Do you really believe that
prehistoric humans were linguistically incompetent? >>

George Gordon Meade, victor of the battle of Gettysburg, was born, raised and
flourished in a culture largely dependant on the horse.  He spent his entire
career as a professional officer profondly involved with horses. In reading
his writings, it is obvious that he was far from "inguistically incompetent".
It is just as obvious that  George didn't know squat about horses.

John Biskupski


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Wed Jun  6 15:26:07 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2001 11:26:07 EDT
Subject: About the Yew1
Message-ID: <WED.6.JUN.2001.112607.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/5/2001 2:55:01 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<< I'm well aware that cognate dendronyms can refer to different trees in
different languages, and examples from IE and Semitic occur in my own
postings. But in fact Taxus baccata _is_ quite distinctive as trees go.
First, it has prominent red berries. Second, its wood is prized for making
bows and arrows. Third, its leaves are highly toxic (unusual, if not unique,
for a tree native to Europe)... It is very unlikely that a name for this
particular tree, once established among a body of speakers, would be applied
by those speakers to
any other tree. They could, of course, migrate out of its habitat and forget
the name.>>

Quick note.  Allow me to address this in more detail once I get back to my
papers.

But I did want to just point out that "Greek has (s)mi:lax" from the earlier
post is a good place to start to examine the simplification being attempted
above.

The statement that "It is very unlikely that a name for this particular tree,
once established among a body of speakers, would be applied by those speakers
to any other tree" just won't work with Greek.

In fact, the Greeks used "smilax" to apply at least four other forms of
flora.  And the original associations they were making appear to be to
carving or perhaps sharpness of the leaves.  As far as, "red berries" goes,
one of the trees-smilax was the "Hollyoak" or "Holmoak", which of course has
red berries, provides an excellent carving wood and has sharp leaves.  The
odd thing, of course, is that there is little or no reference to the smilax
being poisonous in Classical Greek.  When we do have a connection between
poisonous and arrows, it is in words like "ion", which is often associated
with the violet, although there are texts where it is pretty clear this
association is arbitrary and that the word has multiple meanings in reference
to flora also.

The closer we look, in fact, the more we understand that the ancients were
more concerned with wood and pitch and bark and juice than they were with the
modern-style scientific taxonomy of trees (except for the occasional natural
historian) and that the names they actually used reflected this.  More
importantly, if we don't look closely, we may inadvertantly use Occam's Razor
to remove a good chunk of the truth.

Regards,
Steve Long


From semartin at pacifier.com  Tue Jun  5 14:49:38 2001
From: semartin at pacifier.com (Sam Martin)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 07:49:38 -0700
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <197933305.3200638478@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.074938.0700.>

Larry Trask mentions the revival of the properly buried "albeit". He may
be amused that I have heard this resurrected word pronounced as if it were
German, riming with "Arbeit". The latter, by the way, was borrowed into
Japanese (arubaito) with the meaning "part-time job, side job".

He also mentions the proliferating use of -wise. This is a productive
bound particle, rather than a derivative suffix. Sentence-wise it can go
anywhere, syntax-wise. Usage-wise, I have collected some delightful
examples, wise-wise. Notice that "street-wise" can have two different
meanings: "street-wise youngsters" has the derivative suffix, but
"Street-wise, this city is a mess!" has the particle. The meaning of the
particle is very similar to that of the Japanese particle of backgrounding
focus wa "as for, when it comes to". As a particle the -wise can attach to
a plural, and I could have substituted "Streets-wise" for "Street-wise" in
the example above. Like Japanese multiple-wa phrases, the
particle can occur two or three (or more?) times in a single sentence.
Afterthought-wise, at least. Structure-wise the particle belongs with focus
devices, I think.


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Tue Jun  5 16:07:56 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 11:07:56 -0500
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.110756.0500.>

Dear Stefan and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stefan Georg" <Georg-Bonn at t-online.de>
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2001 1:01 PM

<snip>

So what, is there a /w : v/ contrast in G. ? Not for sose vis a Hollyvood G.
accent, who still are se majorrity ...

[PCR]

When I begin to learn German, I attempted to pronounce [w] in all positions as
/v/.

I found that in words of the form C+[w], my pronunciation was in the extreme
minority. Germans from many different parts of Germany, with whom I grew up,
(almost) universally pronounced C+[w] as a bilabial (/w/) rather than as a
labiodental (/v/).

 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 connolly at memphis.edu  Tue Jun  5 22:13:49 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 17:13:49 -0500
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.171349.0500.>

I (Connolly) wrote:

>> Oh, indeed they are foreign.  It's only in Schwyzer Düütsch that we find
>> initial [x] in native words, and no variety has initial [ç] in them.
>> But that's beside the point.  If Duden's pronunciations are factually
>> correct -- a rather large assumption -- then [x] and [ç] do contrast in
>> initial position and must therefore be assigned to different phonemes.
>> Unless we want to say that foreign words *as foreign* have a different
>> set of phonemes than native ones, quod Deus avertat.

Stefan Georg wrote:

> Qua de causa avertat ? When I'm pronouncing /Chalid/ as /xali:d/ I'm
> using a patch of Arabic in my German discourse, whether I know much
> Arabic apart from that or not.

Certainly if you say [d] rather than [t].

> If Duden gave the "correct" pronunciation of /Xhosa/ with the correct
> click, we would have a click phoneme in German. Give me a job in that
> editors' board and I'll triple the number of phonemes in this
> language.

Get people to say them and you certainly would.

> Those pronunciations for /Chalid/ etc. are indeed artificial. Duden
> people just want to be educational when they indicate how these words
> should be pronounced, i.e. as close to the pronunciation in the
> source language as possible. The set of words given to illustrate the
> initial ç:x contrast is of a sort that I'm sure I've never met a
> German speaker who can take an oath to have used each one of them at
> least once in his life in some meaningful context. In English words
> and names we try to (are told to) observe /th/, /w:v/ as in the
> source language as well. I'm pretty sure Duden tells us to, too. So
> what, is there a /w : v/ contrast in G. ? Not for sose vis a
> Hollyvood G. accent, who still are se majorrity ...

I agree, of course, that no German has had the opportunity to use *all*
of the examples in normal speech.  But haven't you noticed an increased
tendency to say [xa-] in some words of foreign origin spelt with <cha->?

 Channukah comes to mind.  Once they're in, beside others in <cha->
pronounced [ça-] (not to mention [ka-]), it's hard to say that the
phonemes haven't become established.  Such things do happen.  In OE, [v
z] were allophones of /f s/, restricted to medial position.  Yet modern
English is full of words with initial [v- z-], of which only _vat_ and
_vixen_ (and possibly two others) are native, though they entered the
standard language from southern dialects which now show initial voicing.

 Of course, it's too early to say whether /x-/ and /ç-/ will become
established in German, but the process seems to have begun.

Leo Connolly


From petegray at btinternet.com  Tue Jun  5 19:32:25 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 20:32:25 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.203225.0100.>

<kinkajou>

I'm pleased, but not surprised, that it's in American dictionaries, since
it's an American animal.  Is it still in the concise English ones, I wonder?
because that's what my point was.

Peter


From petegray at btinternet.com  Tue Jun  5 19:30:24 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 20:30:24 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.203024.0100.>

> Have you any way of supplying us with meanings?

Yes of course - the dictionary I quoted them from!   They were just a random
sample, and you may find the Anglo-Indian ones (which I didn't include) more
interesting than these, but for what it's worth, here are the definitions
(abbreviated, because I can't be bothered typing the whole thing out.)

>>    Bayard           chivlarous person
>>    hoodman-blind    Blind-man's bluff
>>    kinnikinic       tobacco substitute
>>    kinkajou         N American animal, like a racoon
>>    kino             tree gum
>>    kintal           100 lbs, 100 kg, 112 lbs. (an interesting weight!)
>>    rahat lakoum     Turkish sweetmeat
>>    raff             = riff-raff
>>    sleuth-hound     blood hound
>>    ubiety           being in a definite place, whereness
>>    xoanon   etc.    image of deity fallen from heaven.

Peter


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Thu Jun  7 10:37:03 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2001 10:37:03 -0000
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <THU.7.JUN.2001.103703.0000.>

Larry Trask (4 Jun 2001) wrote:

>I'm thinking of real desk dictionaries, like Collins in Britain and
>Merriam-Webster in the US.  And these really do drop words after a while.
>Ask a professional lexicographer.

>I really do not think that the total number of words pertaining to cars,
>planes and spacecraft is about equal to the number of words pertaining to
>oxcarts and buggies.

You may well be right, but I believe that if we had a reliable way of
tracking the "death" of English words, we would find that the number of
words lost from common use every year roughly equals the number gained.
Since you have given 'cellphone', 'hahnium', and other examples of new words
which don't replace anything, let's look at some words marked as obsolete on
a page chosen at random from the 1903 F&W Standard:

nicker  n. 'night-brawler in London in 18th cent.'
nicker  n. 'water-sprite; nixy'
nicknack  n. 'feast to which every guest contributes'
nicotian  n. 'tobacco'
nictate  v.i. 'wink; nictitate'
nictation  n. 'winking; nictitation'
nidary  n. 'collection of nests'
niddicock  n. 'fool; simpleton; ninny; niddy; noddy'
nide  n. 'clutch; brood; flock of pheasants'
nidgery  n. 'trifle; foolery'
nidget, nigget  n. 'simpleton; idiot'
niding, nithing  adj. 'wicked; infamous; dastardly'
niding, nithing  n. 'infamous fellow; coward'
nief  n. 'neaf; fist'
nifle  n. 'trifle; article of female apparel in 15th cent.'
nifling  adj. 'of trifling importance'
nift  n. 'niece'
nig  v.i. 'be stingy or niggardly'
nig  adj., n. 'niggard; niggardly'
nigerness  n. 'blackness'
niggardship, niggardy  n. 'niggardliness'
niggish  adj. 'niggardly'
nigh  v.t., v.i. 'draw near (to); approach'

Most of these have living variants or synonyms, but not all. 'Nicker' in the
first sense, 'nifle' in the second, and probably 'nidary' appear to have
gone out of use without being replaced.

>I've just been marking a pile of final-year dissertations.  Some of our
>students chose to write on such topics as text messaging, graffiti,
>internet chat-rooms, the slang associated with drugs, and obscenities.  I
>was startled to discover, in these writings, a very large number of words
>which were wholly unknown to me, but which are apparently commonplace among
>young people.  I haven't had the time to try looking these words up in a
>couple of recent desk dictionaries, but I'll bet that quite a few of them
>are not entered.

I suspect that similar studies made in 1900 would reveal large numbers of
words unfamiliar to the older generation and largely forgotten today. Most
of what we call "slang" is short-lived; since it is used to grab attention,
it depends heavily for effect on relative novelty. A few slang terms like
'cool' and 'square' have been around for generations and might be considered
"standard slang", but these are exceptional.

>Anyway, lexicographers just *can't* "leave 'em in" all the time.  Cost, and
>therefore size, is just too important, and something has to give.

>Nor do lexicographers even rush to enter new words.  For example, the
>language has recently sprouted a number of new formations in '-wise', such
>as 'moneywise', 'clotheswise' and 'healthwise'.  These have been frequent
>in speech for years, and they are not rare in journalistic writing.  But
>they're still not entered in my desk dictionaries.

Are you referring to adverbs like 'piece-wise', or determinative compounds
like 'penny-wise'? Both types are formed regularly, and one would not expect
desk dictionaries to be cluttered with them, any more than with regular
plurals, participles, adverbs in -ly, etc.

>I'm afraid I can't agree [with lexical stasis].  A large and expensive
>dictionary can often afford to make room for lots of obsolete words, and of
>course the OED must do this by remit.  But an ordinary desk dictionary has to
>be cheap enough, and hence small enough, to sell large numbers of copies --
>and that means that old words have to be pruned from time to time in order to
>make way for new ones.

This _a priori_ economic argument only works if the processes required to
manufacture dictionaries are stable in cost. During the past century and
more, this has certainly _not_ been the case. Improvements in typesetting
and reproduction, and more recently in information technology, have steadily
driven down the actual cost of producing dictionaries. I believe this is the
principal factor in the increasing size of desk dictionaries, _not_
purported expansion of the lexis. When these costs have reached equilibrium,
so will the size of a given brand of dictionary.

I think a good analogy can be drawn with newspapers. Today's typical
regional paper (circulation on the order of 20k-200k) is much larger and
more colorful than its counterpart of 100 years ago. That doesn't mean that
we have much more, and more colorful, news than folks did in 1900, or that
our lives are much larger and more colorful. It reflects the much lower
cost, with modern technology, of producing newspapers and reproducing
photographs.

DGK


From dlwhite at texas.net  Tue Jun  5 14:44:02 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 09:44:02 -0500
Subject: note on 'dhole'
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.094402.0500.>

----- Original Message -----
From: Justin M. Mott <jmott at babel.ling.upenn.edu>

> It's a minor point, but there is no evidence that the etymon of this word
> had an initial voiced aspirate.  There are no clear sources for it from
> any of the (major) Indo-Aryan languages; the most plausible source for it
> is rather Kannada 'tola' "wolf".  Kannada, being Dravidian rather than
> Indo-Aryan, lacks voiced aspirates.  If this etymology is correct, the
> initial <dh> may just be a spurious (and isolated) spelling of initial
> /t/ (which, and I may be mistaken, could surface as [d]).

       I agree that that is what the usual supects say, on the linguistics
side, but on the biology side, all my sources agree that wolves do not occur
in south India, and therefore in the Kannada area.  (Why is not entirely
clear to me.  They did not spread from China into SE Asia either.  Dislike
of tropcal heat?)  Therefore there is something not quite right here.

Dr. David L. White


From sarima at friesen.net  Tue Jun  5 05:28:37 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 22:28:37 -0700
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <3B180FC4.52D487BD@memphis.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.222837.0700.>

>Larry Trask wrote:

>> happened here since I left home.  Do any of you Yanks out there *really*
>> pronounce an /h/ in 'vehicle'?

It depends on register for me.  If I am speaking formally, or carefully, I
pronounce the /h/, otherwise I drop it.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From sarima at friesen.net  Tue Jun  5 05:31:57 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 22:31:57 -0700
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSO.4.33.0106021951590.9145-100000@shell.pacifier.com>
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.223157.0700.>

At 07:59 PM 6/2/01 -0700, Sam Martin wrote:

>On Larry's inquiry about American speakers and their vehicular
>(vee-HICK-y at -l@r) haitchiness:

>I have always pronounced "vehicle" as VEE-hick- at l.
>The first eighteen years of my life were spent in Kansas.

Ah, that explains it.  I am also from Kansas, but I have lived in
California for over 15 years now, so I apparently vacillate between the
Kansas and the California pronunciation.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Jun  5 08:03:11 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 09:03:11 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <d1.7773c4f.284a91e2@aol.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.090311.0100.>

--On Saturday, June 2, 2001 3:00 pm +0000 RAHammitt at aol.com wrote:

>        As for what you said about not tolerating /h/ before schwa, my
>        speech agrees except with the h in word-initial position.  I
> pronounce the word "hull" with a schwa.

OK; thanks, and I guess I'd better clarify a bit.  In Britain, it is the
tradition to identify the 'cut' vowel as a wholly distinct phoneme from
schwa.  In the US, of course, there is something of a tradition of treating
the 'cut' vowel, on grounds of phonetic similarity, as merely the stressed
form of schwa.  If this second analysis is preferred, then I must modify my
account of my own speech as "no /h/ before unstressed schwa".  I too, of
course, have /h/ before the 'cut' vowel in 'hull', 'hut', 'hush', 'hum',
'hung', 'hustle', 'huddle', and many other words.

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 whiting at cc.helsinki.fi  Wed Jun  6 17:59:05 2001
From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting)
Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2001 20:59:05 +0300
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
In-Reply-To: <004a01c0eaca$867546a0$fbf1fea9@swbell.net>
Message-ID: <WED.6.JUN.2001.205905.0300.>

On Fri, 1 Jun 2001, proto-language wrote:

<snip>

>>> --On Thursday, May 17, 2001 2:17 pm +0300 Robert Whiting
>>> <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:

>>>> I'm perfectly happy to accept 'thy' as a ModE word.  But
>>>> 'thigh' and 'thy' are as perfect a minimal pair as German
>>>> 'Kuhchen' and 'Kuchen' or 'Tauchen' and Kuchen'.

> <snip>

> [PCR]

> A very impressive argument, one ro which I subscribe, and not the least
> impaired by the following small inaccuracy.

>> Otherwise, <dh> usually represent the phryngeal [d.] (sometimes referred to
>> as "emphatic") in Arabic transcription, as in the place name 'Riyadh'.

> [PCR]

> In my experience, /dh/ (dha:l) is never used to represent Arabic emphatic
> /d./ (d.a:d). They are two separate sounds and letters. Riyadh has dha:l.

No, Riyadh had d.a:d.  Look it up in your Wehr (the root is RWD., not RYD.
as one might expect).  The symbol "<dh>" identifies a written sequence,
not a phonetic one and I was fairly specific about indicating that is is
an English graphic sequence.  The point is that English <dh> is not used
to indicate Arabic dha:l except in the month names beginning with <Dhu>
and in <dhal> which is the name of the letter used to write the sound.
Otherwise, English <dh> in transcriptions frequently represents Arabic
[d.] the phryngeal ("emphatic") d, while Arabic [D] is usually represented
by <d> (e.g. dahabeeyah, from the root Dhb "to go back and forth."

<snip>

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi


From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi  Wed Jun  6 18:24:12 2001
From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting)
Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2001 21:24:12 +0300
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
In-Reply-To: <003701c0eadc$8b50b1c0$f903703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <WED.6.JUN.2001.212412.0300.>

On Fri, 1 Jun 2001, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Robert Whiting" <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
> Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2001 5:15 PM

>> Now for the interesting part.  The Latin alphabet did not have a
>> sign for the [w] sound (mostly because it disappeared from Greek)
>> and used the <u/v> graph instead.

> [Ed Selleslagh]

> I doubt that: the Romans didn't have the English v-sound, and the letter u
> (written as v) was used as a semi-vowel close to w, or as a vowel. So they
> didn't need an extra letter to transcribe Greek wau, if they had had to.

Originally Latin had a vocalic [u] and a semi-vowel [w], both written with
the <u/v> graph (the two shapes were simply variants of the same
grapheme).  Since [u] or [w] was predictable from the context, separate
signs were not needed.  This is exactly paralleled by the use of <i> for
both [i] and [j].  Later the semi-vowel [w] shifted to [v], but was still
predictable so there was still no need to specify with different signs,
but there was an increasing tendency to specialize the graphic variants
<u> and <v> for [u] and [v] respectively.  However, they remained more or
less interchangeable until the late middle ages.

<snip>

> BTW, the Greeks had their own problems with transcription of Latin: I think
> it was in Delphi (or was it Olympia - now Olimbía - ?) where I saw AKOAI
> on an ancient bath house, for Latin AQUAE.

Comes from not having a [w] sound.

>> Much later, the medieval Norman scribes began writing the u/v graph doubled
>> (uu/vv) to indicate the English [w] sound because they were unfamiliar with
>> the English letter wyn or wen.  This Norman double-u (or to the French,
>> double-vay) became the normal sign for the [w] sound and once again, this is
>> the only letter whose name reflects its shape rather than its sound.
>> Outrageous coincidence that the old <w> and the new <w> are the only letters
>> in their alphabets named for their shapes?
>> <snip>
>> Bob Whiting

> [Ed]
> For your information: in Dutch, w is called 'we', pr. like Eng. 'way' (some
> Dutchmen will say 'vay').

As usual, Dutch is stuck in the middle between German and English.  German
has no [w] sound so they use the <w> graph for [v] (since they use the <v>
graph for [f]).  To them the name of the <w> graph is 'vay' (just like
the name of the Hebrew letter waw is vav in German).  Dutch has a [w]
sound and uses the <w> graph for it, but has adapted the name from German
('vay' > 'way').

> And Double-U (pr. Dub'ya) is still another thing, nothing to do with its
> shape either :-)

cf VV and W or UU and W.  With a little imagination you can see how
double-u (or double-vay) got its name.  Interestingly, Finnish does not
have a [w] sound, but has the letter (originally used for writing [v], in
fact, words with <w> and <v> are alphabetized together as one letter).
The name of the letter in Finnish? -- kaksois-v "double-vay".  Kaksois-v
is not a loan translation of dub'ya, but it is of double-v.

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Fri Jun  8 03:34:34 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2001 23:34:34 EDT
Subject: Chronology and history of Germanic Consonant Shift
Message-ID: <THU.7.JUN.2001.233434.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/7/01 7:55:55 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
hstahlke at gw.bsu.edu writes:

> Where could I find current discussion of this and the more general
> chronology of early Germanic.  The recent discussion on the etymology of
> Goth was helpful to some degree.

-- Mallory and Adams note that the Celtic loanwords of the 1st millenium BCE
undergo the first Germanic soundshift.


From richard.schrodt at aon.at  Fri Jun  8 07:37:33 2001
From: richard.schrodt at aon.at (Richard Schrodt)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 09:37:33 +0200
Subject: Chronology and history of Germanic Consonant Shift
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.093733.0200.>

> linguistic and historical chronology of the Germanic Consonant shift, stating
> (. 56) that "it began several centuries B.C. and ended about 500 A.D."  Where
> could I find current discussion of this and the more general chronology of
> early Germanic.

Not very new, but perhaps useful for some discussions: Richard Schrodt, Die
germanische Lautverschiebung und ihre Stellung im Kreise der
indogermanischen Sprachen, 2. Aufl. Wien 1976 (without Vennemanns theories,
which came later).


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sat Jun  9 08:24:51 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 09:24:51 +0100
Subject: Chronology and history of Germanic Consonant Shift
Message-ID: <SAT.9.JUN.2001.092451.0100.>

> Prokosch, in his Comparative Germanic Grammar (Secs 16-24), lays out
> a linguistic and historical chronology of the Germanic Consonant shift,
> stating (. 56) that "it began several centuries B.C. and ended about 500
> A.D."  ... Where could I find current discussion of this and the more
> general chronology of early Germanic?

There has been some discussion of this earlier in one of the language
lists - about a year ago, I think.   You might be able to find it on the
'net somewhere.

Some confusion might be around because the Germanic sound changes a re a
complex of different phenomena, not all of which were completed before the
different languages separated.   Some of the later changes were still being
worked out (e.g in Middle Frankish) as late as the 10th century AD.

As for the first sound shift, I'm not up to date with the most recent stuff,
but I quote the following from the dtv-Atlas:

   "For the date of the 1st sound shift, we can use the word Hanf, which
comes from the Greek word kannabis.  This word is a loan word out of
Scythian, which did not enter Greek till the 5th century BC.  In Germanic we
meet the word in its shifted form *hanap-.  Since Germanic could not have
borrowed this word very early, we can assert that at this time the rules *k
> h and *b > p were still in force.  But it does not tell us how long this
rule had existed.  That it no longer was in force in the 3rd and 2nd
centuries before Christ can be concluded from loan words from Latin, none of
which have shifted forms.  (The first contact of Germans with Romans as in
this period.)"

Walker-Chambers supports this.  He says:  "It is estimated that the First
Sound Shift was completed by c 500BC;  but we only know that it was finished
before the Germanic peoples established contact with the Romans in the1st
century BC, since none of the words borrowed from Latin were affected by
it."

Hope that helps.

Peter


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Fri Jun  8 03:36:34 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2001 23:36:34 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <THU.7.JUN.2001.233634.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/7/01 9:16:05 PM Mountain Daylight Time, edsel at glo.be
writes:

> E.g. during the Middle Ages society hardly changed over 100 or more years;
> in more recent times, however...

-- there's a genuine discontinuity over the past 500 years or so in Western
society, and historical change has accelerated greatly.  However, prior to
the Renaissance, this doesn't apply.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Fri Jun  8 04:01:21 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 00:01:21 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.000121.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/7/01 9:45:18 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com
writes:

>   We've been through this.  What you call often call "change" is actually
> continuity to me, because you still call what remains "cognate", which means
> there must be something that stayed the same.

-- cognate means "derived from the same source", neither more nor less.

Cognate words in related languages need bear no phonetic resemblance to each
other at all, as such.  Only when the systemic _patterns_ of change over time
are understood does their relationship become obvious, in many cases.

Eg., "pita" (Hindi) and "father" (English) are cognates, as are "pad" and
"foot", despite having no surface similarity at all.

This is not apparent until you know the rules for the relevant sound-changes.
 (PIE *p ==> p in Indo-Aryan, *p ==> f in Germanic, etc.)


From bmscott at stratos.net  Fri Jun  8 04:18:26 2001
From: bmscott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 00:18:26 -0400
Subject: Rate of Change
In-Reply-To: <002c01c0ed96$d9dd2500$c802703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.001826.0400.>

On 5 Jun 2001, at 9:58, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

>> 1000 years is 1000 years, whether it occurs from 6000 to
>> 5000 BCE, or from 0 to 1000 CE.

> Although this is strictly true, it is highly debatable: you have
> to take into account the rate of change of local society. E.g.
> during the Middle Ages society hardly changed over 100 or more
> years; in more recent times, however...

The basic point is probably sound enough, but you'd have a hard time
finding a medieval historian who would agree that 'during the Middle
Ages society hardly changed over 100 or more years'.  Pick any 100-
year period you like during the MA, and you'll find significant social
changes.

Brian M. Scott


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Jun  8 10:06:49 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 11:06:49 +0100
Subject: Rate of Change
In-Reply-To: <d.15c1a474.284f145d@aol.com>
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.110649.0100.>

--On Wednesday, June 6, 2001 1:06 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

Folks, I'm buried in exam marking, and I don't have time now to respond to
all of Steve Long's points.  For now, I'll have to content myself with
replying to just one, on the comparative method.

> To say that I can't back up to that starting point, where everything is at
> best similarities and resemblances -- before any judgments about genetic
> relationships would have been made -- is to queer the game.  It makes the
> comparative method immune to critical analysis.

No; certainly not.  The comparative method is not immune to critical
analysis.  If it were, nobody would have any confidence in it.  Any
attempted application of the method must stand or fall on the quality of
the evidence offered to support it.  If that evidence is not good enough,
then the claimed conclusions will be rejected.

> I suspect part of the problem begins back when no analysis has yet been
> done and there can be nothing but resemblances between two languages.
> That's where the presumption starts that there WILL be only one genetic
> relationship and therefore there should be only one original systematic
> correspondence between the languages.  If you start by presuming that all
> "genetic" relationships can only relate to one parent, than all your
> results will tend towards that presumption, whether true or not.

Not so, I'm afraid.  The comparative method cannot possibly reconstruct an
ancestor that never existed -- not if it's competently applied, anyway.
Incompetent attempts are prominent in the fringe literature, of course, but
these are simply laughed away by professional linguists.

> (The Australian example you give -- Blake and "the clear patterns
> underlying the superficial absence of resemblances,..." could only happen
> in a historical and geographical context where relationships were already
> expected, for extrinsic reasons.

Again I disagree.  Of course, it made more sense for Blake to try to spot
patterns linking the troublesome Australian languages to other Australian
languages, rather than to, say, Eskimo-Aleut.  But he would not have found
those patterns if they had not already been there, waiting to be discovered.
He didn't create patterns that didn't already exist.  The comparative
method can't do that.

> I don't imagine you would have much
> patience with anyone establishing a close genetic relationship between
> Mexican and Phoenician despite "the superficial absence of resemblances"
> between the two languages.)

Depends on the evidence.  If "Mexican", whatever that is, and Phoenician
really do exhibit systematic correspondences, then those correspondences
are sitting there waiting to be discovered.  If somebody discovers them,
then that is the end of the matter.

I get the distinct impression that Steve believes that the comparative
method is a sham, a toy that does no more than to spit back the assumptions
built into it in the first place.  'Tain't so, Steve.

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 rao.3 at osu.edu  Fri Jun  8 15:33:44 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 11:33:44 -0400
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.113344.0400.>

S. Long <X99Lynx at aol.com> wrote:
> But what you're saying - up until the last sentence - seems to make out that
> "systematic correspondence" come out of thin air.

> Where a comparative analysis has to begin - not where it ends up - is
> similarities and resemblances between two or more languages.

The point is that such similarities and resemblances are considered to
be coincidences till systematic correspondences have been established.
The difference is between collection of discrete facts and establishment
of general laws. Only the latter is (nowadays) considered science.


From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi  Fri Jun  8 04:47:10 2001
From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 07:47:10 +0300
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.074710.0300.>

[Larry Trask:]

>Certain of the Pama-Nyungan languages have undergone such dramatic
>phonological changes that words in them look very little like their
>cognates in related languages that have not undergone such dramatic
>changes.  Australianists were at first baffled by the position of these
>strange-looking languages, but then Barry Blake -- in an undergraduate
>dissertation -- spotted the clear patterns underlying the superficial
>absence of resemblances, and the problem languages then proved to be
>easily assignable to Pama-Nyungan.  The main casulaty here was our ideas
>about possible phonological changes, which took something of a hammering.

Just out of curiosity: how strange are the changes in these Pama-Nyungan
languages?

Most examples of bizarre changes that I know are from various Samoyedic
languages, e.g. *w- > q-, *j- > q-, *V- > ngV-, *mp > ngf and even *s- >
k- before /e/ and /i/! But I'd be most interested in other examples of
uncommon phonetic developments.

And, if anyone can make any sense of the phonetic side of the change *s >
*k mentioned above, I'd be glad to hear it...

Regards,

Ante Aikio


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Tue Jun 12 05:03:33 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2001 01:03:33 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look
Message-ID: <TUE.12.JUN.2001.010333.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/7/2001 11:19:18 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:
<< We can imagine a lower rate of change, but there seems to be no good
evidence for it.  Without some hard evidence, we have no right to assume
that linguistic change was any slower in the remote past than it has been
in the historical period.  Such an assumption would violate our linguistic
Uniformitarian Principle: languages and speakers in the remote past behaved
much as languages and speakers have behaved in the historical period. >>

While I respect the trained linguist's ability to "feel" the relative age of
a language, I must be firm in pointing out that "rate of change," as Prof
Trask is using it, has little scientific validity - at least without
confirmable numbers that anybody can double-check.

That's the price of admission if you are going to start claiming scientific
validity and a "linguistic Uniformitarian Principle."

What specific changes is Prof Trask referring to?  How is the "rate" is
measured in terms of IE languages?  Are all the changes in a language added
together?  Or are all the changes irrelevant and do only certain changes
count?  Which changes and why?  How much do each of these changes equal in
years?  How much is a sound shift worth in years?  How do you measure the
difference between two morphologies and how do you calculate the time it's
been since they were once one morphology?  Why do any of these better reflect
the actual rate of change than let's say rate of borrowings?

Do you count up all the cognates in two "daughter" languages, divide by the
total words in each and then multiply by ten years?  Or do you count the
sound shifts in "core" words, whatever that means?

I helped prepare a presentation before a board of physicists at the National
Science Foundation a few years back.  You got to know if you went in front of
them with phrases like "rate of change", you'd be expected pinpoint exactly
what you were measuring, how you measured it, how many times you measured it
and convey a clear assurance that if anyone else measured it they would come
up with the same result.

If they expect this kind of specificity about "rates of change" in quantum
mechanics and animal behavior experiments, they can expect it in historical
linguistics.

Some observations:

1. The basic rate change formula for function [f] in the time interval [a,a +
h] is:  Rate of Change = f(a + h) - f(a).  This is true in physics,
psychology and pina coladas.  If there is no way to measure the quantitative
difference between languages, there is no way to validly measure "rate" of
change.  ("Rate" being defined in English and in science as a change in unit
quantity per another unit quantity.)

If we are talking about sound changes that separate two daughter languages,
we should be able to show that those specific sound changes took a certain
number of years, days, hours and with historical evidence.  If we are
claiming that that rate is somehow universal - justifying the application of
a uniformity assumption - we should be prepared to show that the same rate
per sound change can be observed in a large enough number of other languages.
 Or explain why they vary.

2.  An example.  In biology, we talk about the rate of mutation.  That is the
rate of particular chromosomal change per unit of time.  And here we actually
count the chromosomes that change per unit of time and can even project from
that correlation.  And it is also understood in what way that rate is
variable.  For example, when we artificially induce mutation, the rate at
which such change occurs is actually correlatable to the strength of the
radiation.  Or, as another example, at the age of fifty a man's sperm cells
will contain three times as many mutated chromosomes as they do when he is
twenty, plus or minus .062.  These are different quantifiable vectors that
affect the rate of change.

2. Others on this list invoke the close "resemblance" of cognates and
inherited morphology to suggest a lack of change.

In point of fact, this might be the worst indicia.

An example: Most mammals had body hair, a distinguishing "inherited"
characteristic.  So what does body hair tell us about "rate of change?"  50
million years ago, most mammals had body hair.  About 20 million years ago,
several branches of mammals developed that did not have body hair.  Elephants
who developed before humans have less body hair than humans. But today 40
million years later, most mammals still have lots of body hair.  So, the last
thing we would use to measure "rate of change" is the identifying "cognate"
of body hair.  Because it is sure to tell us the opposite of what we are
looking for.  It might even lead us to dubious conclusions like Greek and
Latin were in some way mutually comprehensible in 1000BC.

3. How much has English changed in the last thousand years?  Can that rate be
represented in a number?  How is that number derived, what specific feature
in the languages that changed is reflected in the number?  A sound change?
How does one measure sound changes?  How many sound changes? Why are other
features not being measured?  Is the rate of borrowing a more accurate
measure of rate of diversity among related languages?

How does the formula derived from changes in English in 1000 years measure up
when applied to French in 1000 years?  To Old Norse?  To Slavic?

How do you propose to measure the rate of change in modern preliterate
languages?  How do they measure up against written languages?  Do they give
any evidence that rate is affected by the acquisition of writing?

Are these results reproducible?

Can any scientist sit down with the same data and apply the same formula and
come up with the same results?

4. As I said, this is not meant to be disrespectful of linguistic expertise.
It is however what is required before any claim of any Uniformitarian
Principle can be seriously claimed in any scientific sense.  Before you can
make any claims about knowing "rates of change" in the preliterate past of IE
languages, you should at minimum be able to show some coherent, reproducible
formula for present IE languages.

But of course if Prof Trask's use of "Uniformitarian Principle" was
metaphorical or casual, and not meant to imply any real level of scientific
certainty, then I can have no objection to it.

Regards,
Steve Long


From rao.3 at osu.edu  Fri Jun  8 15:15:43 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 11:15:43 -0400
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.111543.0400.>

I am troubled with the claim that Anglo-Romani is a form of English.
There was paper in the early 70's (72 I think) in Language by Kulkarni
on the language of the Konkan Sarasvat Brahmins. This language is IA,
but has lost many of the IA syntactic patterns that do not exist in
Kannada (the major language of the region where KSB live), with the
Kannada patterns being used instead. Due to the convergence/substratum
influence, the difference between IA and Dravidian was much smaller to
begin with than between English and Romani. But the development is
clear: The patterns of the more frequently used language (Kannda being
used everywhere except when all participants were KSB) crept into the
minority language till the former ousted the latter. [From personal
knowledge the same can be said of Maratti speakers in Madurai.]

H. W. Hatting wrote:
> If this information is correct, English Romani is indeed basically English
> relexified with Romani vocabulary.

But how was the lexicon preserved? That today's speakers just learn the
"code words" does not mean that is how it happened in the first
place. A better hypothesis would be that as Romani became restricted in
use and essentially a "learnt language", the substratum influence of
English caused the grammar changes. That makes Anglo-Romani a dialect of
Romani with strong English influence, rather than English "relexified"
with Romani.

---

I am also uncomfortable with the idea of assigning "verbal morphology"
the primary place in ascertaining genetic relationships. It seems that
verbal categories are subject to remaking as much as nominal categories.
In particular, progressive -> imperfective/non-past and perfect ->
perfective/past seem to quite common, with the antecedents arising quite
often.

Perhaps what is being asserted is that morphemes used in conjugation are
more resistant to borrowing or external influence. This may be the case,
but seems to be arguable given what has been said so far.

Regards
Nath


From rao.3 at osu.edu  Fri Jun  8 19:36:43 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 15:36:43 -0400
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.153643.0400.>

"Larry Trask" <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk> wrote:
> It is true that sentence operators, such as negation and tense, are
> most typically associated with verbs.  But this is not true without
> exception. For example, in Sanskrit -- I am told -- the negative
> marker can appear anywhere in a sentence at all, and need
> not be attached to the verb.
> (OK; I'm ready for flak from the Sanskritists on this list. ;-) )

No flak on this specifically. Just that when making statements about
Sanskrit, we must pay attention to diachrony and genre, due to the
length of time and substratum influences.

For a more detailed analysis, see Gonda's "La place de la particule
négative "na" dans la phrase en vieil indien.", Leiden, E. J. Brill,
1951.  I have forgotton the his precise conclusions. My impression is as
follows: In the oldest prose texts, negation (na') occurs most often in
the clause initial position or with the verb. In the medieval
commentaries,  the last position in the sentence is common and this
position starts appearing in Mahabhashya a 1st c. BCE commentary, but
this is generally considered to be Dravidian influence (where negation
is indicated by a particle cliticized to the finite verb that would
otherwise be at the end of the sentence).


From dlwhite at texas.net  Fri Jun  8 22:25:08 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 17:25:08 -0500
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.172508.0500.>

[ moderator edited ]

>> Whether TK meant "anything goes" or not depends on how strong a reading we
>> give to their statement.

> LT:  But why should we impute to them a position which they have never
> asserted or endorsed?  Is this fair?

DLW:  My point is that their formulation includes possibilities that do not
actually occur, _in their own evidence_, which I presume they can reasonably
be expected to be familiar with.  Their failure to note this is surely a
failure of some sort, and whatever we choose to call it, it is fair to call
it something not good.

>> It should be noted that whether finite verbal morphology gets borowed at all
>> is a matter of definition,

> LT:  Sorry; I can't agree.  If language A gradually replaces most of its
> inherited verbal morphology with morphology taken from language B, while at
> the same time retaining much of its inherited lexicon and grammar, then
> there is no definition about it: the language has borrowed verbal
> morphology, and that is the end of the matter.  T & K's stance is that we
> should consider this a possibility and look to see if there are any
> examples of it.

DLW:  There aren't, save by hypothesis.  To both assume and conclude that
the "gradual replacement" scenario has happened is entirely circular.  It is
indeed a matter definition, or at least of theoretical stance.  We have one
simple fact:  there are no attested mixed finite verbal morphologies.  This
can be viewed either as reflecting a mystic pricinple that "There is no
partial borrowing of finite verbal morphologies" or as indicating that
"Genetic descent can always be traced through finite vebal morphology (where
applicable)".   Or we can 1) assume that in the past there were mixed finite
verbal morphologies, so that their absence in the present (and the attested
past) is therefore simply a misleading coincidence, and then 2) triumphantly
conclude that mixed finite verbal morphologies are possible, QED.  This is a
sub-case of the "it was different in those days" view of language change, by
which all sorts of bizarre things happened in the past, in situations we are
not able to observe, in this case mixed languages lurking under every rock,
a la Steve Long.  You quite rightly decry this sort of approach in a very
recent posting.  Good luck, by the way, answering Steve Long's objections to
what might be called "mono-descent", in view of what you have recently said
concerning the supposed applicability Tiger Woods' genetic descent to this
matter.

> LT:  Thomason now concludes that Laha, at least, is indeed an
> example of this very thing.  Whether she is right in this is a matter for
> empirical investigation, not a matter of definition.

DLW:  Unless there is something in the facts that can prove that a partial
Malay finite verbal morphology existed at one point (not likely, since Malay
has no finite verbal morphology) it remains fundamentally a matter of
theoretical stance.

> LT:  Well, Laha is on the table.  The chief investigator, Collins, has
> concluded that Laha has indeed borrowed almost all of its verbal morphology
> from Malay.  What is there to discuss, apart from the possibility that
> Collins may be in error?

DLW:  That, even if true, is not proof that a partial Malay finite verbal
morphology existed in Laha at some point in the past.  And "borrowing" of an
entire verbal morphology may just as well be taken as descent from the
supposed source of this.  Consider the case of Mednyj Aleut.  If Collins
claims (with good evidence) that Laha at one point had part of its finite
verbal morphology from Malay, that would be different, and Laha would indeed
be a mixed language.  But we are, to use DGK's phrase, playing ping pong in
the dark without access to the original article.

>>> LT:  If so, let me ask this: in what respect does Michif fall
>>> short of being a mixed language?  It looks to me like a paradigm case of a
>>> mixed language.  If we encountered, or imagined, a real mixed language,
>>> what features would it have that Michif lacks?

>> DLW:  The finite verbal morphology of Michif is all Cree.  Therefore, by
>> the Davidian standard, it is Cree.  That also answers the scond question.

> OK.  My friend Homer is a specialist in nouns.  He loves nouns, and he
> regards them as paramount in languages.  According to Homer, the ancestry
> of a language is determined by the origin of its nouns.  Therefore, by the
> Homeric definition, Michif is French.  End of discussion. ;-)

> Why is Homer's position more arbitrary than yours?

DLW:  You seem to be repeatedly missing some basic points here.  Not only is
there a good case to be made for the proposition that verbs are more
fundamental ("higher") than nouns, but there are some mixed nominal
morphologies, whereas there are no mixed verbal morphologies.  The cases are
not parallel.  Among other things, "Homer's" standard would not yield a
clear verdict in cases of mixed nominal morphology.  He would also have to
say why nominal morphology is to be regarded as the most "framish" part of
the frame, and therefore the most reliable indicator of genetic descent,
when the evidence suggests very strongly that this honor goes to verbal
morphology.

[on Takia]

>> If the finite verbal morphology (morphemes, not categories) is Takia, it is
>> Takia. That may well seem arbitrary, but it is not.  Verbs are more basic
>> than nouns, and what is more basic is more indicative of descent.

> LT:  I'm sorry, but I cannot agree that verbs are more basic than nouns.
> This seems to me an arbitrary fiat.  Anyway, I've never seen a language
> without nouns, and that suggests to me that nouns are about as basic as
> anything can be in languages.

DLW:  It is not a matter of what is or is not basic in some binary sense,
but of what is more basic in the sense of being higher in the tree.  Nouns
depend on verbs, not the other way around.

> LT:  But I'll discuss this in terms of what follows.
> A little quibble first, though.  Arguably, I possess no characteristic more
> "basic" than my biological sex, which is male.  Does it therefore follow
> that I am more closely related to my father than to my mother? ;-)

DLW:  Vague analogies with biology are not really relevant here.

> LT:  The position that the verb is the head of the sentence is embraced in
> certain syntactic theories, especially in most dependency grammars and in
> some relational grammars.  But it is rejected in other approaches,
> including other relational approaches and all Chomskyan approaches.  The
> Chomskyan view takes the head of the sentence to be an abstract element,
> and not the verb.  I am not a Chomskyan, but I don't think it can simply be
> taken for granted that the verb is the head of the sentence.

DLW: It is not being taken for granted.  It is in effect part of what is
being posited:  "if we assume that verbs are more basic than nouns .."  By
they way, the Chomskyite "INFL" (if they are still doing that:  I know
little and care less) is historically descended from the inflection of the
verb, so their position too would have to be that verbal inflection (in this
case finite) is more basic.

> LT:  There is also a fascinating counter-argument here.  Consider this
> example:

>   'That Martians are green is well known.'

> Now, the subject of 'is' is plainly the complement clause 'That Martians
> are green'.  Fine.  Now, what is the head of this clause?  Is it the verb,
> as David seems to be implying?  Then the head of the subject is 'are'.  But
> -- whoops -- this is plural, and yet the whole clause takes singular
> agreement.
> Oh, dear. ;-)

DLW:  This is not so fascinating, or problematic.  It is fairly easy to say
that the subject of the verb is "that", which would explain why it cannot,
in such cases, be deleleted.

>> We may also note that things that might be held to apply to
>> an entire proposition, like negation, are typically attached to or
>> associated with verbs,

> LT:  It is true that sentence operators, such as negation and tense, are most
> typically associated with verbs.  But this is not true without exception.
> For example, in Sanskrit -- I am told -- the negative marker can appear
> anywhere in a sentence at all, and need not be attached to the verb.  (OK;
> I'm ready for flak from the Sanskritists on this list. ;-) )

DLW:  You do not have to wait for flak from Sanskritists.  What you say is
true not only of Sanskrit, but also, marginally, for English:  "I see not
any good cause ."  To use "no" would be more normal, but "not any" seems
possible.  In any event, it is not relevant.  I said "typically", not
"universally".   And we do not, for example, find markers of tense attached
to subject nouns.

>> and that though there is a type of language,
>> polysynthetic, in which the verb and its mandatorily associated elements
>> form a complete sentence, there is no corresponding type of language
>> where the subject noun and its mandatorily associated elements form a
>> complete sentence.

> LT:  It is true that, in *some* languages, a sentence may consist entirely of
> an affixed verb.  But it is equally true that, in *some* languages, a
> sentence may consist entirely of nominal elements, with no verb-form present
> at all.

DLW:  There is no _type_ of language where the subject noun and its
mandatorily associated elements (which would include tense) form a complete
sentence.  And except for cases of BE-deletion (which only occurs in the
present), adjetives that serve as (and are marked as) verbs, and NPs uttered
when context makes clear what the higher VP would be, I venture to doubt the
validity of your assertation.

>> Thus upon examination it is not arbitrary to regard
>> vebal morphology as more basic than nominal morphology.

> LT:  Ah, no -- for several reasons.  I've just mentioned two: it is not an
> obvious truth that the verb is the head of the sentence, and it is not true
> that verbs are universally more indispensable than nominals.  But there is
> more, much more.

> What David White is arguing, successfully or not, is that the *lexical verb*
> plays a central role in sentence structure.  Even if we grant this, it *does
> not follow* that verbal morphology is somehow more central than any other
> morphology, such as nominal morphology.  Verbal morphology is not the same
> thing as a lexical verb.

DLW:  This is a point you yourself seem to miss, in attributing to me
beliefs about lexical verbs which were intended to apply only to verbal
morphology.

> LT:  Moreover, David's arguments here seem self-contradictory.  Consider a
> language with native verbal morphology but with many borrowed lexical verbs
> -- such as English or Basque.  In such a language, it is the (borrowed)
> lexical verb which serves as the sentential head, in David's account, and
> which determines the syntactic properties of the sentence.  At the same
> time, the native verbal morphology merely follows the requirements of the
> lexical verb in a wholly passive manner.  But now consider David's
> position: the (borrowed) lexical verb is the most central element in the
> sentence, and its properties determine the structure of the sentence,
> including the associated morphology.  Yet it is the native verbal
> morphology which is somehow (I haven't followed this).

DLW:  No kidding.

> LT:  .more central in identifying the genetic origin of the language,
> because this morphology is now what is "central".  Have I missed something?
> This line of thinking seems wholly inconsistent to me.

DLW:  Let me back up (or off) and attempt to restate what I am saying.
Finite verbal morphology is the most "framish" of the frame.  As the frame
is reduced, under severe external influence, finite verbal morphology is the
last to go.  (If it does, then genetic descent has truly been lost.  But
this is astronomically rare.)  To put it another way, when genetic descent
is backed into a corner, finite verbal morphology is that corner.  Yes, this
is all "by hypothesis".  But the hypothesis is, of course, intended to serve
a useful prurpose or two, and has not been invented out of sheer
counter-trendy perversity (though I am surely guilty of that too).

The main "useful purpose" served is to explain why we find mixed nominal
morphologies but not mixed (finite) verbal morphologies.  People will borrow
nominal morphology ("alumni", "crises") before they will borrow verbal
morphology.  (Note that nobody even bothers to worry about the "proper"
preterites of Romance verbs in English, for example.  They just will not
intrude so much foreign-ness into "the frame".)

Another "useful purpose" is to provide a clear standard for assigning
genetic descent in doubtful cases.  (See just above for why the standard is
_not_ arbitrary.  I am getting tired of hearing about how it supposedly is.)
I note that no answer has been given to my assertion that TK might as well
be tossing a coin in some of their assignments.  I presume this is because
there is no valid answer.  There is indeed little to be said for a
theoretical framework that in one case of "Language A morphology, Language B
words" assigns the language in question to Language A, but in another case
assigns the language in question to Langage B.  If things like this are TK's
main selling points, I hope they give up sales.  Be that as it may, with a
clear standard, we can avoid not only coin-tossing but also finding mixed
languages (or worse, semi-mixed languages) under every pre-historic rock.
Thus we have an answer to the "No Proto" crowd, which is more than TK can
manage.

I will give a quite relevant example of what I mean by this.  If genetic
descent is to be traced through non-sound features (I notice you are no
longer actively claiming this), then why isn't Celtic a mixed language, so
that there was never really any such thing as Proto-Celtic?  The non-sound
convergence of (Insular) Celtic to Semitic, or something like it, is quite
striking, and extends even down to the level of fairly minor details like
the Northern Subject Rule and Interior Possession ("You killed my horse"
rather than "You killed to me the horse")  I suppose you and others could
claim that the level of Semitic-seeming non-sound resemblances in Celtic,
though it is "a lot", is not "enough", but who is to deny the Steve Longs
and other No-Protos of the world when they come back and say "Yes it is."?

> LT:  It seems that David is telling us that, at one and the same time, the
> borrowed lexical verb is paramount, while the native verbal morphology is
> also paramount.  And I can't follow this.  Surely it has to be one or the
> other, at best.

DLW:  I said nothing about lexical verbs being "paramount" in genetic
descent.  You made that one up yourself.  The argument about verbs
(presumably lexical verbs) being heads (not the same thing) was made in
support of the arguments about the primacy of verbal morphology in the frame
of language, and therefore in genetic descent.  It was not an argument about
the primacy of lexical verbs.  Two different primacies.  In my example with
"necesitates", the verb is the head (more than any of the nouns, anyway),
but the ending is part of the frame, in a neo-Swadeshian sense of being the
most basic morpheme.  Speaking of waxing Neo-Swadeshian, note that if we
included "preterite" (more or less) as a basic meaning and took "/o/-grade"
as its phonic instantiation, the IE-ness of Germanic would be evident on
that basis alone. On a smaller scale, the Germanicness of all Germanic would
be evident from dental preterites alone.

> LT:  Finally, let me advance a counter-argument.  As David's own 'tank'
> example illustrates, it is commonplace in languages for verbs to agree with
> nominal arguments -- that is, for intrinsic features of nominals (person,
> number, gender, maybe others) to be copied onto verbs.  But it is virtually
> unknown -- perhaps entirely unknown -- for verbal features to be copied onto
> nominals.  Is this not a splendid argument that nominals are more autonomous,
> more central, more "basic", and that verbs are merely the slaves of nominals?
> ;-)

DLW:  Not really, no.   Polysynthetic languages have been described as
having their nouns dependent on verbs like planets orbiting the sun.  I
think that is a good analogy.  Thus in Swahili if you were to say the
equivalent of  "The crocodile ate the book", the sentence would have (I
forget the ordering) a noun meaning 'crocodile', a noun meaning 'book', and
a verb meaning (more or less) "he ate it".    Class markers would bind the
element meaning 'he' to 'crocodile' and the element meaning 'it' to 'book'.
(Theoretically if 'crocodile' and 'book' were in the same class as there
would be ambiguity.)  The verb is a complete sentence, with its associated
nouns clearly (I would think) dependent on it.  If, by your argument, the
class concords indicate that the verb is to best regarded as dependent on
one of the nouns, which is it?  Are we going to diagram the sentence as
having its verb under two nouns?  I hope not.

 By the way, pronouns are often cliticized and effectively bound to the
verb.  Thus it is that "look up the answer" is possible whereas "look up it"
(with the same meaning) is not.  I note that TK's only two examples of
pronouns supposedly having been borrowed involve English supposedly
borrowing pronouns from other Germanic languages (Norse, Dutch) that had not
necessarily (far from it) diverged to the point of mutual
incomprehensilibility.  This is surely a suspicious coincidence, and I do
hereby officially venture to doubt that there are any examples of personal
pronouns being borrowed in cases of unequivocal mutual unintelligibility.
(Other than silly things like the joke usage of "moi" in English.)  So prove
me wrong.

Dr. David L. White


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Tue Jun 12 12:18:10 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2001 08:18:10 EDT
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
Message-ID: <TUE.12.JUN.2001.081810.EDT.>

There is a larger issue that has come up in this discussion of "finite verb
morphology"  as an indicator of language relatedness.  Awhile back we saw the
following exchange:

Larry Trask wrote:
<< The lexicon of Laha is largely native, though partly borrowed from Malay.
But the grammar is almost 100% Malay, with only a few fragments of native
Laha grammar surviving.  So, my question for David White is this: is Laha a
variety of Malay, or not?  Since the grammar is almost entirely Malay, it
would seem that he must answer "Yes; it's Malay." >>

In a message dated 5/25/2001 8:15:42 PM, dlwhite at texas.net replied:
<< I would need to know what the "few bits of Laha grammar" are.  If they
involve finite verbal morphology, then what I have been saying is wrong....
If they involve nominal morphology, derivational or non-finite verbal
morphology, or (worse yet) mere categories, then what I have been saying is
not wrong.>>

Let's look at Dr White's approach here and what it might mean:

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.

Situation #2: Same as above, but Language A's "finite verbal morphology" is
shared with Language C

RESULT:  ENTIRE "nominal morphology, derivational or non-finite verbal
morphology,.." etc., are now "non-genetic."  Language A is now genetically
related to Language C.

So, a large part of Language A goes abruptly from "genetic" to "non-genetic"
depending on the presence of certain verb morphology.

I think any good scientist would, in the example above, call the distinction
between "genetic" and  "non-genetic" operationally useless.  The second you
can see the interpretation of the whole data (the whole language) turned 180
degrees based on the presence or absence of one element ("finite verbal
morphology"), you know that nothing else is really being measured BUT that
one element.

Operationally, this simply means "genetic" equals "finite verbal morphology."
 What happens in its absence, doesn't matter.  The rest of the language can
only be a relative statistical indicator.  The correlation between "finite
verbal morphology" and "genetic" is determinative, no matter how the theory
behind the operation explains it.

The road that Dr. White goes down in the quote above is one inevitable result
of the assumption that languages can be "genetically" descended from ONLY one
ancestor.  Sooner or later, you will have one "genetic" element coming up
against another.  The contest then becomes which "genetic" element is the
winning "genetic" element.  Everything else loses and becomes non-genetic.
And you will have Dr. White always trumping the table because "finite verbal
morphology" is never "borrowed" or has some other claim to being preemptive.
He wins by definition, so the game is pointless.

None of this has anything to do with comprehension of the languages in
question.  None of it has to do with the possibility that each element has
its own independent, inherent claims to being genetic.  Claims to being
genetic that should not change whether or not Dr. White's trump card is
present.

dlwhite at texas.net also writes:
<<So even the mixed language crowd now admits that a language which

has grammar from source A and (non-grammatical) lexicon from source B is a

form of language A?  That is pretty much what I have been saying. >>

Common sense and half-way decent science would suggest that it is a form of
both source languages.  Why should one genetic element make another
non-genetic?

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.

Haitian Creole speakers were largely descended from West African speakers.
Haitian Creole used West African lexicon and 17th Century French affixes.
What is the possible usefulness of calling it French and not African?  What
did those speakers of African descent do exactly?  Learn French, temporarily
forget West African and then later borrow West African words from themselves?

Common sense and half-way decent science would suggest that there is
something wrong here.  Obviously there are different elements in Haitian
Creole and they obviously come from different sources.  The older source
among the generations of speakers who passed on the language was West
African.  The later French element may be "more genetic."  But why would that
make the West African elements "non-genetic"?  They can lay claim to being
original, continuous and native with those speakers.  How could they suddenly
become totally non-genetic?

Isolating systematic elements of two languages to find a common ancestor is a
powerful methodology.  But why would we conclude from that process that
either of those languages as a whole can only descend from one ancestor?
What makes one element genetic and a similar element borrowed?

Back in 1997, Stefan Georg - who was and may still be a member of this list -
discussed on the HistLing list his work on Itel'men and Chukchi-Koryak.
There he wrote something that has always struck me as being just on the brink
of the cross-over in thinking.  He wrote:
<<There *are* degrees of language relationship (certainly there are degrees
of *discernability* of language relationship), relationship is simply not
always a binary +/- thing.>>

Once you perceive relationship as a matter of degree, you leave room for less
than 100% singular descent.  And for multiple descent.  You are not stuck
with relating a language as a single lump, so you don't need to define a
whole language by a single ancestor.  You can look at the parts.  You can
avoid the situation where the map of human language development is just a
trail of "finite verbal morphology" - which is nothing but a part of a
language and a part that doesn't come close to defining the essence of a real
life working language.

Regards,
Steve Long


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Fri Jun  8 17:55:06 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 12:55:06 -0500
Subject: European Genetics/IE
In-Reply-To: <213705456.3200900543@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.125506.0500.>

[snip]

>And consider the case of Basque.  With Basque, it is only for the phonology
>that we can track the language back as far as 2000 years.  But we can do
>this much, and the results are interesting.  Almost all of the big changes
>in Basque pronunciation seem to have occurred in the early Middle Ages,
>roughly AD 800-1200.  At that time, the Basque Country was a rural
>backwater, largely cut off from the great political and social currents
>sweeping across western Europe.  After 1200, though, most of the country
>was absorbed by Castile.  It was at this time that the Basques began to
>acquire their reputation as formidable seafarers, developing fishing,
>whaling and trade.  They began to play an important role in Spanish
>affairs, and they played a great part in the Spanish discovery and
>settlement of the Americas.  Basque society was transformed by massive
>emigration; Basque ports became bustling and prosperous; shipbuilding
>became a great Basque industry, as did iron and steel, and eventually
>manufacturing.  Yet, during all of these remarkable political, social and
>economic transformations, the pronunciation of the language scarcely
>changed at all.  Moreover, the scraps of evidence that we have suggest that
>the rich and distinctive Basque morphology has not changed significantly
>since the 9th century, at least.

>So, in the Basque case, rate of social change does not appear to correlate
>at all with rate of linguistic change.  It appears that the language
>changed fastest when it was spoken in a stable and largely closed society,
>but much less rapidly after it was caught up in dramatic social changes.

	It seems logical that increased communication and mobility between
areas would have a leveling effect

[snip]

>Well, not necessarily.  Today there are nearly 7000 mother tongues.  Of
>these, probably no more than a few dozen are creoles (I exclude pidgins),
>even though the European expansion of several centuries ago created
>exceptionally favorable circumstances for creole-formation in several parts
>of the world.  If fewer than one percent of today's languages are creoles,
>we should not be surprised to find that creoles were not exactly thick on
>the ground in the remote past.

[snip]

	Wouldn't it be possible that some languages or dialects may have
started out as creoles and then have become standardized through increased
contact with the parent language. Something like this is claimed for
African-African English Vernacular and it seems plausible that (some) early
regional forms of Romance may have initially been more like Latinate
creoles than daughter languages.

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From g_sandi at hotmail.com  Fri Jun  8 12:36:01 2001
From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 12:36:01 -0000
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.123601.0000.>

Reply to: Thomas McFadden <tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu>

>> Actually, I don't think that I said anything about the position of full NP
>> subjects relative to verbs. Still, having a different order for personal
>> pronouns is not that unusual, is it? In the Romance languages the direct
>> object of the verb normally comes after the verb if it is an NP (Je vois le
>> chien), but before the verb if it is a personal pronoun (Je te vois).

>> Whether a similar switchover can happen with the subject is another
>> question. I don't think that there is a theoretical reason why it can't.

>if you were arguing that PIE was VSO, no matter whether the subject was
>full NP or pronoun, then fine, that's no problem if it can be
>supported.  there's nothing at all implausible about the idea that clitic
>pronouns in such a situation could have developed into agreement suffixes,
>of course.  appologies.  and no, there's nothing unusual in personal
>pronouns having a different order than full NPs, it is very common, but i
>think the specific case where full NP subjects precede the verb and
>pronoun subjects follow it would be very odd, simply because the examples
>of ordering differences that im familiar with are like the one you mention
>above, where full NP objects follow the verb and pronouns precede,
>presumably because, being lighter elements, they're more susceptible to
>cliticization.

I think that it is odd as well, yet I can't help noticing that personal
markings of verbs in IE (and Uralic and Altaic as well, for all you
Nostraticists) consistently come after the verb stem and not before it.
What's more, some of these endings contain consonants identical or similar
to what is found in the corresponding personal pronoun. -m- in the first
person is the most obvious (in PIE and Uralic, plus some other proto
languages), as is the -t- in the 2nd person plural (also, 2nd person sing.
in Uralic), -t- in the third person less so, the -s- in the 2nd person sing.
not at all. There are three competing hypotheses:

1. coincidence
2. agglutination of the pronoun
3. there is a relationship, but the ending is not the result of an
agglutination of the verbal root with a pronoun

If the answer is no.2 above, I would like to come up with a succession of
linguistic changes that look reasonable and result in the pattern we see.

>> Admittedly there are problems here, including the fact that older IE
>> languages definitely favour VSO word order,

>i may be betraying a lack of important knowledge here, but what makes you
>say this?  which older IE languages favor VSO?  i suppose this is why i
>misinterpreted your previous post, because i didn't understand the
>positing of VSO as the basic order.  (and i am honestly asking here, not
>just looking for trouble!)

Sorry about that. I meant SOV. And part of my job description in my
non-linguistic life is being a proofreader! Shame on me...

With my best wishes,

Gabor


From xavier.delamarre at free.fr  Fri Jun  8 20:07:32 2001
From: xavier.delamarre at free.fr (Xavier Delamarre)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 22:07:32 +0200
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
In-Reply-To: <002d01c0ed96$da204880$c802703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.220732.0200.>

le 5/06/01 10:09, Eduard Selleslagh à edsel at glo.be a écrit :

>> 1/ Hier j'ai achete une maison tres grande a Vaucresson

>> 2/ Hier j'ai achete une tres grande maison a Vaucresson

>> Absolutely no difference in meaning, style or emphasis. I am sorry.

> Yes, but consider:
> 1) De Gaulle était un très grand homme.
> 2) De Gaulle était un homme très grand.

> The meaning is completely different.

    Of course, classical example of handbooks. You have (semantic) freedom
with the substantive maison but not with homme.
    What is in question here is that when there is the possibility of free
word order, it does not induce _systematically_ a difference in meaning,
style, emphasis etc.
    But there again it is not PIE, where these possibilities were much more
extended than in Modern french.
    And to reduce PIE syntax to word-order (Lehmann, Friedrich) is simply
nonsense.

    XD


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sun Jun 10 08:19:51 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 09:19:51 +0100
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
Message-ID: <SUN.10.JUN.2001.091951.0100.>

>>...a more intimate practice of old IE languages like Latin,
>>Greek, Sanskrit,or Lithuanian would convince you that word-order is not an
>>essential part of their grammar.

>That would be practically impossible, since all of the grammar books I
> trust on those languages say exactly the opposite.

The role of word order in these languages is very well known, and the debate
is in danger of becoming more unhelpful, as it becomes more polarised.  Of
course there is a sense in which both of you are right.

There is an expected, but not necessary word order.  The degree of
expectation is reasonably strong compared with say German, where very small
contextual changes can provoke adjustment of the first element of a
sentence.  In both Latin and Greek, a change from the expected order usually
brings a noticeable emphasis.   Sanskrit is more easily varied.

So word order is not an essential part of the grammar, in one sense, but it
is an essential element of the whole linguistic communication.

Peter


From jalonsom at arrakis.es  Sun Jun 10 10:16:49 2001
From: jalonsom at arrakis.es (Juan Alberto Alonso)
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 12:16:49 +0200
Subject: One single vocalic phoneme in PIE?
Message-ID: <SUN.10.JUN.2001.121649.0200.>

Dear IEists,

I'm new in the list, so the point I wanted to raise might have been
discussed already (in that case I apologize for coming back to the issue).

As far as I have read in the specialized literature, some reconstructions
assume a single vocalic phoneme */e/ for the early stages of
(pre-inflectional) Proto-Indoeuropean, probably with two alophones [e] and
[o] that would later become phonemes of their own and the
origin of the (e/o/0) ablaut phenomenon (cf. Gr /steixo:/, /stoixos/,
/'estixon/).

The point is of course that such a reduced vocalic inventory is quite
unusual throughout the world's languages. The only example I know of
are some languages of the Abkhaz-Adygean family, (e.g. Kabardian), spoken in
the Caucasus, with only two vowels. By the way, these
languages are ergative and they have a big number of consonantal phonemes
(up to 80 in Ubykh).

Juan A. Alonso

[ Moderator's note:
  I have already directed Mr. Alonso to the archives for the recent discussion
  of languages with putative small inventories of vowels.
  --rma ]


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Fri Jun  8 14:07:54 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 09:07:54 -0500
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.090754.0500.>

Dear Peter and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "petegray" <petegray at btinternet.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2001 2:20 PM

[PCRp]
>> does that, in your opinion, mean there was no *g^en-?

[PG]
> One senses an unfriendly trap - which is fun - but I do prefer a more open
> sharing of ideas.

[PCR]
Seriously, I am not trying to "trap" anyone --- just soliciting informed
opinions.

The reason for my question is that, in another context, I had a difference of
opinion with someone on this question.

Like Pokorny, I believe that an Old Indian form like _jánati_ points to
*g^en- rather than *g^enH-.

Secondarily, everything I have investigated leads me to believe that the basis
of the CVC definition of a root is pretty universal.

Methodologically, if it (and some others) can be derived from *both* *g^en- and
*g^enH-, I see no reason to assume the non-existence of *g^en- just because all
forms can be derived from *g^enH-. My preference would be to assume that a
root, *g^en- (which I would consider to be *basic*) and a root with extension,
*g^enH- have been conflated into a single paradigm.

This scenario seems to me to be a logical possibility (and, if one is commmited
to the CVC-model as I am: necessary) but I do understand that if Occam's Razor
is vigorously applied, there is, of course, no necessity to posit *g^en-.

> Studiously trying to avoid your trap, I say that the existence of the root
> (or roots) *g'enH / g'neH says nothing at all about the existence of *g'en.
> I do however allow that I am not aware of any IE forms that would point to
> such a root, rather than to *genH with loss of H.

> Is that carefully enough worded for you?

[PCR]
Certainly.

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 Jun  8 17:14:07 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 13:14:07 -0400
Subject: *G^EN-
In-Reply-To: <007d01c0edde$baf1b820$fbf1fea9@swbell.net>
 (proto-language@email.msn.com)
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.131407.0400.>

On 5 June 2001, Patrick Ryan wrote:

> Thus, *g^enH1- would constitute an exception to the general proposition that
> IE roots have the form CVC-. Every good "rule" needs an exception or two.

The general proposition that IE roots are CeC is directly related to the notion
that IE roots involve extensions, or determinatives.  The root is abstracted
from the stem, that portion of the word which is left after all inflectional
and derivational morphemes are abstracted away; since the stem can be very
messy, its analysis into a root plus a (poosibly zero) suffix plus one or more
extensions simplifies things.

Lehmann has a discussion of this in his 1952 monograph on phonology, derived
from Benveniste's long exposition in _Origines de la formation des noms en
indoeurop'een_.

So the exception is only apparent.

								Rich Alderson


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri Jun  8 18:35:43 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 19:35:43 +0100
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.193543.0100.>

> *g^enH1- would constitute an exception to the general proposition that IE
> roots have the form CVC-.  Every good "rule" needs an exception or two.

There are many exceptions of this kind, Pat.  Are you being, perhaps, a
little disingenuous?   Just for the pattern Ce(/R)TH (T= stop), one can
suggest:
  *keubH2   lie down, lay down
  *sekH        cut
  *wedhH1   hit
  *wetH2      say
  *krepH      creep
The pattern of g'enH,  CeRH, is even commoner.

Peter


From sarima at friesen.net  Sun Jun 10 00:32:50 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 17:32:50 -0700
Subject: *G^EN-
In-Reply-To: <007d01c0edde$baf1b820$fbf1fea9@swbell.net>
Message-ID: <SAT.9.JUN.2001.173250.0700.>

At 11:15 AM 6/5/01 -0500, proto-language wrote:

>Dear Rich and IEists:

>I have no problem with that opinion. Thus, *g^enH1- would constitute an
>exception to the general proposition that IE roots have the form CVC-. Every

I actually doubt any such rule exists.  For one thing, I suspect the idea
is due at least in part to what Rich called "over-analysis".  That is, many
of the supposed CVC- roots that only occur with root determinatives are
better treated as CVCVC- roots (or even CVCC or CCVC roots).  There are
also a fair number of roots that apparently originally ended in laryngeals,
which now masquerade as CVC- roots.

I find it better to just take PIE roots as they come, without trying to
force them into some preconceived mold.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Fri Jun  8 19:24:34 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 14:24:34 -0500
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.142434.0500.>

Dear Steve and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: <X99Lynx at aol.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2001 11:54 PM

> In a message dated 6/4/2001 2:30:01 AM, edsel at glo.be writes:

>>> Damate:r - Dor., Arc., Thess. and Boeot. form of goddess Demeter

<snip>

> OR spouse.  Are you familiar with how the wildman Enkidu was tamed in
> Gilgamesh, an epic that might predate the earliest IE texts by 1500 years?
> (And then again there's "the taming of the shrew.")

[PCR]
I believe that's: "the taming with the screw".

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 Jun  8 21:30:39 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 17:30:39 -0400
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
In-Reply-To: <5b.16ff6271.284f116b@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com)
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.173039.0400.>

NB:  In the following, I transcribe <omega> as <O:> and <eta> as <E:>.

On 6 June 2001, Steve Long wrote:

> In a message dated 6/4/2001 2:30:01 AM, edsel at glo.be writes:

>>> Damate:r - Dor., Arc., Thess. and Boeot. form of goddess Demeter

>> [Ed Selleslagh]

>> Don't exaggerate: isn't that 'god(dess)-mother'? (Cf. Jupiter: 'god-father')

Actually, Ed, it's "sky-father", from *dyu:-, a variant of *dye:w- "(bright)
sky"; cf. _Zeu pater_, vocative epithet of Zeus, and Skt. _dyauh. pita:r_.  The
first element in the name of the harvest goddess is, I think, unrelated.

> Or Demeter, the goddess of domestication?  Sometimes I suppose the chicken
> comes first.  Sometimes the egg.  But in the context of all those other
> words, and with an open-mind, the possibilities do expand.

Steve has misled himself with his transcriptions.  The name of the goddess is
_dE:mE:tE:r_, Doric et al. _da:ma:tE:r_, Aeolic _dO:ma:tE:r_, not comparable to
_domos_, _demO:_ "I build", etc., nor to _dama:r, damartos_.  Quantities are
vitally important.

								Rich Alderson


From alderson+mail at panix.com  Fri Jun  8 21:33:30 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 17:33:30 -0400
Subject: Red Deer in Anatolia
In-Reply-To: <001101c0edcd$113776a0$a76063d1@texas.net> (dlwhite@texas.net)
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.173330.0400.>

On 5 June 2001, David White wrote:

> From: Rich Alderson <alderson+mail at panix.com>

>> You wish to have the word which means "red deer" in all daughter languages,
>> even those spoken where the fallow deer is present, to have once meant
>> "fallow deer", because the red deer is not present in Anatolia.

> Not that it matters greatly, but red deer are (or perhaps were?)  present in
> Anatolia.  They are one of the more successful recent species, with a
> strikingly wide distribution.

I haven't had the time to review all the recent postings regarding the habitat
of the red deer vs. that of the fallow deer, but if Dr. White is correct, then
my point is _a fortiori_ made.

								Rich Alderson


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Tue Jun 12 03:34:19 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 23:34:19 EDT
Subject: Ockham's Razor
Message-ID: <MON.11.JUN.2001.233419.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/4/2001 10:08:22 PM, alderson+mail at panix.com writes:
<<Meanings do not change as fluidly as you want them to:..>>

The substantive word I said the most yesterday, "money", found its name into
my language from a temple, dedicated to a goddess who had nothing to do with
financial matters, that by pure accident was located across the street from a
Roman mint.  When important words like this one arise in such a negligent
fashion, it's hard for me to accept that that less important ones travel any
less fluidly - at least without closer examination.

And it's not a matter of what I want to believe.  It's where the facts lead
me.

 <<You wish to have the word which means "red deer" in all daughter
languages, even those spoken where the fallow deer is present, to have once
meant "fallow deer", because the red deer is not present in Anatolia.>>

As Dr White pointed out I believe, the red deer was present in Anatolia and
even Mesopotamia.

I do not "wish" anything. I simply know of no differentiation between the
fallow and the red deer in the Anatolian languages, where we know that both
deer were present.  I also know of no sure differentiation made in Greek (in
Ionia or otherwise), where the fallow and red appear to have been present in
many form (live, as skins, antlers, food, images.)  And suspect that there
was no specific word that differentiated between the two species before the
imported fallow became the favorite of medieval European aristocrats creating
deer parks.  It's worthy of note in this connection that in English today,
the red and the fallow are both "deer,"  but in America the red is not a deer
anymore but an "elk," while the fallow deer is still very much a "deer."  So
much for non-fluidity.

There are two words in Greek that might have referred to the fallow - one is
<stago:n>, spotted, in the form <stagosi> which I believe is how Pliny used
it referring to an antlered animal (and therefore not a generic spotted
fawn).  English etymologies seem to ignore the Greek word, possibly because -
following the highly influential Pliny - stag came to mean a mature male
deer.  But in the early English texts it often appears in connection with the
precise age of the deer, which suggests perhaps that these were at least
captive deer - whether red or fallow.  But <stagoni> may have also referred
originally to the Axis deer, which like "Indian dogs", may have already been
imported into Greece in Herodotus' time (pre 500BC).  The Axis deer has red
deer-style antlers but adult spots, even more so than the fallow.

<Hellos> in Greek might also have referred to the fallow, rather than the red
deer, as in the text I've seen it seems to refer to a smaller antlered adult
deer.  But the dictionaries usually make it almost synonymous with <nebros>,
a fawn, and there's really no way to tell.   <Elaphos> shows no specificity
at all.  <Dama> may refer to a tamed deer, and in Latin may refer to a tamed
deer let loose.  Or may refer to an antlerless doe or buck in contrast to an
antlered <cervus>, which is the way Virgil seems to use it.

As far as the deer words that Mr. Stirling brings up, I don't have enough
information about those eastern languages to know whether there was an
ancient contrast between red and fallow in for example Armenian (where there
may have been fallow deer), and it appears that today the deer are simply
contrasted by addition of the word "yellow" to the usual deer word.  So none
of this can prove very much.  Especially since Buck tells me that Sanskrit
uses a horse word for deer.  And "buck" itself is a cow word, for that
matter.  So much for non-fluidity.

<<(Mr. Stirling has pointed out that words for horse, ox, yoke, etc., have
not undergone any such radical change.)>>

You mean the words for deer, aurochs and joined pieces of wood, etc.  Give me
some time and I'll get to those, too.

<<Ockham calls for a simpler explanation, such as "The fallow deer was not
present in
the IE homeland".>>

Actually Ockham's Razor states: "Entities are not to be multiplied beyond
necessity."

Distinguishing between fallow and red deer is definitely multiplying entities
not only beyond the necessity, but clearly beyond the evidence.  I've seen no
evidence for the distinction between fallow and red in deer words in the
Anatolian languages, where this premise begins and ends.  There is no
necessity for it.  The distinction obviously violates Ockham's rule.  The
whole scheme proves nothing one way or another about the Anatolian/Danubian
hypothesis.

Next thing, we'll be hearing about how there was no word for left-handed
bowlers in *PIE.

Regards,
Steve Long


From sarima at friesen.net  Sun Jun 10 00:47:36 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 17:47:36 -0700
Subject: About the Yew1
In-Reply-To: <7c.16ca7e85.284efb0c@aol.com>
Message-ID: <SAT.9.JUN.2001.174736.0700.>

At 11:18 PM 6/5/01 -0400, PolTexCW at aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 6/5/1 3:55:01 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:

><< I don't see that Polaroid cameras are necessary. If you and I belong to the
>same tribe, and we don't agree on what to call trees in the next valley,
>then our use of language is dysfunctional. Do you really believe that
>prehistoric humans were linguistically incompetent? >>

>George Gordon Meade, victor of the battle of Gettysburg, was born, raised and
>flourished in a culture largely dependant on the horse.  He spent his entire
>career as a professional officer profondly involved with horses. In reading
>his writings, it is obvious that he was far from "linguistically incompetent".
>It is just as obvious that  George didn't know squat about horses.

I am not sure this is really cogent.  There is a big difference between
citified societies and tribal societies.  In citified societies, extreme
specialization is the norm, and individuals are often relatively uninformed
outside of their functional area.  On the other hand, in tribal societies
everyone has to be relatively less specialized, and able to perform most
functions required in that culture.

Me, I know squat about automobile mechanics, and I have never been harmed
by that lack.  But if I lived in a tribal society, I had better have been
able to hunt, and make basic tools, and live off the land at need.  And the
latter, at least, requires one know the identities of the various plants in
the area (and hunting really is more efficient if you can recognize the
different habitats, and know where to look for the prey).

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi  Sun Jun 10 05:11:40 2001
From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio)
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 08:11:40 +0300
Subject: About the Yew1
In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010605060413.00b27e20@getmail.friesen.net>
Message-ID: <SUN.10.JUN.2001.081140.0300.>

On Tue, 5 Jun 2001, Stanley Friesen wrote:

> More than that, people who live close to nature are often very good at
> identifying what they live among.   A good example of this can be found in
> a monograph on rainforest trees of Borneo that I know of.  Guess how the
> author identified the trees.  Yep, he used a native guide.  As I remember
> it, he even discovered one or two new species based on the fact that his
> native guide gave them different names.

> A tribal people would have to be truly incompetent to mistake the yew for
> anything else, or vice versa.

An example of Uralic tree names is perhaps interesting in this connection.
At least five tree names can be reconstructed in Proto-Uralic, and all of
them show identical meanings in all the cognate languages. Hence, no
change in meaning in some 7000-8000 years. (The reconstructed tree names
include at least 'birch', 'spruce', 'Siberian pine', 'bird cherry', and
'rowan'.) The corpus of PU etymologies is very small, so it seems that at
least in the case of Uralic, the tree names have belonged to the most
stable part of the lexicon.

 -Ante AIkio


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Mon Jun 11 21:27:58 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 17:27:58 EDT
Subject: The Iceman's Berries
Message-ID: <MON.11.JUN.2001.172758.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/5/2001 2:55:01 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<< I don't think any serious objections have been presented to the thesis that
PIE-speakers didn't know the yew.  >>

Actually what becomes fairly apparent is that if "PIE-speakers" did know
about the yew, there would be no way of telling.

The exercise of looking into the real history of these plants and animals is
worthwhile, but not because it provides any flash answers about PIE.  What it
does do is take one beyond cognates and into the language itself and what
these people were actually talking about.  The simplistic connections that
are used to trace many of these words - like "yew" and "red deer" - very
quickly disappear.

<<As I mentioned before, "yew" itself has ancient congeners only in Celtic
and Germanic, plausibly derived from PIE *eiw- 'berry'.>>

This statement gives me pause.  Is any one on this list who is uncomfortable
with the idea that its plausible that yew comes from PIE *eiw- 'berry'?

I watched the "Iceman" feature on the Discovery channel the other day.  He's
the fellow if you recall who got caught up crossing the Alps back in @ 3200BC
and provided us with the "oldest mummy" from prehistory.  He was found just a
short distance south of the Italy-Austrian border.

The iceman was dressed in a cloak woven from an unspecified bark and carried
a yew bow and arrows.  The bow and arrows apparently were not functional, not
being finished.  There were actually also a dozen types of trees represented
on his person.

He was from the south but the arrowheads and firestone he carried were made
from flint whose provenance placed them 300 miles to the north - on the other
side of the Alps from his home, in southern Germany.  And he had all kinds of
other stuff with him or on him.  A bearskin cap and bearskin as the soles of
his shoes.  (You can tell bears were already in trouble at that point.)
Items made from leather that apparently were from both domesticates and
non-domesticates.

He also carried an axe with a copper axehead.  They show the Iceman and his
buddies smelting the copper with a skin bellows and pouring it into a pretty
nifty two-piece stone mold, carved inside to the split shape of the axehead,
strapped with leather tongs.  Looked like a lot of work for a small village
for such a project and my guess was that it was really something they picked
up from the same trade routes that brought the flint.  One might even suspect
that the yew bow - not yet notched by the user - and arrows may also have
been "store bought."

The Iceman also had a nice sized pouch completely full of dried berries.

In the reenactment and the commentary, they spent a bit of time on the
berries.  They show the Iceman and his folk harvesting the berries and a
British academic makes the point that these berries are quite tart unless
they are soaked and dried.

What amazed me was how bright red these berries were on the boughs these
reenactors were carrying.  And they even show a big bush or a small tree with
the same bright summer(?) berries on them.  And the Brit comes on and talks
about how, despite the domesticated grains they were growing, these people
would have depended on the "sloe" to round out their nutritional needs.

Two different members of this list wrote to me that they had never even heard
of the fallow deer before they saw the word on the list.  I imagine many
would have the same reaction to the "sloe."

Looking into the yew, of course, I've discovered that its "red berries" are
hardly unique, that they only appear for a short time on only some trees and
therefore are pretty much less prominent feature than the red berries on the
hawthorn (edible) and the holly (highly toxic), as well as a number of other
trees and bushes of the region -- all of which would have been more common
than the yew, and that would have included the Iceman's favorite, the sloe.

Given all this, it becomes difficult to see why its particularly plausible
that yew comes from PIE *eiw- 'berry' - except that the yew is one of
hundreds of trees and bushes that produce "berries."

No doubt it would be convenient phonologically to have yew < PIE *eiw-
'berry'.  But I think that is where the problem may be.  The history of the
yew name and the yew tree and its place in European history is both more
intricate and interesting than this, and the more you know about it, the less
likely the connection becomes.

And rather than confirming something about the IE homeland, the yew probably
demonstrates how much interchange there was between IE languages after
dispersal and how much a mistake it might be to rely on superficial history
to support a dubious paleolinguistics.  I hope to have more on this soon.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Wed Jun 13 22:55:52 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 18:55:52 EDT
Subject: The Yew and the Native Guide
Message-ID: <WED.13.JUN.2001.185552.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/5/2001 2:55:01 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<< I don't see that Polaroid cameras are necessary. If you and I belong to the
same tribe, and we don't agree on what to call trees in the next valley,
then our use of language is dysfunctional. Do you really believe that
prehistoric humans were linguistically incompetent? >>

In a message dated 6/8/2001 3:24:17 PM, sarima at friesen.net writes:
<< More than that, people who live close to nature are often very good at
identifying what they live among.   A good example of this can be found in
a monograph on rainforest trees of Borneo that I know of.  Guess how the
author identified the trees.  Yep, he used a native guide.  >>

Actually, no, they are not always very good at it.  In fact, frequently, in
preliterate situations, they can be quite inconsistent in "naming" plants and
animals.

A really interesting paper on all this is, Boster, J.S. (1985) "Requiem for
the omniscient informant: There is life in the old girl yet" in "Directions
in Cognitive Anthropology",  J. Dougherty (ed.) Univ. Of Illinois Press. Pp
177-197.

In the paper, Boster cites a list of studies over the decades that show a
serious amount of naming variance among members of individual villages, and
his list is hardly complete.  The items include plants and animals, wild and
domesticated.

Boster is actually a proponent of the idea that there is less variance in
preliterate "naming" then has been found in many studies.  The above paper
provides a relatively strong statistical argument that there is reasonable
"naming consensus" in preliterate villages speaking the same language, but
they will invariably be limited to only certain members of the village
regarding certain objects.  In fact, there is an indication there are
multiple systems, each giving a different consensus name to the plant (or
animal.)

Factors that allowed Boster to pick out the different consensus names for the
manioc plant among speakers in the same Peruvian Aguaruna village were
demographics (age, gender, occupation) and very much a factor was the kind of
functional importance the plant had to the different groups.  Even among
females, naming or awareness of varieties of manioc varied according to age
and other factors.  Some male groups had names for the plant, some had none.

(For a view that is much more skeptical of preliterate naming consistency
among members of the same villages speaking the same language, see Gardner,
P., (1976), "Birds, words, and a requiem for the omniscient informant,"
American Ethnologist 446-468.  Cf., Weller, S. C. (1984), "Consistency and
consensus among informants: disease concepts in a rural Mexican town",
American Anthropologist, 966-975.)

*PIE/PIE speakers presumably would have shown the same kind of
multiple-naming practices.  Woodcutters may have a different name for the yew
than bark-strippers, wood-carvers, tanners, herders and concerned mothers.
I've counted eight different non-ritual or ornamental uses for the yew,
including pest and vermin control, so include in that group the ancient
equivalent of the Roach Motel makers. (They check in, but they don't check
out.)

Obviously, if this "universal" applied to PIE, it's not hard to see how one
or the other "consensus names" might have passed into different daughter
languages, and how we  have only what made it to writing, depending on who
was in charge of writing when writing came around.

The Colorado Dept of the Natural Resources commissioned a study a while ago
designed to catalogue plant resources in rural areas.  They concluded: "1)
Most plants have no common name. 2) Some plants have several common names. 
This frequently leads to misunderstandings.. about the identification of a
plant.  3) One common name often refers to many plants in a genus, not to one
specific plant, e.g., ...Pine, Fir. 4) Some unrelated plants have the same
common name, e.g., ...Fir..."

This inconsistency is of course the very reason that a scientific system was
first begun about 400 years ago.

But even today the different functional perspectives on naming causes
problems. So  we see in this recent review of the exhaustive 776 page The
Cactus Family by Edward F.Anderson: "Plant taxonomy faces a big problem in
that the naming systems it produces is used by people with widely differing
needs. The botanist needs a system which can reveal how plants and groups of
plants are related and might have evolved while the horticulturalist needs
labels for plants which they will be producing and distributing which will
distinguish plants of differing appearance and attributes."

Probably the most illustrative story is the one about "the canoe-tree" that
comes out of 19th Century Native American studies.  And what it might show is
that modern humans may think quite differently about tree names and the
transfer of meaning from ancient names must be done carefully.  There were
I'm told a slew of papers at the Museum of the American Indian in New York
all arguing about what the Algonquins called "the canoe-tree."  It was
settled apparently when someone showed that the name canoe-tree applied not
to trees of a particular species, but rather to trees that were suited for
canoe-making during a particular season.  I would love to actually read those
papers.  They might even look a bit like our arguments about the yew.

A very interesting piece in this same regard is Boster, J. S., and J. C.
Johnson, (1989), "Form or function: a comparison of expert and novice
judgments of similarity among fish." American Anthropologist 91(4):866-889.

To sum up, with regard to the statements above, I think it's pretty clear
that it is reasonable to think that the facts could be otherwise.  And that
the name for yew may prove nothing about IE origins.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Jun  9 19:14:15 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 15:14:15 EDT
Subject: The News in 1900 and 2001
Message-ID: <SAT.9.JUN.2001.151415.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/8/2001 6:45:50 PM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<< I think a good analogy can be drawn with newspapers. Today's typical
regional paper (circulation on the order of 20k-200k) is much larger and
more colorful than its counterpart of 100 years ago. That doesn't mean that
we have much more, and more colorful, news than folks did in 1900, or that
our lives are much larger and more colorful. >>

This looks like it is not true.  The advertising industry in the US presents
studies on a regular basis about the sharp increase in news sources and that
one of the major factors is simply the fact that there are many more people
in the US and the world than there was in 1900, and 1950 - the usual
comparison date.   There are simply more "human events" happening in the
world today and it is an open question whether coverage has expanded
commensurately.

Another factor is the increase in the total mass of "knowledge." Neil de
Grasse Tyson, the astronomer, has talked about scientific information expandin
g exponentially every four years, paralleling the "rule" for the expansion of
technology.  Not too long ago I was asked to compare an college-level
astronomy textbook from the 1930's with a current one.  Literally, the entire
old book corrresponded to the first three chapters of the new book, which was
32 chapters long.

What this has done is essentially make the news and general information
media, in their dependence on encyclopedias and any kind of science texts,
rely on a good deal of obsolete information, quite simply because there is
too much information moving too quickly.  This is not something that was
considered a problem in 1900 or even 1950.

Researchers in the "public sector' like David Kirsh at UCSD have pointed to
hard quantitive evidence of "cognitive overload" that equates to the ad
industry's notion of "clutter."  This has intensified the investment in the
competition for attention (not even "comprehension") so that the modern news
media (including newspapers) must spend more money in promoting themselves
then in gathering news.  And because of advertising revenues and how they
have come to pinpoint and dictate preferred audiences, new organizations must
be much more calculating (than in 1900) in what news they can or will cover.

There is simply a great deal more quantitative information that is available
and that is being generated and exchanged in the world today than there was
in 1900.  That a language must alter itself to accomodate this situation is a
logical conclusion.

One last observation.  The discussion of dictionaries did not touch upon the
fact that for example American English is not a single entity but rather
represents a fair number of linguistic communities.  To the extent that
uniform education and the electronic media has served to standardize that
language, it has also created a situation where many of these linguistic
communities are now being represented as valid sources of words and meanings.
 And where therefore the selective "elite" English of the old dictionaries
may no longer apply.

Regards,
Steve Long


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sun Jun 10 08:23:22 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 09:23:22 +0100
Subject: bishop
Message-ID: <SUN.10.JUN.2001.092322.0100.>

There was discussion a while ago of the word "bishop", coming from Greek
episkopos.    I think it was Piotr who said the loss of the initial vowel
was not an issue, but the voicing of the "p" was uncommon.  (Pardon me if
I've mis-remembered who it was!)

It occurred to me that there is another example in the Italian bottega,
Spanish (whence English) bodega, meaning shop or inn, from the Greek
apotheke.

Peter


From leo at easynet.fr  Wed Jun 13 00:07:23 2001
From: leo at easynet.fr (Lionel Bonnetier)
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 02:07:23 +0200
Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc.
Message-ID: <WED.13.JUN.2001.020723.0200.>

It's funny that Latin suffixed -cum in mecum, tecum, etc.
has created some special -go case marker in Spanish with
conmigo, contigo, consigo. I suppose -cum is a remnant of
an older time when prepositions were either postpositions
or relatively mobile adverbs. Is there any obvious reason
why -cum is the only instance of the archaic system? May
*kom (cum) and *ko (cis) and *kwe (-que) be related
etymologically around the idea of "here-nearby-with"?


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Wed Jun 13 05:57:34 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 05:57:34 -0000
Subject: Pelasgian Place-names
Message-ID: <WED.13.JUN.2001.055734.0000.>

On 19 May 2001, I wrote:

>Not likely, since Etruscan orthography _usually_ distinguishes the
>semivowel
>(written F, transcribed <w>) from the vowel (written V, transcribed <u>).

The Etruscan semivowel written F is conventionally transcribed <v>, not <w>.
This was a typing error on my part.

DGK


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Wed Jun 13 09:06:35 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 09:06:35 -0000
Subject: Munda in Early NW India
Message-ID: <WED.13.JUN.2001.090635.0000.>

Vidhyanath Rao (21 Apr 2001) wrote:

>I am not sure if "Douglas G Kilday" <acnasvers at hotmail.com> is for or
>against *gh etc being affricates. But I will use his post to to hang my
>questions on.

>> [...] A language
>> with an inventory of stops comparable to Sanskrit ought to have 3 or 4
>> distinct fricatives in addition to /h/.

>Does that mean that Sanskrit itself `should' have had 3 or 4 distinct
>fricatives?  [Nor am I sure what distinct means: Sanskrit had voiceless
>fricatives produced at various places, but these where all allophones of
>/s/.
>There is the sound commonly transcribed h, but this is voiced and results
>from (Brugmannian *gh', and less often from *dh. Then there are three
>sibilants.]

What I meant, and should have specified, was _phonemically_ distinct. I am
labeling voiced /h'/ and the sibilants /s/, /s./, /s'/ as "fricatives".
Macdonell calls them "spirants". In my usage, "fricatives" are continuants
produced with audible friction, and "sibilants" are fricatives in which the
primary articulation is formed by the extensible part of the tongue.

I don't have the advantage of formal instruction in Sanskrit. Macdonell
describes Visarga /h./ as a "hard spirant" (i.e. unvoiced fricative) and, if
I am reading correctly, [x] and [f] are "obsolete" allophones of Visarga,
which sounds [h] when unassimilated. Hence it appears that Sanskrit has 5
phonemically distinct fricatives.

>>[...] OTOH if the traditional (Brugmannian) voiced aspirates were
>> "really" voiced fricatives, the transition to voiced aspirates in Indic
>> could be viewed as systematic substrate-induced fortition, if the
>> Munda-substrate hypothesis is in the ballpark.

>How do we explain Germanic? Or for that matter, Iranian where *dh etc
>became d etc (at least intervocalic)? And if substratum explanation is
>in the ballpark, why did the aspirated series go to a voiced fricative?
>[in Vedic, this already had happened with intervocalic *dh in verbal
>endings such as mahe (< PI-Ir *madhai), as well as all intervocalic PI-Ir
>*jh and this speads to all (intervocalic) voiced aspirates in MIA.]

It's not hard to find examples of voiced fricatives becoming voiced stops.
This is sufficiently common that no substratal invocation is necessary: I
certainly wouldn't posit "Pre-Chicagoan" substrate to explain "Da Bears" or
"Da Bulls". In the hypothesis under discussion, Brugmannian *dh etc. are
presumed to have _originally_ been voiced fricatives, which became voiced
aspirates in Indic only. The phonetic systems in Iranian and MIA are thus
viewed as more conservative than the Sanskrit system, and there is no need
to explain "the aspirated series going to a voiced fricative". The trouble
lies in explaining the reverse, namely the voiced aspirated series in Indic,
and this is where substrate may be in the ballpark.

Of course, if PIE is presumed _not_ to have had aspirates, there is the
difficulty of explaining why both Greek and Sanskrit avoid successive
aspirated stops. Some form of Grassmann's Law must have operated in Late
South PIE. Since I don't understand the phonetic basis for Grassmann's Law
in the first place (which looks like the result of a cyclic suprasegmental),
I am neither "for" nor "against" *gh etc. being the traditional voiced
aspirates, at least in Late PIE.

My main point was that traditional PIE is short on fricatives and long on
"laryngeals". Historically, unvoiced fricatives lead a precarious existence,
like frogs living in a toilet-bowl. The next phonetic shift may flush one of
them down the larynx to become /h/, which is subject to further reduction
into a glide or even outright loss. I think the H-series in PIE represents
undetermined unvoiced fricatives, probably varying greatly among dialects
and more rapidly in time than most other PIE sounds. Their characterization
as "laryngeal" properly belongs to their final stage as fricatives, and I
doubt that any synchronic speech had more than two literally laryngeal
fricatives (fortis and lenis, perhaps). Otherwise we must conclude that PIE
was spoken by a tribe of ventriloquists (which could, of course, help
explain the difficulty in locating their homeland).

DGK


From bronto at pobox.com  Thu Jun  7 07:09:07 2001
From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood)
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2001 00:09:07 -0700
Subject: history of hay?
Message-ID: <THU.7.JUN.2001.000907.0700.>

petegray wrote:
> Quite how we got onto biology I don't know, but while we're there,
> can I ask when cattle began to be fed hay? . . .

I have the dim impression that it was a medieval innovation,
but maybe that was a particular kind of hay.

--
Anton Sherwood  --  br0nt0 at p0b0x.com  --  http://ogre.nu/


From philjennings at juno.com  Tue Jun 12 00:46:48 2001
From: philjennings at juno.com (philjennings at juno.com)
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 19:46:48 -0500
Subject: Five Antiquities of Hay (was Thy Thigh, etc)
Message-ID: <MON.11.JUN.2001.194648.0500.>

(1) Straw was a seasonally abundant product from the beginning of
agriculture, and the ingenuity of early farmers would have applied the
use of this material to hats, mats, fire-starters, bedding, roofing
(thatch), flooring, et cetera.  In the off seasons, cut grass might have
substituted for some of these uses, and the iceman used cut grass for
clothing material.  Nothing in all this relates to "hay" as cut grass
used as fodder.

(2) An alternative very early origin of "hay" may have related to the
taming of wild animals.  There may have been a time when experimental
taming was the style, and captured young plant-eating animals would have
been kept in enclosures, and supplied with hay during the taming period.
Some of these creatures would have been successfully tamed, most not.
Continuity in the use of "hay" in these sorts of experiments is not
likely.  Either the animals became tame, or they were failures.  Either
way, it was not an interminable necessity to cut and store inventories of
cut grass.

(3) Another early occasion for the invention of "hay" also related to
enclosures.  These were not enclosures used for taming, but rather for
the protection of herd animals at night.  The animals would have been
more comfortable in their stockades, protected against predators, if food
was available.  The LBK people used stockades, but I know of no evidence
that they supplied their night cattle with cut grasses.  If they did, no
large inventories were required.  It might have happened as the spirit
moved them.

(4) The LBK people, or the Corded Ware people who came after, trying to
make efficient use of the land near their settlements, without risking
the lives of their valuable cattle, would have sent young churls out to
problematic wet and half-boggy lands to cut grass and bring it back to
where the animals might eat safely.  This late scenario for the invention
of "hay" is connected to the settlement of northern Europe, short of the
heavy snow zone.  As the proto-Germanic word for hay, and the
Baltic-Slavic word for hay, seem not to be related, I suspect that these
two groups went their own ways northward into separate boggy zones,
neither an origin for the other.

(5) the final theory for "hay" relates to regions where snow covers the
ground thickly for several months of the year, and hay has to be cut in
summer, to keep cattle alive in winter.  However, the peoples who moved
into snow country, must necessarily have come from bog country, and so
already knew of "hay" and did not have to invent the stuff.


From edsel at glo.be  Sat Jun  9 09:25:03 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 11:25:03 +0200
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <SAT.9.JUN.2001.112503.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sam Martin" <semartin at pacifier.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2001 4:49 PM

[snip]
> He also mentions the proliferating use of -wise. This is a productive
> bound particle, rather than a derivative suffix. Sentence-wise it can go
> anywhere, syntax-wise. Usage-wise, I have collected some delightful
> examples, wise-wise. Notice that "street-wise" can have two different
> meanings: "street-wise youngsters" has the derivative suffix, but
> "Street-wise, this city is a mess!" has the particle.
[snip]
> As a particle the -wise can attach to
> a plural, and I could have substituted "Streets-wise" for "Street-wise" in
> the example above. [snip]
> Structure-wise the particle belongs with focus devices, I think.

[Ed Selleslagh]

Of course, the two 'wise' words are originally two homonyms, one an adjective
meaning 'knowing, savvy,...' like in 'wise men', the other a noun meaning 'way,
manner' (Cf. Ger. Weise, Du. wijze).

In 'street-wise' it is the adjective, with a prepositioned qualifier, in
'streets-wise' it is the noun with the second meaning, and serves as a
adverb-forming particle meaning something like 'when speaking of, in the
context of...'. Whether you can call this a focus device, I don't know. One
thing is certain: there has been a slight semantic shift away from the original
meaning '(in the) way/manner (of)'.

It looks rather American to me, if I ignore the usual world-wide
'contamination' phenomena that accompany American neologisms.

Ed.


From Georg-Bonn at t-online.de  Sat Jun  9 09:22:39 2001
From: Georg-Bonn at t-online.de (Stefan Georg)
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 11:22:39 +0200
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <3B1D599A.696B7A0D@memphis.edu>
Message-ID: <SAT.9.JUN.2001.112239.0200.>

>>  Qua de causa avertat ? When I'm pronouncing /Chalid/ as /xali:d/ I'm
>>  using a patch of Arabic in my German discourse, whether I know much
>>  Arabic apart from that or not.

>Certainly if you say [d] rather than [t].

Good point.

>>  If Duden gave the "correct" pronunciation of /Xhosa/ with the correct
>>  click, we would have a click phoneme in German. Give me a job in that
>>  editors' board and I'll triple the number of phonemes in this
>>  language.

>Get people to say them and you certainly would.

Also a good point.

>>  Those pronunciations for /Chalid/ etc. are indeed artificial. Duden
>>  people just want to be educational when they indicate how these words
>>  should be pronounced, i.e. as close to the pronunciation in the
>>  source language as possible. The set of words given to illustrate the
>>  initial ç:x contrast is of a sort that I'm sure I've never met a
>>  German speaker who can take an oath to have used each one of them at
>>  least once in his life in some meaningful context. In English words
>>  and names we try to (are told to) observe /th/, /w:v/ as in the
>>  source language as well. I'm pretty sure Duden tells us to, too. So
>>  what, is there a /w : v/ contrast in G. ? Not for sose vis a
>>  Hollyvood G. accent, who still are se majorrity ...

>I agree, of course, that no German has had the opportunity to use *all*
>of the examples in normal speech.  But haven't you noticed an increased
>tendency to say [xa-] in some words of foreign origin spelt with <cha->?

Maybe. But that's an increased tendency to be aware of foreign
phonemes, an increased openness for the outside world, and certainly
an increase which increases with education. Whatever this means for a
phoneme system.

StG

--
Dr. Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Sat Jun  9 15:49:52 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 10:49:52 -0500
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <000e01c0ee66$0fec6780$bb66073e@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <SAT.9.JUN.2001.104952.0500.>

kintal, then, is Portuguese [& Spanish] quintal "hundred weight"

[snip]
>>>    kintal           100 lbs, 100 kg, 112 lbs. (an interesting weight!)
[snip]

This one is an odd sounding Latinism. Does it shows up anywhere else?

>>>    ubiety           being in a definite place, whereness

>Peter

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi  Sun Jun 10 06:02:26 2001
From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio)
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 09:02:26 +0300
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <3B1D599A.696B7A0D@memphis.edu>
Message-ID: <SUN.10.JUN.2001.090226.0300.>

On Tue, 5 Jun 2001, Leo A. Connolly wrote:

>  Of course, it's too early to say whether /x-/ and /ç-/ will become
> established in German, but the process seems to have begun.

I don't think that the fact that some speakers "correctly" pronounce
phonemes alien to the language in loan words implies that these phonemes
would be in the process of being established in the language. People have
always tried to mimic foreign pronunciation in loan words whenever it is
considered fashionable. But give it a couple of hundred years and the
words often become nativized. Not always, of course; foreign phonemes and
phonotactic patterns are sometimes introduced through loan words.

Consider the following. Present day colloquial Finnish is swarming with
english loan words, and words and expressions like "about" (in the meaning
'approximately'), "anyway", "fuck it", "shit", "come on", "all right",
etc. show very high frequency in young people's speech. Often the english
words and expressions are pronounced with full English phonology and
phonotaxis, with no nativization at all. Should we then say that in
Finnish a process has begun through which *ALL* the English phonemes alien
to Finnish may become established in the language? This would be bizarre,
because a Finnish teenager who injects English discourse particles in
every sentence he says, knows that these words are not Finnish (that's why
he chose to use them in the first place). The same person can equally well
pronounce /piolokia/ for 'biology' in some other connection.

In historical linguistics, when we uncover prehistoric loan word layers
through etymological research (such as, say, the numerous Proto-Germanic
loans in Proto-Finnic), we usually find very neat substitution patterns
for foreign sounds (e.g. *x- > *k-, as in PG *xanan- > PF *kana 'hen').
One almost gets the impression that 2,000 years ago people just were in
general unwilling to try to pronounce foreign sounds "correctly". But
observations from present-day borrowing reveal that the process was, in
all probability, quite different. I'm sure that there have been many
speakers of Proto-Finnic who have tried to mimic the pronounciation of /x/
- it was, after all, a high-frequency phoneme in a prestige language from
which they borrowed more than 500 words (probably a lot more, actually;
these survive to the present day). But probably after a while they just
got bored with straining their tongues trying to say [xana] every time
they were talking about hens, and started saying [kana] instead.

Regards,
Ante Aikio


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sun Jun 10 08:36:15 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 09:36:15 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <SUN.10.JUN.2001.093615.0100.>

> [German bilabial (/w/) rather than ... labiodental (/v/)]

The sound is sometimes described as neither bilabial nor labiodental, but in
between.  IPA has a separate sign for it.  The bottom lip makes simultaneous
contact with both the upper lip and the front teeth.

Because it is an "in between" sound, English speakers often hear what it is
not, so Germans appear to the English to be saying /v/ for w and /w/ for v,
when in fact they are producing the same non-English sound for both.

Having said that, it must be acknowledged that both the bilabial and
labiodental pronunciations are also widely heard in Germany.

Peter


From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com  Mon Jun 11 13:17:47 2001
From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader)
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 09:17:47 -0400
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <000f01c0ee66$10acaa40$bb66073e@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <MON.11.JUN.2001.091747.0400.>

Well, it's in the 6th ed. of the _Concise Oxford_ (1982), and in
somewhat older editions of comparable one-volume dictionaries by
Collins and Chambers.  I'm not sure the editors have seen fit to
include it in more recent UK dictionaries.

Jim Rader

> <kinkajou>

> I'm pleased, but not surprised, that it's in American dictionaries, since
> it's an American animal.  Is it still in the concise English ones, I wonder?
> because that's what my point was.

> Peter


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Jun 11 13:40:01 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 14:40:01 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSO.4.33.0106050731001.2194-100000@shell.pacifier.com>
Message-ID: <MON.11.JUN.2001.144001.0100.>

--On Tuesday, June 5, 2001 7:49 am -0700 Sam Martin <semartin at pacifier.com>
wrote:

> Larry Trask mentions the revival of the properly buried "albeit". He may
> be amused that I have heard this resurrected word pronounced as if it were
> German, riming with "Arbeit".

Not so much amused as flabbergasted.  However, I guess I shouldn't be
surprised.  This word must have been resurrected via reading, and I guess
it's not unusual for a reader who is eager to collect fancy-looking words
to see this as [indigestible glob], and to assign a pronunciation
accordingly.

I once came across a woman who had learned the word 'misled' through
reading, and who pronounced it like 'mild', blissfully unaware that it had
anything to do with 'mislead'.  Honest.

> He also mentions the proliferating use of -wise. This is a productive
> bound particle, rather than a derivative suffix. Sentence-wise it can go
> anywhere, syntax-wise. Usage-wise, I have collected some delightful
> examples, wise-wise. Notice that "street-wise" can have two different
> meanings: "street-wise youngsters" has the derivative suffix, but
> "Street-wise, this city is a mess!" has the particle. The meaning of the
> particle is very similar to that of the Japanese particle of backgrounding
> focus wa "as for, when it comes to". As a particle the -wise can attach to
> a plural, and I could have substituted "Streets-wise" for "Street-wise" in
> the example above. Like Japanese multiple-wa phrases, the
> particle can occur two or three (or more?) times in a single sentence.
> Afterthought-wise, at least. Structure-wise the particle belongs with
> focus devices, I think.

Yes; on reflection, I think I must agree with this.  Many thanks for the
correction.

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  Mon Jun 11 13:49:08 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 14:49:08 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <000e01c0ee66$0fec6780$bb66073e@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <MON.11.JUN.2001.144908.0100.>

--On Tuesday, June 5, 2001 8:30 pm +0100 petegray <petegray at btinternet.com>
wrote:

>>>    kintal           100 lbs, 100 kg, 112 lbs. (an interesting weight!)

This is the British hundredweight.  As I recall, there are scraps of
evidence showing that Germanic 'hundred' could mean anything from '100' to
'120'.  The hundredweight has shown considerable regional variation in
value, with the US finally settling on 100 pounds, but the UK on 112
pounds.

When I first came to Britain in 1970, I was a teacher of physics and
chemistry, and British science education in those days still used Imperial
units.  Every time I did a physics problem involving hundredweights, I got
the wrong answer -- until I finally discovered that the local hundredweight
was 112 pounds.  That was a shock, I can tell you.  The British ton, being
twenty hundredweight, is of course 2240 pounds.

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 jrader at Merriam-Webster.com  Mon Jun 11 15:59:34 2001
From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader)
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 11:59:34 -0400
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <F88cU6xfPTeip68V8zD00002698@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <MON.11.JUN.2001.115934.0400.>

Seems like this is drifting rather far from Indo-European, but...

I think the production people here (Merriam-Webster) would be very
surprised to hear that dictionaries--at least the monolingual general-
audience desk dictionaries that I think are at issue--have become
cheaper to produce.  I couldn't give you the figures because the
accounting people here would never give them to me, but I bet each
of the editions of our desk dictionary that have appeared since
1897 or so has cost more adjusted for inflation.  The size of the
editorial staff has slowly increased as means to create citations
have become easier and more and more new citations have to be
scanned.  Forty years ago starting editors were paid ridiculously
low wages and turnover was extremely high--now even an editorial
assistant with a fresh B.A. gets a tolerable wage plus medical
benefits, and given the vagaries of the American economy,
employees tend to stay, meaning they get annual raises.  Paper
costs more even adjusted for inflation.  Typesetting has been
digitized and is faster, but given the expense of software and
hardware, I doubt very much that it's cheaper, because everything
becomes obsolete so fast that the cash outlay just to keep up is
constant.  The typesetting for our Collegiate dictionary is
customized, so every time I decided to use a new diacritic-letter
combination for an exotic language etymon, it has be digitally
created--it doesn't matter that I myself can print out virtually any
combination possible by downloading free character sets from the
Internet--no good for the typesetter's purposes.

What really constrains commercial dictionary size is price.  It took
a long time for the $19.95 ceiling for an American hardbound desk
dictionary was broken--when a hardbound novel, undiscounted,
often sold for $24.95 or more.  Now we've reached $24.95,
ridiculously low for a fairly well-printed and produced book of 1,557
pages.  The profit margin on dictionaries is exceedingly small, and
dictionary publishers can only make money if they sell in
enormous volume.  Every new fascicle in a new edition squeezes
things tighter.  In this regard, comparison with a newspaper is
totally inappropriate, because in the last half century I suspect
many newspapers have at least trebled in price.  If our desk
dictionary had done that, we'd be out of business.

I could say a lot more about commercial dictionaries.  I'd rather
read about Indo-European, though....

Jim Rader

> [Douglas Kilday:]
> This _a priori_ economic argument only works if the processes required to
> manufacture dictionaries are stable in cost. During the past century and
> more, this has certainly _not_ been the case. Improvements in typesetting
> and reproduction, and more recently in information technology, have steadily
> driven down the actual cost of producing dictionaries. I believe this is the
> principal factor in the increasing size of desk dictionaries, _not_
> purported expansion of the lexis. When these costs have reached equilibrium,
> so will the size of a given brand of dictionary.

> I think a good analogy can be drawn with newspapers. Today's typical
> regional paper (circulation on the order of 20k-200k) is much larger and
> more colorful than its counterpart of 100 years ago. That doesn't mean that
> we have much more, and more colorful, news than folks did in 1900, or that
> our lives are much larger and more colorful. It reflects the much lower
> cost, with modern technology, of producing newspapers and reproducing
> photographs.


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Jun 12 14:21:49 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2001 15:21:49 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <F88cU6xfPTeip68V8zD00002698@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.12.JUN.2001.152149.0100.>

--On Thursday, June 7, 2001 10:37 am +0000 Douglas G Kilday
<acnasvers at hotmail.com> wrote:

[Folks, I'm still buried in exam marking, and I'm having to economical with
my e-mail, so this response will be unavoidably brief.]

> I believe that if we had a reliable way of
> tracking the "death" of English words, we would find that the number of
> words lost from common use every year roughly equals the number gained.

OK.  On this point we flatly disagree.  Sadly, I have no hard data at my
fingertips to back up my position, and no time to look for any, so I'll
just repeat myself.  Today we have cell phones, planes, computers, cars,
trains, spacecraft, TVs, VCRs, faxes, CDs, the Internet, e-mail, credit
cards, genetic engineering, nuclear reactors, and all manner of modern
technology
-- all of them with a large and growing body of associated terminology.  We
had none of them 200 years ago, and we didn't have some of them 30 years
ago.  Is it really plausible to assume that the vast number of words
brought into English by this technology has been effectively balanced out
by the loss of words pertaining to obsolete technology?  I don't think so.
We may have lost some words pertaining to windmills, but I'll bet we have
gained a very much larger number of words pertaining to nuclear power
stations.  How many parts does a windmill have, anyway?

[snip several points -- no time; sorry]

> This _a priori_ economic argument only works if the processes required to
> manufacture dictionaries are stable in cost. During the past century and
> more, this has certainly _not_ been the case. Improvements in typesetting
> and reproduction, and more recently in information technology, have
> steadily driven down the actual cost of producing dictionaries. I believe
> this is the principal factor in the increasing size of desk dictionaries,
> _not_ purported expansion of the lexis. When these costs have reached
> equilibrium, so will the size of a given brand of dictionary.

Well, an interesting position, but two things: (1) we'll have to wait a
while to find out if the prediction is true; (2) even if dictionary sizes
do stabilize, that doesn't falsify my position: it only means that pruning
must become more ruthless, and that dictionaries must become more
selective.

> I think a good analogy can be drawn with newspapers. Today's typical
> regional paper (circulation on the order of 20k-200k) is much larger and
> more colorful than its counterpart of 100 years ago. That doesn't mean
> that we have much more, and more colorful, news than folks did in 1900,
> or that our lives are much larger and more colorful. It reflects the much
> lower cost, with modern technology, of producing newspapers and
> reproducing photographs.

Well, interesting, but I can't see that this is a striking analogy.  It may
well be the case that the total amount of daily news in the world is
roughly constant over time, but I can't see that it follows that the size
of the English lexicon must therefore also remain roughly constant.

During the last century, the number of mother tongues on earth has
declined.  Yet the terminology of linguistics has been growing steadily in
size.  This is true even in my own field of historical linguistics, which
has been established far longer than any other branch of the subject.  In
writing my dictionary, I found only a tiny handful of terms which were once
prominent but which have now dropped out of use, such as 'surd' and
'proethnic'.  But I found myself including several hundred terms which have
entered the literature only in the last few years: 'accretion zone',
'decliticization', 'lexical diffusion', 'weak-ties theory', 'punctuated
equilibrium', 'exaptation', 'junk', 'abrupt pidgin', 'Northern Cities
Shift', 'Monte Carlo test', 'historicization', 'language missionary',
'language cluster', and loads of others.  Is there any reason to suppose
that linguistics is atypical?

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  Fri Jun  8 09:28:14 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 09:28:14 -0000
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.092814.0000.>

Larry Trask (31 May 2001) wrote:

>I might also point out that, in the US, the word 'vehicle' is a traditional
>shibboleth for spotting country bumpkins: if you pronounce an /h/ in
>'vehicle', you're a bumpkin.  Even the folk singer Arlo Guthrie, hardly the
>personification of cosmopolitan sophistication, used this word to great effect
>on one of his records to identify a southern policeman as a bumpkin.

It's noteworthy here that Varro reports <veha> as a rustic pronunciation of
<via>: "rustici etiam quoque viam veham appellant, et vellam non villam"
(R.R. I.2.14).

>Incidentally, I've just noticed that John Wells reports that 33% of his
>American panel preferred the pronunciation of 'vehicle' with /h/, and a
>further five percent actually put the main stress on the second syllable.
>Sheesh.  Either John is using a remarkably catholic panel, or something has
>happened here since I left home.  Do any of you Yanks out there *really*
>pronounce an /h/ in 'vehicle'?

I don't, unless I'm trying to imitate a rustic stereotype. However, I
recently heard 'vehicle' with an /h/ in the smooth, cosmopolitan
pronunciation of one of the "CNN Headline News" announcers. It may be
gaining ground.

I've never heard 'vehicle' with the main stress on the second syllable. This
must be influenced by 'vehicular'. It might be interesting to test the 5% on
'mandible' and 'crucible'. Would 'mandibular' influence 'mandible'? Since
there is no *crucibular, would 'crucible' follow the others by analogy? What
about 'icicle' and 'bicycle'?


From rao.3 at osu.edu  Fri Jun  8 14:53:58 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 10:53:58 -0400
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.105358.0400.>

M. Tuver wrote:

> That, by the way, is a rule I was never taught.  I always had the spelling
> pronunciation [D] for <dh> words before I learned about Sanskrit.  (It took
> me a while to link [dArm@] with <dharma>...)  Even now I still have
> dental/interdental [d] in those words (instead of the regular alveolar or
> whatever), and in words like <dhole>, the [D] still persists.

Don't feel so bad. "dh" is interdental (stop not spirant though) in
modern Indian pronunciation, and was dental (i.e. tongue tip on teeth)
[or where the enamel meets the gum, according to some] in the ancient
pronunciation.

Preserving the place instead of the quality does not strike me as being
worse. But then the interdental spirants of English are realized in my
mouth (as in that of many Tamil speakers) as interdental stops [while
the alveolar stops become retroflex stops]. So your pronunciation will
sound perfectly OK while the typical pronunciation of dharma as dArma is
what I do when I make fun of (would be)Anglophones


From douglas at nb.net  Sat Jun  9 14:59:50 2001
From: douglas at nb.net (Douglas G. Wilson)
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 10:59:50 -0400
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <177041807.3200291392@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SAT.9.JUN.2001.105950.0400.>

>In my vernacular, even in proper names, I absolutely can't have /h/ before
>schwa or before unstressed /I/.

Does Larry Trask really mean that he (in his American persona) doesn't say
"habitual" with /h@/ (@ = schwa)? I think most Americans say it so, and my
talking (Yankee) dictionary does. Similarly: "habiliment", "rehabilitate",
etc., etc., and one frequent pronunciation of "harass".

Finding the /h/ between TWO schwas is a little more difficult ... some
pronounce "Abraham" /eibr at h@m/, and I wouldn't have trouble reading the
imaginary but conceivable "ultra-habituating" as /Vltr at h@bItSueitIN/ or so
... I think "intrahabenular" = "inside the habenula" is an acceptable word
(medical/anatomical) which would be pronounced /Intr at h@bEnjul at r/ usually ....

-- Doug Wilson


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sun Jun 10 08:01:18 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 09:01:18 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <SUN.10.JUN.2001.090118.0100.>

> In Britain, it is the tradition to identify the 'cut' vowel as a wholly
> distinct phoneme from schwa.

I've been following this debate with interest.
I just want to remind linguists, in case anyone's interested - in NZ, there
is no schwa.  The vowel in "bit" is used instead.  So there is no problem
whatever with h before schwa - it just doesn't occur.

Peter


From g_sandi at hotmail.com  Sat Jun  9 12:48:11 2001
From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi)
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 12:48:11 -0000
Subject: note on 'dhole'
Message-ID: <SAT.9.JUN.2001.124811.0000.>

>        I agree that that is what the usual supects say, on the linguistics
>side, but on the biology side, all my sources agree that wolves do not occur
>in south India, and therefore in the Kannada area.  (Why is not entirely clear
>to me.  They did not spread from China into SE Asia either.  Dislike of
>tropcal heat?)  Therefore there is something not quite right here.

>Dr. David L. White

Could the Dravidian word refer to a different carnivore?

Your question is very interesting: why have wolves not penetrated south
India or SW Asia? It can't be just the heat - north India (where there ARE
wolves) can be as hot as any place on this earth in the summer, as I know
from experience (48 degrees in May/June are not unusual in New Delhi, for
example). Maybe it's the humidity they don't like, or there are carnivores
who thrive better than wolves in the year-round humid heat.

Gabor


From edsel at glo.be  Sat Jun  9 10:12:51 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 12:12:51 +0200
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
Message-ID: <SAT.9.JUN.2001.121251.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Whiting" <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2001 8:24 PM

[snip]

>> [Ed]
>> For your information: in Dutch, w is called 'we', pr. like Eng. 'way' (some
>> Dutchmen will say 'vay').

> As usual, Dutch is stuck in the middle between German and English.  German
> has no [w] sound so they use the <w> graph for [v] (since they use the <v>
> graph for [f]).  To them the name of the <w> graph is 'vay' (just like
> the name of the Hebrew letter waw is vav in German).

[Ed]
Modern Israelis say 'vav' too.

I think your statement about Germans pronouncing w as v and v as f goes a bit
too far. These are relatively modern pronunciations (which tend to propagate to
Holland), with lots of exceptions, almost exclusively for w. In certain
contexts (like C+w), as Pat mentioned, and in a lot of regional speech, w is
pronounced w. Similar things can be said about e.g. r (more, or less,
velarized).

It seems to me that German pronunciation is still evolving in a perceptible
(and uneven) way. And so is the the pronunciation of Dutch in the Netherlands,
but emphatically not in Flanders, Belgium, which is phonetically and lexically
more conservative, even though it's the original homeland of Dutch as we know
it (but since the (religious-political) secession in the 16-17. c. and the
ensuing mass emigration to Holland, it has become more peripheral).

> Dutch has a [w] sound and uses the <w> graph for it, but has adapted the name
> from German ('vay' > 'way').

>> And Double-U (pr. Dub'ya) is still another thing, nothing to do with its
>> shape either :-)

[Ed]
I meant George W.


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sun Jun 10 08:40:33 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 09:40:33 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
Message-ID: <SUN.10.JUN.2001.094033.0100.>

>> Greeks ...transcription of Latin: AKOAI
>> ...for Latin AQUAE.

> Comes from not having a [w] sound.

Greek found the same solution as French.  In both languages the vowel
written <u> is fronted, so the back /u/ is written ou.  It is this back /u/
which is used to represent the /w/ sound, as in Oualerios (Valerius) or
"oui" or Touareg /twareg/.

Peter


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sun Jun 10 08:29:01 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 09:29:01 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
Message-ID: <SUN.10.JUN.2001.092901.0100.>

> Originally Latin had a vocalic [u] and a semi-vowel [w], both written with
> the <u/v> graph (the two shapes were simply variants of the same
> grapheme).  ...., they remained more or
> less interchangeable until the late middle ages.

The u shape was unknown to the Romans.  They had only capital V.  When small
letters were developed, about 600 AD or so, the small form of V was u, in
all contexts.  This is how the Oxford Classical texts are still printed:
   Vbi at the beginning of a sentence, ubi elsewhere.
   Venit at the beginning of a sentence, uenit elsewhere.

But this pattern is totally unroman.

The late development also explains why Greek and Latin developed different
small forms from the same capitals (eg from A B M N K etc).  If this had
happened earlier, the two scripts might have been more similar!

Peter


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Sun Jun 10 17:18:23 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 12:18:23 -0500
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
Message-ID: <SUN.10.JUN.2001.121823.0500.>

Dear Bob and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Whiting" <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2001 12:59 PM

<snip>

>> [PCRp]
>> In my experience, /dh/ (dha:l) is never used to represent Arabic emphatic
>> /d./ (d.a:d). They are two separate sounds and letters. Riyadh has dha:l.

[RW]
> No, Riyadh had d.a:d.  Look it up in your Wehr (the root is RWD., not RYD.
> as one might expect).  The symbol "<dh>" identifies a written sequence,
> not a phonetic one and I was fairly specific about indicating that is is
> an English graphic sequence.  The point is that English <dh> is not used
> to indicate Arabic dha:l except in the month names beginning with <Dhu>
> and in <dhal> which is the name of the letter used to write the sound.
> Otherwise, English <dh> in transcriptions frequently represents Arabic
> [d.] the phryngeal ("emphatic") d, while Arabic [D] is usually represented
> by <d> (e.g. dahabeeyah, from the root Dhb "to go back and forth."

[PCR]
Oops! I am so used to indicating the voiced interdental with [dh] that I
thought I remembered **riya:dh when, as you point out, it is riya:D.

I ASSumed.

Sorry for the misinformation.

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 dsalmon at salmon.org  Tue Jun  5 19:42:59 2001
From: dsalmon at salmon.org (David Salmon)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 12:42:59 -0700
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.124259.0700.>

Larry Trask wrote:

>> In my vernacular, even in proper names, I absolutely can't have /h/ before
>> schwa or before unstressed /I/.  I might also point out that, in the US, the
>> word 'vehicle' is a traditional shibboleth for spotting country bumpkins: if
>> you pronounce an /h/ in 'vehicle', you're a bumpkin.  Even the folk singer
>> Arlo Guthrie, hardly the personification of cosmopolitan sophistication,
>> used this word to great effect on one of his records to identify a southern
>> policeman as a bumpkin.  But this pronunciation nevertheless forces the
>> presence of a stress on the second syllable, and /h/-schwa is still
>> impossible.

>> Incidentally, I've just noticed that John Wells reports that 33% of his
>> American panel preferred the pronunciation of 'vehicle' with /h/, and a
>> further five percent actually put the main stress on the second syllable.
>> Sheesh.  Either John is using a remarkably catholic panel, or something has
>> happened here since I left home.  Do any of you Yanks out there *really*
>> pronounce an /h/ in 'vehicle'?

Richard Hammitt replied:

> Ok, I'll bite.  I was raised in Texas (but have travelled extensively
> throughout the eastern half of the U.S.) and have spent as much time with
> rural folks ("bumpkins") as I have with urban folks.  I do not pronouce the
> h, and I have never heard anyone pronounce the h (except in movies where
> someone was portraying "bumpkins").

> Of course, my exposure to the word is limited; the word is just not used so
> much anymore.  In its place, people I talk to approximate by using "car",
> whether referring to a car, a truck, a van, or any other 4-6 wheeled,
> motorized vehicle.

> As for what you said about not tolerating /h/ before schwa, my speech agrees
> except with the h in word-initial position.  I pronounce the word "hull" with
> a schwa.  That being said, when I add syllables (ending in many different
> consonants or vowels) before it in hypothetical words, I keep dropping the h.

To which I add:

I do pronounce the "h," though also being a native Texan who has lived
abroad-from-Texas for many years, and not, I trust, a country bumpkin.  It
is simply a Southernism, necessary to the drawl.  I don't really know how
one could pronounce "vehicle" in a Southern way without an "h."   Which is
probably why we just say "pickup."

David


From Oliver.Neukum at lrz.uni-muenchen.de  Thu Jun 14 18:56:18 2001
From: Oliver.Neukum at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Oliver Neukum)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 20:56:18 +0200
Subject: -ca in Sanskrit and Bartholomae's law
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.205618.0200.>

Hi,

could someone explain why Bartholomae's law never affects -ca ?

	TIA
		Oliver Neukum


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 14 03:25:56 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 23:25:56 EDT
Subject: Chronology and history of Germanic Consonant Shift
Message-ID: <WED.13.JUN.2001.232556.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/13/2001 9:18:17 PM, petegray at btinternet.com writes:

<< For the date of the 1st sound shift, we can use the word Hanf, which
comes from the Greek word kannabis.  This word is a loan word out of
Scythian, which did not enter Greek till the 5th century BC.  In Germanic we
meet the word in its shifted form *hanap-.  Since Germanic could not have
borrowed this word very early, we can assert that at this time the rules *k
> h and *b > p were still in force.  But it does not tell us how long this
rule had existed.  That it no longer was in force in the 3rd and 2nd
centuries before Christ can be concluded from loan words from Latin, >>

Two quick notes:  I think the word first appears in Herodotus and he treats
it as if his audience does not know hemp, comparing it to linen.  But he says
the Thracians know it and are expert at weaving with it.  In "Europe Before
History," Kristiansen describes the evidence for a powerful Scythian push
into central Europe, forcing Halstatt west of the Tisza, with a similar
westward withdrawal in the North.  At the same time, there is some serious
evidence of Scythian contact in Denmark, including a rich royal golden
Scythian necklace found in the bogs.  This happens I believe beginning around
the sixth century BC.

So, though I am inclined to find Greek influences early in northern places,
it appears that *hanap- could have found its way into German at an earlier
time, from Scythian or even Thracian.  As I don't think it is apparent how
Germanic would have borrowed the word from either of these two languages or
some intermediary, or when, the date of the borrowing and the mechanics given
above might be at best a conjecture.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 14 04:17:01 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 00:17:01 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.001701.EDT.>

I wrote:
>   We've been through this.  What you call often call "change" is actually
> continuity to me, because you still call what remains "cognate", which means
> there must be something that stayed the same.

JoatSimeon at aol.com replies:
<<-- cognate means "derived from the same source", neither more nor less.
Cognate words in related languages need bear no phonetic resemblance to each
other at all, as such.  Only when the systemic _patterns_ of change over time
>>

But that doesn't contradict what I wrote.  "Systematic patterns of change"
allow one to show that cognates are "derived from the same source."  So there
must be some continuity between the source and what is derived from the
source.  The alternative is no continuity, no relatedness, no cognacy.  All
that becomes obvious when linguists use the word "genetic" to describe
"cognate" relationships.

And I should point out that borrowed words can of course be "derived" from
the same source as a cognate.  The events at the Olympics described in Englis
h as "equestrian" use a word that is obviously "derived" from the same source
as <equus>, but would not be considered "genetically" transmitted and
therefore would not in theory be "cognate."

<<Eg., "pita" (Hindi) and "father" (English) are cognates, as are "pad" and
"foot", despite having no surface similarity at all.>>

If you said "pita" and "brassiere" have no surface similarity, well that
would be different.  If you said "pad" and "philadelphia" have no surface
similarity, that might work.  But "pita" and "father" clearly do have some
prima facie structural similarities.  All these similarities and differences
are clearly a matter of degree.  I would suspect that "found" cognates that
truly have no recognizable resemblances are rare.  And I would suspect that
any attempt to find a systematic pattern of change that included "pita" and
"brassiere" as cognates would not get very far.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 14 04:40:51 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 00:40:51 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.004051.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/13/2001 10:56:45 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:
<< I get the distinct impression that Steve believes that the comparative
method is a sham, a toy that does no more than to spit back the assumptions
built into it in the first place.  'Tain't so, Steve. >>

Larry, you really shouldn't go by your impressions.  Aside from being
incorrect, they are a little inflammatory, don't you think?  Especially if
you choose to pick up my points selectively as you have.

It's not the comparative method that I'm criticizing.  It's the conclusion
you come to that you claim OBVIOUSLY follow from the comparative method.   I
can accept the comparative method and still find fault with those
conclusions, which you gave in your first post in this thread.

It's not the comparative method but what you read into it.  After all, even
the devil can quote Scripture to his purpose.

The part that you avoided is what I'm after.  It has to do with the oneness
of PIE.  I'll repeat what I wrote here so that when you get around to it, you
can get past your misinformed impressions, and we can get to the meat of the
matter:

<<The problem I perceive and have been getting at does not arise after a
judgment is made about "genetic" relationships.  It happens before.  Romani
and Anglo-Romani obviously resemble one another in some way.  Upon analysis,
one discovers a "systematic correspondence" between Romani and the lexicon in
Anglo-Romani.  But does that yield a genetic relationship? No, because one
only gets one genetic relationship per customer?  Why?  Because a language
can only represent one "system"?  But Anglo-Romani represents two systematic
correspondences, and therefore presumably two different systems.  In
Anglo-Romani, the problem is clear, because the language is historic.  In IE
languages, the problem is hidden in prehistory.>>

Regards,
Steve Long


From sarima at friesen.net  Thu Jun 14 04:42:36 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 21:42:36 -0700
Subject: Rate of Change
In-Reply-To: <3B2019D2.32736.141020A6@localhost>
Message-ID: <WED.13.JUN.2001.214236.0700.>

At 12:18 AM 6/8/01 -0400, Brian M. Scott wrote:

>The basic point is probably sound enough, but you'd have a hard time
>finding a medieval historian who would agree that 'during the Middle
>Ages society hardly changed over 100 or more years'.  Pick any 100-
>year period you like during the MA, and you'll find significant social
>changes.

Quite so, even based on my amateur studies of post-Norman England I cannot
name any 100 year period without any social change.  Sometimes change was
even fast by modern standards.  The changes after the end of Stephen's
reign were extremely rapid, as Henry didn't tolerate much guff.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 14 05:04:34 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 01:04:34 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.010434.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/13/2001 11:20:36 PM, rao.3 at osu.edu writes:

<< The point is that such similarities and resemblances are considered to
be coincidences till systematic correspondences have been established.
The difference is between collection of discrete facts and establishment
of general laws. Only the latter is (nowadays) considered science. >>

I have no problem with this.  My  point that there is that the "general laws"
should not go further than the facts permit.  It's one thing to say that a
systematic pattern shows the absence of coincidence -- which is all that you
have said in the statement above. It's another to say that that pattern
proves a single ancestor, which was Prof Trask's point.  That's where we
leave science behind.

If I looked at your personal genetic chart assuming you would had only one
parent, it would most likely affect my selection "of discrete facts."  And
there would a good chance that I could "prove" you only had one parent by
those facts.  When you collect facts, it's important to remember that your
criteria of selection can affect the outcome.

Regards,
Steve Long


From hstahlke at gw.bsu.edu  Thu Jun 14 12:30:51 2001
From: hstahlke at gw.bsu.edu (Herb Stahlke)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 07:30:51 -0500
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.073051.0500.>

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.  The comparative method hasn't been applied to a
lot of these languages, although that is changing.  So how do you decide what
to compare.  At least heuristically, you want to give yourself the best chance
you can of being able to get somewhere with the comparative method, and so
Africanists have frequently used methods not based on regular sound
correspondences to find a place to start.  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.

Herb Stahlke

>>> larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk 06/08/01 05:06AM >>>
--On Wednesday, June 6, 2001 1:06 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> To say that I can't back up to that starting point, where everything is at
> best similarities and resemblances -- before any judgments about genetic
> relationships would have been made -- is to queer the game.  It makes the
> comparative method immune to critical analysis.

> I suspect part of the problem begins back when no analysis has yet been
> done and there can be nothing but resemblances between two languages.
> That's where the presumption starts that there WILL be only one genetic
> relationship and therefore there should be only one original systematic
> correspondence between the languages.  If you start by presuming that all
> "genetic" relationships can only relate to one parent, than all your
> results will tend towards that presumption, whether true or not.

Not so, I'm afraid.  The comparative method cannot possibly reconstruct an
ancestor that never existed -- not if it's competently applied, anyway.
Incompetent attempts are prominent in the fringe literature, of course, but
these are simply laughed away by professional linguists.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Thu Jun 14 07:50:20 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 03:50:20 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.035020.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/13/01 11:03:54 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> I must be firm in pointing out that "rate of change," as Prof Trask is using
> it, has little scientific validity - at least without confirmable numbers
> that anybody can double-check.

-- anybody can acquire the necessary knowledge base to know what Professor
Trask is talking about.

You can even reinvent it yourself.

It will take about twenty years, and you'll have to learn a round two dozen
languages or so (a hundred would be better),  and you'll be redoing stuff
that thousands of others have done before you, but you can do it, if you want
to.  Just as anyone can drop weights off the Leaning Tower of Pisa and time
weather the heavy ones hit before the light ones.


> I helped prepare a presentation before a board of physicists at the National
> Science Foundation a few years back.

-- linguistics is a descriptive-historical field, not an experimental one.
It's much more like paleontology than physics; digging up fossils, not
working with subatomic particles.   We describe what happened in the past,
not things which can be repeated at will in a laboratory.  This limits the
degree of quantification which can be done.

> If they expect this kind of specificity about "rates of change" in quantum
> mechanics and animal behavior experiments, they can expect it in historical
> linguistics.

-- no, they can't.  This is not an experimental science.  The field of data
available is of an entirely different order.

Give us a time machine and a tape recorder, and we can obtain results similar
to those of physics.

As it is, we're more like a technical kind of historian or archaeologist,
ferreting through scraps of waste-paper and bits of bone and doing
connect-the-dots.

It's been demonstrated repeatedly that the comparative method of historical
linguistics works; it has predictive power.  Many times we have found new
evidence anticipated beforehand using this method.

But it isn't physics.

> If we are talking about sound changes that separate two daughter languages,
> we should be able to show that those specific sound changes took a certain
> number of years, days, hours and with historical evidence.

-- no, the best we can do is to say that the observable languages indicate that
rates of change vary between a low of X, a high of Y, and average around Z.

When you talk about changes to a language, you're talking about thousands of
discrete events, most of them irreversably lost to entropy.

Quantification is necessarily fuzzy in this field.  It doesn't mean that
there are no boundaries and that anything goes; it just means that the
evidence is, by its nature, imprecise.

We have ranges of possible rates, not _a_ rate.  We can say, "this is
probable, that is improbable, the other thing is for all practical purposes
impossible because it would require a concentration of highly unlikely
chances".

> 2.  An example.  In biology, we talk about the rate of mutation.

-- not applicable.

> So what does body hair tell us about "rate of change?" 

-- not an applicable analogy, even remotely.

_Everything_ in a language eventually changes.  Eventually, it changes so
much that relationships are no longer detectable.

By way of contrast, even a bacterium and a human being share a fair number of
genes are are demonstrably related.

Presumably Basque and English have a common linguistic ancestor _somewhere_;
it's just so far back in time that all detectable links have vanished in the
steady "churning".

Remember, that the _form_ of a word bears no _necessary_ relationship at all
to its semantic _function_.  It's an arbitrary symbol.  Thus a language can
change _totally_, and still fulfill all the same functions it did before.
This is not true with genes.

Degree of _overall_ similarity is a good rough-cut indicator of how long
languages have been separated, and is in fact analagous to the
comparative-DNA tests used to determine the time-depth of the evolutionary
relationship between related animal species.

You can use this method with a high degree of accuracy.  Take a quick look
at, say, two Slavic languages, or two Romance ones, and then a Slavic and
Germanic or Germanic and Romance, or a Slavic, Romance and Germanic.

You will get precisely accurate _relative_ chronology from such a cursory
investigation; without any historical data besides the languages themselves,
you can immediately tell that the common ancestor of Romance is not far away
in time, that Common Slavic is even closer, that the common ancestor of any
Germanic language and any Slavic or Romance one is much further away in time
than that.

> 4. As I said, this is not meant to be disrespectful of linguistic
> expertise.

-- well, it certainly sounds that way.  If you want to talk about
linguistics, you have to come at it from the inside.  You're attempting to
apply inappropriate methodologies, and to do so without the necessary
knowledge base.


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Jun 14 09:23:43 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 10:23:43 +0100
Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look
In-Reply-To: <d2.7e49fc2.2856fca5@aol.com>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.102343.0100.>

--On Tuesday, June 12, 2001 1:03 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

[LT]

> In a message dated 6/7/2001 11:19:18 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:
> << We can imagine a lower rate of change, but there seems to be no good
> evidence for it.  Without some hard evidence, we have no right to assume
> that linguistic change was any slower in the remote past than it has been
> in the historical period.  Such an assumption would violate our linguistic
> Uniformitarian Principle: languages and speakers in the remote past
> behaved much as languages and speakers have behaved in the historical
> period. >>

> While I respect the trained linguist's ability to "feel" the relative age
> of a language, I must be firm in pointing out that "rate of change," as
> Prof Trask is using it, has little scientific validity - at least without
> confirmable numbers that anybody can double-check.

Oh, I agree with this.  Linguistic change has so many dimensions that no
one has yet been able to devise a metric for it, and I suspect that no
metric is possible.

However, perhaps Steve is reading a little too much into my words.  I was
certainly not claiming that the rate of linguistic change is constant.
Rather, I was only objecting to any suggestion that the rate of change, or
any other linguistic property, should have been *wholesale* different in
the remote past from what we see in the historical period.  If you have
good evidence for such a conclusion, then fine.  But, without such
evidence, it is out of order to assume any such thing merely because you
find the assumption convenient.

Have to stop here, I'm afraid: I still have a large pile of exam scripts to
be marked, and they have to be finished by tomorrow.  If I'm still alive
next week, I'll try to catch up a bit on these postings.

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 sarima at friesen.net  Thu Jun 14 13:25:41 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 06:25:41 -0700
Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look
In-Reply-To: <d2.7e49fc2.2856fca5@aol.com>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.062541.0700.>

At 01:03 AM 6/12/01 -0400, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

>If we are talking about sound changes that separate two daughter languages,
>we should be able to show that those specific sound changes took a certain
>number of years, days, hours and with historical evidence.  If we are
>claiming that that rate is somehow universal - justifying the application of
>a uniformity assumption - we should be prepared to show that the same rate
>per sound change can be observed in a large enough number of other languages.
>  Or explain why they vary.

This assumes a constant rate of change, something I doubt anybody
proposes.  What is suggested is a *statistical* median or mean rate, and a
variance in rate.  Given those one can determine a range of reasonable
values for when a *set* of changes took place.  One can certainly determine
a maximum amount of time that could reasonably correlate with a given
amount of change - that is how statistics works.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From mclasutt at brigham.net  Mon Jun 18 07:59:53 2001
From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin)
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 01:59:53 -0600
Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look
In-Reply-To: <d2.7e49fc2.2856fca5@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.18.JUN.2001.015953.0600.>

[[Steve Long wrote:]]

How do you propose to measure the rate of change in modern preliterate
languages?  How do they measure up against written languages?  Do they give
any evidence that rate is affected by the acquisition of writing?

[[I respond:]]

I'm not going to attempt to address your entire point, but I recently had an
article published that illustrates what can be done with preliterate
languages.

John E. McLaughlin.  2000.  "Language Boundaries and Phonological Borrowing
in the Central Numic Languages," _Uto-Aztecan:  Structural, Temporal, and
Geographic Perspectives_.  Ed. Eugene H. Casad and Thomas L. Willet.
Hermosillo, Mexico:  Universidad de Sonora.  Pp. 293-303.

Basically, it all depends on how well the language has been documented
during its history of contact with literate languages.  In the case of
Comanche, we know that the pre-Comanche physically moved away from their
Shoshoni ancestors in the first decade of the 18th century.  The earliest
record of the language is from 1786 and it is clear that Shoshoni and
Comanche were still very, very close at that time, if not still virtually
identical in phonological and morphological structure.  Today, there are
five main phonological changes that separate Shoshoni from Comanche and make
the two mutually incomprehensible without extensive practice.
(Impressionistically, the same magnitude of difference as between American
English and Scots.)  The next documentation in 1828 shows a language in
transition with most of the 5 phonological changes in full process of taking
charge.  The next major documentation in 1861 shows that all five of the
phonological changes have finished the job of restructuring the language.

During this entire period, Comanche society was preliterate and still
nomadic, having been forced onto the reservation only in 1872.  So, during
this 75-year span, 5 fairly important sound changes occurred.  The extensive
records made of Comanche in the late 1940s and 1950s by the first
professional linguists to visit them show that virtually no sound changes
occurred during the following 75-year span.  This measurement, of course,
only deals with phonological changes and not the morphological and syntactic
changes which also occurred in the three centuries between the physical
split with Shoshoni and the present day.  (The 18th and 19th century
documents are exclusively word lists.)  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.  BTW, none of the five changes are
due to the influence of English or Spanish.  Only one of them was due to
influence from a neighboring language--the loss of nasals in nasal-stop
clusters from the Southern Ute dialect of Colorado River Numic (most of you
may know this language as "Southern Paiute").

I can't really tell you how this stacks up against figures for literate
societies because I'm not an Indo-European expert, but I do seem to recall
from my general reading in historical linguistics that this seems to be the
general pattern found in all language change, whether the language is
written or not.  The true Indo-Europeanists can undoubtedly provide detailed
information to verify or correct this impression.

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 larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Jun 18 13:16:50 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 14:16:50 +0100
Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look
In-Reply-To: <d2.7e49fc2.2856fca5@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.18.JUN.2001.141650.0100.>

--On Tuesday, June 12, 2001 1:03 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> But of course if Prof Trask's use of "Uniformitarian Principle" was
> metaphorical or casual, and not meant to imply any real level of
> scientific certainty, then I can have no objection to it.

No.  My use of the term was not metaphorical or casual.  I intended to use
it in the same sense that it has in any other discipline.  In particular, I
meant this:

In the absence of hard evidence to the contrary, we must assume that the
following is true:

Languages and speakers in the remote past did not behave differently from
the way languages and speakers have behaved in the historical period.

To reject this position is to make historical linguistics impossible.  If
the Uniformitarian Principle is rejected, then there is no obstacle to any
far-fetched hypothesis about the remote past that anybody might want to put
forward.  Without the UP, we could claim that PIE spread across Europe and
then remained everywhere unchanged for 5000 years, or we could claim that
Proto-Germanic was an artificial language invented by a Polish oculist, or
we could claim that every IE language is the direct result of PIE in the
inept mouths of substrate-speakers.  Without the UP, historical linguistics
would be no more orderly or principled than a Michael Moorcock fantasy
novel.  We need it.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)


From R.S.Georg at let.leidenuniv.nl  Thu Jun 14 16:59:33 2001
From: R.S.Georg at let.leidenuniv.nl (R.S.Georg)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 09:59:33 -0700
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SGI.4.21.0106080727120.22693186-100000@paju.oulu.fi>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.095933.0700.>

>And, if anyone can make any sense of the phonetic side of the change *s > *k
>mentioned above, I'd be glad to hear it...

Armenian has a somewhat similar development (although the details are
by far not as simple; I don't know them from the top of my head, so
please look it up).

In some New Indian languages, under the so-called ruki-rule, *s went
as far as (at least) /x/. The ruki-rule decrees that /s/, after /r/,
/u/, /k/, /i/ goes to /sh/ (in Iranian, and Indic /s-retrofl./.
Ah, yes, (I'm not fully awake yet), it holds in Slavic, too, where
the outcome, at least after /u/, is /x/, too  (ru. snoxa, lat. nurus,
skt. snuSa:, Gk. nuos).
The phonetic ratio, if any, has to do with retroflexion. If you
retroflect your tongue *a lot* when pronouncing, say, Sanskrit /S/
(s-subscript dot), the acoustic impression is already very close to
(velar, not uvular) /x/. IOW, /S/ and /x/ have quite adjacent places
of articulation. The whole process from /s/ to /x/ is, thus,
describable as a gradual movement of place of articulation. OK, in
the end /x/ has to lose its friction to turn into the stop /k/, but
then you have it.
In early European writings on things Indian, I encountered the term
/upaniSad/ rendered as <Oup'nekhad>  (I think it was in Schopenhauer,
but he certainly got it from someone else); the ultimate source of
this impressionistic notation may have been Bengali Brahmin
pronunciation of Sanskrit, but I'm not so sure about that.

Stefan
--
Dr. Stefan Georg
Heerstrassse 7
53111 Bonn

Vakroep Vergelijkende Taalwetenschappen
Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Jun 14 09:15:38 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 10:15:38 +0100
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SGI.4.21.0106080727120.22693186-100000@paju.oulu.fi>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.101538.0100.>

--On Friday, June 8, 2001 7:47 am +0300 Ante Aikio
<anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi> wrote:

> Just out of curiosity: how strange are the changes in these Pama-Nyungan
> languages?

OK.  First, a correction.  I gave Barry Blake credit for working this stuff
out, but I was quoting from memory.  In fact, it was Ken Hale who did the
initial work, and then it was Terry Crowley who did the undergrad
dissertation which figured out the nasty cases.  Apologies all round.

The changes I had in mind were the initial-dropping languages of Australia.

In a typical Pama-Nyungan language, the phoneme inventory is small; there
are no fricatives; every word must begin with a single consonant; and
monosyllabic word-forms are prohibited.  All of these statements fail to
hold in the exceptional languages.

What happened in the exceptional languages was this.  First, all
word-initial consonants were lost.  Second, in most cases, the first mora
of the following vowel was also lost.  So, for example, before we consider
the rest, original *<guda> becomes <da>, while original *<guuda> becomes
<uda>.  But there's more.

Phonetic features of the lost segments, such as labiality and palatality,
were copied onto the remaining material in one way or another (and lost
velars often produced rhoticity in the surviving material).  In addition,
there were a number of lenitions in the surviving consonants (often
producing fricatives), but also some fortitions (especially of nasals and
liquids).  Finally, some word-final material was frequently also lost or
gained.

The changes in any given language are usually highly regular, though it
took a long time to work out the rules, and in fact it took a long time
even to identify the cognates.  It is not obvious, for example, that
Mbabaram <dOg> 'dog' (O = turned c; the word is amusingly identical to
English 'dog'), Mpalityanh <twa> 'dog', and Ntra?ngith <u?a> 'dog' are
cognate and all derived from original *<gudaga> -- which survives unchanged
in Yidiny (hiya, Steve).

In Yinwum, original *<wanta-> 'put' becomes <ntra->, and original *<yinta->
'(to) spear' becomes <nti->.  In LinngithiG (G = gamma), original
*<ngungku> 'there' becomes <ko>, and original *<ngantu> 'where' becomes
<tro>.  You can see why it took a while to find the cognates.

For an overview of this, see pp. 195-207 of this book:

R. M. W. Dixon (1980), The Languages of Australia, Cambridge UP.

For more information, see several of the papers in this book:

P. Sutton (ed.) (1976), Languages of Cape York, Canberra: Australian
Institute of Aboriginal Studies.

> Most examples of bizarre changes that I know are from various Samoyedic
> languages, e.g. *w- > q-, *j- > q-, *V- > ngV-, *mp > ngf and even *s- >
> k- before /e/ and /i/! But I'd be most interested in other examples of
> uncommon phonetic developments.

Look up the entry for 'unnatural change' in my dictionary:

R. L. Trask (2000), Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics,
Edinburgh UP.

This cites, with references, a number of odd-looking changes (N = [eng]):

  t > k
  -b- > -k-
  l > Ng
  w > ts-, -nts-
  ts > kw OR p OR f
  t > w
  d > N
  l > N

The examples come from Austronesian, Papuan and Athabaskan.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)


From mcv at wxs.nl  Thu Jun 14 09:25:08 2001
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 11:25:08 +0200
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SGI.4.21.0106080727120.22693186-100000@paju.oulu.fi>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.112508.0200.>

On Fri, 8 Jun 2001 07:47:10 +0300, Ante Aikio
<anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi> wrote:

>Most examples of bizarre changes that I know are from various Samoyedic
>languages, e.g. *w- > q-, *j- > q-, *V- > ngV-, *mp > ngf and even *s- >
>k- before /e/ and /i/! But I'd be most interested in other examples of
>uncommon phonetic developments.

>And, if anyone can make any sense of the phonetic side of the change *s >
>*k mentioned above, I'd be glad to hear it...

Well, *s > *t in Samoyedic (whether *s was really /s/ or perhaps
something like /T/ is a matter we discussed some time ago).  Then, /t/
before a front vowel palatalizes to /t^/, a sound intermediate between
/t/ and /k/.  Then it further shifts to /k/ (cf. Egyptian Arabic */d^/
> /g/).

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Fri Jun 15 05:13:03 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 01:13:03 EDT
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.011303.EDT.>

[ moderator edited ]

In a message dated 6/13/2001 11:41:57 PM, anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi writes:

<< Most examples of bizarre changes that I know are from various Samoyedic
languages, e.g. *w- > q-, *j- > q-, *V- > ngV-, *mp > ngf and even *s- > k-
before /e/ and /i/! But I'd be most interested in other examples of uncommon
phonetic developments.... >>

A catalogue of some "unusual sound shifts" by Benji Ward is on the web
somewhere (I've lost the URL) as part of a public list, in the course of
which he brought up some issues that might be of interest: (this is part of
what I saved)

   "[It's not apparent] that "t > h" via the route evident for Sabaki recurs
    elsewhere.  However, that does not convince me that it should be considered
    an unusual sound change in the manner of the arch example of the
    correspondence between Armenian [erk] and IE *dw.  Incidentally, Marc
    Picard cautioned me to distinguish between "correspondences" and "changes".
    But I didn't understand the point until I thought of this example (he
    remained abstract).  I still don't know how this correspondence came about,
    because even though it recurs ad nauseam in the literature, it is always to
    make Marc's point, and I guess it is only explained in specialist
    discussions.  It is obviously not a sound change, but at best a
    coincidental series of such things.  In contrast, the following is about
    sound changes.  The main question is: why should there be an "unusual"
    sound change?  If a sound change CAN occur, why doesn't it occur more
    often?  There will be hints about the answer to this mystery below.

    Many of the messages were about the Irish and Gaelic change of t > h,
    apparently via the stage theta. Strictly speaking, then, this is not the
    "same" as the Bantu *t > h change, since it was clear from my introductory
    discussion that the Bantu change was from post-alveolar rather than dental
    "t" (because I mentioned that the intermediate voiceless /r/ was attested).
    Nevertheless, I appreciated the example, and could not fault the
    respondents, since dental and alveolar t's are both t's, as far as "t > h"
    is concerned.

    In fact, whether the *t is dental or not, the principle may be more or less
    the same.  First it weakens to something retaining some of the buccal
    features, and the voicelessness, and finally it weakens to the ultimate
    voiceless segment /h/.  Meanwhile, the dental t also made me wonder what
    happened in the course of Germanic, because Grimm's law shows that original
    *t was dental, but the t that comes from IE *d has become alveolar in
    Germanic, for the most part.  Why?...

    Similarly with interest in the intermediate stages, which are indeed of
    central importance to understanding *t > h (and any other "unusual"
    change), Marc Picard pointed out that stages of the Bantu change occur
    independently elsewhere.  Thus, he recognised the tapped American English
    /t/ as akin to the flap that I described for the voiceless /r/ intermediate
    stage (or more similar to the occasional flapped "t" in Mombasa Swahili).
    Then he went on to point out that European Portuguese has the rolled r, but
    (Northern) Brazilian Portuguese has an /h/ reflex of /r/, to which I added
    that the Puerto Rican Spanish rolled ("double") rr is often pronounced as a
    velar like in French etc.  The implication is that Brazilian may have
    passed through this stage in the evolution of r > h.

    This might seem to support what I understood to be his thesis that the
    Machame R (Parisian voiceless R) should be counted as a stage in *t > h
    even in Sabaki.

    I had suggested this for Siha (and will back off that below), but I
    disagreed for Sabaki since no R stage is attested. I don't see why there
    had to be one.  That is, a velar or uvular does not seem to be a necessary
    waystation to /h/.  That doesn't happen with s > h, and obviously wasn't
    happening in the Charmey theta-h variation, so why should it be necessary
    with hr > h?

    In essence, my objection is that Occham's razor should not be applied to
    THEORIES about possible paths, but to EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE, there being no
    empirical evidence for a R intermediate stage between hr and h in Sabaki.

    Yes, I realise that that's a strong statement for people doing historical
    reconstruction, but all the better for us sound change in progress
    devotees..."

As for a hypothetical chain of possible changes, from a quoted post in the
same message:

   "Likewise, note the change of /dh/ > /gh/ is attested in Gaelic (????), and
    the change of /gh/ > /y/ in the Ripuarian, Brandenburgian, etc., dialects
    of German including those of the cities of Berlin, Magdeburg, Cologne, and
    Aachen (Zhirmunskij 1956:284-285).  Hence, there is a sequence of sound
    changes in the languages of the world which can get us from /dh/ to /y/."

Steve Long


From adiego at fil.ub.es  Wed Jun 13 22:21:17 2001
From: adiego at fil.ub.es (Ignasi Adiego)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 00:21:17 +0200
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.002117.0200.>

> And, if anyone can make any sense of the phonetic side of the change *s >
> *k mentioned above, I'd be glad to hear it...

> Regards,
> Ante Aikio

I don't know the circumstances of Samoyedic historical phonology, but a
change *s > *k could be acceptable if one assumes an intermediate step *h or
*x or the like, so *s > *h > *k. or *s > *h > *k or even *s > *h > *x > *k
Both *s > *h and *x/h > *k are banal (for *s > *h cf. Ancient Greek or
Avestan; for *x > *k or *h > *k, cf. Lycian or Carian).

Regards,
Ignasi-Xavier Adiego.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Thu Jun 14 07:59:17 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 03:59:17 EDT
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.035917.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/13/01 11:25:42 PM Mountain Daylight Time, rao.3 at osu.edu
writes:

> But how was the lexicon preserved?

-- it's a common phenomenon for social groups to either preserve or invent
jargons precisely to limit communication so that they can speak without
outsiders being able to follow their conversation.

Much slang has exactly this function; and often in-group slang changes
precisely when it becomes generally known and therefore loses its ability to
exclude.

Examples range from thieves' cant to the speech of 19th-century Classics
professors, where even when speaking English so many elements of Latin and
Greek vocabulary were used, and so many "learned tags", that people outside
the academic field often couldn't understand them at all.  Technical jargon
often both aids precision in a recondite field, and serves as a social
barrier to outsiders.

In the case of Anglo-Romani, it's clearly a case of a community becoming
English-speaking, but preserving the Rom lexicon as a way of maintaining a
form of communication that non-Rom couldn't understand.

Given the rather specialized social-economic ecological niche occupied by the
Rom, it's virtually inevitable that they would maintain some sort of cant or
in-group slang even when they became basically English-speaking.  It's an
occupational necessity as well as an aid to group identity.


From dlwhite at texas.net  Thu Jun 14 16:14:49 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 11:14:49 -0500
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.111449.0500.>

> Perhaps what is being asserted is that morphemes used in conjugation are
> more resistant to borrowing or external influence. This may be the case,
> but seems to be arguable given what has been said so far.

        Just briefly, yes:   what I am asserting is that the morphemes used
in conjugation are very resistant to borrowing.  External influence, if this
is "non-sound", is another matter.  I see no reason to imagine that speakers
of a given Language A might not somehow create in some Language B an ending
to correspond with something in Language A, if feeling the lack of such a
thing Language B, though I cannot think of any examples at the moment.  This
would not affect genetic descent.

Dr. David L. White


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Thu Jun 14 21:15:23 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 16:15:23 -0500
Subject: Genetic Descent
In-Reply-To: <000901c0f069$f017d560$1f6063d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.161523.0500.>

	But would syntax in and of itself be a determining factor?

	Romance languages also have some odd syntax patterns --although
these are limited to certain types of verbs,
	e.g. Spanish OVS

	Me gustan los libros.
	"To me please (3p) the books."
	"I like books."

	Se venden libros.
	"Themselves (mediopassive pronoun) sell (3pl) books"
	"Books are sold."

	Se me acabo/ el dinero.
	"Itself (mediopassive/reflexive pronoun) to me finished (3s) the
money."
	"My money ran out."

	Old Spanish often used VSO forms such as

	Gusto/me el libro.
	"Pleased-(3s)-me the book."
	"I liked the book."

[snip]
>I will give a quite relevant example of what I mean by this.  If genetic
>descent is to be traced through non-sound features (I notice you are no
>longer actively claiming this), then why isn't Celtic a mixed language, so
>that there was never really any such thing as Proto-Celtic?  The non-sound
>convergence of (Insular) Celtic to Semitic, or something like it, is quite
>striking, and extends even down to the level of fairly minor details like
>the Northern Subject Rule and Interior Possession ("You killed my horse"
>rather than "You killed to me the horse")  I suppose you and others could
>claim that the level of Semitic-seeming non-sound resemblances in Celtic,
>though it is "a lot", is not "enough", but who is to deny the Steve Longs
>and other No-Protos of the world when they come back and say "Yes it is."?
[snip]

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Wed Jun 20 15:17:02 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 16:17:02 +0100
Subject: Genetic Descent
In-Reply-To: <000901c0f069$f017d560$1f6063d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <WED.20.JUN.2001.161702.0100.>

--On Friday, June 8, 2001 5:25 pm -0500 "David L. White"
<dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

I'm still too busy to reply to this long posting in detail, so I'll have to
settle for responding to just a few points.

[on the supposed centrality of verbs]

> DLW:  You seem to be repeatedly missing some basic points here.  Not only
> is there a good case to be made for the proposition that verbs are more
> fundamental ("higher") than nouns,

Why?  I have yet to see any convincing argument that this is so.  Anyway,
even if it *were* so, the centrality of verbs is an entirely different
matter from the supposed centrality of verbal morphology.  Elsewhere in
this very posting, you have taken me to task for arguing that you were
confusing lexical verbs with verbal morphology -- and yet here you are,
apparently doing the same thing again.

> but there are some mixed nominal
> morphologies, whereas there are no mixed verbal morphologies.

This remains to be established, I'm afraid.  "I can't cite any" is not the
same thing as "There are none."  For that matter, I can't name too many
languages with mixed nominal morphology, either.

>> LT:  I'm sorry, but I cannot agree that verbs are more basic than nouns.
>> This seems to me an arbitrary fiat.  Anyway, I've never seen a language
>> without nouns, and that suggests to me that nouns are about as basic as
>> anything can be in languages.

> DLW:  It is not a matter of what is or is not basic in some binary sense,
> but of what is more basic in the sense of being higher in the tree.  Nouns
> depend on verbs, not the other way around.

First, this is once again an argument about lexical verbs, and not about
verbal morphology.  I still think you are confusing the two badly.

Second, why is the verb "higher in the tree"?  I have already pointed out
that such a configuration is not a piece of truth, but only an analytical
stance, and not even a stance adopted by most syntacticians.

Thid, in what sense do nouns "depend on verbs"?  The central property of
verbs -- indeed, virtually the definition of verbs -- is that they
intrinsically require nominal arguments.  Nominals, in contrast, do not
intrinsically require verbs.  How does this lead to your conclusion?

>> LT:  I am not a Chomskyan, but I don't think it can simply
>> be taken for granted that the verb is the head of the sentence.

> DLW: It is not being taken for granted.  It is in effect part of what is
> being posited:  "if we assume that verbs are more basic than nouns .."

Er -- what?  If we assume that verbs are more basic than nouns, then we are
simply assuming the conclusion you are trying to establish.

> By
> they way, the Chomskyite "INFL" (if they are still doing that:  I know
> little and care less) is historically descended from the inflection of the
> verb, so their position too would have to be that verbal inflection (in
> this case finite) is more basic.

Well, I'm not a Chomskyan, and I don't care for Chomskyan analyses, but I
don't think this is a fair summary of the Chomskyan position.

First, the Chomskyan I (= INFL) is emphatically not verbal in nature: in
particular, it is not a projection of V(erb).

Second, only *some* verbal morphology (in English) is assigned to I, while
the rest is assigned to the verb.  Chomskyan theory makes a sharp
distinction between the two kinds of morphology, even though -- in English
-- they all surface on the verb.

Third, the Chomskyans considered it a great vindication of their analysis
when Ken Hale reported that the Australian language Walbiri has an overt
'auxiliary' constituent in every sentence which carries much of the
morphology attached to verbs in other languages but which is wholly
non-verbal in nature.

Fourth, in English, most of the verbal morphology is attached to
auxiliaries when these are present -- but, for the Chomskyans, auxiliaries
are emphatically not verbs.

I'm afraid the Chomskyan stance offers no support for David White's
position, and it is out of order to argue that the Chomskyans are "really"
embracing a position which they are manifestly, and very explicitly, not
embracing.

On all this, see any textbook account of Chomskyan syntax.  I've just
consulted pp. 303-313 of Andrew Radford (1988), Transformational Grammar,
CUP -- which, in spite of its odd title, is a textbook of Chomsky's
Principles and Parameters approach.

>> LT:  There is also a fascinating counter-argument here.  Consider this
>> example:
>
>>   'That Martians are green is well known.'
>
>> Now, the subject of 'is' is plainly the complement clause 'That Martians
>> are green'.  Fine.  Now, what is the head of this clause?  Is it the
>> verb, as David seems to be implying?  Then the head of the subject is
>> 'are'.  But -- whoops -- this is plural, and yet the whole clause takes
>> singular agreement.
>> Oh, dear. ;-)
>
> DLW:  This is not so fascinating, or problematic.  It is fairly easy to
> say that the subject of the verb is "that", which would explain why it
> cannot, in such cases, be deleleted.

It may be "fairly easy", but it's wrong.

I know of no syntactician anywhere, of whatever persuasion, who takes the
complementizer of a sentential subject as the subject of the matrix verb.
I presume this suggestion boils down to the proposal that the
complementizer should be taken as the head of the complement clause -- but
I don't know anybody who endorses that, either.

Moreover, the argument from undeletability fails.  Consider another example:

  She realizes (that) Martians are green.

Here the complementizer can readily be deleted.  So, by David's account,
'that' cannot be the head of the complement clause in this case, even
though it is in the other case.  And this is incoherent.

Finally, this whole argument sems to me to clash badly with David's
insistence that the verb is "higher" than anything else.

>> LT:  It is true that, in *some* languages, a sentence may consist
>> entirely of an affixed verb.  But it is equally true that, in *some*
>> languages, a sentence may consist entirely of nominal elements, with no
>> verb-form present at all.
>
> DLW:  There is no _type_ of language where the subject noun and its
> mandatorily associated elements (which would include tense) form a
> complete sentence.  And except for cases of BE-deletion (which only
> occurs in the present), adjetives that serve as (and are marked as)
> verbs, and NPs uttered when context makes clear what the higher VP would
> be, I venture to doubt the validity of your assertation.

OK; let's look.

First, what on earth do you mean by "type of language"?  What is a type of
language?  Who decides what types there are?  Who decides on what basis
languages should be assigned to types?  And why should we believe anything
he says?

Second, what is "BE-deletion"?  Many languages have no copula at all.  So
why should we speak of "deletion" when the copula predictably fails to show
up?

Third, consider Turkish.  Here are some entirely typical Turkish sentences.
In Turkish, the third-singular marker is zero, while the past-tense marker
is <-(y)di>, with vowel harmony; the variable <y> appears after a vowel but
not after a consonant.  This is true whether or not the tense-marker is
attached to a verb.

  Ali hazIr  'Ali is ready'

This consists of <Ali> plus <hazIr> 'ready', with no verbal element at all.

Now try it in the past:

  Ali hazIrdI  'Ali was ready'

Here the past-tense suffix <-dI> has been attached directly to the
adjective, and there is still no verb.

  Ali evde  'Ali is at home'

The second word is <ev> 'house' plus <-de> Locative.  No verb.  In the past:

  Ali evdeydi  'Ali was at home'

Again, the tense-marker goes onto the nominal, and there is no verb.

(These examples do not represent the only possible constructions in
Turkish, but they do illustrate the ordinary and unmarked constructions.)

Now, I have no idea whether these facts qualify Turkish for some particular
"type" of language, but they're still facts.  Who needs verbs when you can
put the tense-marking onto nouns or adjectives?  And why are Turkish facts
less important than the facts of some other (unidentified) languages with
other kinds of sentence structure?

[LT]

>> What David White is arguing, successfully or not, is that the *lexical
>> verb* plays a central role in sentence structure.  Even if we grant
>> this, it *does not follow* that verbal morphology is somehow more
>> central than any other morphology, such as nominal morphology.  Verbal
>> morphology is not the same thing as a lexical verb.

> DLW:  This is a point you yourself seem to miss, in attributing to me
> beliefs about lexical verbs which were intended to apply only to verbal
> morphology.

But, just above, you have twice again appealed expressly to verbs, and not
to morphology.

Sorry, folks: gotta go now.  A pile of work beckons.  Sigh.

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  Thu Jun 14 08:25:24 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 04:25:24 EDT
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.042524.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/14/01 12:36:12 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> The road that Dr. White goes down in the quote above is one inevitable result
> of the assumption that languages can be "genetically" descended from ONLY one
> ancestor.

-- demonstrably, virtually all the languages which we can observe are so
descended. "But it was different long ago" doesn't cut it.

> Common sense and half-way decent science would suggest that it is a form of
> both source languages.  Why should one genetic element make another
> non-genetic?

-- well, English is not a form of French, nor is it a Romance language,
despite having nearly half its vocabulary derived from those sources.

You won't find one single, solitary linguist who'd say that it is.

I suggest that if you want to argue in this field, you have to learn its
vocabulary and how words are defined.  To question them, you must first
understand them in their own terms.

> A language is made up of many totally independent parts.  Why should the
> "genetics" of one part affect the "genetics" of another part.

-- no, a language is a system of interrelated parts (or rules) in a
continuous process of change.

It is a single "thing"; rather like a living organism, in fact, particularly
considered in its development through time.  (Please note that "rather like"
is not the same as "identical to").


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Thu Jun 14 08:54:27 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 04:54:27 EDT
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.045427.EDT.>

Steve Long wrote:

> Haitian Creole speakers were largely descended from West African speakers.

-- there is no such thing as a "West African speaker"; that would be like an
"Asian speaker" or a  "European speaker" or an "American speaker".

If you're going to try to use Haitian Creole as an example to support your
argument, first you have to get the facts about it right, or nobody is going
to take you very seriously.

The slaves imported to French Santo Domingo were speakers of many language
families and quite literally scores of different, often mutually
incomprehensible, languages.  A monoglot Fon speaker can no more understand a
Hausa or baKongo than a monoglot English-speaker can understand Chinese.

That's why they ended up speaking pidgin French to each other, as well as to
their French-speaking overlords.  They had no common language.

> Haitian Creole used West African lexicon and 17th Century French affixes.

-- ah... this is not an accurate description of Haitian Creole, most of the
lexicon of which is and always was French, with substantial amounts of
vocabulary from Fon and a number of other (often unrelated) West African
languages.

> What is the possible usefulness of calling it French and not African?

"Accuracy", among other things.  For example, "French" is a linguistic term,
and "African" a geographical one.

Simply asking your question in these terms shows that it's devoid of meaning.

You would have to say something like "What is the possible usefulness of
calling it French-based and not Fon-based?"

(Or Yoruba-based or Peul-based or baKongo-based, or whatever.)

Once rephrased in those more accurate terms, the answer is obvious:  because
it's not based on Fon, or Peul, or baKongo.

Take a little Haitian Creole:

"Bas 'genoux, fi' de malheu'!  Fai'e moa honneu!
 Li es' royaume moan --
 Li est moa qui 'regne 'ci!
 Ne pas passer par' li
 Sans hommage 'rendu --"

Or:

"Ogoun vini caille nous!
 Li gran'gout, li grangran soif!
 Grand me'ci, Ogoun Badagris!
 Manger! Bueh! Sat'!"

Note the characteristic pidgin-derived Creole features:  reduplication for
emphasis, for example:  "grangran" instead of "tres grande".  English-based
pidgins use exactly the same feature -- "big-big" instead of "very big".  And
simplification of the pronouns, etc.  English-based pidgins generally use
"him" uniformly instead of forms like "he"; "him bigbig man".

Anyone looking at the above text, with no knowledge of the history involved,
could say:  "This is a form of creolized pidgin French."   With a little more
text, you could go on to say:  "The contact languages involved in the
creation of the pidgin from which the creole developed were mostly West
African."

Note that both "creolized" and "pidgin" have rather precise meanings, and
that pidgins and creoles have similar structural characteristics irregardless
of the languages which go into their creation.

In fact, someone with a general knowledge of Indo-European linguistics but
who didn't know there was such a thing as a French language could also look
at a Haitian Creole text and say "and it's an Indo-European language", thus
neatly tying up its ultimate "genetic" origins.

> What did those speakers of African descent do exactly?  Learn French,
> temporarily forget West African and then later borrow West African words from
> themselves?

-- what they did -- exactly -- was (in cooperation with native
French-speakers) learn pidgin French, speak that to each other and their
children, and then (as the children grew up speaking it) it developed into a
creole language.  With some vocabulary and features due to the -- various,
different -- languages the slaves spoke originally, as a sort of multiple
substrate.

A pidgin, one should note, is a _lingua franca_ language which is not spoken
by anyone as their native tongue.

This later became a creole language, as new generations grew up speaking it
as their native tongue.  It therefore underwent certain -- highly distinctive
-- developments common to creoles.

> The older source among the generations of speakers who passed on the
> language was West African.

-- no.   The input of (various, different) West African languages and French
was simultaneous, and French was the linguistic scaffolding on which the
pidgin rested from the first.

It was pidgin _French_, not pidgin Fon or pidgin Yoruba.

Simplifying the grammar of French and tacking on some Fon words does not make
a language any less French-derived, any more than discarding inflection and
tacking on a lot of Romance vocabulary makes English a form of French.

A native French speaker could make the pidgin out, more or less, with a
little trial and effort.  Like all pidgins, it had a restricted vocabulary
and a radically simplified grammar.

A native Fon or Yoruba speaker could not understand it at once, despite
lexical borrowings from those languages.  They had to learn it.  It would be
easier for them to learn than standard French, of course -- partly because of
lexical borrowings from their languages, but mostly because of the features
all pidgins share.  Not many words, radically simplified grammar.

This is all quite natural, since the primary purpose of the pidgin was
communication between French speakers and speakers of various (different,
mutually incomprehensible) West African languages.


From parkvall at ling.su.se  Thu Jun 14 12:30:21 2001
From: parkvall at ling.su.se (Mikael Parkvall)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 14:30:21 +0200
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
In-Reply-To: <51.cd6cb1a.28576282@aol.com>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.143021.0200.>

Steve Long wrote:

>Haitian Creole speakers were largely descended from West African speakers.
>Haitian Creole used West African lexicon and 17th Century French affixes.
>What is the possible usefulness of calling it French and not African?

My comment doesn't really address the issue under debate, but only this
specific detail of Steve's argumentation.

To the best of my knowledge, no variety of Haitian Creole has ever been
attested in which African words make up more than a couple of per cent (at
the very best) of the vocabulary. The lexicon of Haitian is normally
considered to be more than 80% (citing from memory, but I could probably
come up with references if neccessary) of French origin, regardless of
whether you consider the core lexicon or the whole vocab. Given that most
French affixes -- though they do exist -- have got lost on their way, it
would make more sense (which doesn't mean it would be correct) to describe
Haitian as French lexicon and no affixes rather than Afro lexicon and
french affixes.

More relevant to the debate, I think it is unfortunate that creoles
sometimes are cited on par with intertwined languages in debates on genetic
descent. A pidgin or a creole is not neccessarily -- contrary to belief
among non-experts (and quite a few experts) -- particularly mixed, and it
should be obvious to anyone who bothers to take a closer look that Tok
Pisin and Michif certainly aren't very structurally alike.

A deliberate oversimplification which would need to be taken by more than a
grain of salt, but which have some truth to it is that while a non-contact
language has one parent, an intertwiner has two, and a pidgin or creole none.

Mikael Parkvall


From dlwhite at texas.net  Thu Jun 14 17:02:06 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 12:02:06 -0500
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.120206.0500.>

> Let's look at Dr White's approach here and what it might mean:

> 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.

         Just briefly again (I have bailed back into the Finland conference,
which I had bailed out of) ...
        Actually, I would be quite happy to call such a language an isolate.
It is 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 traceabe to Language B, we are not
justified in blithely proceeding as if it is, or ignoring it.

        But the point is, we have a fact here that cries out for
explanation:  that there are no mixed finite verbal morphologies.  What I
have suggested, essentially that finite verbal morphology is so basic that
it is not borrowable,  explains this, while nothing else that has been
proposed does.

        We do, by the way, have at least one mixed finite verbal morphology,
though the nature of its "mixture" is rather different than might be
expected:  Kormakiti "Arabic", where (if the facts have been reported
correctly) Arabic verbs use Arabic morphology and Greek verbs use Greek
morphology.  (Thus it is not the case that, as an example, singular personal
morphemes are Greek and plural personal morphemes are Arabic.  This would be
a true mixed finite verbal morphology, of the sort that evidently does not
occur.)   It is interesting to consider why mixture has occcured in this
case but not the case of Kupwar.  The answer is fairly obvious:  Greek and
Arabic have two different kinds of verbal morphology, concatenative and
non-concatenative respectively, so that the two can mix without getting in
each other's way.  The parallel expedient applied to Kupwar, Kannada endings
for Kannada verbs and Marathi endings for Marathi verbs (to simlify a bit)
would produce a situation where two different morphemes meaning the same
thing would occur in exactly the same place and pattern, which would be
rather pointless.  Therefore mixture is more difficult to pull off and does
not occur.   The nature of the languages in contact makes a difference.
        I cannot say more at this time (I am working on my own rival
theoretical framework to oppose to TK's "shift" versus "borrowing"), but I
would ask those sharing their views on this matter to PLEASE ANSWER THE
QUESTION  why it is that truly mixed finite verbal morphologies do not
occur.  Continued ducking will qualify you folks to seek a career in
politics.

Dr. David L. White


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Jun 18 14:51:00 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 15:51:00 +0100
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
In-Reply-To: <51.cd6cb1a.28576282@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.18.JUN.2001.155100.0100.>

--On Tuesday, June 12, 2001 8:18 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

I'm still marking, so I'll again have to be brief.

[on certain hypothetical examples, and replying to David White]

> So, a large part of Language A goes abruptly from "genetic" to
> "non-genetic" depending on the presence of certain verb morphology.

This is a response to David White's position, not to mine.

> I think any good scientist would, in the example above, call the
> distinction between "genetic" and  "non-genetic" operationally useless.

I'll leave David White to reply to this from his point of view, if he wants
to.  From my point of view, the distinction is very far from "operationally
useless".  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.  Recall the case of Tlingit and
Eyak-Athabaskan: loads of common elements; no patterns; hence no
demonstrable common ancestry.

> The road that Dr. White goes down in the quote above is one inevitable
> result of the assumption that languages can be "genetically" descended
> from ONLY one ancestor.  Sooner or later, you will have one "genetic"
> element coming up against another.  The contest then becomes which
> "genetic" element is the winning "genetic" element.  Everything else
> loses and becomes non-genetic.

No.  David White aside, this is simply not the way comparative linguistics
is done.  We do not count up elements of varying origins and then base any
genetic conclusions on our totals.

In English, we now have far more elements of French, Latin and Greek origin
than we have of native Germanic origin.  But no comparative linguist wants
to conclude, therefore, that English is no longer a Germanic language.
English is Germanic because we can identify the correspondences linking it
to the other Germanic languages, and because -- as a result of these
correspondences -- we can trace the ancestry of English back to
Proto-Germanic.  No matter how many Latino-Romance elements we find in
English, we cannot move English into the Romance family: the required
patterns are just not there.

In the same vein, Basque is not a Romance language, in spite of the vast
number of Latino-Romance elements it contains, and Romanian is not a Slavic
language, in spite of the very large number of Slavic elements in it.  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.

[on a hypothetical mixed language]

> Common sense and half-way decent science would suggest that it is a form
> of both source languages.  Why should one genetic element make another
> non-genetic?

It doesn't.  When we borrowed the word 'kangaroo' from Guugu-Yimidhirr,
English acquired no Guugu-Yimidhirr ancestry at all, and the inherited
Germanic elements became no less inherited.

> 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.

This is not the way we use 'genetic' in linguistics.  We do 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.

[on Haitian Creole]

> Common sense and half-way decent science would suggest that there is
> something wrong here.  Obviously there are different elements in Haitian
> Creole and they obviously come from different sources.  The older source
> among the generations of speakers who passed on the language was West
> African.  The later French element may be "more genetic."  But why would
> that make the West African elements "non-genetic"?  They can lay claim to
> being original, continuous and native with those speakers.  How could
> they suddenly become totally non-genetic?

I don't know enough about Haitian Creole to make any pronouncements about
it -- though I have the impression that HC has a rather more complex origin
than a standard average creole.  Still, the position among those who have
studied it appears to be that HC is not the direct descendant of any
ancestor -- in other words, it is what we now call a 'non-genetic language'.
Whether this conclusion is correct is an empirical matter, but it least
it's coherent.

> Isolating systematic elements of two languages to find a common ancestor
> is a powerful methodology.  But why would we conclude from that process
> that either of those languages as a whole can only descend from one
> ancestor? What makes one element genetic and a similar element borrowed?

Patterns, patterns, patterns.

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  Thu Jun 14 09:05:29 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 05:05:29 EDT
Subject: European Genetics/IE
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.050529.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/14/01 12:57:15 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes:

> Wouldn't it be possible that some languages or dialects may have
> started out as creoles and then have become standardized through increased
> contact with the parent language.

-- yes, this is a common phenomenon.

> and it seems plausible that (some) early regional forms of Romance may have
> initially been more like Latinate creoles than daughter languages.

-- no, because the special conditions which are required for the creation of
a creole language weren't present.

Creoles are pidgins which have become 'naturalized' and spoken as a first
language.

To have a creole, you first need a pidgin -- and pidgins are the result of
incomplete language acquisition in situations where multiple languages are
spoken and a trade jargon is needed, but acquisition of the standard form is
not possible.

None of the Romance languages was a pidgin to begin with; they all started
off as fairly standard versions of Late Latin -- regional dialects of Late
Latin, to be precise.

There may well have been forms of pidgin Latin spoken in the course of Roman
expansion, and among the masses of slaves from varoius areas in Italy and
adjacent parts of the Roman domains.  In fact, there probably would have
been.

But they never became creolized, as far as I know.


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 14 15:12:17 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 11:12:17 EDT
Subject: On "Joke Usage"
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.111217.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/14/2001 1:11:38 AM, dlwhite at texas.net writes:
<< This is a sub-case of the "it was different in those days" view of
language change, by which all sorts of bizarre things happened in the past,
in situations we are not able to observe, in this case mixed languages
lurking under every rock, a la Steve Long.>>

A mild correction.  My position is that "all sorts of bizarre things" are
also happening in the present.

<<...Other than silly things like the joke usage of "moi" in English.>>

Good example.  I imagine the last of the Anglo-Saxon wordists hearing that
medieval Muppeteer Chaucer reciting his Tales and then calling all those
French and Latin words "silly things" that should properly be categorized as
"joke usage."  Would make a good theoretical category, explaining how such
usage can fundamentally take over the substance of a language with a hearty
sense of humor, like English.  On a similar note, I heard an ESPN commentator
explain how one player had plans to "out-jumpize" the height advantage of the
Lakers.  Damn that Chaucer, Miss Piggy and the companies that customize
mini-vans.

<<...in this case mixed languages lurking under every rock...>>

Or staring you in the face.

Dr White's situation is not unlike that of the English natural philosopher
who traveled to Australia prepared to debunk the existence of the platypus,
the kangaroo, etc.  A boxing match was arranged between the philosopher and a
representative of one of these fauna.  After being soundly thrashed and
knocked out in the first round, Dr White - I mean, the philosopher denied he
had lost the match on the grounds that his opponent was theoretically
impossible.

Living la vita loca,
Steve Long


From edsel at glo.be  Thu Jun 14 12:53:35 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 14:53:35 +0200
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.145335.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Xavier Delamarre" <xavier.delamarre at free.fr>
Sent: Friday, June 08, 2001 10:07 PM

> le 5/06/01 10:09, Eduard Selleslagh à edsel at glo.be a écrit :

>>> 1/ Hier j'ai achete une maison tres grande a Vaucresson

>>> 2/ Hier j'ai achete une tres grande maison a Vaucresson

>>> Absolutely no difference in meaning, style or emphasis. I am sorry.

>> Yes, but consider:
>> 1) De Gaulle était un très grand homme.
>> 2) De Gaulle était un homme très grand.

>> The meaning is completely different.

>     Of course, classical example of handbooks. You have (semantic) freedom
> with the substantive maison but not with homme.
>     What is in question here is that when there is the possibility of free
> word order, it does not induce _systematically_ a difference in meaning,
> style, emphasis etc.
>     But there again it is not PIE, where these possibilities were much more
> extended than in Modern french.
>     And to reduce PIE syntax to word-order (Lehmann, Friedrich) is simply
> nonsense.

>     XD

[Ed]

Just a last note, not meant to be facetious: It seems to me that even in your
example there is a slight difference that (slightly) echoes the one in mine.
That difference is IMHO that the regular order (noun-determiner/adjective in
Romance languages) is more neutral, matter-of-fact-like, while the inverse
order implies something, usually a more symbolic or figurative sense, whence
sometimes poetic. This is quite general: unusual word order often implies
something beyond the literal meaning.

To me, 'une très grande maison' implies a (very light) shade of grandeur,
while 'une maison très grande' is simply a big house.

Ed.


From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu  Thu Jun 14 16:07:30 2001
From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 11:07:30 -0500
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
In-Reply-To: <B746FCB8.EAF%xavier.delamarre@free.fr>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.110730.0500.>

>le 5/06/01 10:09, Eduard Selleslagh à edsel at glo.be a écrit :

>>> 1/ Hier j'ai achete une maison tres grande a Vaucresson

>>> 2/ Hier j'ai achete une tres grande maison a Vaucresson

>>> Absolutely no difference in meaning, style or emphasis. I am sorry.

>> Yes, but consider:
>> 1) De Gaulle était un très grand homme.
>> 2) De Gaulle était un homme très grand.

>> The meaning is completely different.

>    Of course, classical example of handbooks. You have (semantic) freedom
>with the substantive maison but not with homme.
>    What is in question here is that when there is the possibility of free
>word order, it does not induce _systematically_ a difference in meaning,
>style, emphasis etc.
>    But there again it is not PIE, where these possibilities were much more
>extended than in Modern french.
>    And to reduce PIE syntax to word-order (Lehmann, Friedrich) is simply
>nonsense.

>    XD

The word order position attributed here to Lehmann, Friedrich and others is
over simplified for the period in which it was being done (the early '70's)
and there is much now that goes beyond it without, however, entirely
scrapping some of the basic principles.

Even then (Lehmann's article in LG 1973 on "A Principle ...") it was not a
question of word order per se but of correlates among categories such as
governed objects and their governors, including the basic order of the
adjective in comparisons of inequality (e.g., 'bigger than John', 'from
John bigger').

Certainly pragamatic factors affect the statistics of occurring word order
patterns, as noted by various people on this list. For the classicist,
Henri Weil's (reprinted) little book on word order that distinguished
between rhetorical order and basic order among the older Latin and Greek as
opposed to the more recent French and German (maybe English too) gives
examples using those languages.

More recently attention to issues of alignment or contentive type in
language add to the issue of word order another entire range of syntactic
argument. Essentially, was PIE ergative? Was it an active language as
Gamkrelidze & Ivanov (their IE & the IEeans), Lehmann (1993), K. H. Schmidt
(various publications) suggested? Some recent approaches to the
interrelations of language categories and type or IE and such contentive
types have just appeared in the new issue of General Linguistics 37 2000 (1997)
(GL website: http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/lrc/gl/gl.html  contents of
GL 37 to be posted this week) for anyone who is interested.

Carol Justus


From sarima at friesen.net  Fri Jun 15 01:32:45 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 18:32:45 -0700
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
In-Reply-To: <B746FCB8.EAF%xavier.delamarre@free.fr>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.183245.0700.>

At 10:07 PM 6/8/01 +0200, Xavier Delamarre wrote:
>le 5/06/01 10:09, Eduard Selleslagh à edsel at glo.be a écrit :

>>> 1/ Hier j'ai achete une maison tres grande a Vaucresson

>>> 2/ Hier j'ai achete une tres grande maison a Vaucresson

>>> Absolutely no difference in meaning, style or emphasis. I am sorry.

>> Yes, but consider:
>> 1) De Gaulle était un très grand homme.
>> 2) De Gaulle était un homme très grand.

>> The meaning is completely different.

>     Of course, classical example of handbooks. You have (semantic) freedom
>with the substantive maison but not with homme.

My French is rather weak, so I would appreciate an explanation of the 
distinction in the case of 'homme', please?

>     What is in question here is that when there is the possibility of free
>word order, it does not induce _systematically_ a difference in meaning,
>style, emphasis etc.

This is tricky to analyze.  Sometimes a regular distinction is neutralized
in some conditions.  Also, self reporting is not always the best criterion
for such subtle distinctions.  It would be interesting to see an analysis
of the distribution of the two patterns in an extended prose set for "free"
words such as 'maison'.

In Latin there is good evidence that adjectives (and similar modifiers)
placed before the noun provide some form of prominence or salience to the
adjective.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From sarima at friesen.net  Fri Jun 15 01:35:34 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 18:35:34 -0700
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
In-Reply-To: <000501c0f190$a78b9020$f96801d5@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.183534.0700.>

At 09:19 AM 6/10/01 +0100, petegray wrote:

>There is an expected, but not necessary word order.

Expression rules can certainly be optional.

>So word order is not an essential part of the grammar, in one sense, but it
>is an essential element of the whole linguistic communication.

I guess this is in part a matter of definition, as I consider such things
to be part of the grammar, unless they have no impact at all on the
communicative effect.
--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From sarima at friesen.net  Thu Jun 14 13:35:12 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 06:35:12 -0700
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <F196KvxtJ08v7jWLhZS000180e3@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.063512.0700.>

At 12:36 PM 6/8/01 +0000, Gabor Sandi wrote:

>I think that it is odd as well, yet I can't help noticing that personal
>markings of verbs in IE (and Uralic and Altaic as well, for all you
>Nostraticists) consistently come after the verb stem and not before it.
>What's more, some of these endings contain consonants identical or similar
>to what is found in the corresponding personal pronoun. -m- in the first
>person is the most obvious (in PIE and Uralic, plus some other proto
>languages), as is the -t- in the 2nd person plural (also, 2nd person sing.
>in Uralic), -t- in the third person less so, the -s- in the 2nd person sing.
>not at all. There are three competing hypotheses:

>1. coincidence
>2. agglutination of the pronoun
>3. there is a relationship, but the ending is not the result of an
>agglutination of the verbal root with a pronoun

>If the answer is no.2 above, I would like to come up with a succession of
>linguistic changes that look reasonable and result in the pattern we see.

Well, it is certainly possible that some pre-PIE language was VSO without
effecting the possibility that PIE itself was SOV.  Such transitions are
attested.  Perhaps this means that Proto-Nostratic was VSO, perhaps
not.  Either way, once the clitics have transitioned into inflections there
is no bar against a change in the unmarked position of the subject.

[Note, reconstruction of word order is difficult, there is good evidence
for "early" VSO in both Germanic and Celtic - but that is still later than
the classical IE languages].

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From petegray at btinternet.com  Thu Jun 14 19:20:58 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 20:20:58 +0100
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.202058.0100.>

> I can't help noticing that personal markings of verbs in IE (and Uralic and
> Altaic as well, for all you Nostraticists) consistently come after the verb
> stem and not before it.

A similar, newly developed, pattern might be observable in Sanksrit - though
detailed analysis is really needed, and I am going only on impression.  It
is relatively common to find the word "aham" (= "I") attached to the end of
a verb or participle, but not common to find it before -
     e.g.:   vistabhya aham   = supporting I   = I am supporting
             katham vidyam aham  = how might know I = how might I know
             vahami aham   = bring I   = I bring
etc

Peter


From rao.3 at osu.edu  Thu Jun 21 02:34:04 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 22:34:04 -0400
Subject: Word Order and verb endings (was Re: No Proto-Celtic?)
Message-ID: <WED.20.JUN.2001.223404.0400.>

Just because verb endings come from pronouns does not mean it must go
back to VS order. Tamil provides a good example where we can attribute
it to a different mechanism.

Modern Tamil has a large number of formations based on 'auxillaries'.
[These are called compound verbs. When grammaticalized, they function
much like auxillaries.] Their origin is clear in formal speech [even if
obscured in colloquial speech], except for a former progressive. Also,
double plural endings became established some time in the medieval
period (with old plural becoming the respectful form). After removing
these, we are left with basically two forms, traditionaly called past
and non-past when referring to Classical Tamil. These can be segmented
into a stem and an ending which is clearly the pronoun in the third
person and very similar to the pronoun in the first person. For example,
the forms for the verb "va:", 'come', the forms are

varuve:n    varuvo:m    vante:n    vanto:m
varuva:y    varuvi:r      vanta:y    vanti:r
varuva:n    varuva:r     vanta:n    vanta:r
  (-a:L, -atu)

But the stems varu- and vant- also occur in non-finite functions. In
particular, stem+current form of the pronoun function as participles,
and with the neut III can also function as a verbal noun. Most
importantly, similar forms can be used to turn a clause into an
adjective: "The man who came yesterday" can be rendered as
    neRRu    vanta    manitan
   yesterday [come] man

This suggests a very different explanation: Finite verbs came from
verbal nouns and the order stem+pronoun then will be due to the usual
order of adjective+noun.

I don't presume to claim that the origin of the person/number endings in
PIE is similar: To do that we need an explanation of why these endings
do not show common gender vs neuter gender. I just wish to point out
that alternate explanations must be ruled out before asserting that
Verb-Pronoun order lead to the endings.

Regards
Nath


From sarima at friesen.net  Thu Jun 14 13:44:55 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 06:44:55 -0700
Subject: *G^EN-
In-Reply-To: <004801c0f024$6a6581a0$fbf1fea9@swbell.net>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.064455.0700.>

At 09:07 AM 6/8/01 -0500, proto-language wrote:

>Methodologically, if it (and some others) can be derived from *both* *g^en-
>and *g^enH-, I see no reason to assume the non-existence of *g^en- just
>because all forms can be derived from *g^enH-

Actually, there is a methodological reason to at least not reconstruct a
*g^en- (even if one cannot positively say it did not exist).  It is called
Occam's Razor - do not multiply entities beyond necessity. In a case like
this there is no *need* to introduce three elements: a root, and extension,
and an extended root, so it should not be done.  Only if there is some
specific evidence requiring the existence of the "non-extended" root should
it be reconstructed as such.

Now, if Skt 'janati' does in fact point to *g^en instead of *g^enH, this
could be such evidence.  I am not really qualified to judge, but I am
somewhat skeptical.  For one thing, it is generally held that a form needs
to be found in two or three branches of IE before it can reconstructed for
PIE, so if Skt is the only source seeming to require bare *g^en, there is a
very real possibility of innovation in Indic.

>. My preference would be to assume that a root, *g^en- (which I would consider
>to be *basic*) and a root with extension, *g^enH- have been conflated into a
>single paradigm.

I would apply Occam, and only introduce this entity if I could reconstruct
it as such.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri Jun 15 18:38:55 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 19:38:55 +0100
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.193855.0100.>

I'm sorry if I was too suspicious of your motives, Pat!

You said:

>Like Pokorny, I believe that an Old Indian form like _janati_ points to
>*g^en- rather than *g^enH-.

Not necessarily.   It could have come from a zero grade *g'nH-eti (syllabic
n > an in this context.)   The same pattern is found in the zero grade Vedic
perfect plural jajanus for the expected (and later) jajnus.

I admit the accent is a problem, but this pattern of zero grade present
+ -e/o suffix is not uncommon.  Rix takes several verbs back to this
pattern, eg Latin maneo, venio, Greek baino,  Lithuanian lupu, Gothic
ga-lu:kan, Latin/Greek luo et al.

You also said:

> everything I have investigated leads me to believe that the basis
>of the CVC definition of a root is pretty universal.

Yes, but the vowel is not always -e-.  It can also be -r-, -i-/-y- -u-/-w-
etc, - I'm  sure you know the theory in PIE, whatever you think of it.   So
a root g'enH can be seen (and should be seen!) as CeVC / CVC: *g'enH/g'nH.
The unusual roots are those that are CC.

As for a root *g'en without laryngeal, there are some Sanskrit forms that
show no laryngeal, but they stand alongside forms that need it, and they can
be explained from the *g'enH root, whereas the forms with H cannot be
explained from a root *g'en.

So we're left with no evidence for laryngeal-less *g'en.  That does not mean
it did not exist!   Only that we have neither evidence for it, nor need of
it.

Peter


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Sun Jun 17 16:29:19 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 11:29:19 -0500
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <SUN.17.JUN.2001.112919.0500.>

Dear Peter and IEists:

---- Original Message -----
From: "petegray" <petegray at btinternet.com>
Sent: Friday, June 08, 2001 1:35 PM

[PCRp]

>> *g^enH1- would constitute an exception to the general proposition that IE
>> roots have the form CVC-.  Every good "rule" needs an exception or two.

[PG]

> here are many exceptions of this kind, Pat.  Are you being, perhaps, a
> little disingenuous?   Just for the pattern Ce(/R)TH (T= stop), one can
> suggest:
>   *keubH2   lie down, lay down
>   *sekH        cut
>   *wedhH1   hit
>   *wetH2      say
>   *krepH      creep
> The pattern of g'enH,  CeRH, is even commoner.

[PCR]

It is well-established in Afrasian studies, that roots are CVC. If we assume
that IE and Afrasian are derived from a common ancestor, Nostratic, it is
natural to suppose that all non-borrowed IE roots are originally derived from
Nostratic CVC roots even though the CVC component may not have survived in IE
as an independent root in a given instance.

To take one of the examples you have provided, *keubH2-, 'lie down, lay down',
I see no reason not to derive it from Pokorny's 2. *kew-, 'bend'.

Why do you not explain to us why you believe that it cannot be so derived, and
must constitute an independent, unrelated root?

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  Sun Jun 17 16:43:38 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 11:43:38 -0500
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <SUN.17.JUN.2001.114338.0500.>

Dear Rich and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rich Alderson" <alderson+mail at panix.com>
Sent: Friday, June 08, 2001 12:14 PM

> On 5 June 2001, Patrick Ryan wrote:

>> Thus, *g^enH1- would constitute an exception to the general proposition that
>> IE roots have the form CVC-. Every good "rule" needs an exception or two.

[RA]

> The general proposition that IE roots are CeC is directly related to the
> notion that IE roots involve extensions, or determinatives.  The root is
> abstracted from the stem, that portion of the word which is left after all
> inflectional and derivational morphemes are abstracted away; since the stem
> can be very messy, its analysis into a root plus a (poosibly zero) suffix
> plus one or more extensions simplifies things.

> Lehmann has a discussion of this in his 1952 monograph on phonology, derived
> from Benveniste's long exposition in _Origines de la formation des noms en
> indoeurop'een_.

> So the exception is only apparent.

[PCR]

Obviously, I have commented in general in two other postings on this question.

But, I really do not understand what you mean by "so the exception is only
apparent".

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- (which I
do not believe to be the case), 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-.

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  Mon Jun 18 14:01:59 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 09:01:59 -0500
Subject: Fw: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <MON.18.JUN.2001.090159.0500.>

Dear Stanley and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stanley Friesen" <sarima at friesen.net>
Sent: Saturday, June 09, 2001 7:32 PM

> At 11:15 AM 6/5/01 -0500, proto-language wrote:

[PCRp]

>> I have no problem with that opinion. Thus, *g^enH1- would constitute an
>> exception to the general proposition that IE roots have the form CVC-. Every

[SF]

> I actually doubt any such rule exists.  For one thing, I suspect the idea
> is due at least in part to what Rich called "over-analysis".  That is, many
> of the supposed CVC- roots that only occur with root determinatives are
> better treated as CVCVC- roots (or even CVCC or CCVC roots).  There are
> also a fair number of roots that apparently originally ended in laryngeals,
> which now masquerade as CVC- roots.

[PCR]

This is, of course, a natural "suspicion". However, having suspected the same,
no doubt, initially, IEists like Pokorny et al. were able to show a commonality
of meaning which linked various CVC(V)C roots together.

If one takes the idea of "overanalysis" to its ultimate implication, should we
assume that any CVC(V)C "root" is necessarily unrelated to a semantically
similar CVC root? Or do you believe that some CVC(V)C roots are legitimately
derived from CVC roots?

And how does one identify the legitimate derivations?

[SF]

> I find it better to just take PIE roots as they come, without trying to
> force them into some preconceived mold.

[PCR]

You assume what you attempt to argue.

It is the form of a PIE root which is the question  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 gordonbr at microsoft.com  Thu Jun 14 16:39:48 2001
From: gordonbr at microsoft.com (Gordon Brown)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 09:39:48 -0700
Subject: PU trees (WAS: About the Yew1)
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.093948.0700.>

Ante, can you give us some modern reflexes of these tree names, say in
Finnish, Estonia, Saami, perhaps others?

> ----------
> From: 	Ante Aikio[SMTP:anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi]
> Sent: 	Saturday, June 09, 2001 10:11 PM

> An example of Uralic tree names is perhaps interesting in this
> connection. At least five tree names can be reconstructed in
> Proto-Uralic, and all of them show identical meanings in all the
> cognate languages. Hence, no change in meaning in some 7000-8000
> years. (The reconstructed tree names include at least 'birch',
> 'spruce', 'Siberian pine', 'bird cherry', and 'rowan'.) The corpus of
> PU etymologies is very small, so it seems that at least in the case of
> Uralic, the tree names have belonged to the most stable part of the
> lexicon.

>  -Ante AIkio


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sun Jun 17 06:50:01 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 02:50:01 EDT
Subject: About the Yew1
Message-ID: <SUN.17.JUN.2001.025001.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/5/2001 2:55:01 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<< If you believe, like Renfrew, that these farmers (who entered Europe from
Anatolia) spoke PIE, then you must explain why "IE" *ebur- should have been
superseded by *eiw- in the north and by other words in the south and east.
This can be done if you posit movement of IE-speakers out of Anatolia and
east of yew-country, then back into Europe. But then we're begging the
question of what IE and non-IE are. It is pointless IMHO to extend
"Indo-European" back to the first European farmers, and equally pointless to
regard PIE as arbitrarily old. >>

Not so.  A good piece of Anatolia does not have yew trees either.  In fact,
the central plateaus have been steppes for most of the more modern climatic
periods.

So there's no difference between Anatolians IEists and the
Somewhere-East-of-Wherever IEists you are positing.  Move 'em up or down a
little and you've located the IE homeland, just avoid some patches of yew
trees here and there.

BTW, what I suspect - rather than believe - is that the evidence can support
a language like *PIE being spoken on the Danube in neolithic times.  Since
*PIE probably didn't fall from the sky, I suspect the predecessor(s) of that
language may have spread there from Anatolia.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Mon Jun 18 16:40:54 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 12:40:54 EDT
Subject: Yew Two
Message-ID: <MON.18.JUN.2001.124054.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/5/2001 2:55:01 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<< Celtic has preserved pre-IE *ebur- 'yew' rather extensively in toponyms,
ethnonyms, and personal names, and also Irish <ibhar> 'yew; bow' beside <eo>
'yew'. The stem *ebur- also appears in toponyms in Iberia, Liguria,
Campania, and probably Greece (Ephura:, old name of Corinth and other
places). In my opinion *ebur- belongs with the Old European substrate
associated with the expansion of Neolithic farmers across Europe (ca.
5500-4000 BCE). If you believe, like Renfrew, that these farmers (who
entered Europe from Anatolia) spoke PIE, then you must explain why "IE"
*ebur- should have been superseded by *eiw- in the north...>>

Because I suspect that words like Irish <iubhar>, Gaelic <iubhar>, Old Irish
<ibar> were words that could have developed as trade words, I don't think
there's any need need to explain an "IE" *ebur- at all.

The Romans, of course, knew ivory as <ebur, eboris>.  But they also called
ivory a "horn" <cornu> and words for ivory itself have been applied to the
boar and other tusks and horns of various kinds, as well as whale bone.  (See
Germanic <ebar>, <eber>, <ibor>, <epur>, <i:for> boar; Lat <aper> boar.) It
was common for horn and antler to be interchangeable with wood in a large
number of ancient European carved and turned objects.  We know that horn,
antler and ivory were often used in the making of bows (Homer only describes
bows made of horn or antler.) It's hard to trace but "ivory wood" is an old
term, and "white", "pink", "red" and "black ivory wood" (a kind of ebony)
have been available for some time to the woodworking trade.  "Eber-" is a
common name applied to, among others, the "service tree" (sorbus) and to the
rowan or mountain ash - a red-berry bearing tree that makes excellent bow
wood.  The Romans used "iberis" and similar terms to refer to various plants,
including perhaps the pepperwort.  (E.g, Pliny calls <ibe:ris>, "a kind of
cress." Cf., vibo, vibo:nis, m., the flower of the herb called "Britannica,"-
Pliny.) Hesychlus mentions both plants and animals with <iber-> names , and
attributes the name "Iberes" to an unidentified animal, <iber>.  Cf., "gravis
imber et uber", Latin, <uber> referring to copious-growing plants and
presumably trees and trade wood.

So, it seems reasonable to think that "ebor"-words may not be quite so
specific to the yew and may not be quite so "Old European" (if such a thing
existed) but relates in some way to better quality trade wood and horn
working materials and the places where they were traded from or to.  E.g.,
"ibhar" referring to ivory producing elephants in Sanskrit, far from "Old
European" haunts.

Another possibility which I like is that Irish <iubhar>, Gaelic <iubhar>
simply are reflections of the early or later Greek influences among
Celtic-speakers.  The Greek influence on Celtic has often been overlooked,
despite the major archaeological evidence of Greek trade routes deep into
France and Spain for centuries before 400BC.  And the obvious influence of
learned Greek in both pagan and Christian times.  (E.g., Caesar's observation
that the druids wrote in Greek "literi.")

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.)

(<ios> also can refer to a variety of plants and unpredictable colors, but
that's another yew tale.)

The joint meaning is seen in words like <iobolos>, "shooting arrows" or
"shedding venom, venomous."  Or <iodokos> "holding arrows" (in Homer) or
"containing venom, fangs."  And the attested <iotokos, iotokon>, interpreted
as "poison-bearing" is interesting in that it suggests perhaps an early
connection for the "toxon" word for bow - "poison/arrow-bearing."  See also
<iocheaira> "arrow-pourer, shooter of arrows" epithet of Artemis.

Also interesting is the use of <-phoros>, carrying, bearing, in connection
with <ios>.  Well-attested is <xiphe:phoros> "sword-carrying, sword in hand,
swordsman."  And while <iophoros> is interpreted as "poison bearing" where
attested, it obviously can follow the split meaning given above and also mean
"arrow bearing" or sending or bringing.  I.e., a bow or a wood from which
arrows are made.

Of course, Gr <iophoros> as a borrowed word into Celtic may possibly have
ended up as Irish <iubhar> and Gaelic <iubhar>.  (See, e.g., Gaelic
<leabhar>,a book; Welsh <llyfr>; from Latin <liber>; <io> and <iu> being
somewhat interchangeable, compare Gaelic <iollagach> with <iullagach>, both
meaning frolicsome.)  See also Gaelic <uthaidh,
i:thaidh>, arrow; <coiliobhar>, a kind of gun; <ionntraich>, miss.  Cf.,
Gaelic <giuthas>, Early Irish <gius>, fir or similar wood.) All thios might
suggest a connection that conforms better perhaps to what we know about the
use of trade names for materials in ancient times.

It should be noted that references to Celtic archers are rare and most found
truly ancient bows are not yew.  The yew comes in Britain into prominence
with the Welsh longbow and most of the wood for those bows in the middle ages
were imported as a matter of royal policy from Spain and the Levant (for one
thing the wood was considered better), ballast on ships carrying Greek and
Italian wine.  We have some clues that a vigorous trade in horn, bow wood and
even ivory-type materials was carried on long before those times.

<...Ephura:, old name of Corinth and other places...>

I would suspect those place names may be connected to their character as
market places and ports.  See Gr <phoros>, levy, tax, tribute; <ephormizo:>,
anchor, harbor; <ekphora>, exportable; <ephoros>, overseer, collector,
guardian and, in Sparta, the officers of a corporation.

Regards,
Steve Long


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Thu Jun 14 18:57:59 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 14:57:59 EDT
Subject: Ockham's Razor
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.145759.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/14/01 9:51:36 AM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com
writes:

> And it's not a matter of what I want to believe.  It's where the facts
> lead me.

-- so far, you have not presented any facts supporting the hypothesis that
the word for "red deer" somehow meant "fallow deer" or "deer in general" in
remote antiquity.

> I also know of no sure differentiation made in Greek (in Ionia or
> otherwise)

-- "Elaphos", red deer, specifically; "ellos" and "enelos", young of the red
deer, fawn.

> Distinguishing between fallow and red deer is definitely multiplying entities
> not only beyond the necessity, but clearly beyond the evidence.

-- this is simply a false-to-fact statement.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Thu Jun 14 19:10:34 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 15:10:34 EDT
Subject: The Iceman's Berries
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.151034.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/14/01 10:57:30 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> Actually what becomes fairly apparent is that if "PIE-speakers" did know
> about the yew, there would be no way of telling.

-- 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.

*taksos has cognates in Latin, Celtic, Greek, and Indo-Iranian.

> The simplistic connections that are used to trace many of these words -
> like "yew" and "red deer" - very quickly disappear.

-- not if you actually use the standard methods of linguistics.

> This statement gives me pause.  Is any one on this list who is uncomfortable
> with the idea that its plausible that yew comes from PIE *eiw- 'berry'?

--- "related to" rather than "comes from".

There are two PIE words for "berry"

*og, with cognates in Baltic, Slavic, Tocharian, Celtic, Germanic, and
possibly Armenian.

*oi-wo, with cognates in Latin, Greek, and Armenian.  *oi-wo may well be
_related_ to the word for yew.

[clip of irrelevant stuff about mummies and bears]


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sun Jun 17 06:36:03 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 02:36:03 EDT
Subject: Uniformitarianism and the Arrowwood
Message-ID: <SUN.17.JUN.2001.023603.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/5/2001 2:55:01 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<< If you believe, like Renfrew, that these farmers (who entered Europe from
Anatolia) spoke PIE, then you must explain why "IE" *ebur- should have been
superseded by *eiw- in the north and by other words in the south and east.>>

Actually, I'd rather put the onus on you to justify the identification of
*ebur- or *eiw- with any particular modern tree classification.  I do not
doubt the phonology in the reconstructions.  I think that anyone who looks
closely will find that the meanings are anywhere as stable as you contend.

And of course this whole idea doesn't depend on the phonology.  It depends on
the meanings of these words.  What YOU must prove is that there's no chance
that the "yew" word would have changed if *PIE had had a yew word.  A lot of
evidence says that the word would have changed - possibly many times in 2000+
years.  But in the end you have no way of proving what such words meant in
the 2000+ years before ACTUAL attestation.  Because you have no direct
evidence at all.

<<If you and I belong to the same tribe, and we don't agree on what to call
trees in the next valley, then our use of language is dysfunctional. Do you
really believe that prehistoric humans were linguistically incompetent?>>

There's been some talk about a linguistic Uniformitarian Principle.  So let
me invoke it right now.

What actually happened when people gave names to trees, before modern
scientific classifications attempts to make them uniform?

Let's take the eastern US only, and pick a tree with a good practical name.
Near the top of the list of "common names" (non-scientific names) is
"ARROWWOOD" - kind of yew/bow tree in concept.  Maybe it means wood you'd
make arrows from or wood that looks like arrows.  Doesn't matter.

As a matter of the "Uniformitarian Principle" and an example of old fashion
American "non-dysfunctionality" (ha) we should see the ARROWWOOD stand for
one tree and one tree only.  Or we should stop expecting that the *PIE word
for YEW would have stood for one tree for 2000+ before that word would
actually be attested.

The answer is... STOP expecting one prehistoric name will equal one
prehistoric tree.  JUST take a look at how dysfunctional something as simple
as the "arrowwood" word can get:

"Arrowwood" #1 (Oxydendrum arboreum Ericaceae) - Other Names: sourwood, elk
tree, lily-of-the-valley tree, sorrel gum, sorrel tree, sour gum, titi, titi
tree.

"Arrowwood" #2 (Euonymus atropurpureus) - Other Names: wahoo, burningbush,
spindle tree, indian arrowwood, bursting-heart, strawberry-tree, strawberry
bush, American spindle tree, bitter ash, pegwood.

"Arrowwood" #3 (Viburnum dentatum, acerifolium, recognitum, pubescens) -
Other Names: southern arrowwood, northern arrowwood, smooth arrowwood,
withe-wood, downy arrowwood, viburnum, black haw, highbush cranberry,
maple-leaved viburnum, nannyberry, sheepberry, wild raisin.

"Arrrowwood" #4 (Rhamnaceae Rhamnus fragula) - Other Names: alder buckthorn,
black dogwood, glossy buckthorn, european buckthorn, black alder dogwood,
black alder tree, persian berries, european black alder, alder buckthorn.

"Arrowwood" #5 (Cornus florida L.) - Other Names: flowering dogwood, cornel,
boxwood, white cornel, cornelian tree, bunchberry, dogwood, false boxwood,
florida dogwood.

Check out all those tree names!!!  MAJOR dysfunction!

Based on this and an even generous application of the  "Uniformitarian
Principle", one would have to say the identification of prehistoric trees
with prehistoric names is not a very good bet.

Not something you'd want to use to identify the IE homeland, for sure.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 14 17:16:49 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 13:16:49 EDT
Subject: Red Deer in Anatolia
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.131649.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/4/2001 10:08:22 PM, alderson+mail at panix.com writes:
<< the word which means "red deer" in all daughter languages,...>>

I suspect there is no such word.  In the IE languages most relevant - those
where the fallow may have been present natively - the red deer and fallow
deer were one thing -  a deer.  Ockham's Razor.  Do not multiply entities
needlessly.

In a message dated 6/14/2001 9:58:21 AM, alderson+mail at panix.com writes:

<< I haven't had the time to review all the recent postings regarding the
habitat of the red deer vs. that of the fallow deer, but if Dr. White is
correct, then my point is _a fortiori_ made. >>

But in Anatolian languages there is no distinction made between fallow and
red.  Ergo, the presence or absence of the fallow (or red) tells us nothing.
Wherever the *PIE homeland was - whether it had fallow or red deer or both -
a deer was probably just a deer.  Much as it is today.  (Except of course
today in America, where the red deer is not a deer.)

Regards,
Steve Long


From stevegus at aye.net  Thu Jun 14 19:06:41 2001
From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 15:06:41 -0400
Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc.
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.150641.0400.>

Lionel Bonnetier wrote:

> Is there any obvious reason
> why -cum is the only instance of the archaic system? May
> *kom (cum) and *ko (cis) and *kwe (-que) be related
> etymologically around the idea of "here-nearby-with"?

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.  Which ones are treated as suffixes and
which as particles following a noun is more of a matter of current
orthography; the Romans themselves originally wrote without word
breaks.  These prepositions are more obviously case forms of other roots
than 'cum' is, though.

--
Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law
Fox & Cotner:  PHONE (812) 945 9600   FAX (812) 945 9615
http://www.foxcotner.com

I sure ain't the master of my fate, nor the captain of my soul.


From edsel at glo.be  Fri Jun 15 15:45:56 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 17:45:56 +0200
Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc.
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.174556.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lionel Bonnetier" <leo at easynet.fr>
Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2001 2:07 AM

> It's funny that Latin suffixed -cum in mecum, tecum, etc.
> has created some special -go case marker in Spanish with
> conmigo, contigo, consigo. I suppose -cum is a remnant of
> an older time when prepositions were either postpositions
> or relatively mobile adverbs. Is there any obvious reason
> why -cum is the only instance of the archaic system? May
> *kom (cum) and *ko (cis) and *kwe (-que) be related
> etymologically around the idea of "here-nearby-with"?

[Ed]

Why do you call Sp. -go a case marker? Isn't 'contigo' simply a popular
formation based upon 'tecum' (>tigo), with 'con' added when people became
unaware of the meaning of -go?

In Brabant Dutch dialects you have a similar phenomenon with the duplication of
the 2sg. pronoun when it was forgotten that -de was originally 'du' (a lost
word in later Dutch, like 'thou' in English. 'Gij' corresponds to 'you',
originally a plural):

Du. 'hebt gij...?' (Have you ...?) , dial. 'hedde-gij?' < hebst du gij?  'Gij'
is clearly superfluous like 'con-' in 'contigo', as long as you still
understand the original formation (quod non, for all, except a few linguists).

I'm really looking forward to the answers to your question about cum/cis/-que.
We already had an informative discussion about *kom (Lat. cum/con-, but also
Germanic ge-).

Ed. Selleslagh


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri Jun 15 18:51:18 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 19:51:18 +0100
Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc.
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.195118.0100.>

> I suppose -cum is a remnant of an older time when prepositions were either
> postpositions or relatively mobile adverbs.

Yes, so it is suggested.

> Is there any obvious reason why -cum is the only instance of the archaic
> system?

It only occurs with personal pronouns, and nowhere else.   The most
interesting suggestion I have heard is that it began with an avoidance of
the sequence cunn-.   cum nobis could sound like forms of cunnus, from which
comes the good English word cunnilingus.  Hence nobiscum, thence to other
personal pronouns.

> May *kom (cum) and *ko (cis) and *kwe (-que) be related etymologically around
> the idea of "here-nearby-with"?

No.  Latin cum has a good PIE history in *kom or *km, and -que has a
different one in *-kwe.  (different consonant, different vowel)

Peter


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri Jun 15 19:06:21 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 20:06:21 +0100
Subject: Munda in Early NW India
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.200621.0100.>

Sanskrit fricatives
> ...Visarga /h./ as a "hard spirant"

There are two h sounds, the voiceless visarga, and the sound transcribed
<h>, which is a voiced sound - so it can't be the usual /h/ sound of
English.   Does that make it a fricative?

The three sibilants are not all allophones of /s/.   One is the direct
reflex of PIE k' (as in as'va horse).   Another prbably began life as an
allophone (mostly becasue of the RUKI rule) but in attested Skt it must be
treated as a phoneme - there are enough minimal pairs.

>> How do we explain .., Iranian where *dh etc became d etc (at least
>> intervocalic)?

I understand (but may be wrong) that the written Iranian d is a fricative.
The voiced aspirates also appear as fricatives in Germanic and Latin, which
develop to stops later.

> My main point was that traditional PIE is short on fricatives and long on
> "laryngeals ... Their characterization
> as "laryngeal" ...

"Laryngeal" is just a label, and not a phonetic description.   The only
evidence we have is the evidence we've got, which allows us to interpret the
"laryngeals" as velars or post-velars.  There is nothing to stop them being
palatals, if you can make it fit the evidence.

Peter


From alderson+mail at panix.com  Mon Jun 18 23:27:18 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 19:27:18 -0400
Subject: Munda in Early NW India
In-Reply-To: <F99pP1znXgffHr1qmd6000073ac@hotmail.com> (acnasvers@hotmail.com)
Message-ID: <MON.18.JUN.2001.192718.0400.>

On 13 Jun 2001, Douglas G Kilday wrote:

> I think the H-series in PIE represents undetermined unvoiced fricatives,
> probably varying greatly among dialects and more rapidly in time than most
> other PIE sounds. Their characterization as "laryngeal" properly belongs to
> their final stage as fricatives

The characterization of Saussure's _co'efficients sonantiques_ as "layrngeals"
is based on their effect on surrounding vowels, an effect known to M/oller from
the Semitic language family to which he wished to relate Indo-European.  It is
now conventional, but should not be taken as more than that; on the other hand,
it would be interesting to hear of vocalic effects of non-laryngeal/non-pharyn-
geal fricatives in the languages of the world.

								Rich Alderson


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Thu Jun 14 21:24:51 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 16:24:51 -0500
Subject: bishop
In-Reply-To: <000601c0f190$a8537400$f96801d5@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.162451.0500.>

	A very fertile word in Spanish!

apotecario "pharmacist"
bodega "storage room, wine cellar, shop, convenience store"
botica "pharmacy"
boticario "herbal doctor"
botiqui/n "medicine cabinet"
and from French butik, boutique
etc.

[snip]
>It occurred to me that there is another example in the Italian bottega,
>Spanish (whence English) bodega, meaning shop or inn, from the Greek
>apotheke.

>Peter

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From edsel at glo.be  Fri Jun 15 15:41:30 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 17:41:30 +0200
Subject: bishop
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.174130.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "petegray" <petegray at btinternet.com>
Sent: Sunday, June 10, 2001 10:23 AM

> There was discussion a while ago of the word "bishop", coming from Greek
> episkopos.    I think it was Piotr who said the loss of the initial vowel
> was not an issue, but the voicing of the "p" was uncommon.  (Pardon me if
> I've mis-remembered who it was!)

> It occurred to me that there is another example in the Italian bottega,
> Spanish (whence English) bodega, meaning shop or inn, from the Greek
> apotheke.

> Peter

[Ed]
A few comments:

1. These particular cases of voicing (of p) are not so frequent, but they
typically occur a) in languages like Spanish and Portuguese (and to a much
lesser degree: Italian, but still: soddisfare < satisfacere) that show a marked
tendency to voicing, and b) in Greek words that virtually nobody understood (I
mean their literal meaning in the original Greek), but that were very
intensively used by the whole population, thus making them very common words in
the receiving language. Those are potent factors to make the words conform to
phonetic practices (i.e. make them sound indigenous).

2. In some languages (Italian, French) there was an additional shift b > v in
the bishop-words (Vescovo, Evêque), while in Italian even the p of skopos was
voiced (and then became a fricative v). It seems to me that the voicing of the
p's only occurred if they were intervocalic (like the t-d voicing in American
English) since I don't know any cases of voicing of initial p in formerly Greek
words.

3. Bodega and bottega appear as boutique in French. Spanish also has botica,
closer to the original meaning of apotheke. I got the impression that a lot of
mutual copying has gone on, at different points in time.

3. In the same religious context, we have 'iglesia' , from Greek 'ekklesía',
also with voicing, but with a shift of accent. In Portuguese even 'igreja',
with additional voicing of the s(i) to zh.

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.

Ed. selleslagh


From dlwhite at texas.net  Thu Jun 14 23:16:20 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 18:16:20 -0500
Subject: kinkajou
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.181620.0500.>

>> <kinkajou>

>> I'm pleased, but not surprised, that it's in American dictionaries, since
>> it's an American animal.  Is it still in the concise English ones, I wonder?
>> because that's what my point was.

        It is not "an American animal" in the sense of being an animal that
occurs in the territory of American English.  (It does not occur north of
southern Mexico.)  It is "an American animal" only in the sense of occurring
in the New World.  I would hope that Brits, even lexicographers, would not
be so zoologically parochial as to exclude the only English name for this
animal on such grounds.  American lexicographers do not exclude Old World
animals like lorises and lemurs, after all, on the grounds they are Old
World (thus "un-American"?) animals.  If "kinkajou" has been excluded from
some recent dictionaries, it is, I hope, on account of rarity (as a word),
not geography.

Dr. David L. White


From dlwhite at texas.net  Fri Jun 15 16:25:52 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 11:25:52 -0500
Subject: "ou" in "kinkajou"
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.112552.0500.>

> Greek found the same solution as French.  In both languages the vowel
> written <u> is fronted, so the back /u/ is written ou.  It is this back /u/
> which is used to represent the /w/ sound, as in Oualerios (Valerius) or
> "oui" or Touareg /twareg/.

        And in kinkajou, judging by the pronunciation.  First named in
French Guyana?   Passed into English in British Guyana?   (There were once
such entitities, no?   My knowledge of colonial history is failing me.)

Dr. David L. White


From dlwhite at texas.net  Fri Jun 15 16:22:17 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 11:22:17 -0500
Subject: 'dhole'
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.112217.0500.>

>> I agree that that is what the usual supects say, on the linguistics side,
>> but on the biology side, all my sources agree that wolves do not occur in
>> south India, and therefore in the Kannada area.  (Why is not entirely clear
>> to me.  They did not spread from China into SE Asia either.  Dislike of
>> tropcal heat?)  Therefore there is something not quite right here.

>> Dr. David L. White

> Could the Dravidian word refer to a different carnivore?

        Well, the obvious possibility is that is refers to dholes, and that
somewhere along the line somebody screwed up in saying that it means 'wolf'.

> Your question is very interesting: why have wolves not penetrated south
> India or SW Asia? It can't be just the heat - north India (where there ARE
> wolves) can be as hot as any place on this earth in the summer, as I know
> from experience (48 degrees in May/June are not unusual in New Delhi, for
> example). Maybe it's the humidity they don't like, or there are carnivores
> who thrive better than wolves in the year-round humid heat.

        Yes, dholes do.  Why is unclear.  They are not tropical animals,
being known to occur as far north as the so-called Siberia of Siberian
tigers.  (Which would be better called "Ussuriland".   It is really part of
the Chinese zone, biologically.)   But they are an older lineage than wolves
(with smaller brains, for example), and have perhaps had longer to adapt,
however they have, to year-round humid heat.  They used to occur in Europe,
but were in the long run unable to compete with wolves there. So it is odd:
wolves out-compete dholes in Europe, but dholes out-compete wolves in
south/east Asia.  In China and northern India, both occur.  (Or in the case
of China, used to.  The Chinese have done a great job of replacing animal
biomass with human biomass.)

Dr. David L. White


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Fri Jun 15 16:31:41 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 12:31:41 EDT
Subject: note on 'dhole'
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.123141.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/8/2001 7:06:18 PM, dlwhite at texas.net writes:

<< I agree that that is what the usual supects say, on the linguistics
side, but on the biology side, all my sources agree that wolves do not occur
in south India, and therefore in the Kannada area.  (Why is not entirely
clear to me.  They did not spread from China into SE Asia either.  Dislike
of tropcal heat?)  Therefore there is something not quite right here.

Dr. David L. White >>

I suppose it's worth repeating.  What's not quite right is equating the wolf
word to the animal in the wild.

A word for wolf does not have to refer to an actual animal.  Imported wolf
hides or wolf heads, wolf teeth, wolf images, wolf stories, wolf totems,
powdered wolf whatevers, people with wolf nicknames, animals or animal
by-products that might be like a wolf in some form or function or captive
wolves traveling with an ancient equivalent of a circus or at the zoo might
all answer to the name "wolf."

The actual distribution of the wolf in the wild therefore may have only minor
relevance to its presence in a particular vocabulary.

Steve Long


From philjennings at juno.com  Thu Jun 14 02:07:10 2001
From: philjennings at juno.com (philjennings at juno.com)
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 21:07:10 -0500
Subject: Five Antiquities of Hay (was Thy Thigh, etc.)
Message-ID: <WED.13.JUN.2001.210710.0500.>

As an appendix to my prior post, it occurs to me that the invention/naming of
hay might be associated with the domestication of the horse.

Human use of the horse has historically been abusive, with hard riders keeping
strings of horses and wearing them out one by one.  Basically we ride horses
and keep them otherwise occupied, precisely at those times of day when they
need to be grazing.  To compensate, horse-people take steps to provide food,
even concentrated food, at other times of day, ie. when horses are stabled or
corralled.

If horse people were also cow people, they might have gradually adopted the
same policy in the care of one animal as for the other, but horses needed to
take precedence.  Horses forced the issue.  Cows didn't.

This would explain the lateness of our proto-Germanic and Balto-Slavic "hay"
words.  Certainly their LBK predecessors had cow stockades, but perhaps were
lazy about providing fodder to their cattle during shut-in times, because after
all the animals had plenty of time to graze during the day.

Of course, here I'm ignoring the phenomenon of "working" cattle, as we do
easily nowadays in the age of tractors.  If the LBK people used draught oxen,
et cetera, they may have conceived the need to compensate them for their labor.
The use or non-use of hay by the LBK people seems to be the central issue.  If
the LBK language represents IE at an early and fairly unified stage, and they
used hay, there would be a common term across many language sub-families.  If
the Corded Ware people used hay (probable), then if there is no common term
across several sub-languages, one possible conclusion is that the Corded Ware
people were linguistically a mere superstrate, absorbed by diverging IE groups,
or absorbed in the west and only dominant in part of the east.


From bronto at pobox.com  Fri Jun 15 06:58:24 2001
From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 23:58:24 -0700
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.235824.0700.>

> I once came across a woman who had learned the word 'misled'
> through reading, and who pronounced it like 'mild', . . .

Does anyone really rhyme it with `drizzled'?

--
Anton Sherwood  --  br0nt0 at p0b0x.com  --  http://ogre.nu/


From brent at bermls.oau.org  Fri Jun 15 10:21:36 2001
From: brent at bermls.oau.org (Brent J. Ermlick)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 06:21:36 -0400
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <a05010403b7479a6a6e2b@[193.159.57.14]>; from
 Georg-Bonn@t-online.de on Sat, Jun 09, 2001 at 11:22:39AM +0200
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.062136.0400.>

On Sat, Jun 09, 2001 at 11:22:39AM +0200, Stefan Georg wrote:
> Maybe. But that's an increased tendency to be aware of foreign
> phonemes, an increased openness for the outside world, and certainly
> an increase which increases with education. Whatever this means for a
> phoneme system.

I've noticed a slight tendency in this direction in American
English. In the fifties I don't recall any American radio or TV
announcer using the phoneme /x/ in any word. The Scottish word
"loch" was pronounced with a definite /k/.

While /k/ is still the majority pronunciation, sometime afterwards
(starting in the 70's?) I started to hear an occasional announcer
use /x/ in this word as well as others.

I think that this is also "an increased openness for the outside
world" rather than a change in the phoneme system.

--
Brent J. Ermlick		Veritas liberabit uos
brent at bermls.oau.org


From John_Freeman1 at btinternet.com  Fri Jun 15 21:44:06 2001
From: John_Freeman1 at btinternet.com (John Freeman)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 22:44:06 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.224406.0100.>

Larry Trask wrote:

>> Larry Trask mentions the revival of the properly buried "albeit". He may
>> be amused that I have heard this resurrected word pronounced as if it
>> were German, riming with "Arbeit".

> Not so much amused as flabbergasted.  However, I guess I shouldn't be
> surprised.  This word must have been resurrected via reading, and I guess
> it's not unusual for a reader who is eager to collect fancy-looking words
> to see this as [indigestible glob], and to assign a pronunciation
> accordingly.

As it happens, my partner, who was brought up in Munich but has lived in
London for over thirty years and so speaks almost faultless English, was
reading out a passage from the (London) Times to me in the car last
weekend. At one point she enunciated what appeared to me to be the
phrase "all-bite" in an adverbial context. When I twigged and explained
what it was, I was left in no doubt as to (a) my own pedantry (rather
unreasonably, I thought) and (b) the pretentiousness of Times journalists
(more justifiably, perhaps).

Incidentally, I once heard [maizld] for 'misled'.

John Freeman
London


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri Jun 15 19:10:56 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 20:10:56 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.201056.0100.>

> the word 'misled' through reading, and who pronounced it like 'mild',

..and the famous pronunciation as "mizzled".

Peter


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri Jun 15 19:09:40 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 20:09:40 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.200940.0100.>

> I'm not sure the editors have seen fit to
> include it in more recent UK dictionaries.

Hurray!   That was the starting point of this discussion - I was suggesting
a few words which might have been dropped from modern dictionaries.

Peter


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Jun 15 13:19:42 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 14:19:42 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.0.20010609104127.01d58540@127.0.0.1>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.141942.0100.>

--On Saturday, June 9, 2001 10:59 am -0400 "Douglas G. Wilson"
<douglas at nb.net> wrote:

[LT]

>> In my vernacular, even in proper names, I absolutely can't have /h/
>> before schwa or before unstressed /I/.

> Does Larry Trask really mean that he (in his American persona) doesn't say
> "habitual" with /h@/ (@ = schwa)? I think most Americans say it so, and my
> talking (Yankee) dictionary does.

OK; ya got me.  I was being careless.  I can certainly have /h/
word-initially, even before schwa, and I do have /h/ in 'habituate'.  A
stupid blunder, and I can only blame the annual ordeal of exam-marking for
wiping out some of my favorite brain cells.

> Similarly: "habiliment", "rehabilitate",
> etc., etc., and one frequent pronunciation of "harass".

I definitely do not have /h/ in 'rehabilitate'.  As for 'harass', I put the
stress on the first syllable.  The word rhymes with 'embarrass', and also
with 'Paris'.

> Finding the /h/ between TWO schwas is a little more difficult ... some
> pronounce "Abraham" /eibr at h@m/,

Not me.

> and I wouldn't have trouble reading the
> imaginary but conceivable "ultra-habituating" as /Vltr at h@bItSueitIN/

Yes; if I encountered this, I would use /h/.

> or so
> ... I think "intrahabenular" = "inside the habenula" is an acceptable word
> (medical/anatomical) which would be pronounced /Intr at h@bEnjul at r/ usually

Probably, but not a word known to me.

OK.  I'll try again.  I cannot have /h/ before unstressed schwa except
word-initially ('Havana') or (sometimes) after an obvious prefix.  I hope
I've got it right this time.

Thanks, Doug.

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 zsau at yahoo.com.au  Fri Jun 15 14:11:48 2001
From: zsau at yahoo.com.au (Tristan Alexander McLeay)
Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2001 00:11:48 +1000
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <000401c0f190$a6c9c6c0$f96801d5@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <SAT.16.JUN.2001.001148.1000.>

>> In Britain, it is the tradition to identify the 'cut' vowel as a wholly
>> distinct phoneme from schwa.

> I've been following this debate with interest.
> I just want to remind linguists, in case anyone's interested - in
> NZ, there
> is no schwa.  The vowel in "bit" is used instead.  So there is no problem
> whatever with h before schwa - it just doesn't occur.

You've got it back-to-front. The vowel in 'bit' is a schwa over there. I'm
an Aussie, but have heard enough NZeders to know it.
Fush and Chups, 5+1=sex... (and, on the other hand, sex=/sIks/ (or something
close to it)
(both different renditions of the same sound, a stressed /'@/)

And so they have hs before @s, in words like hit and hill.

Tristan


From stevegus at aye.net  Fri Jun 15 15:33:48 2001
From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 11:33:48 -0400
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.113348.0400.>

petegray wrote:

>>> Greeks ...transcription of Latin: AKOAI
>>> ...for Latin AQUAE.

>> Comes from not having a [w] sound.

> Greek found the same solution as French.  In both languages the vowel
> written <u> is fronted, so the back /u/ is written ou.  It is this back /u/
> which is used to represent the /w/ sound, as in Oualerios (Valerius) or
> "oui" or Touareg /twareg/.

Also, the Greek letter upsilon had the sound of /y/ rather than /u/ in
Attic and Koine Greek.  Greek /u:/ was written 'ou,' and I don't think
that Greek had a short /u/.  So AKUAI would not have suggested the
correct pronunciation, and AKOUAI would have suggested a three syllable
word.

--
Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law
Fox & Cotner:  PHONE (812) 945 9600   FAX (812) 945 9615
http://www.foxcotner.com

I sure ain't the master of my fate, nor the captain of my soul.


From edsel at glo.be  Fri Jun 15 14:00:24 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 16:00:24 +0200
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.160024.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas G Kilday" <acnasvers at hotmail.com>
Sent: Friday, June 08, 2001 11:28 AM

> Larry Trask (31 May 2001) wrote:

>> I might also point out that, in the US, the word 'vehicle' is a traditional
>> shibboleth for spotting country bumpkins: if you pronounce an /h/ in
>> 'vehicle', you're a bumpkin.  Even the folk singer Arlo Guthrie, hardly the
>> personification of cosmopolitan sophistication, used this word to great
>> effect on one of his records to identify a southern policeman as a bumpkin.

> It's noteworthy here that Varro reports <veha> as a rustic pronunciation of
> <via>: "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).

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.

Ed. Selleslagh


From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi  Mon Jun 18 18:28:26 2001
From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting)
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 21:28:26 +0300
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
In-Reply-To: <000701c0f190$a90c15a0$f96801d5@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <MON.18.JUN.2001.212826.0300.>

On Sun, 10 Jun 2001, petegray wrote:

>> Originally Latin had a vocalic [u] and a semi-vowel [w], both written with
>> the <u/v> graph (the two shapes were simply variants of the same
>> grapheme).  ...., they remained more or
>> less interchangeable until the late middle ages.

> The u shape was unknown to the Romans.

This is just not true.  If one considers only inscriptional capitals you
could make a case, but you are ignoring all the handwritten scripts like
Old Roman Cursive (1st-2nd century BC) and New Roman Cursive (4th century
AD) and the various book hands.  Not all Roman writing was engraved in
stone.

> They had only capital V.

In the inscriptional capitals this is true.  In other scripts it is not.
But it is true that individual scripts tended to have either one or the
other of U and V, not both.  Inscriptional capitals and later square
capitals tended to have the pointed shape and cursive hands tended to have
the rounded shape.  But a Roman would have no difficulty in recognizing
inscriptional V and book hand u as the same letter.

> When small letters were developed, about 600 AD or so, the small form
> of V was u, in all contexts.  This is how the Oxford Classical texts
> are still printed:
>    Vbi at the beginning of a sentence, ubi elsewhere.
>    Venit at the beginning of a sentence, uenit elsewhere.

> But this pattern is totally unroman.

You are leaving uncials (popular from the 4th to the 8th century AD,
principally for books) completely out of consideration.  Do you consider
them to be unroman?  The uncial u/v is the origin of the modern lowercase
<u>, but this shape already has its beginnings in the Old Roman Cursive of
the republic.  Most lowercase letters developed out of the uncial and half
uncial hands, but uncials are not lowercase letters but simply more
cursive capitals.  Their forms, however, in many cases led directly to the
modern lowercase forms.

Now I agree that the mixture of u and V in the same script is totally
unroman; roman writing did not mix scripts.  To get V and u in the same
inscription they would have to mix inscriptional capitals or square
capitals with uncials and they just didn't do it.

So the grain of truth in this is that inscriptional capitals had only
V and uncials had only u.  But they were nonetheless variants of the
same letter, even if never used in the same inscription.

Claiming that Latin had only capital V until the 6th century when a
lowercase u sprang out of nowhere is a gross oversimplification of very
complex developments.  Have a look at S. Knight, "The Roman Alphabet" in:
Daniels and Bright, _The World's Writing systems_ (Oxford, 1996), 312-32.

<snip>

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi


From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi  Sat Jun 16 08:45:57 2001
From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting)
Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2001 11:45:57 +0300
Subject: Dubya (was Re: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme
 not a morpheme?))
In-Reply-To: <001101c0f0cc$d46d4760$8502703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <SAT.16.JUN.2001.114557.0300.>

On Sat, 9 Jun 2001, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Robert Whiting" <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
> Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2001 8:24 PM

<snip>

>> As usual, Dutch is stuck in the middle between German and English.
>> German has no [w] sound so they use the <w> graph for [v] (since
>> they use the <v> graph for [f]).  To them the name of the <w> graph
>> is 'vay' (just like the name of the Hebrew letter waw is vav in
>> German).

> [Ed]
> Modern Israelis say 'vav' too.

And for much the same reason.

> I think your statement about Germans pronouncing w as v and v as f
> goes a bit too far.

I would have thought so too, but for the fact that I had a German-speaking
colleage who pronounced English <v> as [w] (as in "willage").  When I
pointed out to her that she could easily pronounce the [v] sound in
<village> she said, "Oh, no, German doesn't have that sound -- we use
<v> for [f] like in <Vater>.  Well, what can you say?  Now if 'village'
were written *<willage>, she would have had no trouble pronouncing it.

> These are relatively modern pronunciations (which tend to propagate to
> Holland), with lots of exceptions, almost exclusively for w. In
> certain contexts (like C+w), as Pat mentioned, and in a lot of
> regional speech, w is pronounced w. Similar things can be said about
> e.g. r (more, or less, velarized).

Yes,  there are always more ways of pronouncing things than you will find
in the manuals, and ways of pronouncing (some?/most?) things are always
changing.

> It seems to me that German pronunciation is still evolving in a
> perceptible (and uneven) way. And so is the the pronunciation of Dutch
> in the Netherlands, but emphatically not in Flanders, Belgium, which
> is phonetically and lexically more conservative, even though it's the
> original homeland of Dutch as we know it (but since the
> (religious-political) secession in the 16-17. c. and the ensuing mass
> emigration to Holland, it has become more peripheral).

I rather think that the pronunciation of any living language you care to
name is still evolving in a perceptible and uneven way.  It is the nature
of the beast.

<snip>

>>> And Double-U (pr. Dub'ya) is still another thing, nothing to do with its
>>> shape either :-)

> [Ed]
> I meant George W.

Yes.  I'm sorry, but despite the capital letter and the smiley, I just
didn't make the connection.  It wasn't until this week when Dubya was
playing in my back yard that the penny dropped, and I realized that my
response was neither apropos nor appropriate.  This of course provides new
linguistic raw material.  If things continue on their present course, then
I see the development of a new idiom, 'you pulled a Dubya' or 'that's a
Dubya', meaning "you just did or said something really stupid or
boneheaded," more or less synonymous with 'say goodnight, Gracie'.  Call
it linguistic preconstruction. :)

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi


From jmott at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Fri Jun 22 04:14:19 2001
From: jmott at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Justin M. Mott)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 00:14:19 -0400
Subject: 'pitA' and 'pad'
In-Reply-To: <c9.11497cbe.285994bd@aol.com>
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.001419.0400.>

Before these correspondence sets go any further, Hindi 'pitA' and 'pad'
are not native Hindi words.  Both are Sanskrit borrowings, i.e. tatsamas.

-Justin Mott

On Thu, 14 Jun 2001 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> I wrote:

>>   We've been through this.  What you call often call "change" is actually
>> continuity to me, because you still call what remains "cognate", which means
>> there must be something that stayed the same.

> JoatSimeon at aol.com replies:

[ moderator snip ]

> <<Eg., "pita" (Hindi) and "father" (English) are cognates, as are "pad" and
> "foot", despite having no surface similarity at all.>>

> If you said "pita" and "brassiere" have no surface similarity, well that
> would be different.

[ moderator snip ]


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Fri Jun 22 07:21:16 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 03:21:16 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.032116.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/21/01 10:00:37 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> But that doesn't contradict what I wrote.  "Systematic patterns of change"
> allow one to show that cognates are "derived from the same source."  So there
> must be some continuity between the source and what is derived from the
> source.

> -- continuity is not similarity.

> <<Eg., "pita" (Hindi) and "father" (English) are cognates, as are "pad" and
> "foot", despite having no surface similarity at all.>>

> But "pita" and "father" clearly do have som prima facie structural
> similarities.

-- they have one vowel in common -- and it isn't even the same vowel in each.
The Hindi word has "i" where the English has "a". "Pad" and "foot" don't have
even that much.  If you know the sound-shifts, you can tell the p/f
correspondences, etc.

> truly have no recognizable resemblances are rare.

-- well, you're wrong there.

Consider the following words, all cognates and all meaning "horse" and all
derived from *ekuos

jor
eoh
'sp
yuk

Or there's the word for "or", *aw

no
-ve
wat

Or there's *uper, for "over":

for
super
ylfir

Or there's *eudol, "pain":

adduwal
yolo
erkn

And I could go on for pages and pages.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Fri Jun 22 07:22:33 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 03:22:33 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.032233.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/21/01 10:29:33 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> The part that you avoided is what I'm after.  It has to do with the oneness

-- it's quite simple:  if the comparative method works as advertised, then
*PIE was one language.  And if it wasn't, then the method just doesn't work.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Fri Jun 22 07:23:43 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 03:23:43 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.032343.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/21/01 11:19:12 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> It's one thing to say that a systematic pattern shows the absence of
> coincidence -- which is all that you have said in the statement above. It's
> another to say that that pattern proves a single ancestor, which was Prof
> Trask's point.

-- no, in point of fact it's exactly the same thing.


From edsel at glo.be  Fri Jun 22 08:29:12 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 10:29:12 +0200
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.102912.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stanley Friesen" <sarima at friesen.net>
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2001 6:42 AM

> At 12:18 AM 6/8/01 -0400, Brian M. Scott wrote:

>> The basic point is probably sound enough, but you'd have a hard time
>> finding a medieval historian who would agree that 'during the Middle
>> Ages society hardly changed over 100 or more years'.  Pick any 100-
>> year period you like during the MA, and you'll find significant social
>> changes.

> Quite so, even based on my amateur studies of post-Norman England I cannot
> name any 100 year period without any social change.  Sometimes change was
> even fast by modern standards.  The changes after the end of Stephen's
> reign were extremely rapid, as Henry didn't tolerate much guff.

[Ed Selleslagh]

I made a clear exception for "periods of upheaval, relatively sudden migrations
etc.". I guess the Norman invasion in England was a major upheaval with long
lasting after-effects.

During the early Middle Ages on the continent, there were lots of limited wars
and countries changed hands many times, but the cultural evolution was
generally pretty slow up to the 13-14th century, when the cities became more
independant and created a new type of civil society.

Anyway, my focus was more on Antiquity, and my remark about the M.A. may not
have been so relevant or convincing.

But it is a fact that some societies evolve very slowly at times, sometimes
over a 1000 year period, cf. Ancient Egypt, China, arctic peoples, etc.

Quick change is almost always related to migration/separation,
invasion/conquest, major changes in the environment, import of new technology,
etc. These are discrete, non-continuous phenomena in most cases, at least in
pre-industrial times. Languages are part of culture, and the single most
important tool for communication within a society, so they tend to follow the
socio-cultural changes. The conditions for quick change mentioned above are
also favorable to linguistic change (physical separation, exposure to other
languages, cultures, technology, etc); conversely, their absence causes a
fall-back to a kind of slow base-rate of linguistic change (e.g. phonetics)
implicit in the transmission from one generation to the next one, a bit like
genetic evolution.

This my own view of course. Anyone is free to disagree.

Ed.


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Jun 22 12:52:20 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 13:52:20 +0100
Subject: Rate of Change
In-Reply-To: <dd.15f83240.28599a53@aol.com>
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.135220.0100.>

--On Thursday, June 14, 2001 12:40 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> It's not the comparative method that I'm criticizing.  It's the conclusion
> you come to that you claim OBVIOUSLY follow from the comparative method.

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 can accept the comparative method and still find fault with those
> conclusions, which you gave in your first post in this thread.

Well, I'm listening.

> It's not the comparative method but what you read into it.  After all,
> even the devil can quote Scripture to his purpose.

I don't think I read anything into the method.  I'm just reporting it.

Steve, have you ever *done* any comparative linguistics?  Have you ever
grappled with linguistic data in an effort to demonstrate common ancestry,
or to challenge someone else's efforts in this direction?

> The part that you avoided is what I'm after.  It has to do with the
> oneness of PIE.

You mean you don't agree that PIE was a single language?  If so, please
tell us why.

> I'll repeat what I wrote here so that when you get around to it, you can get
> past your misinformed impressions, and we can get to the meat of the matter:

> <<The problem I perceive and have been getting at does not arise after a
> judgment is made about "genetic" relationships.  It happens before.
> Romani and Anglo-Romani obviously resemble one another in some way.

So they do, but this insistence on "resemblances" is yours, not mine.  I
have pointed out repeatedly that the comparative method has nothing to do
with resemblances.

Esperanto "resembles" quite a few European languages, but I don't therefore
conclude that it is genetically related to any of them.

> Upon analysis, one discovers a "systematic correspondence" between Romani
> and the lexicon in Anglo-Romani.

No, one doesn't.  One simply discovers a modern English lexicon in
Anglo-Romani -- not the same thing at all.

> But does that yield a genetic relationship?
> No, because one only gets one genetic relationship per customer?  Why?
> Because a language can only represent one "system"?  But Anglo-Romani
> represents two systematic correspondences, and therefore presumably two
> different systems.  In Anglo-Romani, the problem is clear, because the
> language is historic.  In IE languages, the problem is hidden in
> prehistory.>>

OK; let's see if I follow this.

Steve is suggesting that there is something (unidentified) in IE which is
comparable to Anglo-Romani.  I don't agree.

Steve, *what exactly* is there in any IE language or languages that is
similar to Anglo-Romani?  My answer is "nothing".  I can see no IE language
that even vaguely resembles Anglo-Romani -- not even Albanian.  So what are
you talking about?

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 Jun 22 13:46:35 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 14:46:35 +0100
Subject: Rate of Change
In-Reply-To: <c9.11497cbe.285994bd@aol.com>
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.144635.0100.>

--On Thursday, June 14, 2001 12:17 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

[Joat Simeon]

> <<Eg., "pita" (Hindi) and "father" (English) are cognates, as are "pad"
> and "foot", despite having no surface similarity at all.>>

> If you said "pita" and "brassiere" have no surface similarity, well that
> would be different.  If you said "pad" and "philadelphia" have no surface
> similarity, that might work.  But "pita" and "father" clearly do have some
> prima facie structural similarities.  All these similarities and
> differences are clearly a matter of degree.  I would suspect that "found"
> cognates that truly have no recognizable resemblances are rare.

Well, maybe not that rare.  Romance is a rather shallow family, but look at
these cognates:

	French	Italian

	/u/	/agosto/	'August'
	/o/	/akkwa/	'water'
	/wazo/	/uttSello/	'bird'
	/Sa~/	/kampo/	'field'
	/SEf/	/kapo/ 	'head'
	/SE~/	/kane/	'dog'

And so on.  French /o/ 'water' arguably resembles the unrelated Basque <ur>
'water' much more closely than it does its Italian cognate, and Italian
/agosto/ 'August' arguably resembles the unrelated Basque <agorril>
'August' more closely than it does its French cognate.

I suspect that dissimilar-looking cognates are not particularly rare at
all.  After all, English 'head' is cognate with both the Romance words for
'head' given above, but it really does not resemble either.

But note that the last three words, while exhibiting little in the way of
resemblance, exhibit a systematic correspondence rather well.

> And I would suspect that any attempt to find a systematic pattern of change
> that included "pita" and "brassiere" as cognates would not get very far.

Oh, I beg to differ -- semantics aside.  First, the long form 'brassiere'
is now pretty much obsolete, and unknown to younger speakers.  So let's try
<pita> and <bra>.  An initial bilabial plosive, followed by a non-nasal
coronal, followed by /a/ -- by some standards, this is a very high degree
of similarity.  I know one or two not very respectable linguists who would
not hesitate to reconstruct *<pta>, with vowel epenthesis in one language,
and the changes *<pta> --> *<pra> --> <bra> in the other.  Of course, that
element <-ssiere> is just an accretion, and not to be taken seriously, like
the final elements of Spanish <cabeza> 'head' and <corazon> 'heart'.  ;-)

Now, the semantics of 'father' and 'bra' is a challenge, but perhaps the
most important Roman bra-factory was located in or near the Temple of Jove
the Father. ;-)

Sorry, folks -- I'm always like this at the end of the exam-marking period.
I hope to be back to my normal gruff self within a week.

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 sarima at friesen.net  Fri Jun 22 14:02:59 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 07:02:59 -0700
Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look
In-Reply-To: <MABBIJNNPBOFHEBNBMEHCEPFCLAA.mclasutt@brigham.net>
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.070259.0700.>

At 01:59 AM 6/18/01 -0600, Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote:

>English and Scots.)  The next documentation in 1828 shows a language in
>transition with most of the 5 phonological changes in full process of taking
>charge.  The next major documentation in 1861 shows that all five of the
>phonological changes have finished the job of restructuring the language.
>...
>During this entire period, Comanche society was preliterate and still
>nomadic, having been forced onto the reservation only in 1872.  So, during
>this 75-year span, 5 fairly important sound changes occurred.  ...
>I can't really tell you how this stacks up against figures for literate
>societies because I'm not an Indo-European expert, but I do seem to recall
>from my general reading in historical linguistics that this seems to be the
>general pattern found in all language change, whether the language is
>written or not.

It certainly is about on par with the Great Vowel Shift in English, which
took on order of 50 to 100 years to complete.

And that was in a somewhat literate society (there was certainly enough
literacy to support a literature).

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Jun 23 05:27:08 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 01:27:08 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look
Message-ID: <SAT.23.JUN.2001.012708.EDT.>

I wrote:
>If we are talking about sound changes that separate two daughter languages,
>we should be able to show that those specific sound changes took a certain
>number of years, days, hours and with historical evidence.  If we are
>claiming that that rate is somehow universal - justifying the application of
>a uniformity assumption - we should be prepared to show that the same rate
>per sound change can be observed in a large enough number of other languages.
>  Or explain why they vary.

In a message dated 6/22/2001 1:56:04 AM, sarima at friesen.net replied:
<<This assumes a constant rate of change,..>>

No it doesn't.  Average rates of change are based on multiple occurrences.
You get an average by finding the same changes in different languages and
averaging the time they took.  Variable rates of change (the opposite of
constant) simply mean that rates will vary in correlation to the change in
some independent variable.

<<What is suggested is a *statistical* median or mean rate, and a
variance in rate.  Given those one can determine a range of reasonable
values for when a *set* of changes took place.  One can certainly determine
a maximum amount of time that could reasonably correlate with a given
amount of change - that is how statistics works.>>

So, you have a historical *set* of changes and some numbers to supply here?
Now you're talking.  I'm ready to go.  My buddy and statistical wiz Seth
Margos has even volunteered to do the crunching.  He's done standard curve
analysis on projects where there were over a half million incidences and over
25 variables.  This should be a piece of cake.

First, what *set* of changes do you want to use?  Remember that we'll need
more than one occurrence of that set.  One occurrence has no statistical
validity, of course.  So pick a *set* of changes that has occurred in at
least five, preferably ten languages, and the time it took for each of them
to occur historically.  This will give us your basic mean, mode, medium rates
of change, a rate of variance, standard deviations and some level of
statistical validity.

Now just find the same *set* in a prehistoric language and we'll get a pretty
respectable probable rate of change for that prehistoric language.

And THAT is how statistics works.

Of course, someone may come up with different *sets* of changes and get
different average rates of change, but Seth can handle that, too, if you can
quantify the differences between the *sets.*  (The rate of change might
"vary" predictably according to the *sets*.) But that's jumping ahead.

There's nothing mysterious here.  If Time consistently produces a MEASURABLE
amount of AVERAGE change in some specific feature of a number of historical
languages, that can be validated statistically.  And once it's validated, you
can statistically expect to find the same (plus or minus) "rate of change" in
prehistorical languages that have those same specific features.

Awaiting the data,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Jun 23 06:00:14 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 02:00:14 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look
Message-ID: <SAT.23.JUN.2001.020014.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/22/2001 2:19:29 AM, mclasutt at brigham.net writes:
<<Today, there are five main phonological changes that separate Shoshoni from
Comanche and make the two mutually incomprehensible without extensive
practice.>>

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?

<< 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....I can't really tell you how this stacks up against figures for
literate societies because I'm not an Indo-European expert, but I do seem to
recall from my general reading in historical linguistics that this seems to
be the general pattern found in all language change, whether the language is
written or not.  The true Indo-Europeanists can undoubtedly provide detailed
information to verify or correct this impression.>>

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.

Regards,
Steve Long


From edsel at glo.be  Fri Jun 22 14:27:42 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 16:27:42 +0200
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.162742.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: <X99Lynx at aol.com>
Sent: Friday, June 15, 2001 7:13 AM

[snip]

>     Then he went on to point out that European Portuguese has the rolled r,
>     but (Northern) Brazilian Portuguese has an /h/ reflex of /r/, to which I
>     added that the Puerto Rican Spanish rolled ("double") rr is often
>     pronounced as a velar like in French etc.  The implication is that
>     Brazilian may have passed through this stage in the evolution of r > h.

[snip]
> Steve Long

[Ed Selleslagh]

Isn't there a little confusion here? Isn't the Brazilian Portuguese r that's
pronounced as uvular r, as [rx] in final position, or as [x] or even [h], the
original rr (cf. Spanish), the rolling r (>3 taps)? Not the single r
(originally one tap, now often more). [Note that double r is not always written
as such, as orthography is different according to position in a word, e.g.
initially or finally]. Did you mean that Puertoricans use the Brazilian
pronunciation of double r? I wasn't aware of that. Maybe Portuguese influence
stretched farther north than I thought: in Curaçao Papiamento there is a
considerable Portuguese base, but that's still far more to the south than P.R.

In the mid-southern Andes (parts of Perú, Bolivia, N. Argentina), the double
r is pronounced [Z] (French j), strongly reminescent of Polish rz or Czech
r-hacek, which - as far as I know - have the same origin (rolling r). All seem
to be results of retroflexion.

As to unusual sound correspondences, isn't there a Sumerian rustic dialect that
uses m and S instead of g and n? I seem to remember something like that from
Meillet. Can anyone tell me more about that?

Ed.


From mcv at wxs.nl  Fri Jun 22 18:06:05 2001
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 20:06:05 +0200
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
In-Reply-To: <a05010400b74e9af87403@[132.229.243.85]>
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.200605.0200.>

On Thu, 14 Jun 2001 09:59:33 -0700, "R.S.Georg"
<R.S.Georg at let.leidenuniv.nl> wrote:

>>And, if anyone can make any sense of the phonetic side of the change *s > *k
>>mentioned above, I'd be glad to hear it...

>Armenian has a somewhat similar development (although the details are
>by far not as simple; I don't know them from the top of my head, so
>please look it up).

In Armenian, sw > k` (like tw and kw).

>In early European writings on things Indian, I encountered the term
>/upaniSad/ rendered as <Oup'nekhad>  (I think it was in Schopenhauer,
>but he certainly got it from someone else); the ultimate source of
>this impressionistic notation may have been Bengali Brahmin
>pronunciation of Sanskrit, but I'm not so sure about that.

Wasn't it simply French?

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon Jun 25 06:45:08 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 02:45:08 EDT
Subject: Uniformitarianism and the Arrowwood
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.024508.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/25/01 12:02:47 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> Actually, I'd rather put the onus on you to justify the identification of
> *ebur- or *eiw- with any particular modern tree classification.  I do not
> doubt the phonology in the reconstructions.  I think that anyone who looks
> closely will find that the meanings are anywhere as stable as you contend.

-- *eiuos produces a word meaning "yew" in Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, and
probably Hittite.  In Slavic, it's shifted to "willow".

The rules generally used for historical linguistics would accord a high
probability of this being the PIE meaning.

Again, if you want to argue in the field of historical linguistics, you have
to accept the rules in general use.

> What YOU must prove is that there's no chance that the "yew" word would
> have changed if *PIE had had a yew word.

-- that is not so.  As mentioned above, the general rule is that three
separate language families with the same meaning render a PIE meaning highly
probable.  Particularly if one or more is widely separated from the others.

> evidence says that the word would have changed - possibly many times in
> 2000+years.

-- odd that you haven't produced one scrap of it, then.

Semantic shifts in _other_ words have no relevance to the original meaning of
_this_ word.

Incidentally, yew wood was used for bows throughout northern Eurasia from
Mesolithic times on.  The Alpine "iceman" had a yew bow.

The evidence indicates that PIE had _two_ words for "yew", one (the older)
with the general sense of "evergreen tree with reddish heartwood and
berries", and the other (possibly a late dialectical word of the PIE center
and east) meaning roughly "bow-wood".


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Tue Jun 26 07:20:02 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 07:20:02 -0000
Subject: Uniformitarianism and the Arrowwood
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.072002.0000.>

Steve Long (17 Jun 2001) wrote (responding to my posting of 5 Jun 2001):

>Actually, I'd rather put the onus on you [DGK] to justify the identification
>of *ebur- or *eiw- with any particular modern tree classification.  I do not
>doubt the phonology in the reconstructions.  I think that anyone who looks
>closely will find that the meanings are anywhere as stable as you contend.

>And of course this whole idea doesn't depend on the phonology.  It depends on
>the meanings of these words.  What YOU must prove is that there's no chance
>that the "yew" word would have changed if *PIE had had a yew word.  A lot of
>evidence says that the word would have changed - possibly many times in 2000+
>years.  But in the end you have no way of proving what such words meant in the
>2000+ years before ACTUAL attestation.  Because you have no direct evidence at
>all.

According to your rhetoric, all words are susceptible to frequent, random,
unknowable change. Therefore, words cannot be used to argue anything
whatsoever about linguistic or ethnographic prehistory. You have objected to
other list-members "queering the game", and your response is to throw the
whole game-board into the trash.

And when did it become incumbent upon _me_ to prove "no chance" of something
happening contrary to a scenario I have suggested? Do you hold your own
scenarios to the same absolute standard of proof?

>There's been some talk about a linguistic Uniformitarian Principle.  So let
>me invoke it right now.

>What actually happened when people gave names to trees, before modern
>scientific classifications attempts to make them uniform?

You mean things are different now? Linnaeus unwittingly changed the habits
of all subsequent speakers, even those who have never heard of Linnaeus or
binomial nomenclature? When a pre-Linnaean (such as Dioscorides) discussed a
particular taxon, it could have referred to anything, in your view? It seems
rather arbitrary and capricious to invoke the UP only to exclude its
_present_ application in the next sentence.

>Let's take the eastern US only, and pick a tree with a good practical name.
>Near the top of the list of "common names" (non-scientific names) is
>"ARROWWOOD" - kind of yew/bow tree in concept.  Maybe it means wood you'd
>make arrows from or wood that looks like arrows.  Doesn't matter.

>As a matter of the "Uniformitarian Principle" and an example of old fashion
>American "non-dysfunctionality" (ha) we should see the ARROWWOOD stand for
>one tree and one tree only.  Or we should stop expecting that the *PIE word
>for YEW would have stood for one tree for 2000+ before that word would
>actually be attested.

>The answer is... STOP expecting one prehistoric name will equal one
>prehistoric tree.  JUST take a look at how dysfunctional something as
>simple as the "arrowwood" word can get:

>[...]

>"Arrowwood" #3 (Viburnum dentatum, acerifolium, recognitum, pubescens) -
>Other Names: southern arrowwood, northern arrowwood, smooth arrowwood,
>withe-wood, downy arrowwood, viburnum, black haw, highbush cranberry,
>maple-leaved viburnum, nannyberry, sheepberry, wild raisin.

Thanks for the memories! I haven't heard about highbush cranberries since
the days when Euell Gibbons was shilling for Post Grape-nuts.

>[...]

>Check out all those tree names!!!  MAJOR dysfunction!

Not at all. What you have forgotten while gathering the woodpile is that my
example involved members of the same tribe. In modern North America, such a
community corresponds roughly to a village like "Mayberry" with its
surrounding farmland, not to the entire eastern USA. If a single village
actually exhibited such a wide variety of terms for the same tree, it would
be a major dysfunction indeed, suitable for a plot-device.

Andy: "I told you to stake out the house behind the boxwoods!"
Barney: "Those _are_ boxwoods, Andy!"
Andy: "Those are _false_ boxwoods, Barn ..."

DGK


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Jun 23 03:15:22 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 23:15:22 EDT
Subject: "Uniformitarian Principle"
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.231522.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/22/2001 2:41:08 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:
<< ["Uniformitarian Principle"] = languages and speakers in the remote past
did not behave differently from the way languages and speakers have behaved
in the historical period.>>

Now, don't forget that you brought this "Uniformitarian Principle" up
specifically and especially as the support for your "rate of change"
statements about IE.

And whether it works or not for other aspects of historical linguistics (and
I think it does), it just doesn't work for your pronouncements about rate of
change.

You have no objective "rate of change" to offer for speakers in historical
periods.  So you really have nothing to extend to prehistorical periods.

<<To reject this position is to make historical linguistics impossible.>>

This is untrue. We can validly assume all kinds of uniformity and linguistic
continuity between the historic and the prehistoric - without buying your
subjective judgments about "rate of change" of IE languages.

There is plenty of room for "Uniformitarianism" in historical linguistics,
without claiming that it supplies you some kind of objective measure of
language "change" per measure of time.

<<Without the UP, historical linguistics would be no more orderly or
principled than a Michael Moorcock fantasy novel.  We need it.>>

But, unfortunately, as far as a scientific rate of change goes, you just
don't meet the qualifications.

Regards,
Steve Long


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sat Jun 23 01:25:21 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 21:25:21 EDT
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.212521.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/22/01 7:23:23 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes:

> but who is to deny the Steve Longs and other No-Protos of the world when
> they come back and say "Yes it is."?

-- well, they'll do that anyway.  Every field has this sort of
cannot-be-convinced person hanging around its fringes.


From mcalamia at hotmail.com  Wed Jun 27 10:50:19 2001
From: mcalamia at hotmail.com (Maria Anna Calamia)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 06:50:19 -0400
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.065019.0400.>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
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From petegray at btinternet.com  Sun Jun 24 18:47:14 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 19:47:14 +0100
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <SUN.24.JUN.2001.194714.0100.>

> what I am asserting is that the morphemes used in conjugation are very
> resistant to borrowing.  ...

The highly productive English morpheme -ess appears to derive (through Late
Latin) from the Greek -issa which appears, from its phonetic shape and other
factors, to be a loan into Greek from some substrate.

So there's one interesting example, at any rate.

Peter


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Jun 23 06:53:27 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 02:53:27 EDT
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
Message-ID: <SAT.23.JUN.2001.025327.EDT.>

[ moderator edited ]

In a message dated 6/22/2001 10:09:04 PM, parkvall at ling.su.se writes:
<< To the best of my knowledge, no variety of Haitian Creole has ever been
attested in which African words make up more than a couple of per cent (at
the very best) of the vocabulary. The lexicon of Haitian is normally
considered to be more than 80% (citing from memory, but I could probably
come up with references if neccessary) of French origin, regardless of
whether you consider the core lexicon or the whole vocab. Given that most
French affixes -- though they do exist -- have got lost on their way, it
would make more sense (which doesn't mean it would be correct) to describe
Haitian as French lexicon and no affixes rather than Afro lexicon and
french affixes. >>

You're quite right about the lexicon.  It is mainly French and I misread my
very old notes.

You should be aware however that you may find strong disagreement about your
"no affixes" statement in some quarters.  Michel DeGraff at MIT seemed to
find French affixes and even found their development and consistent with
genetic developments in French:

"[To identify Haitian Creole as non-genetic] these features must diverge when
 comparing the grammars of (colloquial) 17th-18th century French dialects to
 that of Haitian Creole, and such divergences must be *qualitatively*
 different than their counterparts in the ("genetic") course of French
 diachrony.

 So far, I have not be able to isolate such features. Whatever divergences
 exist between colloquial 17th-18th century French dialects and Haitian
 Creole (e.g., `loss' of verbal inflection, verb-placement differences, etc.)
 seem to have counterparts in the diachronic course of `genetic' languages.
 And what I find most intriguing is that such divergences in `genetic'
 diachrony also seem to coincide with the history of contact within these
 `genetic' diachronies."

There's a paper on HC by Michel DeGraff that should still be on the web at:
http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/degraff/hc-sketch.pdf

A completely different approach, and one that points to "genetic" continuity
with West African morphology was taken by Brousseau,  Filipovich & Lefebvre
at the University of Quebec :

"[Comparing] the productive morphology of Haitian with that of French (the
 lexifier language), and Fon, a contributive West African language, ... 1)
 productive affixes of Haitian creole pattern in a significant way with the
 model of contributing West African languages more so than with French; and 2)
 the presumed morphological simplicity of [HC] reduces to the selection of the
 unmarked option with respect to the position of morphological heads." (JPCL
 4:1 1989)

If any of the above is possibly accurate, then the multiple "genetic strains"
in Haitian Creole may still apply, despite my misstatement regarding the
lexical part.

What I was AMAZED by in your post was the following paragraph:

<<A deliberate oversimplification which would need to be taken by more than a
grain of salt, but which have some truth to it is that while a non-contact
language has one parent, an intertwiner has two, and a pidgin or creole
none.>>

The idea that any language can have TWO PARENTS - grain or salt or not - is a
significant enough step for me in this dialogue.  Following Russell and
Whitehead and the dictum that "qualitative differences are just large
quantitative differences," I would ask if there isn't a bit of "interwiner"
in most languages?

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Jun 23 08:09:09 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 04:09:09 EDT
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
Message-ID: <SAT.23.JUN.2001.040909.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/22/2001 10:44:59 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:

> 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.

<<This is not the way we use 'genetic' in linguistics.  We do 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.

Is there a more "pithy" answer to why there can only be one genetic ancestor
than this one?

Regards,
Steve Long


From parkvall at ling.su.se  Sat Jun 23 14:47:13 2001
From: parkvall at ling.su.se (Mikael Parkvall)
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 16:47:13 +0200
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
In-Reply-To: <271946182.3201868260@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SAT.23.JUN.2001.164713.0200.>

Regarding the history of Haitian Creole, both Joat Simeon and Larry Trask
recently referred to the classical pidgin-to-creole cycle as the current
majority view of creole development. Indeed, this is how most people have
become used to looking at creoles for at least the past four decades.

However, if only for the record, I thought that I as a creolist should tell
you that this view is now rapidly losing ground in mainstream anglophone
creolistics (Americans are thereby reinventing the view that francophone
creolistics -- whose works they never bothered to read since they're not in
English -- has had for a long time). What many, and perhaps even most,
creolists believe these days is that Haitian et al never passed through any
"pidgin bottleneck" -- the relation of Haitian to French, they have it, is
simply similar to that of French to Latin. End of story.

The debate on this subject is very heated. I personally strongly disagree
with the view sketched above, clinging to the view in which creoles indeed
have a pidgin past, and that this can be demonstrated even in modern
creoles. Things happened to eg French on its way to Haitian that normally
don't happen in "normal" language development.

If you ask me, the reasons for taking this new position are more of a
political nature than anything else ("Pidgins are primitive languages, and
my ancestors surely weren't primitive -- are you trying to say that we
blacks can't learn to master inflexions?").

Anyway, even though I dislike the direction creolistics is taking, I
thought that you as historical linguists should be aware of it, so this is
just for your information.

Mikael Parkvall


From miskec4096 at hotmail.com  Sun Jun 24 21:21:41 2001
From: miskec4096 at hotmail.com (Kreso Megyeral)
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 23:21:41 +0200
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
Message-ID: <SUN.24.JUN.2001.232141.0200.>

Larry Trask wrote:

> And Albanian is not Greek, Romance, Slavic, HUNGARIAN or Turkic, even though
> elements of these origins greatly outnumber the inherited elements.

Excuse me, but I will kindly ask for the explanation of the possible
Hungarian elements in Albanian. I'm a student of Hungarian and have also
studied Albanian, but have found no trace of evidence for such connection
(except the interesting similarity between Hungarian "|l" and Albanian "ul"
- to sit). Or was it that you just took Hungarian as an example of
"any-possible-language-it-could-be-connected-to"?


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Jun 23 08:00:04 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 04:00:04 EDT
Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns"
Message-ID: <SAT.23.JUN.2001.040004.EDT.>

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. >>

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."

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.

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.)

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:

<<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....

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.

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.

Regards,
Steve Long


From edsel at glo.be  Sat Jun 23 11:22:22 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 13:22:22 +0200
Subject: European Genetics/IE
Message-ID: <SAT.23.JUN.2001.132222.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: <JoatSimeon at aol.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2001 11:05 AM

[snip]
> None of the Romance languages was a pidgin to begin with; they all started
> off as fairly standard versions of Late Latin -- regional dialects of Late
> Latin, to be precise.

> There may well have been forms of pidgin Latin spoken in the course of Roman
> expansion, and among the masses of slaves from varoius areas in Italy and
> adjacent parts of the Roman domains.  In fact, there probably would have
> been.

> But they never became creolized, as far as I know.

[Ed Selleslagh]
I would like to add something to this:

It could possibly be argued that early Castilian had some kind of a pidgin
phase during the Reconquista, when it became the communication device for the
different regional groups (who all spoke different Romance languages, some even
non-IE Basque) taking part in it and settling in its wake, in the place of
fleeing Arabs. If it actually was a pidgin at one time, it quickly became a
creole, but with a relatively low social status (as most creoles): high level
poetry (troubadours) continued in Catalan for some time, but folksy comedy was
in Castilian.

In fact, Castilian has some, but not much, grammatical simplification compared
to other Romance languages like French or Italian (e.g. wholly or partly
'regularized' verbs) and inconsistency in phonetic evolution stages of
different words, indicating different Romance origins; and there are a number
of peculiarities that have been attributed to 'substrate', often Basque (e.g.
Lapesa)- although this is far from a consensus opinion. (Note that Castilian
was 'born' in the southern fringe of the Basque speaking region of the time; so
those wouldn't qualify as pidgin efects or creolization).

If Castilian is not so clearly a creole, this would be explainable by the fact
that its speakers originally spoke pretty closely resembling languages (except
the Basques: see above), but in different stages of phonetic evolution (e.g.
initial f>h, but not in all older words).

Another case of someone's two cents, I guess.

Ed.


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Sat Jun 23 20:15:07 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 15:15:07 -0500
Subject: European Genetics/IE
In-Reply-To: <fd.7bc3eb4.2859d859@aol.com>
Message-ID: <SAT.23.JUN.2001.151507.0500.>

	From what I've seen, written forms definitely seem close to the
standard.
	But I'm wondering if the masses initially spoke some pidginzed form
of Latin in the marketplace, which developed into a creole or somelike
close to one.
	I seem to remember reading about some degree of language-mixing (as
opposed to dual texts) in Hispano-Celtic inscriptions

[ Moderator's note:
  The following material is quoted from a posting by JoatSimeon at aol.com dated
  14 Jun 2001 05:05:29 EDT.
  -- rma ]

>> and it seems plausible that (some) early regional forms of Romance may have
>> initially been more like Latinate creoles than daughter languages.

>-- no, because the special conditions which are required for the creation of
>a creole language weren't present.

>Creoles are pidgins which have become 'naturalized' and spoken as a first
>language.

>To have a creole, you first need a pidgin -- and pidgins are the result of
>incomplete language acquisition in situations where multiple languages are
>spoken and a trade jargon is needed, but acquisition of the standard form is
>not possible.

>None of the Romance languages was a pidgin to begin with; they all started
>off as fairly standard versions of Late Latin -- regional dialects of Late
>Latin, to be precise.

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Fri Jun 22 11:53:42 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 11:53:42 -0000
Subject: Pelasgian/was Etruscans
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.115342.0000.>

Eduard Selleslagh (1 Jun 2001) wrote:

>If [Hebrew] <ko:pher> can mean 'pitch', and <go:pher> 'sticky stuff', couldn't
>there be some semantic link, leading either to convergence of two originally
>different words, or to two variants of the same original word?

This could well be a case of convergence. The 'covering'-word <ko:pher> is
clearly native Hebrew, from the common root <k-p-r> 'to cover'. The
'sticky-stuff'-word <go:pher>, if it is (as I think likely) derived from
(unrelated) Pelasgian *kupar-, seems to have been assimilated in form to the
more common Hebrew word. Aramaic has a verb <g-p-r> 'to cover with pitch'
apparently back-formed from <go:pher>.

For a third-party borrowing with k- in Greek and g- in West Semitic, we also
have the 'tin'-word: Gk. <kassiteros>, Aram. <gas't'iyra:>. Watkins derives
this from Elamite <kassi-ti-ra> 'coming from the land of the Kassi'.

DGK


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Fri Jun 22 12:43:50 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 12:43:50 -0000
Subject: Chronology and history of Germanic Consonant Shift
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.124350.0000.>

petegray (9 Jun 2001) wrote:

>As for the first sound shift, I'm not up to date with the most recent stuff,
>but I quote the following from the dtv-Atlas:

>    "For the date of the 1st sound shift, we can use the word Hanf, which
>comes from the Greek word kannabis.  This word is a loan word out of Scythian,
>which did not enter Greek till the 5th century BC.  In Germanic we meet the
>word in its shifted form *hanap-.  Since Germanic could not have borrowed this
>word very early, we can assert that at this time the rules *k > h and *b > p
>were still in force.  But it does not tell us how long this rule had existed.
>That it no longer was in force in the 3rd and 2nd centuries before Christ can
>be concluded from loan words from Latin, none of which have shifted forms.
>(The first contact of Germans with Romans as in this period.)"

A Scythian source for the 'hemp'-word is reasonable enough, given Old
Persian <kanab> and alleged cognates in Finno-Ugric. But why on earth would
Greek intermediation be necessary to get a Scythian word into Germania?
Darius I bridged the Danube in his costly campaign against the Scythians,
and that puts a large part of them much closer to the Germans than the
Greeks were.

>Walker-Chambers supports this.  He says:  "It is estimated that the First
>Sound Shift was completed by c 500BC; but we only know that it was finished
>before the Germanic peoples established contact with the Romans in the1st
>century BC, since none of the words borrowed from Latin were affected by it."

There's something wrong with this analysis, since the ethnonym
Catti/Chatti/Hesse and the hydronym Vacalis/Vachalis/Vahalis/Waal show that
the consonant-shift was _not_ completed everywhere by the 1st cent. BCE.
Both authors have assumed that "first contact" is relevant to the form of a
borrowed word. In the case of borrowings from Latin into Germanic, this is
probably false. The first borrowing of <coquus> 'cook' might well have
undergone shifting of initial [k] to [x] in some dialects, but the resulting
forms would have been superseded by fresh borrowings with [k], as
Romano-German contacts continued for several centuries. In situations like
this, "last contact" may be more important than "first contact".

DGK


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri Jun 22 16:38:59 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 17:38:59 +0100
Subject: -ca in Sanskrit and Bartholomae's law
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.173859.0100.>

> could someone explain why Bartholomae's law never affects -ca ?

It concerns the specific formation root + tos.  It raises a number of severe
questions, and the "new phonoogy" of PIE mght even remove teh law entirely.

In more traditional terms, -tos is seen as a bound morpheme suffixed to a
non-independent form of the root, whereas -ca is seen as a separate
morpheme, following an indpenedent word.  In our modern script, it happens
to be written on the word in Latin, not on the word in Greek, and on the
word in Sanskrit, but in Sanskrit everything is written without a space if
possible, so that means nothing.   The morpheme boundary between a preceding
element and -ca is much stronger than the boundary between a root (which
does not exist on its own) and the bound morpheme -tos.

Peter


From dlwhite at texas.net  Sun Jun 24 00:04:24 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 19:04:24 -0500
Subject: On "Joke Usage"
Message-ID: <SAT.23.JUN.2001.190424.0500.>

> A mild correction.  My position is that "all sorts of bizarre things" are
> also happening in the present.

        Like what?

> <<...Other than silly things like the joke usage of "moi" in English.>>

> Good example.  I imagine the last of the Anglo-Saxon wordists hearing that
> medieval Muppeteer Chaucer reciting his Tales and then calling all those
> French and Latin words "silly things" that should properly be categorized as
> "joke usage."

        Well, when "moi" displaces "me" in isolative usage, then you will
have something.  Not before.

> <<...in this case mixed languages lurking under every rock...>>

> Or staring you in the face.

        Again, like what?

> Dr White's situation is not unlike that of the English natural philosopher
> who traveled to Australia prepared to debunk the existence of the platypus,
> the kangaroo, etc.  A boxing match was arranged between the philosopher
> and a representative of one of these fauna.  After being soundly thrashed and
> knocked out in the first round, Dr White - I mean, the philosopher denied
> he had lost the match on the grounds that his opponent was theoretically
> impossible.

        Excuse me, but last I heard you were not even able to coherently
distinguish between influence and descent.  I think you are mistaken about
who got knocked out inf the first round.

        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".

Dr. David L. White


From edsel at glo.be  Sun Jun 24 09:15:05 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 11:15:05 +0200
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
Message-ID: <SUN.24.JUN.2001.111505.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stanley Friesen" <sarima at friesen.net>
Sent: Friday, June 15, 2001 3:32 AM

[ moderator snip ]

>>> Yes, but consider:
>>> 1) De Gaulle était un très grand homme.
>>> 2) De Gaulle était un homme très grand.

>>> The meaning is completely different.

> My French is rather weak, so I would appreciate an explanation of the
> distinction in the case of 'homme', please?

[Ed Selleslagh]

1) D.G. was a very great man
2) D.G. was a very tall man

Ed.


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sun Jun 24 18:53:50 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 19:53:50 +0100
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
Message-ID: <SUN.24.JUN.2001.195350.0100.>

>In Latin there is good evidence that adjectives (and similar modifiers)
>placed before the noun provide some form of prominence or salience to the
>adjective.

In Latin the adjective is regularly put before a complex nominal group, and
after a simple noun.  The reason is to indicate the limits of the noun
phrase;  an adjective not immediately followed by a noun in agreement is
left "hanging", and closure of the syntactic relationship implies closure of
the phrase.   For example the patterns:  adj - genitive - noun and
adjective-preposition-noun are very much commoner than other orders for
those combinations of words - though exceptions can of course be found.

Peter


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Mon Jun 25 22:28:28 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 18:28:28 -0400
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
In-Reply-To: <B746FCB8.EAF%xavier.delamarre@free.fr>
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.182828.0400.>

>     Of course, classical example of handbooks. You have (semantic) freedom
> with the substantive maison but not with homme.
>     What is in question here is that when there is the possibility of free
> word order, it does not induce _systematically_ a difference in meaning,
> style, emphasis etc.

sorry for the delay on replying to this.  i disagree that what is in
question here is solely the systematic correlation between differences in
word order and differences in meaning.  yes, i am saying that i would
expect differences in meaning, broadly construed, accompanying differences
in word order, but i've also been trying to say that whether this holds up
in every instance or not is actually independent of whether word order is
a part of the grammar of all languages.  in order for word order to be a
component of the grammar it is not necessary for it to be tied directly to
nuances of meaning.  it is only necessary for the various word order
possibilities in a given language to be determined by the grammar of that
language.  maybe there are two word order variants in French or some other
language that have absolutely identical meanings and usage restrictions,
but the point is that the fact that they are available at all (while other
imaginable orders are not) is a fact about French grammar.

>     But there again it is not PIE, where these possibilities were much more
> extended than in Modern french.

yes, of course, but that does not imply that the possibilities are not
regulated by the grammar.  it just makes it harder to show that they are.

>     And to reduce PIE syntax to word-order (Lehmann, Friedrich) is simply
> nonsense.

>     XD

i agree wholeheartedly.  i don't think anyone was trying to do that (at least i
hope).  to reduce English syntax to word order is nonsense as
well.  syntax involves the full scope of putting elements together to form
a grammatical sentence in a given language.  but its also nonsense to
reduce PIE syntax (or the syntax of any language) to something excluding
word order.  word order has to be part of it, just like case, agreement,
etc.  like i've said before, these other parts of syntax are much easier
to reconstruct than word order, so it may well be that confidently
reconstructing PIE word orders and their nuances will remain impossible,
but that's a very different thing than saying they didn't exist in the
grammar.


From g_sandi at hotmail.com  Sun Jun 24 11:22:19 2001
From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi)
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 11:22:19 -0000
Subject: Word Order and verb endings (was Re: No Proto-Celtic?)
Message-ID: <SUN.24.JUN.2001.112219.0000.>

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From proto-language at email.msn.com  Sun Jun 24 17:58:32 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 12:58:32 -0500
Subject: Word Order and verb endings (was Re: No Proto-Celtic?)
Message-ID: <SUN.24.JUN.2001.125832.0500.>

Dear Nath and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Vidhyanath Rao" <rao.3 at osu.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2001 9:34 PM

<snip>

> Most importantly, similar forms can be used to turn a clause into an
> adjective: "The man who came yesterday" can be rendered as
>     neRRu    vanta    manitan
>    yesterday [come] man

> This suggests a very different explanation: Finite verbs came from
> verbal nouns and the order stem+pronoun then will be due to the usual
> order of adjective+noun.

[PCR]

First, I think we should explicit note that Adj+N is the order associated with
SOV.

Probably, the following comments are arguably more appropriate to the
Nostratic-List, and Rich may transfer this posting there if he chooses to do
so.

My studies of many language groups have led me to the conclusion that if one
can go back far enough into the syntactic structure of any language, one finds
equational sentences, composed of a Topic and Comment.

The application of this to IE is that I propose that IE or the language that
produced IE had a stage in which a statement like

*mon(u) *sek

could be interpreted to mean either

'the man is cutting (something)', or

'the man is cut',

with the context distinguishing between the two possible interpretations.

With the aid of an element, *te, designating a fellow tribe-member, hence
animate,

*mon(u) seket(e)

man cut(ting)+tribe-member

in effect, this Adj+N phrase, specified the active aspect of *mon(u), so that

THE MAN IS CUTTING (SOMETHING)

was the mandatory interpretation.

On the other hand, with the aid of an element, *?e (or *H{1}e), designating
'(something) over there', hence inanimate,

*mon(u) sek(e)H{1}(e)

man cut+(something) over there

in effect, this Adj+N phrase, specified the inactive aspect of *mon(u), so that

THE MAN IS CUT

was the mandatory interpretation.

I realize that this explanation involves many assumptions that many
list-members will be positively loath to make; and, for them, I offer this
(very much oversimplified) explanation only as a curiosity.

[VR]

> I don't presume to claim that the origin of the person/number endings in
> PIE is similar: To do that we need an explanation of why these endings
> do not show common gender vs neuter gender.

[PCR]

I presume you are referring here to the Tamil (and Dravidian) paradigm here
rather than the IE one.

In the case of IE, inanimate neuters (another oversimplification, I know) would
naturally favor stative endings; and animates, when not expressing their
animacy, would be functionally neuter.

Now I know all this needs beaucoup of qualifications but, in the interest of
hopefully not trying the patiences of list-members who will find this
speculation worthless, I have tried not to expand it overduly.

[VR]

> I just wish to point out that alternate explanations must be ruled out before
> asserting that Verb-Pronoun order lead to the endings.

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  Sun Jun 24 10:15:00 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 12:15:00 +0200
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <SUN.24.JUN.2001.121500.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stanley Friesen" <sarima at friesen.net>
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2001 3:35 PM

> At 12:36 PM 6/8/01 +0000, Gabor Sandi wrote:

>> I think that it is odd as well, yet I can't help noticing that personal
>> markings of verbs in IE (and Uralic and Altaic as well, for all you
>> Nostraticists) consistently come after the verb stem and not before it.
>> What's more, some of these endings contain consonants identical or similar
>> to what is found in the corresponding personal pronoun. -m- in the first
>> person is the most obvious (in PIE and Uralic, plus some other proto
>> languages), as is the -t- in the 2nd person plural (also, 2nd person sing.
>> in Uralic), -t- in the third person less so, the -s- in the 2nd person sing.
>> not at all. There are three competing hypotheses:

>> 1. coincidence
>> 2. agglutination of the pronoun
>> 3. there is a relationship, but the ending is not the result of an
>> agglutination of the verbal root with a pronoun

>> If the answer is no.2 above, I would like to come up with a succession of
>> linguistic changes that look reasonable and result in the pattern we see.

> Well, it is certainly possible that some pre-PIE language was VSO without
> effecting the possibility that PIE itself was SOV.  Such transitions are
> attested.  Perhaps this means that Proto-Nostratic was VSO, perhaps
> not.  Either way, once the clitics have transitioned into inflections there
> is no bar against a change in the unmarked position of the subject.

> [Note, reconstruction of word order is difficult, there is good evidence
> for "early" VSO in both Germanic and Celtic - but that is still later than
> the classical IE languages].

[Ed Selleslagh]

Even as a non-specialist, I can only note that in agglutinating languages (e.g.
in some Uralic and Altaic, but also in Quechua, the Inca language) the person
marker for verbs and the possessive marker for nouns is virtually the same
suffix, or obviously derived from the same form. IMHO this pleads in favor of
'2. agglutination of the pronoun'. Maybe it also suggests a previous
agglutinative phase for PIE; if so, that would make the position of the old
suffixed pronoun irrelevant for the VSO/SOV... discussion.

It might also suggest that in the early stages of agglutinating languages the
distinction between verbs and nouns wasn't as clear-cut as we might want to
believe. That would suggest an even earlier stage when lexical words
represented essentially 'concepts', and were themselves invariable like in
isolating languages.

So, my first suggestion that the enclitic pronoun might be due to PIE having
been VSO was probably not so fortunate, but it yielded an interesting dicussion
nonetheless.

Ed.


From alderson+mail at panix.com  Mon Jun 25 18:04:18 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 14:04:18 -0400
Subject: *G^EN-
In-Reply-To: <005701c0f74a$a966c8a0$7a464241@swbell.net>
 (proto-language@email.msn.com)
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.140418.0400.>

On 17 Jun 2001, Pat Ryan wrote:

> It is well-established in Afrasian studies, that roots are CVC. If we assume
> that IE and Afrasian are derived from a common ancestor, Nostratic, it is
> natural to suppose that all non-borrowed IE roots are originally derived from
> Nostratic CVC roots even though the CVC component may not have survived in IE
> as an independent root in a given instance.

So the question you are really asking is, "Is **g'en- a possible Nostratic
root?", then?  Wrong newsgroup for that discussion...

> To take one of the examples you have provided, *keubH2-, 'lie down, lay
> down', I see no reason not to derive it from Pokorny's 2. *kew-, 'bend'.

> Why do you not explain to us why you believe that it cannot be so derived,
> and must constitute an independent, unrelated root?

No, that's not how it works.  As the one proposing the etymology, it is up to
you to demonstrate why it should be accepted.  And if you are proposing it as
an *Indo-European* etymology, you are restricted to using only IE materials in
your demonstration.  (Internal reconstructions are of course fair game.)

								Rich Alderson


From alderson+mail at panix.com  Mon Jun 25 18:59:27 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 14:59:27 -0400
Subject: *G^EN-
In-Reply-To: <006501c0f74c$a953f200$7a464241@swbell.net>
 (proto-language@email.msn.com)
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.145927.0400.>

On 17 Jun 2001, Pat Ryan wrote:

> 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-
> (which I do not believe to be the case), 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-.

That is of course one possibility, but let's examine one other that is at least
as likely:

Let us suppose the existence of a stem extension **-n-, added to roots to form
a verbal stem, and a rule of "laryngeal metathesis" which requires that the
sequence **-HN- => **-NH- (where <N> here represents any nasal).  In that case,
the expected pre-form of reconstructed *g'enH1- must ultimately be **gVH1-n-,
with a root **gVH1.

So without further evidence for the reduced shape of the root, I propose that
we stick with the reconstructible form.

								Rich Alderson


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon Jun 25 04:31:29 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 00:31:29 EDT
Subject: About the Yew1
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.003129.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/24/01 10:29:43 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> BTW, what I suspect - rather than believe - is that the evidence can support
> a language like *PIE being spoken on the Danube in neolithic times.  Since
> *PIE probably didn't fall from the sky, I suspect the predecessor(s) of that
> language may have spread there from Anatolia.

-- there's plenty of evidence it didn't, and absolutely none that it did.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon Jun 25 04:34:43 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 00:34:43 EDT
Subject: About the Yew1
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.003443.EDT.>

>Steve Long

>A good piece of Anatolia does not have yew trees either.  In fact,
>the central plateaus have been steppes for most of the more modern climatic
>periods.

-- moving the PIE speakers around Anatolia again, are we?

One minute these people of 7000 BCE are in far eastern Anatolia, among the
red deer.  Next they're in the steppes where there are no yew trees.

And they must have been _very careful_ not to see the lions, leopards and roe
deer; not to mention the olives and vines native to central and western
Anatolia.

Meanwhile, by time-travel and telepathy, they knew all about horses and
wheeled vehicles, thousands of years before the development of those
technologies.

Astoundingly capable people -- perhaps Alien Space Bats were involved?

What a waste of time and effort.


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Tue Jun 26 08:30:38 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 08:30:38 -0000
Subject: About the Yew1
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.083038.0000.>

Steve Long (6 Jun 2001) wrote:

>Quick note.  Allow me to address this in more detail once I get back to my
>papers.

>But I did want to just point out that "Greek has (s)mi:lax" from the earlier
>post [DGK, 5 Jun 2001] is a good place to start to examine the simplification
>being attempted above.

>The statement that "It is very unlikely that a name for this particular tree,
>once established among a body of speakers, would be applied by those speakers
>to any other tree" just won't work with Greek.

Actually, I believe it will work, but my earlier posting contained a glaring
oversight. The regular Greek word for 'yew' is <taxos>, which is clearly
from the same source as Latin <taxus>. The word I cited, <smi:lax>, is an
epithet of several diverse plants. As you suggest, the most plausible
connection is with <smi:le:> 'type of knife', and the epithet probably means
'having knife-like leaves', since vines and weeds are hardly suitable for
carving. Anyhow, there is no reason to suppose that <smi:lax> was ever
established in the _exclusive_ sense of 'yew' and then applied to other
plants.

>In fact, the Greeks used "smilax" to apply at least four other forms of flora.
>And the original associations they were making appear to be to carving or
>perhaps sharpness of the leaves.  As far as, "red berries" goes, one of the
>trees-smilax was the "Hollyoak" or "Holmoak", which of course has red berries,
>provides an excellent carving wood and has sharp leaves.  The odd thing, of
>course, is that there is little or no reference to the smilax being poisonous
>in Classical Greek.  When we do have a connection between poisonous and
>arrows, it is in words like "ion", which is often associated with the violet,
>although there are texts where it is pretty clear this association is
>arbitrary and that the word has multiple meanings in reference to flora also.

There are three distinct Greek words here: the oxytone <i:os> 'arrow'
referred by L&S to the root of <ienai> 'to go'; the oxytone <ios> 'poison,
esp. of serpents' cognate with Latin <vi:rus> 'slime; poison' (PIE *weis-
Pok. 1134); and the paroxytone <ion> 'violet' cognate with Lat. <viola> id.
of non-IE origin.

>The closer we look, in fact, the more we understand that the ancients were
>more concerned with wood and pitch and bark and juice than they were with the
>modern-style scientific taxonomy of trees (except for the occasional natural
>historian) and that the names they actually used reflected this.  More
>importantly, if we don't look closely, we may inadvertantly use Occam's Razor
>to remove a good chunk of the truth.

If poor old Occam had a nickel for every time someone misused his razor, he
would be the world's richest dead man. It seems to me that your own method
of analysis is likely to cut out much of the truth as well. Lumping together
similar-sounding words in order to support crude generalizations is as
hazardous to the facts as going berserk with a straight razor.

DGK


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon Jun 25 06:24:04 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 02:24:04 EDT
Subject: Yew Two
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.022404.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/24/01 10:59:43 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> Another possibility which I like is that Irish <iubhar>, Gaelic <iubhar>
> simply are reflections of the early or later Greek influences among

-- no, this is phonologically impossible.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon Jun 25 06:23:20 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 02:23:20 EDT
Subject: Yew Two
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.022320.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/24/01 10:59:43 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> Because I suspect that words like Irish <iubhar>, Gaelic <iubhar>, Old Irish
> <ibar> were words that could have developed as trade words,

-- No.  This is out of the question; obviously false.

PIE *eiuos, "yew", is attested by cognates in Celtic, Germanic, Baltic,
Slavic, and (probably) Hittite.

This is more than enough, by the usual rules, to guarantee PIE status for
*eiuos.


From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com  Mon Jun 25 13:39:08 2001
From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 09:39:08 -0400
Subject: Yew Two
In-Reply-To: <111.125ec83.285f8916@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.093908.0400.>

Mr. Long is playing with Irish orthography here.  The Old Irish word
is <ibar>, with a short <i>, as cited earlier in the message.  The
spellings with <iu> reflect Early Modern Irish developments (growth
of a glide vowel, shift of the diphthongal crest) and resemblance to
Greek <iophoros> is chimerical.  Fluctuations between <io/iu>
spellings in Modern Irish/Scottish Gaelic words reflect mid/high
vowel exchanges in dialects that have nothing to do with the Old
Irish forms of the words.

Jim Rader

> Of course, Gr <iophoros> as a borrowed word into Celtic may possibly have
> ended up as Irish <iubhar> and Gaelic <iubhar>.  (See, e.g., Gaelic
> <leabhar>,a book; Welsh <llyfr>; from Latin <liber>; <io> and <iu> being
> somewhat interchangeable, compare Gaelic <iollagach> with <iullagach>, both
> meaning frolicsome.)  See also Gaelic <uthaidh, i:thaidh>, arrow;
> <coiliobhar>, a kind of gun; <ionntraich>, miss.  Cf., Gaelic <giuthas>,
> Early Irish <gius>, fir or similar wood.) All thios might suggest a
> connection that conforms better perhaps to what we know about the use of
> trade names for materials in ancient times.
...........
>
> Regards,
> Steve Long


From alderson+mail at panix.com  Mon Jun 25 19:14:07 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 15:14:07 -0400
Subject: Yew Two
In-Reply-To: <111.125ec83.285f8916@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com)
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.151407.0400.>

On 18 Jun 2001, Steve Long wrote _inter alia_:

> 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.)

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 parti-
ciple /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, to draw conclusions
supporting your view of the linguistic world which are not actually borne out
by the evidence.  When the Basque+everything enthusiasts do it, we criticize
them; we shouldn't let you get away with the same thing in these discussions.

								Rich Alderson


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Mon Jun 25 20:19:06 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 15:19:06 -0500
Subject: Yew Two
In-Reply-To: <111.125ec83.285f8916@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.151906.0500.>

[snip]

	Buck & Partridge have Latin ebur as ultimately from Egyptian
	Gamkrelidze & Ivanov don't seem to be so sure
	In any case, I'm sure more work has been done since they wrote this

see Sanskrit íbha-h "ivory" [Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1995: 444]
< Indo-European *yebh-, *Hebh- [Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1995: 444]
< Indo-European *lebh-onth [Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1995: 444]
< ? *lebho- [Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1995: 444]
< ? Near Eastern language [Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1995: 444]
< ? Egyptian âb, âbu [Ernout & Meillet 1939: 249]
see Coptic ebou, ebu [Ernout & Meillet 1939: 249]
see Egyptian 3bw, Coptic ebou, ebu "ivory" [Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1995: 444]
< *jebu [Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1995: 444]
see Hebrew s^en-habbim "tusk" (s^en "tooth") [Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1995: 444]

>The Romans, of course, knew ivory as <ebur, eboris>.  But they also called
>ivory a "horn" <cornu> and words for ivory itself have been applied to the
>boar and other tusks and horns of various kinds, as well as whale bone.  (See
>Germanic <ebar>, <eber>, <ibor>, <epur>, <i:for> boar; Lat <aper> boar.)
>[snip]

	Spanish berro "cress" is usually seen as from Celtic. Here's what I
have. MacBain, of course, is dated but his link between watercress and water
is interesting, although I don't know if the calque is valid in Celtic.

berro "watercress"; berra "strong type of watercress"; berraza, berrera
"water parsnip"
	< Iberian Celtic [jng]
	< Celtic [wje 190-91; rks 12-13; Corominas 1972: II 211]
	see Gaelic biolaire, Irish biolar, early Irish biror, Welsh berwr,
Cornish, Breton beler "watercress" [MacBain]
	see Welsh berwr [wje 40; Corominas 1972: II 226]
	< Celtic *beruro- [MacBain; Corominas 1972: II 226
	see French berle, Latin berula [MacBain; wje 40]
	< Gaulish beruro "watercress" [wje 190-91]
	see Celtic berwô "seethe"; Old Irish tipra, Gaelic tobar "well"
[MacBain]
	see English burn "spring, stream"; German brunnen kresse
"watercress; i.e. well-cress" [MacBain]
	see early Gaelic bir "water", bior "well" [MacBain]
	see Indo-European *bhreu- "to boil, bubble, effervesce, burn"
[Watkins 1985: 9]
	see Old English burn, burna "spring, stream"
	< Germanic *brunnôn < *bhrunn-, *bhrunen- [Watkins 1985: 9]
	see Greek phrear "spring"
	< *bhrêw-r- [Watkins 1985: 9]
	see Latin fervêre "to boil, ferment"
	< *bherw- [Watkins 1985: 9]

>(E.g, Pliny calls <ibe:ris>, "a kind of cress." Cf., vibo, vibo:nis, m., the
>flower of the herb called "Britannica,"- Pliny.) Hesychlus mentions both
>plants and animals with <iber-> names , and attributes the name "Iberes" to
>an unidentified animal, <iber>.  Cf., "gravis imber et uber", Latin, <uber>
>referring to copious-growing plants and presumably trees and trade wood.

[snip]

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Mon Jun 25 06:39:15 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 02:39:15 EDT
Subject: Ockham's Razor
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.023915.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/25/2001 12:21:29 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com writes:
<< -- so far, you have not presented any facts supporting the hypothesis that
the word for "red deer" somehow meant "fallow deer" or "deer in general" in
remote antiquity. >>

So far, you have presented no facts that show any distinction between the two
types of deer in early IE languages.

Supporting a possible Anatolian origin for IE languages, you have provided no
distinction between the two deer types in Anatolian languages.

The earliest distinction I am aware of in IE languages is possibly Roman and
apparently refers to the semi-domestication of the fallow.  You've shown
nothing that indicates that we have any way of knowing how *PIE speakers
distinguished between the two types of deer.

The most apparent solution is that there was no distinction between the two
deer types in *PIE.

<<Elaphos", red deer, specifically; "ellos" and "enelos", young of the red
deer, fawn.>>

Show me specifically in any Classical Greek texts where the distinction is
made between red deer and fallow deer.

If you cannot, then I think it is reasonable to conclude that this whole
fallow deer thing has nothing to do with history or IE origins.  Upon close
examination, this seems to be the way most of these paleolinguistic arguments
for an IE homeland go.

Regards,
Steve Long


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon Jun 25 06:51:58 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 02:51:58 EDT
Subject: Red Deer in Anatolia
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.025158.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/25/01 12:22:10 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> In the IE languages most relevant - those where the fallow may have been
> present natively - the red deer and fallow deer were one thing - a deer.
> Ockham's Razor.  Do not multiply entities needlessly.

-- no.  This is a false statement.  These are distinct terms in enough IE
languages that the attribution of PIE *elhen is secure.


From leo at easynet.fr  Mon Jun 25 16:27:32 2001
From: leo at easynet.fr (Lionel Bonnetier)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 18:27:32 +0200
Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc.
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.182732.0200.>

Steve Gustafson wrote:

>> Is there any obvious reason why -cum is the only instance of the archaic
>> system?

> 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...


From leo at easynet.fr  Mon Jun 25 16:43:29 2001
From: leo at easynet.fr (Lionel Bonnetier)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 18:43:29 +0200
Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc.
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.184329.0200.>

Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

>> It's funny that Latin suffixed -cum in mecum, tecum, etc.
>> has created some special -go case marker in Spanish with
>> conmigo, contigo, consigo.

[Ed]
> Why do you call Sp. -go a case marker? Isn't 'contigo' simply a popular
> formation based upon 'tecum' (>tigo), with 'con' added when people became
> unaware of the meaning of -go?

Sure, but intuitively, by comparison with other
prepositions, there's a feeling of a -go mark:

para mi     con mi go
para ti     con ti go
para si     con si go

One may say it's felt like a con-go circumfix
because they write them as single words.

> In Brabant Dutch dialects you have a similar phenomenon with the duplication
> of the 2sg. pronoun when it was forgotten that -de was originally 'du' (a
> lost word in later Dutch, like 'thou' in English. 'Gij' corresponds to
> 'you', originally a plural):

> Du. 'hebt gij...?' (Have you ...?) , dial. 'hedde-gij?' < hebst du gij?
> 'Gij' is clearly superfluous like 'con-' in 'contigo', as long as you still
> understand the original formation (quod non, for all, except a few
> linguists).

Maybe the m-s-t... personal endings in IE verbs
crunched previous marks the same way?

> I'm really looking forward to the answers to your question about
> cum/cis/-que.  We already had an informative discussion about *kom (Lat.
> cum/con-, but also Germanic ge-).

I'll dig for it. I hope it explains why *ke/o went
ge- instead of he-... (Heschwister, tohether...)


From leo at easynet.fr  Mon Jun 25 16:52:53 2001
From: leo at easynet.fr (Lionel Bonnetier)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 18:52:53 +0200
Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc.
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.185253.0200.>

petegray wrote:

>> Is there any obvious reason why -cum is the only instance of the archaic
>> system?

> It only occurs with personal pronouns, and nowhere else.   The most
> interesting suggestion I have heard is that it began with an avoidance of
> the sequence cunn-.   cum nobis could sound like forms of cunnus, from which
> comes the good English word cunnilingus.  Hence nobiscum, thence to other
> personal pronouns.

Ha, not only *wlkos was not allowed on the hunt,
but cunn- was taboo too in rhetorics... But what
about "cum nostribus (...)" or "cum novis (...)"
or similar? Maybe less frequent.

>> May *kom (cum) and *ko (cis) and *kwe (-que) be related etymologically
>> around the idea of "here-nearby-with"?

> No.  Latin cum has a good PIE history in *kom or *km, and -que has a
> different one in *-kwe.  (different consonant, different vowel)

No *ko-we > *kwe pattern envisionable? (*-we being
just a dummy placeholder here).


From dlwhite at texas.net  Mon Jun 25 21:16:52 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 16:16:52 -0500
Subject: Note on 'dhole'
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.161652.0500.>

> A word for wolf does not have to refer to an actual animal.  Imported wolf
> hides or wolf heads, wolf teeth, wolf images, wolf stories, wolf totems,
> powdered wolf whatevers, people with wolf nicknames, animals or animal
> by-products that might be like a wolf in some form or function or captive
> wolves traveling with an ancient equivalent of a circus or at the zoo might
> all answer to the name "wolf."

        Well yes, but then the word would probably be a borrowing (unless
there is some evidence it is a coined compound, which does not seem likely),
in which case Kannada "tola" is not its real origin, so my point still
stands.  There is also the problem that Kannada /t/ does not really explain
a spelling with "dh".  It would appear more likely that the original etymon
has been lost somehow, and that the Kannada word is a side-show.

Dr. David L. White


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Tue Jun 26 06:35:37 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 02:35:37 EDT
Subject: the 'Dhole'
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.023537.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/25/2001 3:01:34 PM, dlwhite at texas.net replied to the
following post:

<<Your question is very interesting: why have wolves not penetrated south
India or SW Asia? It can't be just the heat - north India (where there ARE
wolves) can be as hot as any place on this earth in the summer,... Maybe it's
the humidity they don't like, or there are carnivores who thrive better than
wolves in the year-round humid heat.>>

<<Yes, dholes do.  Why is unclear.  They are not tropical animals,
being known to occur as far north as the so-called Siberia of Siberian
tigers.>>

Dholes (aka "red dog of India" (Kipling)) are found in dense forests.  Wolves
as a general rule and apparently especially in southern Asia are found in
open habitats.  There has been some small marginal crossover noted.

<<But they are an older lineage than wolves (with smaller brains, for
example), and have perhaps had longer to adapt, however they have, to
year-round humid heat. >>

It may well be the other way around.  Wolves and dholes evolved from a common
ancestor and it looks like it's the dholes that carry more innovations.
"Smaller brains" are no indication of evolutionary age or time - the all-time
champion brain size-to-weight ratio goes to a South American fish that
developed a much longer time ago.  I don't know the numbers, but brain size
probably has nothing to do with either intelligence or primitiveness in this
case.

<<They used to occur in Europe, but were in the long run unable to compete
with wolves there. So it is odd: wolves out-compete dholes in Europe, but
dholes out-compete wolves in south/east Asia. >>

Much more likely, the dhole lost its habitat in the deforestation that turned
most of Europe into a savannah in the early Holocene.  There appears to be
very little competition between wolves and dholes where they share common
ground.  Dholes are generally considered to compete with the big cats and
other big predators - but mainly with man - where they occur.  (See, e.g.,
Venkataraman, A. "Do dholes (Cuon alpinus) live in packs in response to
competition with or predation by large cats." Current
Science,1995,11:934-36.)  Large packs of dholes are reputed in folk reports
capable of taking on tigers, though this is definitely (and wisely) not how
they make their living.  Dholes also seem to be vulnerable to disease because
of their social behavior.

Dholes exhibit a relatively high degree of social behavior - more so than the
wolf - and their need to cohabit in much larger colonies may also have made
them more vulnerable to "persecution" by man.  These large social units also
place a heavy burden on food resources, as the dhole appears to be an
ultracarnivore rather than an omnivore like the dog or bear.  Tropical
forests would offer them a better bet at finding a high enough ratio of prey
concentration to subsist on.

<< Well, the obvious possibility is that is refers to dholes, and that
somewhere along the line somebody screwed up in saying that it means 'wolf'.>>

Or that it applied to wolves and was later applied to "dholes".  Common names
given to the dhole have been reported as (these are referenced as from Burton
1940). :

English: dhole, red dog, asiatic wild dog, Indian wild dog, Indian hunting dog
Hindi: adivi-kuta, son-kuta, sona-kuta, rasa-kuta.
Assamese: kuang-kukur, rang-kukur.
Bengali: ban Kutta, ban-kukur.
Bhutanese: phara.
Burmese: tan-kwe.
Canarese: ken-nai, chen-nai.
Chenchu: reis-kukul.
Chinese: nyar
Gujiarati: earam-naiko.
Gurkhali: ban-kukur.
Hindustani: jungli-kuta, rwn-kuta, ban-kuta.
Kachin: kyi-kwa-lam.
Kashmiri: jungli-kuta, ram-hun, ban-kuta, bhansa.
Korku: bun-secta.
Lepcha: sa-tun.
Malay: sirgala Aijing-kutar.
Malayalam: hahmasai-kuta, kotsun, kolsa, kolarsi.
Nepali: bwaso.
Tibetan: phara.
Tamil: chen-nai.
Telegu: vanna-kooka.
Thai: maa paa.

A Javanese/Sumatran source gives:
[DOG:] anjing; wasua (Kanikeh, Seram).
[DHOLE:] ajag; anjing hutan.

Another more recent source gives
Hindi: dhole
Tamil: chen nai, kattu nai
Telugu: reza kutta
Kannada: kadunai

Possibly British or Hindi speakers applied the original or generic wolf name
to the "Cuon alpinus" (dhole), relatively recently.

The taxonomic name has now changed back again I believe to "Canis alpinus."
The dhole is hardly ever called a wolf in European literature, except in
Romance languages ("lobo alpino").  The original classification of the dhole
(by Pallas 1811) was as a dog - Canis.

The obvious reason is that the dhole looks like a dog, much more so than a
wolf does.  There are photos on the web and in some the dhole looks just like
"Old Yeller".

Although dholes are relatively close relatives of wolves and dogs, in the
times before close comparative anatomy and DNA, they were totally associated
with dogs.  It is much more likely it would seem that a dhole would have been
called a dog than a wolf before the 20th century.  Two 19th century entries
on the dhole illustrate:

This is from an American Natural History series of the late 1800's:
"Buansuah.
 This is the native name of the wild dog of Nepal and northern India, an
 animal whose special interest to us lies in the fact that it is supposed by
 naturalists to be the original type of the dog tribe, although the honor of
 such a supposition is shared with the Dhole of British India. The Nepal
 claimant is certainly a dog in the rough, without the refining influences of
 association with the human race.

 It is of a reddish color, pale underneath, with a bushy, pendulous tail, and
 in size is between that of the wolf and the jackal, but with very stout
 limbs. It hunts in packs of eight or twelve, and follows game mostly by the
 nose instead of the eye, as it possesses exquisite powers of scent. It is
 shy, and never willingly permits itself to be seen, but is capable of being
 tamed to a certain degree, and when captured young, can be trained to hunt.
 It is of the most assistance in chasing the wild boar, as its wolf-like
 attack of sudden snap is more destructive to its prey than the bite of an
 ordinary hound, but for other game it is not at all trustworthy, and will
 often give up the chase at the critical moment, and turn its attention to a
 tame sheep or goat which happens to be grazing in its pathway. The difference
 between the habits of this animal and those of the faithful and trusted
 'friend of man,' is a remarkable illustration of development."

This is translated from a Danish book on dogs printed in 1880:

"The DHOL - a wild dog in India, resembling a sighthound
 The Indian Wild Dog or the Dhol lives wild in India. Form and size mostly
 resembles a small sighthound. Slimmer and with a more pointed nose than the
 Dingo, whom it resembles in color and in the form of the pointed upright
 ears, the Dhol is lighter in construction and possess more power and
 endurance.  It also have a bushier tail...
 Most of the Dhols live in the highlands of Dekan at the Koromandel coast, but
 they are not numerous anywhere. It is also very shy and prefer the big
 jungles.  When hunting, the Dhol are often seen in packs of 50 - 60
 individuals and they persue all kind of prey.  They are said to be an
 important factor to stop the spread of the tiger. Dhol packs don't hesitate to
 attack tigers or bears. Even if 10 or more are killed, the others keep
 attacking the prey very fervently until it is exhausted.  The Dhol is known
 to be very independant."

The principle commercial value of the dhole (as with the wolf) has long been
its fur.  As it has some seasonal coat variation, its confusion with the wolf
could have easily occurred not in the jungle - where it was rarely seen by
most folks - but at the marketplace, where its fur would have been traded
along with the wolf's.

Regards,
Steve Long


From Georg-Bonn at t-online.de  Mon Jun 25 21:51:11 2001
From: Georg-Bonn at t-online.de (Stefan Georg)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 23:51:11 +0200
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <3B29B210.53539CD1@pobox.com>
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.235111.0200.>

>> I once came across a woman who had learned the word 'misled'
>> through reading, and who pronounced it like 'mild', . . .

>Does anyone really rhyme it with `drizzled'?

With "his lead", I think ... (But what do I know). StG
--
Dr. Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn


From bmscott at stratos.net  Mon Jun 25 21:53:36 2001
From: bmscott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 17:53:36 -0400
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <3B29B210.53539CD1@pobox.com>
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.175336.0400.>

On 14 Jun 2001, at 23:58, Anton Sherwood wrote:

>> I once came across a woman who had learned the word 'misled'
>> through reading, and who pronounced it like 'mild', . . .

> Does anyone really rhyme it with `drizzled'?

I once knew someone who had acquired it through reading as
/'maIzld/ and who only later connected it with the /,mIs'lEd/ that she'd
heard others use.

Brian M. Scott


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Tue Jun 26 20:32:48 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 15:32:48 -0500
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <3B29B210.53539CD1@pobox.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.153248.0500.>

	No, but on US TV I've heard kooks talk about being /maizld/ by
politicians and about things being /aw-ri/ rather than /@rai/

>> I once came across a woman who had learned the word 'misled'
>> through reading, and who pronounced it like 'mild', . . .

>Does anyone really rhyme it with `drizzled'?

>--
>Anton Sherwood  --  br0nt0 at p0b0x.com  --  http://ogre.nu/

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From DFOKeefe at aol.com  Fri Jun 22 21:48:54 2001
From: DFOKeefe at aol.com (DFOKeefe at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 17:48:54 EDT
Subject: Proto-Celtic - An Exploration: Celtic ICM & Q/P Words = Function
 IE Roots
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.174854.EDT.>

Hello Indo-European List:

          Recently there was some discussion of Proto-Celtic on the list.  As
you probably know, my wife and I are amateur linguists.  In spite of our
amateur status, please permit us to offer for your consideration a paper
entitled PROTO-CELTIC - AN EXPLORATION: Celtic Initial Consonantal Mutation
and Q/P Equivalent Words as a Function of I.E. Roots.  We believe that our
analysis of I.E. roots in terms of ICM helps obtain a much clearer picture of
the prehistoric development of ICM and perhaps the phonological dynamics
which brought it about.  We are sure that this analysis of ICM in terms of
I.E. roots can benefit from some constructive suggestions.  Thank you for
your consideration.

          You may access this paper at one of our two Web sites:
http://hometown.aol.com/IrishWord/page1.html  (section 1)
http://hometown.aol.com/Dfokeefe/page1.html  (section xiii)
We humbly apologize for the all-too-basic America On Line graphics of our Web
page.

Sincerely,
David O'Keefe
Houston, Texas


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Wed Jun 27 03:15:27 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 23:15:27 EDT
Subject: 'pitA' and 'pad'
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.231527.EDT.>

> Before these correspondence sets go any further, Hindi 'pitA' and 'pad'
> are not native Hindi words.  Both are Sanskrit borrowings, i.e. tatsamas.

-- well, that's rather like French borrowing a word from Latin, since
Sanskrit is ancestral to Hindi.


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Wed Jun 27 06:25:43 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 02:25:43 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.022543.EDT.>

I wrote:
<<If you said "pad" and "philadelphia" have no surface similarity, that might
work.  But "pita" and "father" clearly do have some prima facie structural
similarities.>>

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.
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.

And that's the problem with subjective evaluations.  They lack objective
measure.

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.

Regards,
Steve Long


From sarima at friesen.net  Wed Jun 27 06:50:26 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 23:50:26 -0700
Subject: Rate of Change
In-Reply-To: <006401c0faf6$331e5aa0$fa01703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.235026.0700.>

At 10:29 AM 6/22/01 +0200, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:
>> Quite so, even based on my amateur studies of post-Norman England I cannot
>> name any 100 year period without any social change.  Sometimes change was
>> even fast by modern standards.  The changes after the end of Stephen's
>> reign were extremely rapid, as Henry didn't tolerate much guff.

>[Ed Selleslagh]

>I made a clear exception for "periods of upheaval, relatively sudden
>migrations etc.". I guess the Norman invasion in England was a major upheaval
>with long lasting after-effects.

Remarkably long lasting :-)  Stephen's reign ended about 90 years after the
Conquest!  And about 60 years later the Magna Carta was being signed - 150
years after the Conquest.  And very shortly after that were the three
Edwards with their own brand of changes (new laws, new conquests, new
nobles, ...).

The fact is one can date an English castle to within 50 or so years just by
its architecture - from shortly before the Conquest all the way until the
mid 1300s at least (and probably later).  So at least one aspect of English
culture was constantly changing for over 300 years.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi  Wed Jun 27 07:47:32 2001
From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 10:47:32 +0300
Subject: Rate of Change
In-Reply-To: <a9.17442147.28644bec@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.104732.0300.>

[Steve Long:]
>I would suspect that "found" cognates that truly have no recognizable
>resemblances are rare.

[Joat Simeon:]
> -- well, you're wrong there.

(snip of list of examples from IE)

It is true that found cognates with little or no phonological similarity
are very common. Just a while ago, Larry brought up sound changes in some
Pama-Nyungan languages, which, as far as I understand, have quite
effectively eradicated all surface similarity from most of the cognate
words. But this thread is a perfect excuse to list my ten favorite
examples from Uralic. ;-) So here goes:

PU *jïNsi 'bow'
Sami /juoksa/
Hungarian /íj/
Nenets /nginº/

PU *wixti 'five or ten'
Finnish /viisi/ '5'
H. /öt/ '5'
N. /yuq/ '10'

PU *SiNiri 'mouse'
F. /hiiri/
H. /egér/

PU *widimi 'marrow'
F. /ydin/
H. /velöö/

PU *sexji 'pus'
S. /siet´t´a/
H. /év/
N. /tyím-/

PU *kulki- 'go, flow'
F. /kulke-/
N. /xæ-/

PU *weti 'water'
F. /vesi/
N. /yiq/

PU *ulki 'pole'
S. /holka/
N. /ngú/

PU *wajNi 'breath, spirit'
S. /vuojNa/
N. /yíntºq/

PU *käxli 'tongue'
S. /kiella/
N. (Forest) /sye/

etc.

These examples are not at all untypical. I once compiled a list of all the
cognate words between North Sami and Tundra Nenets (there are not very
many of them, less than 100). At least about half of the Sami words hardly
resembled their Nenets cognates at all.

 - Ante Aikio


From g_sandi at hotmail.com  Wed Jun 27 08:10:30 2001
From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 08:10:30 -0000
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.081030.0000.>

>[Ed Selleslagh]

>I made a clear exception for "periods of upheaval, relatively sudden
>migrations etc.". I guess the Norman invasion in England was a major upheaval
>with long lasting after-effects.

>During the early Middle Ages on the continent, there were lots of limited wars
>and countries changed hands many times, but the cultural evolution was
>generally pretty slow up to the 13-14th century, when the cities became more
>independant and created a new type of civil society.

>Anyway, my focus was more on Antiquity, and my remark about the M.A. may not
>have been so relevant or convincing.

>But it is a fact that some societies evolve very slowly at times, sometimes
>over a 1000 year period, cf. Ancient Egypt, China, arctic peoples, etc.

>Quick change is almost always related to migration/separation,
>invasion/conquest, major changes in the environment, import of new technology,
>etc. These are discrete, non-continuous phenomena in most cases, at least in
>pre-industrial times. Languages are part of culture, and the single most
>important tool for communication within a society, so they tend to follow the
>socio-cultural changes. The conditions for quick change mentioned above are
>also favorable to linguistic change (physical separation, exposure to other
>languages, cultures, technology, etc); conversely, their absence causes a
>fall-back to a kind of slow base-rate of linguistic change (e.g. phonetics)
>implicit in the transmission from one generation to the next one, a bit like
>genetic evolution.

>This my own view of course. Anyone is free to disagree.

>Ed.

Reply:

I have a lot of sympathy for your point of view, Ed, since I also like to
draw a parallel between accelerated language change and changes in the
external environment of the speakers, whether characterized as historical or
social changes.

Yet I can't help wondering about the circularity of the argument: when we
see fast linguistic change, we look at society at the time of the change,
and fix on some aspect of it that is undergoing change - after all,
something is bound to be changing at any one period, given the fact that
human beings get bored easily.

Take periods of known "great change": the English vowel shift for example,
or French (Latin in Gaul?) between the end of the Western Roman empire (end
of 5th century AD) and the Strasbourg Oaths (mid 9th century). Did these
periods correspond to greater social change than earlier or later periods in
the same geographic area, or when compared with the same historical period
in other (but comparable) areas? I think that France in the high Middle Ages
is a good example: the area of the langue d'oeil underwent noticeably more
changes in both phonetics and morphology than did the arae of the langue
d'oc. Is this because of more social changes in the north than in the south?

Standard Italian has undergone practically no changes in its phonological or
morphological structure since Dante's time, yet standard English, French and
Spanish have all changed considerably since then. Has Italy been a
historical or social backwater in all this time? I hardly think so, what
with constant invasions, the Risorgimento, Mussolini and the rest.

And I haven't even broached the subject of contemporary life, probably the
fastest changing social (and technical) environment ever known to mankind.
Yet the phonological and morphological structures of contemporary languages
are not changing that fast, or are they?

Just some thoughts for discussion...

Best wishes,
Gabor


From petegray at btinternet.com  Wed Jun 27 20:32:26 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 21:32:26 +0100
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.213226.0100.>

> -- it's quite simple:  if the comparative method works as advertised, then
> *PIE was one language.  And if it wasn't, then the method just doesn't
work.

The comparative method also allows us to identify differences spatially and
over time within the reconstructed language.   These are very significant
for PIE.

Peter


From rao.3 at osu.edu  Thu Jun 28 23:13:40 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 19:13:40 -0400
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.191340.0400.>

<JoatSimeon at aol.com> wrote:

> -- actually, in their earliest attested forms, the languages are
> transparently quite closely related, both lexically and in terms of
> syntax; [...] Or sentences having to do with elementary activities;
>"Ten horses of my father are pregnant" [...] etc.

I am not sure that without hindsight, equus and hippos sound
"transparently quite closely related". And if we take not generic
sentences, but those relating to past tense, I doubt that they will
sound very close to each other. How about translating the following:
    I had a white horse. I used to ride every day. Yesterday, it
    tripped, fell down and broke its leg. So, I have to go to the
    market to buy a new horse. I hope that it will be as good as
    the old horse.

Try translating these into various IE languages and see how similar they
look in terms of morphosyntax. For real fun, try translating them into
languages at the same point in time, say 2nd BCE Latin, Koine Greek and
Pali/Prakrit [Sanskrit was a learned language by this time].

---

I had started drafting the above, but did not get around to finishing
it. But recent remarks concerning use of morphemes vs "morphology" led
me to resurrect this. I am not sure what "morphology" was meant to be in
this context. For example, the PIE perfect is in Latin the perfective
(and narrates), in Greek, perfect was a resultative (though in Koine,
started to merge with the aorist) and it is the aorist that narrates,
and totally lost in Pali (in late Brahmana /upanishad prose, perfect
narrates legends/myths and is unusable in the above passage for
translation) and narration was with the preterit which was the result of
the merger of the "imperfect" with the aorist. It is the relatedness of
the morphemes and our knowledge of how syntactic categories evolve and
tend to evolve, that allows us to see the connection between the forms.

In other words, when it came to verbs, it is the morphemes played a big
role in relating IE languages, not morphosyntax.


From mcv at wxs.nl  Wed Jun 27 09:08:02 2001
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 11:08:02 +0200
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
In-Reply-To: <00b801c0fb2b$308ebc00$2b01703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.110802.0200.>

On Fri, 22 Jun 2001 16:27:42 +0200, "Eduard Selleslagh" <edsel at glo.be>
wrote:

>As to unusual sound correspondences, isn't there a Sumerian rustic dialect that
>uses m and S instead of g and n? I seem to remember something like that from
>Meillet. Can anyone tell me more about that?

The reference is probably to Emesal, a literary dialect of Sumerian
which is sometimes considered a "woman's language" (because in the
texts it's mainly used to render women's speech), although it may well
be a regional or evolved dialect of standard Sumerian [Emegir] (cf.
the use of Prakrits by female characters in Sanskrit drama).

Emesal, besides other phonetical and lexical (but few grammatical)
characteristics,  uses <m> for Sumerian <g>, but only when this stands
for *g~, a sound usually reconstructed as /Nw/ (labialized velar
nasal).    It is possible that the spelling <m>, in Akkadian fashion,
represents /w/.  The correspondence Emegir <n> ~ Emesal <s^> occurs
only in a few words (normally <n> = <n>), and may be connected with
the alternation <n> ~ <l> that is otherwise found in Sunerian.  The
spelling <s^>, as in Akkadian, might then represent some kind of
lateral (fricative or maybe palatalized).

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl


From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi  Wed Jun 27 18:58:07 2001
From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 21:58:07 +0300
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
In-Reply-To: <a05010400b74e9af87403@[132.229.243.85]>
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.215807.0300.>

On Thu, 14 Jun 2001, R.S.Georg wrote:

> In some New Indian languages, under the so-called ruki-rule, *s went
> as far as (at least) /x/. The ruki-rule decrees that /s/, after /r/,
> /u/, /k/, /i/ goes to /sh/ (in Iranian, and Indic /s-retrofl./.
> Ah, yes, (I'm not fully awake yet), it holds in Slavic, too, where
> the outcome, at least after /u/, is /x/, too  (ru. snoxa, lat. nurus,
> skt. snuSa:, Gk. nuos).
> The phonetic ratio, if any, has to do with retroflexion. If you
> retroflect your tongue *a lot* when pronouncing, say, Sanskrit /S/
> (s-subscript dot), the acoustic impression is already very close to
> (velar, not uvular) /x/. IOW, /S/ and /x/ have quite adjacent places
> of articulation. The whole process from /s/ to /x/ is, thus,
> describable as a gradual movement of place of articulation. OK, in
> the end /x/ has to lose its friction to turn into the stop /k/, but
> then you have it.

I don't think the Mator *s > *k shift has to do with retroflexion; the
context (/_e,i) rather suggests palatalization. So one would rather think
of something like *s > *sj > *cj > *kj > *k, but this feels quite
awkward.

Regards,
Ante Aikio


From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi  Wed Jun 27 19:00:59 2001
From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 22:00:59 +0300
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
In-Reply-To: <6g0hit0kobrv50294hsleabtomkui4sojh@4ax.com>
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.220059.0300.>

On Thu, 14 Jun 2001, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:

> Well, *s > *t in Samoyedic (whether *s was really /s/ or perhaps
> something like /T/ is a matter we discussed some time ago).  Then, /t/
> before a front vowel palatalizes to /t^/, a sound intermediate between
> /t/ and /k/.  Then it further shifts to /k/ (cf. Egyptian Arabic */d^/
> > /g/).

It was not PU *s (> Samoyedic *t) which became /k/ in Mator, but
Proto-Samoyedic *s (< PU *s´), which was unambiguously a sibilant. But the
development could still have been similar, perhaps via *c´ and *k´ as I
suggested in a parallel mail.

 Regards,
 Ante Aikio


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Wed Jun 27 22:27:36 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 17:27:36 -0500
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
In-Reply-To: <00b801c0fb2b$308ebc00$2b01703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.172736.0500.>

>----- Original Message -----
>From: <X99Lynx at aol.com>
>Sent: Friday, June 15, 2001 7:13 AM

>>     Then he went on to point out that European Portuguese has the rolled r,
>>     but (Northern) Brazilian Portuguese has an /h/ reflex of /r/, to which I
>>     added that the Puerto Rican Spanish rolled ("double") rr is often
>>     pronounced as a velar like in French etc.  The implication is that
>>     Brazilian may have passed through this stage in the evolution of r > h.

>[Ed Selleslagh]

>Isn't there a little confusion here? Isn't the Brazilian Portuguese r that's
>pronounced as uvular r, as [rx] in final position, or as [x] or even [h], the
>original rr (cf. Spanish), the rolling r (>3 taps)? Not the single r
>(originally one tap, now often more). [Note that double r is not always
>written as such, as orthography is different according to position in a word,
>e.g. initially or finally].

	I think that's what he meant. Some varieties of Brazilian
Portuguese use /h/ for trilled /rr/. I've heard it from people from the
South as well, from Rio Grande do Sul and Rio de Janeiro. The northerners
I've met used a type of uvular /R/. I've been told that /rr/ is also
trilled in parts of Brazil


>Did you mean that Puertoricans use the Brazilian pronunciation of double r?
>I wasn't aware of that.

	Not all Puerto Ricans, but some. It was a rural pronunciation but
is now found among urban working class people of rural origin in Puerto
Rico and New York --or so I've been told by Puerto Ricans. It's also found
among some Dominicanos and --I've been told-- among some Orientales (Far
Eastern Cuba). You hear a lot among Hispanics from all over who have
settled in New York and lived among Puerto Ricans --including one of my
Costa Rican brothers-in-law

>Maybe Portuguese influence stretched farther north than I thought: in
>Curaçao Papiamento there is a considerable Portuguese base, but that's still
>far more to the south than P.R.

>In the mid-southern Andes (parts of Perú, Bolivia, N. Argentina), the double
>r is pronounced [Z] (French j), strongly reminescent of Polish rz or Czech
>r-hacek, which - as far as I know - have the same origin (rolling r). All seem
>to be results of retroflexion.

	This is common all over most of Spanish-speaking Latin America
outside of the Caribbean and northern Mexico: Costa Rica, Guatemala,
western Panama, southern Mexico, parts of Highland Columbia & Venezuela,
parts of Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, etc.

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From alderson+mail at panix.com  Wed Jun 27 19:14:31 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 15:14:31 -0400
Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look
In-Reply-To: <a5.1774f2a6.286582ac@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com)
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.151431.0400.>

On 23 Jun 2001, Steve Long wrote:

> Average rates of change are based on multiple occurrences.  You get an
> average by finding the same changes in different languages and averaging the
> time they took.

Definitionally difficult:  Two languages cannot undergo "the same changes", so
substitute "similar" for "same".  Then be prepared to argue the validity of the
similarity you propose to measure and average.

> So pick a *set* of changes that has occurred in at least five, preferably ten
> languages, and the time it took for each of them to occur historically.

Who gets to decide how long the changes took?  Or are you restricting the
sample only to historically attested changes?  In that case, are you prepared
to accept the results if they contradict your view of the prehistoric spread of
the Indo-European languages?  Or will you aver that unattested (that is to say,
unwitnessed) changes must have happened at a different rate?

> If Time consistently produces a MEASURABLE amount of AVERAGE change in some
> specific feature of a number of historical languages, that can be validated
> statistically.

Suppose that no specific feature ever shows a correlatable average rate of
change?  Suppose that it is instead entire systems that change at a comparable
rate, with no particular change required?  What then?

								Rich Alderson


From alderson+mail at panix.com  Wed Jun 27 19:35:32 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 15:35:32 -0400
Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look
In-Reply-To: <12e.714796.28658a6e@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com)
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.153532.0400.>

On 23 Jun 2001, Steve Long wrote:

> In a message dated 6/22/2001 2:19:29 AM, mclasutt at brigham.net writes:

>> The true Indo-Europeanists can undoubtedly provide detailed information to
>> verify or correct this impression.

> 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.

You forget that Indo-Europeanists do not study only unrecorded languages, but
the records of a very large family over a period of roughly 4,000 years, which
show that drastic change is often episodic, punctuated, and rapid, while
constant, gradual change is often drastic in its results, making it impossible
in the end to tell which has occurred without the aid of records.

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.

								Rich Alderson


From connolly at memphis.edu  Wed Jun 27 15:03:46 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 10:03:46 -0500
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.100346.0500.>

Maria Anna Calamia wrote:
>
> I am not sure that all of your examples are relavent. In the first
> example the more accurate translation would be "the books are pleasing
> to me". The corresponding verb in Italian "piacere" follows the same
> pattern: Mi piacciono i libri. There is nothing preventing one from
> saying: Los libros me gustan or I libri mi piacciono, therefore
> creating an SOV order. The only reason for this type of word order as
> you point out is that the verb is passive. Maria Anna Calamia > Me
> gustan los libros. > "To me please (3p) the books." > "I like books."
> [ moderator snip ] >Rick Mc Callister >W-1634 >Mississippi University
> for Women >Columbus MS 39701

How is 'the books are pleasing to me' "more accurate"?  The most
accurate translation is that which, in its own language, most closely
corresponds to the original in meaning *and* in the psychological
impression made on the hearer/reader.  The original is natural; your
translation is weird.  Superficial grammatical structure has nothing to
do with it.  Nothing!

BTW, apart from the grammatical subject, the structure of your "more
accurate" translation is not parallel to that of the original.
"Pleasing" must be construed as a predicate adjective, not as part of a
progressive verb form; and "to me" is dependent on this adjective rather
than being an argument of the verb, as in Spanish or Italian.

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?

The best explanation I know is the Case Grammar analysis based on
Fillmore: English _like_, Sp. _gustar_, Italian _piacere_, and German
_gefallen_, have two arguments: an "Experiencer" and a "Patient" or
"Theme".  The "normal" subject in this configuration is the Experiencer,
which is now (but not formerly) the choice for the grammatical subject
of _like_.  But _gustar_, _piacere_, and _gefallen_, like many verbs of
similar meaning in other languages, make the Patient (Theme) the
grammatical subject.  This, however, causes complications.  In both
Spanish and Italian, the Experiencer precedes the verb; _los libros me
gustan_ is just barely possible and cannot in any sense be called good
Spanish, whereas _A Carlos no le gustan los libros_ is perfect.  But
this makes sense if we reflect a bit.  Even though Spanish _gustar_ has
the "wrong" grammatical subject, it nevertheless places the Experiencer
PP _A Carlos_ ahead of the verb, where the subject "ought" to go.  Ditto
Italian. -- Most modern linguists have taken note of such facts and
declared that forms such as _A Carlos_ in such sentences actually *are*
subjects.  While I strongly disagree on that point, it is more
defensible than a claim that _gustar_ is somehow "passive".

Leo Connolly


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Wed Jun 27 22:32:59 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 17:32:59 -0500
Subject: Genetic Descent
In-Reply-To: <F41okLQ8aZRhQdOgl4r00001f0a@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.173259.0500.>

	The normal order for verbs like Spanish gustar, Italian piacere, etc.
		is Indirect object pronoun-Verb-Subject, OVS
	You certainly can change the order to SOV for the purpose of
emphasis but my point was that there is a whole category of "reverse action
verbs" in Romance languages.
	I'm curious how the curious syntax arose

>I am not sure that all of your examples are relavent. In the first example
>the more accurate translation would be "the books are pleasing to me".
>The corresponding verb in Italian "piacere" follows the same pattern:  Mi
>piacciono i libri.There is nothing preventing one from saying: Los libros
>me gustan or I libri mi piacciono, therefore creating an SOV order.The
>only reason for this type of word order as you point out is that the verb
>is passive.Maria Anna Calamia> Me gustan los libros. > "To me please (3p)
>the books." > "I like books."[ moderator snip ]>Rick Mc Callister >W-1634
>>Mississippi University for Women >Columbus MS 39701

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From bronto at pobox.com  Wed Jun 27 16:18:43 2001
From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 09:18:43 -0700
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.091843.0700.>

>> what I am asserting is that the morphemes used in conjugation are
>> very resistant to borrowing.  ...

petegray wrote:

> The highly productive English morpheme -ess appears to derive (through
> Late Latin) from the Greek -issa which appears, from its phonetic
> shape and other factors, to be a loan into Greek from some substrate.

> So there's one interesting example, at any rate.

is <-ess> used in conjugation?

--
Anton Sherwood  --  br0nt0 at p0b0x.com  --  http://ogre.nu/


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Wed Jun 27 17:50:00 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 13:50:00 EDT
Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns"
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.135000.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/27/01 11:10:56 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> As you were kind enough to concede, you have to see patterns BEFORE you even
> apply the comparative method.

-- no, that's not what he said.

>Heck, borrowing creates patterns.

-- not this type of pattern.

Look, you're obviously not interested in listening.  Why do you keep wasting
everyone's time?


From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi  Wed Jun 27 18:52:01 2001
From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 21:52:01 +0300
Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns"
In-Reply-To: <6e.c0bd599.2865a684@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.215201.0300.>

On Sat, 23 Jun 2001 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> 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.

Extensive borrowing can indeed create patterns, e.g. recurring sound
correspondences resulting from phonetic (and system-based) sound
substitutions (such can be observed in e.g. the Proto-germanic loan words
in Proto-Finnic). However, these kinds of patterns do not suffice, if a
genetic relationship is to be established. Usually the following is
required:

- systematic correspondences can be established in morphology/morphosyntax
(preferrably between entire paradigms)

- the sound correspondences should not be explicable as phonetically or
otherwise predictable substitutions (excludes extensive/massive
borrowing), and must not reflect different stages in the development of
the assumed cognate languages

- the cognate percentage is higher in basic vocabulary than in typical
cases of extensive borrowing (borrowed items often include much "cultural"
vocabulary pertaining to technological/social innovations, local
phenomena, etc.)

Regards,
Ante Aikio


From alderson+mail at panix.com  Wed Jun 27 22:53:36 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 18:53:36 -0400
Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns"
In-Reply-To: <6e.c0bd599.2865a684@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com)
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.185336.0400.>

On 23 Jun 2001, Steve Long 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.

> 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."

You aren't reading what Herb Stahlke wrote.

The hypothesis is not that "this language is related to ancestral group X", but
rather "these two/three/four/dozen languages are related to each other".  That
makes a very big difference.

Hypotheses of relationship are made among existing languages (or reconstructed
protolanguages once those are available), not between a single language and a
possible ancestor.  Once the comparative method has been employed on data drawn
from a group of languages--and the canonical number is *NOT* 2--and a proto-
language reconstructed (even in part), the latter can be used as a *shortcut*
in examining data from other languages that it is thought may be related, but
it *IS* a *SHORTCUT* for comparing the new data from these languages to all the
data from all the previous languages used to build the protolanguage.

And once again, the hypothesis is not that "this language is related to the
reconstructed ancestral group X", but rather "these two/three/four/dozen
languages are related to each other, and to the two/three/four/dozen already
examined in the same way previously".

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 compara-
tive method, the languages in question are *JUST* *NOT* *RELATED*.

> 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.

Borrowing produces patterns that are qualitatively different from those that
arise from genetic relationship.  The concept of patterning alone is necessary
but not sufficient to define genetic relationship; the *kinds* of pattern are
the determining factor.

								Rich Alderson


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Jun 29 14:27:19 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 15:27:19 +0100
Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns"
In-Reply-To: <6e.c0bd599.2865a684@aol.com>
Message-ID: <FRI.29.JUN.2001.152719.0100.>

--On Saturday, June 23, 2001 4:00 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

[replying to someone else]

> 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.

Steve, please!!!  I have never said any such thing.  I have *never*
asserted that a language cannot have multiple ancestors.  I have only
asserted that no Celtic or IE language is an example of a language with
multiple ancestors.

At various times, on various lists -- probably including this one, though I
can't remember -- I have pointed out that there certainly exist languages
which do not descend from a single ancestor in the ordinary way, and I have
repeatedly cited Michif as an outstanding example.  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.  But the
point is that the ancestry of Michif is fundamentally different in nature
from the ancestry of English, or of any other known IE language.

Since I'm the person who has pointed this out repeatedly, and since I'm the
person who has emphasized the difference between Michif and English -- in
great contrast to Steve, who apparently wants to see no difference -- I
must take exception to Steve's wording when he imputes to me the position
that "languages can't have more than one genetic ancestor".  Naughty,
naughty, Steve.

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 Jun 29 14:01:47 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 15:01:47 +0100
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
In-Reply-To: <26.1736db1d.2865a8a5@aol.com>
Message-ID: <FRI.29.JUN.2001.150147.0100.>

--On Saturday, June 23, 2001 4:09 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

[quoting himself]

>> 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.

[LT]

> <<This is not the way we use 'genetic' in linguistics.  We do 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.

> Is there a more "pithy" answer to why there can only be one genetic
> ancestor than this one?

Steve is taking issue with my fussiness over terminology.  Well, sorry, but
my fussiness is not mere tedious pedantry: I think Steve is trying to blur
a fundamental distinction by introducing misleading terminology of his own
devising.

In linguistics, we use the term 'genetic' in connection with languages and
with the ancestry of languages.  We simply do not apply it to elements
within languages, and doing so is not helpful.

Elements in languages may be labeled 'inherited' or 'borrowed'.  This
distinction is conventionally seen as fundamental, and I want to insist on
the correctness of such a position.  Steve, I gather, wants to blur it, and
perhaps even to abandon it.

The English word 'brother' has been a part of English as long as English
has existed as an identifiable language, and even for longer than that.  It
is inherited.

The English word 'kangaroo' was introduced into English around 1770, after
being taken over from the Australian language Guugu-Yimidhirr.  It is
borrowed.

I take it that Steve wants to draw no distinction between the two cases.
For him, it appears, 'brother' is just one piece of Germanic baggage in
English, while 'kangaroo' is just one piece of Australian baggage, and
there is no difference of principle.  It is merely that the Germanic
baggage -- at present, anyway -- outweighs the Australian baggage.  Is this
right?

But I think there's a huge difference between the stuff that's been in
English from the beginning and the stuff that's entered the language along
the way.  The Norman French influx after the Conquest was so vast that the
French baggage in English probably now outweighs the native Germanic
baggage -- but English is still descended from a Germanic ancestor, not
from a Romance ancestor.  English, like any language, cannot change its
ancestry.

Why do I insist on such doctrinaire pigeonholing?  Why can't I just accept
Steve's enlightened position that all languages have multiple ancestries,
and that making distinctions like mine is a waste of time?

Because I believe firmly that the distinctions are real and important.  The
way that modern English has come into existence is really and fundamentally
different from the way that Michif has come into existence, or Tok Pisin,
or Haitian Creole, or Media Lengua.

In order to understand how these other languages have come into existence,
we must first recognize that there is something fundamentally different
about their origins, compared with "ordinary" languages like English and
Chinese.

If we follow Steve in maintaining that all languages have multiple
ancestors, then we in effect abandon any hope of seeing Michif or Tok Pisin
as anything special, and we thus abandon any hope of understanding the
conditions that led to their creation.  And such an outcome would be a
disaster: we would be closing off a whole avenue of historical
investigation, and moreover an avenue that I would describe as
outstandingly fascinating and important.

Steve wants us to believe that every element present in a language is part
of its genetics, part of its inheritance.  But this view is simply not
helpful: it obscures fundamental distinctions.

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 Jun 29 14:11:54 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 15:11:54 +0100
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
In-Reply-To: <LAW2-F81YP0QzBxhJTA0001432c@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <FRI.29.JUN.2001.151154.0100.>

--On Sunday, June 24, 2001 11:21 pm +0200 Kreso Megyeral
<miskec4096 at hotmail.com> wrote:

[LT]

>> And Albanian is not Greek, Romance, Slavic, HUNGARIAN or Turkic, even
>> though elements of these origins greatly outnumber the inherited
>> elements.

> Excuse me, but I will kindly ask for the explanation of the possible
> Hungarian elements in Albanian. I'm a student of Hungarian and have also
> studied Albanian, but have found no trace of evidence for such connection
> (except the interesting similarity between Hungarian "|l" and Albanian
> "ul" - to sit). Or was it that you just took Hungarian as an example of
> "any-possible-language-it-could-be-connected-to"?

Ah, I knew I'd get pulled up on this one.

What happened here was this.  In my student days, back in the Bronze Age, I
was taught that the Hungarians were among those who had been prominent in
Albania at various times in the past, and that there were Hungarian loan
words in Albanian to prove it.

Before sending out that posting, I checked a standard reference source on
Albanian in my office, and I found that all the other languages I mentioned
were cited as important sources of loans in Albanian, while Hungarian was
not mentioned.

Having already typed the word 'Hungarian', but now doubting it, I almost
deleted it, but then I decided to leave it in.  I figured "Well, if there
are no Hungarian loans in Albanian, somebody will tell me about it."

This is true.  Honest.

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.

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 anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi  Wed Jun 27 18:38:07 2001
From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 21:38:07 +0300
Subject: Genetic Descent/continuity & convergence
In-Reply-To: <26.1736db1d.2865a8a5@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.213807.0300.>

On Sat, 23 Jun 2001 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> Is there a more "pithy" answer to why there can only be one genetic ancestor
> than this one?

Genetic relationship is defined in terms of continuity. E.g., there is
continuity between the linguistic systems of present-day English and
Proto-Germanic. There is no continuity between English and French, despite
the fact that English has borrowed massively from French: i.e., if we
could go backwards in time, we could observe English gradually becoming
Proto-Germanic; but at no point would it become French.

Could there, then, be a case where a language becomes not a different
language, but rather *two* different languages, when the film is run
backwards?

There is one especially interesting type of case, which could
(erroneously?) be seen as a counterexample. I know only a couple of
examples, an especially interesting one being Sea Sami.

Sea Sami is one of the three main dialect groups of North Sami (it is a
dialect group, not a separate language; the North Sami dialects are 95+%
mutually intelligeble). North Sami belongs taxonomically to western Samic,
which shows several innovations distinguishing it from Eastern Samic, the
most important ones here being two sound shifts: Western Samic underwent
the changes *NN > *TN between vowels (i.e., *nn > *tn, *mm > *pm etc.) and
*S (= sh) > *jh before *k, *t or *n (unusual sound shifts, once again),
whereas Eastern Samic preserved the original forms. The sole exception to
these Western Sami innovations is Sea Sami, which has preserved the
original nasal geminates, and only very recently (in the 19th century)
underwent the shift *S > *jh, which is prehistorical in the other
languages / dialects and presumably must be dated to Proto-Western-Samic.
This, and other evidence as well, suggests that Sea Sami was originally no
dialect of North Sami, but rather a separate language belonging to the
Eastern group. But as its speakers spread west along the Scandinavian
coast, it became subject to so strong North Sami influence that it
ultimately coalesced with it, while still preserving a couple of archaic
features indicating its genetic origin.

Sea Sami has sometimes been presented as an example of a language /
dialect having two genetic ancestors (i.e. North Sami and
Proto-Eastern-Samic, both of which, of course, ultimately derive from
Proto-Samic). However, at least in my view, this interpretation can
be criticized: there is no continuity between (Proto-)North Sami
and Sea Sami, so it is genetically Eastern Samic. Synchronically, however,
it is now a dialect of North Sami, but this seems to be merely a result of
convergence (borrowing included under the term "convergence" here).

There are also similar cases in Finnic, but the details are far more
complicated. E.g., Finnish does not represent a single branch in the
Proto-Finnic family tree, but is the result of convergence and ultimate
coalescence of many dialects belonging to at least two taxonomically
distinct branches. Even today, there is not a single isogloss that defines
Finnish as a whole as opposed to the rest of Finnic. The case of South vs.
North Estonian is somewhat similar: South Estonian has preserved several
archaic forms in several cases where *all* the other Finnic
languages/dialects have an innovative form; this concludes that the
primary genealogical dichotomy in Finnic is South Estonian vs. all the
rest (including North Estonian). However, due to convergence, South and
North Estonian are today mutually intelligible to a fair degree, but the
mutual intelligibility of Estonian and Finnish is practically nonexistent,
disregarding some very simple expressions.

I'd be most interested in hearing how typical these kinds of convergence
scenarios between closely related languages are (I suppose there must be
plenty of examples elsewhere), and opinions on how they should be
taxonomically interpreted.

Regards,
Ante Aikio


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Thu Jun 28 13:26:16 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 08:26:16 -0500
Subject: European Genetics/IE
In-Reply-To: <00b501c0fbd6$caaa37a0$3906703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.082616.0500.>

	Dialect creolism? It's an interesting concept.
	Spanish literary language was interesting: Galaico-Portuguese was
used for lyric verse during most of the Reconquista, local varieties of
Castillian were used for humorous verse and prose at that time, and during
the short Renaissance period Salmantine was used for drama.
	In terms of western Romance pidgin or creole language --if such a
thing ever existed, I was thinking of a Celtic-Latin contact language used
in the market place between Celtic-speaking peasants and Latin-speaing city
people. Something that may never have been committed to writing and that
would have been relatively rapidly assimilated into Vulgar Latin.
	I'm curious whether there are studies of the pecentage of
Latin-Celtic cognates in French, Spanish and/or Portuguese vocabulary; i.e.
whether Celtic speakers tended to use words similar to their native
language as opposed to non-cognate synonyms. I see this phenomenon all the
time among Americans learning Spanish and Latin Americans learning English.


>[Ed Selleslagh]
>I would like to add something to this:

>It could possibly be argued that early Castilian had some kind of a pidgin
>phase during the Reconquista, when it became the communication device for the
>different regional groups (who all spoke different Romance languages, some
>even non-IE Basque) taking part in it and settling in its wake, in the place
>of fleeing Arabs. If it actually was a pidgin at one time, it quickly became a
>creole, but with a relatively low social status (as most creoles): high level
>poetry (troubadours) continued in Catalan for some time, but folksy comedy was
>in Castilian.

>In fact, Castilian has some, but not much, grammatical simplification compared
>to other Romance languages like French or Italian (e.g. wholly or partly
>'regularized' verbs) and inconsistency in phonetic evolution stages of
>different words, indicating different Romance origins; and there are a number
>of peculiarities that have been attributed to 'substrate', often Basque (e.g.
>Lapesa)- although this is far from a consensus opinion. (Note that Castilian
>was 'born' in the southern fringe of the Basque speaking region of the time;
>so those wouldn't qualify as pidgin efects or creolization).

>If Castilian is not so clearly a creole, this would be explainable by the fact
>that its speakers originally spoke pretty closely resembling languages (except
>the Basques: see above), but in different stages of phonetic evolution (e.g.
>initial f>h, but not in all older words).

>Another case of someone's two cents, I guess.

>Ed.

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 28 06:20:00 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 02:20:00 EDT
Subject: Uniformitarianism and the Arrowwood
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.022000.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/27/2001 4:35:07 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<< According to your rhetoric, all words are susceptible to frequent, random,
unknowable change. Therefore, words cannot be used to argue anything
whatsoever about linguistic or ethnographic prehistory. You have objected to
other list-members "queering the game", and your response is to throw the
whole game-board into the trash. >>

That's not true.  You can "argue anything" you like about linguistic history
that is strictly linguistic .  But the problem that's obvious is the
non-linguistic elements.  There's a lot more to historic and prehistoric
people, things and processes than an anachronistic dictionary-style
definition of a tree.

And this is not an all or nothing proposition.  The "whole game-board" does
not have to be thrown "into the trash."

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.  And the focal point, in that case, becomes not simple
word-matching, but rather the historical processes themselves.  And the
actual textual context.

After your initial post, in which you mentioned the ""Greek has (s)mi:lax"
for yew, I looked at L-S and about ten different Greek texts that contained
the word.  I found that it referred to at least four totally different trees
or bushes and quite possibly to just wood that was carved or carveable.  I
just don't find that the words that came down to us in writing reflect modern
style tree taxonomies at all.  I think that, even with the Greeks, different
linguistic communities had different names for what we would consider the
same object.  This is totally consistent with everything we know about naming
flora and fauna in preliterate cultures.  And I think these names were based
much less on species definition than on practical usage, which varied among
speakers of the same language.  So the same word was used for different trees
or wood products.  This is true in Greek and I assume therefore all early IE
languages.

Just starting there, I'd be negligent in not having doubts about your claims
about unrecorded proto-Celtic and German.  And there's a lot more that
follows that first step.  It seems particularly dubious to assume that all
these languages did not influence each other in use of names of things that
were demonstrably an important part of on-going commerce and trade - where
names that crossed language barriers would have to be economically more
important than traditional local names.

It seems I'm always being reminded on this list that linguistics is not
simple.  But I have to say that historical processes and relationships and
historical meaning itself can't be any simpler.  In fact, everything we know
says they are far more irregular.  Just the opposite of assuming that a
reconstructed word stood for a modern taxonomic species of tree for 2000+
years of preliteracy.

I may have overstated what you "need to prove," but I was reacting to what
you were telling me I needed to prove.  In fact, all I was proving was that
there is a high degree of uncertainty in all this.  And I think that is
somewhat obvious.

If you are saying that your interpretation is possible, I'd have to agree.
If you are saying its probable, there's just too many other equally plausible
possibilities for that to be true.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 28 14:09:10 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 10:09:10 EDT
Subject: Uniformitarianism and the Arrowwood
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.100910.EDT.>

I wrote:
<<What actually happened when people gave names to trees, before modern
scientific classifications attempts to make them uniform?>>

In a message dated 6/27/2001 4:35:07 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<<You mean things are different now? Linnaeus unwittingly changed the habits
of all subsequent speakers, even those who have never heard of Linnaeus or
binomial nomenclature?>>

No, Linneaus did not erase the use of "idiosyncratic and irregular local
common names" for trees and wood.

Yes, it was his intention to do so.  There was nothing "unwitting" about it.
He says so himself.  He was appalled by the fact that local "common names"
were so "idiosyncratic and irregular."  In this, he had the total support of
commercial interests that were upset about, e.g., shipments of "yew" wood
that in fact turned out to be upon inspection - by those with the expertise -
juniper, rowan, elm or walnut.

In fact, the use of Latin (often in binomial nomenclature) names for such
objects was the common way to overcome idiosyncratic and irregular local
"common names" in trade long before Linnaeus.  He just came up with the first
taxonomic system that actually anticipated evolutionary family trees, which
is where his influence mainly comes from.

The early English references to the yew are generally all made in combination
with Latin names.  (And of course taxus can show up there as being equated to
the "haw-tre" - the hawthorn.)  And that may in fact be how the "yew" name
settled down and standardized to mean a particular tree - one that equated to
the Latin taxus.

<<When a pre-Linnaean (such as Dioscorides) discussed a particular taxon, it
could have referred to anything, in your view?>>

No. But they clearly do not match up with modern scientific classifications
of trees. Nor could they reflect all "idiosyncratic and irregular local
common names."  They were simply earlier attempts to catalogue plant and
trees, and just as often, their by-products, probably according to trade
usage.

But let me ask, do you actually think that no progress has been make in
botanical sciences since Dioscorides?  Do you actually think that early IE
speakers were more scientific than the more modern people who have the
benefit of modern botanical science?

An important factor in standardizing "idiosyncratic and irregular local
common names" for trees and wood probably came not from the efforts of
"natural philosophers" but from the wood-working (including bow makers) and
pharmaceutical trades.  They would obviously need words that crossed language
barriers in order to standardize the supply and distribution of timber, wood
stock, resins and other derivatives as well as finished products.

But these trades had there own names for the woods and by-products.  Which is
why Pliny, Theophrastus and Dioscorides (the latter two were actually
herbalists), etc., are so difficult for modern botanists to figure out and
include so many species and by-products that are "unknown" or questionable.
(Pliny actually mentions an unknown "taxa" tree that is not definitely not a
yew and an "Indian ivy" called the "euon.")

<<It seems rather arbitrary and capricious to invoke the UP only to exclude
its _present_ application in the next sentence. >>

Come on.  The arrowwood example IS a present application.  I gave you the
modern scientific names.  Then I gave you the "idiosyncratic and irregular
local common names."  Are you saying that the *PIEists had standardized
scientific names and only since that golden age have we been reduced to
"idiosyncratic and irregular local common names?"

<<If a single village actually exhibited such a wide variety of terms for the
same tree, it would be a major dysfunction indeed, suitable for a plot-device.
Andy: "I told you to stake out the house behind the boxwoods!"
Barney: "Those _are_ boxwoods, Andy!"
Andy: "Those are _false_ boxwoods, Barn ...">>

But the script goes on:
Barney: "There you go again, Andy!  Two years at the agricultural college and
ain't you the Werner Van Braun of tree-ology...
Andy: "Now, Barn, you know how important it is here in Mayberry for all of us
to have a Uniform Nomenclature System for trees.  'Else how will we be able
to function in our everyday lives.  Can you just imagine if we called trees
by different names?  Imagine if we could not distinguish between the over 85
different trees growing regionally in our everyday conversations with, say,
Floyd the Barber or Aunt Bea? Why, just think of the impact on the social
fabric... "
Barney: "Andy, lemme stop ya'll right there.  When you say 'you', Andy, are
you spelling that 'y-o-u' or 'y-e-w'?

S. Long


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Jun 29 13:03:10 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 14:03:10 +0100
Subject: "Uniformitarian Principle"
In-Reply-To: <12e.6d1df8.286563ca@aol.com>
Message-ID: <FRI.29.JUN.2001.140310.0100.>

--On Friday, June 22, 2001 11:15 pm +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

[LT]

> << ["Uniformitarian Principle"] = languages and speakers in the remote
> past did not behave differently from the way languages and speakers have
> behaved in the historical period.>>

> Now, don't forget that you brought this "Uniformitarian Principle" up
> specifically and especially as the support for your "rate of change"
> statements about IE.

Not really.

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 don't recall ever going any further than that, and I have no idea what
"statements about IE" are being alluded to here.

> And whether it works or not for other aspects of historical linguistics
> (and I think it does), it just doesn't work for your pronouncements about
> rate of change.

Steve, I haven't made any pronouncements about rate of change.  What are
you talking about?

> You have no objective "rate of change" to offer for speakers in historical
> periods.  So you really have nothing to extend to prehistorical periods.

Steve, I have already pointed out that no accepted metric of rate of change
exists, and that I doubt whether such a metric can be constructed to
general satisfaction.  I have made no claims beyond this.  What on *earth*
are you talking about?

As for prehistoric periods, the only claim I have made is that prehistoric
languages and speakers cannot reasonably be assumed to be fundamentally
different from historical ones in any respect at all, unless there is good
evidence to the contrary.  Do you disagree with me here?  If not, what are
you so exercised about?  I haven't said anything else.

[LT]

> <<To reject this position is to make historical linguistics impossible.>>

> This is untrue. We can validly assume all kinds of uniformity and
> linguistic continuity between the historic and the prehistoric - without
> buying your subjective judgments about "rate of change" of IE languages.

Steve, this posting is becoming surreal.  I have made no "subjective
judgements" about rate of change, least of all in IE.  In fact, I haven't
made any statements about rate of change at all beyond what I've just
outlined.

Your lunch disagreeing with you? ;-)

> There is plenty of room for "Uniformitarianism" in historical linguistics,
> without claiming that it supplies you some kind of objective measure of
> language "change" per measure of time.

Steve, for heaven's sake.  I have made no such claim.  This is the sort of
thing glottochronologists do, and I am not a fan of glottochronology.

Have you confused me with someone else?  My name is 'Trask' -- nice, short,
distinctive, Norwegian, easy to remember.

[LT]

> <<Without the UP, historical linguistics would be no more orderly or
> principled than a Michael Moorcock fantasy novel.  We need it.>>

> But, unfortunately, as far as a scientific rate of change goes, you just
> don't meet the qualifications.

And what is this supposed to mean?

First, I am not a rate of change, and your statement is incomprehensible.
You might as well tell me that I don't meet the qualifications for being a
complex number.

Second, I have not proposed any rate of change.

Third, I have never even mentioned any rate of change, except to point out
that we cannot reasonably assume that the rate of linguistic change
increased greatly across the planet -- or decreased greatly, for that
matter -- some thousands of years ago.

I have said no more than this.  Why does it bother you so much?  And why do
you keep accusing me darkly of making sinister claims?

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 sarima at friesen.net  Wed Jun 27 06:33:43 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 23:33:43 -0700
Subject: The Iceman's Berries
In-Reply-To: <8f.be2bd65.285a662a@aol.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.233343.0700.>

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.

>*taksos has cognates in Latin, Celtic, Greek, and Indo-Iranian.

This looks older, as it covers all the widely separated branches except
Hittite.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 28 13:28:29 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 09:28:29 EDT
Subject: Red Deer in Anatolia
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.092829.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/28/2001 6:30:05 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com writes:
<<-- no.  This is a false statement.  These are distinct terms in enough IE
languages that the attribution of PIE *elhen is secure. >>

-- no. This is a false statement.  There are no clearly attested terms in any
early enough IE languages that distinguished between the fallow and red deer.

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.

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.  If you can produce them - in context, if possible - then I might
have to concede the distinction might validly be reconstructed in *PIE.
Otherwise, I can say with confidence I see no logical basis for your
conclusions.

Regards,
S. Long


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Thu Jun 28 18:25:52 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 14:25:52 EDT
Subject: Ockham's Razor
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.142552.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/28/01 4:52:51 AM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com
writes:

> So far, you have presented no facts that show any distinction between the two
> types of deer in early IE languages.

-- since the word means "red deer" specifically in a number of IE languages,
we may therefore assign that meaning to the PIE form.

That's the general rule.  Are you rewriting linguistic methodology again
today?

> Show me specifically in any Classical Greek texts where the distinction is
> made between red deer and fallow deer.

-- Hesychius.


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 28 20:24:49 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 16:24:49 EDT
Subject: About the Yew1
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.162449.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/27/2001 9:20:37 PM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:

<< Actually, I believe it will work, but my earlier posting contained a glaring
oversight. The regular Greek word for 'yew' is <taxos>, which is clearly from
the same source as Latin <taxus>. >>

I don't think so.  Your first post was probably right.  I seriously doubt
that you'll find a single reference to yews or any other tree as <taxos> in
all of Classical Greek.  Even your own Dioscorides cited <taxos> = 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.

<<The word I cited, <smi:lax>, is an epithet of several diverse plants. As
you suggest, the most plausible connection is with <smi:le:> '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.  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.

<<Anyhow, there is no reason to suppose that <smi:lax> was ever established
in the _exclusive_ sense of 'yew' and then applied to other plants.>>

I suspect no word had the exclusive sense of "yew" in pre-Roman Greek.  I've
not seen any in the texts anyway.

<<the oxytone <i:os> 'arrow' referred by L&S to the root of <ienai> 'to go';
the oxytone <ios> 'poison, esp. of serpents' cognate with Latin <vi:rus>
'slime; poison' (PIE *weis-
Pok. 1134);...>>

Whatever the two sources of the words, they are distinguishable in Greek
texts almost only by context and often not even by that.  The source of
course is irrelevant because my notion was that they were borrowed, without
regard to the source, in a later form into Celtic.

<<Lumping together similar-sounding words in order to support crude
generalizations is as hazardous to the facts as going berserk with a straight
razor.>>

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.

Regards,
Steve Long


From edsel at glo.be  Thu Jun 28 17:16:07 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 19:16:07 +0200
Subject: About the Yew1
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.191607.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas G Kilday" <acnasvers at hotmail.com>
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2001 11:31 AM

> Steve Long (21 May 2001) wrote:

[snip]

>> My real problem with all this is that the "yew" is not really that
>> recognizable as a tree or as a wood.  And there is evidence that the name
>> was not altogether that stable, even among cultures that had writing and
>> could communicate long-distances about something as local and variable as
>> the appearance of a tree.  Even if PIEists knew the tree, chances are they
>> would have soon confused it with other trees.

> I'm well aware that cognate dendronyms can refer to different trees in
> different languages, and examples from IE and Semitic occur in my own
> postings. But in fact Taxus baccata _is_ quite distinctive as trees go.
> First, it has prominent red berries. Second, its wood is prized for making
> bows and arrows. Third, its leaves are highly toxic (unusual, if not unique,
> for a tree native to Europe). The Belgic king Catuvolcus took his own life
> with yew-poison (Caes. B.G. VI.31). A persistent superstition (Diosc. IV.79)
> holds that anyone sleeping under a yew will die: hence the epithet "albero
> della morte". It is very unlikely that a name for this particular tree, once
> established among a body of speakers, would be applied by those speakers to
> any other tree. They could, of course, migrate out of its habitat and forget
> the name.

>> The main problem I think with using the yew word to locate PIE is, of
>> course, that the "yew" was not always a "yew."  And this only makes sense,
>> since trees don't move and that means what you call a yew or don't call a
>> yew and what I call a yew in the next valley could be two different trees --
>> up until such time as we obtain Polaroid cameras. Or up until we get around
>> to cutting them down and selling the wood, scrapping their bark for extract
>> or perhaps in the case of the yew, eating their berries.  It would be the
>> by-products, not the tree, that we could discuss in common.

> I don't see that Polaroid cameras are necessary. If you and I belong to the
> same tribe, and we don't agree on what to call trees in the next valley, then
> our use of language is dysfunctional. Do you really believe that prehistoric
> humans were linguistically incompetent?

> I don't think any serious objections have been presented to the thesis that
> PIE-speakers didn't know the yew. As I mentioned before, "yew" itself has
> ancient congeners only in Celtic and Germanic, plausibly derived from PIE
> *eiw- 'berry'. Latv. <ive> and Old Pr. <iuwis> are from MLG <i:we>, not
> Proto-Baltic. Evidently northern IE-speakers _did_ name the tree after its
> distinctive "by-products" when they encountered it by moving west. Other
> groups of IE-speakers entered yew-country by other routes and either adopted
> pre-IE names or fixated on other features.

> Celtic has preserved pre-IE *ebur- 'yew' rather extensively in toponyms,
> ethnonyms, and personal names, and also Irish <ibhar> 'yew; bow' beside <eo>
> 'yew'. The stem *ebur- also appears in toponyms in Iberia, Liguria,
> Campania, and probably Greece (Ephura:, old name of Corinth and other
> places). In my opinion *ebur- belongs with the Old European substrate
> associated with the expansion of Neolithic farmers across Europe (ca.
> 5500-4000 BCE). If you believe, like Renfrew, that these farmers (who
> entered Europe from Anatolia) spoke PIE, then you must explain why "IE"
> *ebur- should have been superseded by *eiw- in the north and by other words
> in the south and east. This can be done if you posit movement of IE-speakers
> out of Anatolia and east of yew-country, then back into Europe. But then
> we're begging the question of what IE and non-IE are. It is pointless IMHO
> to extend "Indo-European" back to the first European farmers, and equally
> pointless to regard PIE as arbitrarily old.

> It should be noted that Hans Krahe, whose research did much to substantiate
> the Old European substrate, regarded this substrate as IE. I think Krahe
> succeeded in showing that Old European shares a few suffixes with PIE and is
> probably related, but again I disagree with the characterization of
> something this old as "Indo-European".

> DGK

[Ed Selleslagh]

1. The very well known case of Lat. 'fagus' (Eng. beech and similar in other
Germanic, e.g. beuk in Du.) and Gr. 'phe:gós' (Dor. phagós) (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?

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.

[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]

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).

Ed.


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 28 21:48:12 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 17:48:12 EDT
Subject: Yew Two
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.174812.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/28/2001 3:53:52 AM, jrader at Merriam-Webster.com writes:
<< Mr. Long is playing with Irish orthography here.  The Old Irish word
is <ibar>, with a short i, as cited earlier in the message.  The
spellings with <iu> reflect Early Modern Irish developments (growth
of a glide vowel, shift of the diphthongal crest) and resemblance to
Greek <iophoros> is chimerical.  Fluctuations between <io/iu>
spellings in Modern Irish/Scottish Gaelic words reflect mid/high
vowel exchanges in dialects that have nothing to do with the Old
Irish forms of the words.>>

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.  What I was trying to do
was suggest just one more alternative explanation for <ibar> et al.  And the
reason I like it is because I don't think that any one can say for sure how
<iophoros> would have been borrowed into Celtic or some part of Celtic.

If you have a notion of what it would looked like, I'd be happy to hear it.

<iophoros> > <ibar> > <iubhar> would work just as well.  In Gaelic, of
course, I only had <iubhar>, so that's what I used.  And it looked good.

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, consistent with the historical and technical
evidence regarding these objects and the clear use of the same or similar
words to refer to those objects.  I think that *ebor was a trade word that
circulated where these objects or materials or substitutes went.  And was
borrowed in one form or another.

But I LIKE the <iophoros> connection because it's a chance to remind somebody
somewhere that the Greeks had some connection with Celtic (and maybe even
Vasconian) speakers, on and off, since way before Celtic historical times.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 28 05:19:37 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 01:19:37 EDT
Subject: "mono-descent is implicit in the comparative method ..."
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.011937.EDT.>

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:

<<Actually, I would be quite happy to call such a language an isolate. It is
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 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:

<<Excuse me, but last I heard you were not even able to coherently
distinguish between influence and descent.>>

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."

<<I think you are mistaken about who got knocked out inf the first round.>>

Of course!  After all, theoretically - it just couldn't happen.  How many
fingers do you see?

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 28 16:35:32 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 12:35:32 EDT
Subject: Handfuls of Unrelated Forms
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.123532.EDT.>

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:
<< 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 28 17:30:46 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 13:30:46 EDT
Subject: The Single Parent Question
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.133046.EDT.>

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.

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.

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, have you ever *done* any comparative linguistics?  Have 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.  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.  That demands that the
process should be rational and reproducible.  If you're saying I'm missing
something, spell it out.  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.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 28 21:10:46 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 17:10:46 EDT
Subject: The Single *PIE Village Theory
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.171046.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/27/2001 4:35:07 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<< Not at all. What you have forgotten while gathering the woodpile is that my
example involved members of the same tribe. In modern North America, such a
community corresponds roughly to a village like "Mayberry" with its
surrounding farmland, not to the entire eastern USA. If a single village
actually exhibited such a wide variety of terms for the same tree, it would
be a major dysfunction indeed,...>>

Earlier DGK wrote:
<< I don't see that Polaroid cameras are necessary. If you and I belong to the
same tribe, and we don't agree on what to call trees in the next valley,
then our use of language is dysfunctional. Do you really believe that
prehistoric humans were linguistically incompetent? >>

What's interesting in this and the quote above 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.

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?

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).

<<If you and I belong to the same tribe, and we don't agree on what to call
trees in the next valley, then our use of language is dysfunctional. Do you
really believe that
prehistoric humans were linguistically incompetent? >>

I posted (6/14/2001 12:04:03 PM) under the title "The Yew and The Native
Guide" the research that says that this is probably wrong.  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.

Regards,
Steve Long


From rao.3 at osu.edu  Wed Jun 27 11:45:28 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 07:45:28 -0400
Subject: -ca in Sanskrit and Bartholomae's law
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.074528.0400.>

"Oliver Neukum" <Oliver.Neukum at lrz.uni-muenchen.de> wrote:

> could someone explain why Bartholomae's law never affects -ca ?

Isn't Bartholomae's Law limited to 'word"-internal sandhi, and not
applicable even to compounds? [even secondary affixes seem to be immune
to internal sandhi] I can't find any primary suffixes that begin with c
or j [and primary suffixes that begin with k, g, p seem to rare and not
productive].


From rao.3 at osu.edu  Wed Jun 27 11:59:00 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 07:59:00 -0400
Subject: Munda in Early NW India
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.075900.0400.>

From: "Douglas G Kilday" <acnasvers at hotmail.com> wrote, on June 13, 2001,
> [...]  Hence it appears that Sanskrit has 5  phonemically distinct
> fricatives.

Four: visarga is an allophone of /s/.

>>>[...] OTOH if the traditional (Brugmannian) voiced aspirates were
>>> "really" voiced fricatives, the transition to voiced aspirates in Indic
>>> could be viewed as systematic substrate-induced fortition, if the
>>> Munda-substrate hypothesis is in the ballpark.

> It's not hard to find examples of voiced fricatives becoming voiced stops.
> [...] The phonetic systems in Iranian and MIA are thus viewed as more
> conservative than the Sanskrit system, and there is no need to explain "the
> aspirated series going to a voiced fricative". The trouble lies in explaining
> the reverse, namely the voiced aspirated series in Indic, and this is where
> substrate may be in the ballpark.

First of all, *d and *dh etc produced distinct phonemes in Germanic
which still needs to be explained: Doesn't the [d] in "da Bulls" merge
with [d] in "dun"?

I don't follow MIA being "more conservative in this regard": PIE *dh,
*gh, *bh all merge into /h/ in MIA (intervocally), but remained distinct
in Sanskrit, except for *dh going to h in verbal endings and
some words. We can see the process happening: The verbal adjective from
*dheH is dhita in RV fairly often, but hita becomes more and more common
as time goes on. How is MIA more conservative? Even in MIA we from -ddh-
(from Sanskrit -gdh-/-bdh-, if I remember right). How?

If the substrate was Munda (as suggested by somebody), why did it
conveniently disappear to leave MIA to change these fricatives to voiced
h, but leave survivors? Or is another case where a unknown substratum
operated only to disappear when it would have become troublesome for
observed outcomes? In both cases, why should we assume that the MIA
changes g, d, b -> zero and gh, dh, bh -> h were unrelated?

> My main point was that traditional PIE is short on fricatives and long on
> "laryngeals".

I have no opinions on the phonology of laryngeals. I am perfectly
willing to assume that PIE had a fricative with every series, with
laryngeals being what we can deduce of their existence, if  a complete
theory can be put forth. I object, on principle, to fix-ups that invoke
substratum explanations whenever somebody points out problems.

To put it more positively: Anyone who proposes a new systemic
reconstruction must provide a complete trajectory into attested daughter
languages that can reasonably be continued into historically known
subsequent changes. This is a tall order of IE, I know; but to ignore it
opens the door to unchecked speculation.


From miskec4096 at hotmail.com  Thu Jun 28 16:44:06 2001
From: miskec4096 at hotmail.com (Kreso Megyeral)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 18:44:06 +0200
Subject: Word Order and verb endings (was Re: No Proto-Celtic?)
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.184406.0200.>

According to Gabor Sandi's observations on Hungarian verbal and nominal
system, I would like to ask what 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?


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Thu Jun 28 19:22:36 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 15:22:36 -0400
Subject: Word Order and verb endings (was Re: No Proto-Celtic?)
In-Reply-To: <001c01c0fce0$e3f2fc00$28474241@swbell.net>
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.152236.0400.>

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.

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Vidhyanath Rao" <rao.3 at osu.edu>
> Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2001 9:34 PM

> <snip>

>> Most importantly, similar forms can be used to turn a clause into an
>> adjective: "The man who came yesterday" can be rendered as
>>     neRRu    vanta    manitan
>>    yesterday [come] man

>> This suggests a very different explanation: Finite verbs came from
>> verbal nouns and the order stem+pronoun then will be due to the usual
>> order of adjective+noun.

> [PCR]

> First, I think we should explicit note that Adj+N is the order associated
> with SOV.

> The application of this to IE is that I propose that IE or the language that
> produced IE had a stage in which a statement like

> *mon(u) *sek

> could be interpreted to mean either

> 'the man is cutting (something)', or

> 'the man is cut',


From sarima at friesen.net  Wed Jun 27 06:26:30 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 23:26:30 -0700
Subject: Fw: *G^EN-
In-Reply-To: <00af01c0f7ff$40f086c0$7a464241@swbell.net>
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.232630.0700.>

At 09:01 AM 6/18/01 -0500, proto-language wrote:
>[PCR]

>This is, of course, a natural "suspicion". However, having suspected the same,
>no doubt, initially, IEists like Pokorny et al. were able to show a
>commonality of meaning which linked various CVC(V)C roots together.

>If one takes the idea of "overanalysis" to its ultimate implication, should we
>assume that any CVC(V)C "root" is necessarily unrelated to a semantically
>similar CVC root? Or do you believe that some CVC(V)C roots are legitimately
>derived from CVC roots?

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.

>And how does one identify the legitimate derivations?

If there are attested forms derived from the CVC basis in several branches
of IE, or there are several *distinct* forms of very similar or closely
related meaning with different extensions.

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.

>[SF]

>> I find it better to just take PIE roots as they come, without trying to
>> force them into some preconceived mold.

>[PCR]

>You assume what you attempt to argue.

>It is the form of a PIE root which is the question  here.

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).

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From petegray at btinternet.com  Tue Jun 26 19:49:50 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 20:49:50 +0100
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.204950.0100.>

Pat said:
>*keubH2-, 'lie down, lay down',
>I see no reason not to derive it from Pokorny's 2. *kew-, 'bend'

Help yourself.  It doesn't alter my (or any normal) understanding of PIE.

PIE


From petegray at btinternet.com  Tue Jun 26 19:48:18 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 20:48:18 +0100
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.204818.0100.>

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

Peter


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Wed Jun 27 08:58:31 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 08:58:31 -0000
Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc.
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.085831.0000.>

petegray (15 Jun 2001) wrote:

>> I suppose -cum is a remnant of an older time when prepositions were either
>> postpositions or relatively mobile adverbs.

>Yes, so it is suggested.

>> Is there any obvious reason why -cum is the only instance of the archaic
>> system?

>It only occurs with personal pronouns, and nowhere else.  The most interesting
>suggestion I have heard is that it began with an avoidance of the sequence
>cunn-.  cum nobis could sound like forms of cunnus, from which comes the good
>English word cunnilingus.  Hence nobiscum, thence to other personal pronouns.

That's certainly ingenious, but it says more about the suggestor than it
does about the linguistics. A kid stashing his dirty pictures between the
pages of his Latin textbook, perhaps ...

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). This usage is preserved better in p-Italic: e.g.
Umbrian <ukriper fisiu tutaper ikuvina> 'pro arce Fisia pro civitate
Iguvina', Oscan <vibieisen beriieis> 'in Vibiis Beriis'. Similarly, in Epic
Greek many prepositions may follow their objects, but in Attic prose only
<peri> may do so.

Noteworthy is the fact that <cunnus> is a 2nd-decl. feminine. This type
occurs commonly with names of trees, which suggests to me that <cunnus> was
originally a phytonym, referring to a species with hirsute foliage, which
acquired the secondary meaning 'pudendum muliebre'. OTOH Watkins refers
<cunnus> to *kutno- 'sheath' from *(s)keu- 'to cover', which is plausible
enough etymologically (cf. <vagina>) but fails to explain the gender. Lest
anyone think that "feminine parts acquire feminine gender" (we've been
through this), <saltus> lit. 'forest' is a 4th-decl. masculine, and it's
used colloquially as 'pudendum muliebre'.

DGK


From Georg-Bonn at t-online.de  Thu Jun 28 14:34:00 2001
From: Georg-Bonn at t-online.de (Stefan Georg)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 16:34:00 +0200
Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc.
In-Reply-To: <003901c0fd97$a039b780$5821b4d4@leo>
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.163400.0200.>

>petegray wrote:

>>> Is there any obvious reason why -cum is the only instance of the archaic
>>> system?

>> It only occurs with personal pronouns, and nowhere else.   The most
>> interesting suggestion I have heard is that it began with an avoidance of
>> the sequence cunn-.   cum nobis could sound like forms of cunnus, from which
>> comes the good English word cunnilingus.  Hence nobiscum, thence to other
>> personal pronouns.

No Latin speaker would have ever cared to avoid the use of cunnus or
whatever it may be which is carefully omitted from our textbooks
today. They wouldn't even have understood what someone who might
object was talking about. (they would have been
flabber-fucking-gasted and would have said so !) They were no
Victorian Latin teachers (isti cinaedi).

StG
--
Dr. Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Thu Jun 28 19:28:22 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 15:28:22 -0400
Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc.
In-Reply-To: <003801c0fd97$9f9b0680$5821b4d4@leo>
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.152822.0400.>

> I'll dig for it. I hope it explains why *ke/o went
> ge- instead of he-... (Heschwister, tohether...)

the ge- in together is a different ge.  its part of the stem, as in gather.


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Thu Jun 28 21:37:22 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 16:37:22 -0500
Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc.
In-Reply-To: <003901c0fd97$a039b780$5821b4d4@leo>
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.163722.0500.>

[snip]

	Old Spanish had conosco & convosco

>Ha, not only *wlkos was not allowed on the hunt,
>but cunn- was taboo too in rhetorics... But what
>about "cum nostribus (...)" or "cum novis (...)"
>or similar? Maybe less frequent.

>>> May *kom (cum) and *ko (cis) and *kwe (-que) be related etymologically
>>> around the idea of "here-nearby-with"?

>> No.  Latin cum has a good PIE history in *kom or *km, and -que has a
>> different one in *-kwe.  (different consonant, different vowel)

>No *ko-we > *kwe pattern envisionable? (*-we being
>just a dummy placeholder here).

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From dlwhite at texas.net  Thu Jun 28 15:45:45 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 10:45:45 -0500
Subject: the 'Dhole'
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.104545.0500.>

> Dholes (aka "red dog of India" (Kipling)) are found in dense forests.  Wolves
> as a general rule and apparently especially in southern Asia are found in
> open habitats.

        Just briefly, again...
        No.  Wolves used to live in eastern N. America, not to mention
Japan, which is not exactly noted for its open steppes, and dholes occurred
in the tundra environments of Ice Age Europe.  The reason we associate
wolves with grasslands these days is that we exterminated them in former
forest lands, which are good for agriculture, first.   It is no sort of
inherent property.  The two species have essentially the same "life-style",
living to a large extent off of deer or deer-sized animals, and there is no
reason to think that one or the other would engage in a sort of tabu
avoidance of areas that were too wooded or not wooded enough, as long as the
overall life-style was viable.
        On the other hand, staying out of each other's way to some extent is
probable.   One may compare how ferrets and badgers in N. America are
grassland animals, though in Eurasia they are not.  Probably the previosuly
established existence of racoons and possums occupying much the same niche
in the forests of N America made spread into these areas more difficult.
And probably wolves, coming into India from the NW and there bumping into
dholes, tended to stay in environments more similar to those they came from,
as did ferrets and badgers in N. America.   But avoidance of dholes cannot
be the whole story.  Note that wolves have not spread from temperate N.
America into tropical Central America either, despite there being no
competition there from dholes or anything else of the sort.

Dr. David L. White


From rao.3 at osu.edu  Fri Jun 29 12:53:01 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 08:53:01 -0400
Subject: the 'Dhole'
Message-ID: <FRI.29.JUN.2001.085301.0400.>

<X99Lynx at aol.com> wrote:
> Large packs of dholes are reputed in folk reports
> capable of taking on tigers,

This was repeated in a PBS show (Nature?), and it was asserted that the
tiger they were following moved away when it got the scent of the wild
dogs.

----

Regarding "year-round humidity" as explanation for wolves being absent
in South India: Do they make maps of humidity levels? My personal
experience was that the (lower) Gangetic plain is much more humid than
the eastern part of Tamil Nadu, Andhra in the summer (which at these
latitudes is April-June): These parts get much of their rain from the
North-East monsoon which occurs in Oct-Nov, and are leewards for the
South-West monsoon.

The avoidance of dense forest by wolfs may be a better explanation: The
pathway from the northwest to the Decan is blocked by two ranges
(Vindhya and Satpura), two major rivers that run east to west and what
must have been heavily forested areas in ancient times.

Regards
Nath


From connolly at memphis.edu  Wed Jun 27 04:01:12 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 23:01:12 -0500
Subject: German <w> (was:Dubya and before that, minimal pairs)
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.230112.0500.>

Robert Whiting wrote:

> ... I had a German-speaking
> colleage who pronounced English <v> as [w] (as in "willage").  When I
> pointed out to her that she could easily pronounce the [v] sound in
> <village> she said, "Oh, no, German doesn't have that sound -- we use
> <v> for [f] like in <Vater>.  Well, what can you say?  Now if 'village'
> were written *<willage>, she would have had no trouble pronouncing it.

Sure she would have.  The fact is, some Germans pronounce <w> 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 petegray at btinternet.com  Tue Jun 26 19:32:28 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 20:32:28 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.203228.0100.>

>"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.

Peter


From petegray at btinternet.com  Tue Jun 26 19:44:01 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 20:44:01 +0100
Subject: bishop
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.204401.0100.>

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'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 petegray at btinternet.com  Tue Jun 26 19:39:53 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 20:39:53 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.203953.0100.>

> Claiming that Latin had only capital V until the 6th century when a
> lowercase u sprang out of nowhere is a gross oversimplification of very
> complex developments.

Yes, I admit I simplified.  But my point was what you said earlier

> Now I agree that the mixture of u and V in the same script is totally
> unroman; roman writing did not mix scripts.  To get V and u in the same
> inscription they would have to mix inscriptional capitals or square
> capitals with uncials and they just didn't do it.

Peter


From petegray at btinternet.com  Tue Jun 26 19:36:28 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 20:36:28 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.203628.0100.>

>> - in NZ, there is no schwa.  The vowel in "bit" is used instead.  So there
>> is no problem whatever with h before schwa - it just doesn't occur.

> You've got it back-to-front. The vowel in 'bit' is a schwa over there. I'm
> an Aussie, ...

It only sounds like that to an Aussie!   I don't have the dialect books at
hand, but I think I stand in lustrous company on this one.   (On the other
hand, even I have been known to err...)

Peter


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Jun 29 10:27:19 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 11:27:19 +0100
Subject: kinkajou
In-Reply-To: <000f01c0f528$16038400$6a6263d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <FRI.29.JUN.2001.112719.0100.>

--On Thursday, June 14, 2001 6:16 pm -0500 "David L. White"
<dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

[on 'kinkajou']

>         It is not "an American animal" in the sense of being an animal
>         that occurs in the territory of American English.  (It does not
> occur north of southern Mexico.)  It is "an American animal" only in the
> sense of occurring in the New World.  I would hope that Brits, even
> lexicographers, would not be so zoologically parochial as to exclude the
> only English name for this animal on such grounds.  American
> lexicographers do not exclude Old World animals like lorises and lemurs,
> after all, on the grounds they are Old World (thus "un-American"?)
> animals.  If "kinkajou" has been excluded from some recent dictionaries,
> it is, I hope, on account of rarity (as a word), not geography.

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)


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Jun 29 10:37:13 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 11:37:13 +0100
Subject: "ou" in "kinkajou"
In-Reply-To: <002b01c0f5b7$eaddd240$e16063d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <FRI.29.JUN.2001.113713.0100.>

--On Friday, June 15, 2001 11:25 am -0500 "David L. White"
<dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

[on the spelling of /u/ as <ou>]

>         And in kinkajou, judging by the pronunciation.  First named in
> French Guyana?   Passed into English in British Guyana?   (There were once
> such entitities, no?   My knowledge of colonial history is failing me.)

The OED has an interesting tale to tell about this word.  It derives from
an Algonquian name for the wolverine, and it passed into French both as
<carcajou> and as <quincajou> 'wolverine'.  But the French naturalist
Buffon, in writing up his natural history of the Americas, screwed up
big-time and mistakenly transferred the second version to a wholly
different animal.  In English, we then took over both French words,
applying the first to the wolverine but the second to the other animal
mistakenly singled out by Buffon.

It occurs to me that we do not have an accepted label for semantic shift
resulting from an outright blunder.  Are there any classicists out there
who can provide a suitably dignified Greek term meaning 'change by cock-up'
or something of the sort?

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 anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi  Thu Jun 28 17:51:37 2001
From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 20:51:37 +0300
Subject: Proto-Celtic - An Exploration: Celtic ICM & Q/P Words =
 Function IE Roots
In-Reply-To: <c4.16208626.28651746@aol.com>
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.205137.0300.>

Dear Mr. Keefe and discussants:

On Fri, 22 Jun 2001 DFOKeefe at aol.com wrote:

>           Recently there was some discussion of Proto-Celtic on the list.  As
> you probably know, my wife and I are amateur linguists.  In spite of our
> amateur status, please permit us to offer for your consideration a paper
> entitled PROTO-CELTIC - AN EXPLORATION: Celtic Initial Consonantal Mutation
> and Q/P Equivalent Words as a Function of I.E. Roots.  We believe that our
> analysis of I.E. roots in terms of ICM helps obtain a much clearer picture of
> the prehistoric development of ICM and perhaps the phonological dynamics
> which brought it about.  We are sure that this analysis of ICM in terms of
> I.E. roots can benefit from some constructive suggestions.  Thank you for
> your consideration.

>           You may access this paper at one of our two Web sites:
> http://hometown.aol.com/IrishWord/page1.html  (section 1)
> http://hometown.aol.com/Dfokeefe/page1.html  (section xiii)
> We humbly apologize for the all-too-basic America On Line graphics of our Web
> page.

As a Uralist, my knowledge of Celtic is very superfluous, so I only wish
comment on the following passages in the paper:

>Consonantal gradation is comparable to initial consonant mutation. There
>is initial consonantal gradation in the Fenno-Ugric languages.

This is incorrect. There is no "gradation" of initial consonats in any
Uralic language; this is not at all what is meant by the term 'consonant
gradation', and morphophonological phenomena affecting initial consonats
are non-existent in Uralic.

>There is consonantal gradation in Uralic languages of all consonants in words,
>which makes Urtalic comparable to Celtic in some respects.

Once again, this is incorrect. The most complex systems of consonant
gradation are found in Samic and Nganasan, but they do not affect all
consonants in words, being prosodically and phonotactically restricted to
certain positions.

>No one has suggested that the consonantal gradation in these languages is a
>recent phonological development.

Depends on what is meant by "recent", but strictly speaking, this is not
true. Practically no one believes in Proto-Uralic gradation anymore, and
the Samoyedic and Sami-Finnic gradation systems are almost uniformly seen
as resulting from convergence. There is even evidence for the view that
also the Samic and Fennic gradational patterns have arisen separately. So,
from the point of view of Proto-Uralic, these phenomena can certainly be
considered 'recent'.

>Therefore, the same should not be assumed of Celtic languages.

Even if the gradation was a Proto-Uralic feature, this is non sequitur,
because the Uralic gradation and the Celtic mutations have certainly
nothing to do with each other.

---------------

In this connection, I also only very briefly comment on two other papers
on the same web site, titled "2,650+ Similar Irish and Finnish Words with
an Irish Tie-in to Uralic" and "Similar Uralic, Fenno-Ugric, and
Indo-European Roots" (it is not possible to thoroughly criticize these
papers here, as they contain so many blunders, factual mistakes and
dubious claims that addressing them all would probably take days or weeks
of my working time - and I doubt that the list members would find this of
any special interest). Regrettably, even a cursory examination of the
supplied "etymologies" reveals the authors' nearly total lack of knowledge
in Uralistics, as well as general methods and principles of comparative
linguistics. Consequently, the observed similarities between Irish and
Finnish, or Uralic and Indo-European, are reduced to a mere fata morgana.

Regards,
Ante Aikio
(Assistant / Sami language, University of Oulu)

Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 22:39:37 +0300
From: Ante Aikio <anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi>
X-Sender: anaikio at paju.oulu.fi
To: Indo-European at xkl.com
Message-ID: <Pine.SGI.4.21.0106282145250.35458771-100000 at paju.oulu.fi>

Just a correction to a silly L2 mistake:

>>As a Uralist, my knowledge of Celtic is very superfluous,

'superficial' was of course what I meant...

- Ante


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Jun 30 07:01:44 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 03:01:44 EDT
Subject: Sound changes versus sound changes
Message-ID: <SAT.30.JUN.2001.030144.EDT.>

[Steve Long:]

>I would suspect that "found" cognates that truly have no recognizable
>resemblances are rare.

In a message dated 6/29/2001 11:53:48 PM, anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi writes:

<< It is true that found cognates with little or no phonological similarity
are very common. >>

The difference between "recognizable resemblances" and "phonological
similarities" may make a difference here.  But in any case your examples are
compelling:

<<PU *jïNsi 'bow'
Sami /juoksa/
Hungarian /íj/
Nenets /nginº/

PU *wixti 'five or ten'
Finnish /viisi/ '5'
H. /öt/ '5'
N. /yuq/ '10'...etc.>>

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.)

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.

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.

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.

So in talking about changes in related languages, maybe we're talking about
two types of change.

One is simply the number of times a language changes.  The other is how fara
language goes with those changes.

<<PU *jïNsi ... Hungarian /íj/.... PU *wixti .... H. /öt/...>>

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.

The Hungarian example also brings to mind the question of how much certain
changes seem just plain immeasurable.

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.  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.

If morphology, grammar and syntax are the least likely things to be 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.  And perhaps the phonological gap is a truer measure, if there is
any reliable measure at all.

You wrote:
<<Larry brought up sound changes in some Pama-Nyungan languages, which, as
far as I understand, have quite effectively eradicated all surface similarity
from most of the cognate words.>>

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.

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.

Regards,
Steve Long


From sarima at friesen.net  Sat Jun 30 13:28:50 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 06:28:50 -0700
Subject: Rate of Change
In-Reply-To: <F337nlT2NqFJ3sl3xbY00016065@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <SAT.30.JUN.2001.062850.0700.>

At 08:10 AM 6/27/01 +0000, Gabor Sandi wrote:

>Yet I can't help wondering about the circularity of the argument: when we
>see fast linguistic change, we look at society at the time of the change,
>and fix on some aspect of it that is undergoing change - after all,
>something is bound to be changing at any one period, given the fact that
>human beings get bored easily.

>Take periods of known "great change": the English vowel shift for example,

While I really agree with you, one can make an argument that this one at
least was associated with profound social upheaval, as it started during
the Wars of the Roses, which seriously disrupted the fabric of the nation
for many years.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sat Jun 30 16:41:22 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 12:41:22 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <SAT.30.JUN.2001.124122.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/29/01 9:04:30 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com
writes:

> 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.

-- excuse me, but how exactly are '_sp_ and _yuk_ close?


From edsel at glo.be  Sat Jun 30 17:06:27 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 19:06:27 +0200
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <SAT.30.JUN.2001.190627.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gabor Sandi" <g_sandi at hotmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2001 10:10 AM

[ moderator snip ]

> Reply:

> I have a lot of sympathy for your point of view, Ed, since I also like to
> draw a parallel between accelerated language change and changes in the
> external environment of the speakers, whether characterized as historical or
> social changes.

> Yet I can't help wondering about the circularity of the argument: when we
> see fast linguistic change, we look at society at the time of the change,
> and fix on some aspect of it that is undergoing change - after all,
> something is bound to be changing at any one period, given the fact that
> human beings get bored easily.

[Ed Selleslagh]

Maybe I should have touched upon other factors; I didn't mainly because the
initial discussion was about the correlation between socio-cultural and
linguistic change.

In pre-modern times, the factors I mentioned often, but not always, lead to
accelerated linguistic change. That depends also on other factors like whether
a given language is on the giving or the receiving end, its associated
culture's degree of self-centeredness or openness (involving among many other
things, the existence or absence of plurilinguism, of a common transcultural
geographical space like NW Europe, etc. or else: cultural-linguistic
pride/chauvinism), its place in the pecking order of cultures, and the like.

As I mentioned, breaking up of previous cultural or linguistic norms, usually
because of the breakdown of communications, is a potent factor in linguistic
change (actually: divergence), at least in the beginning. E.g. the breakup of
the Roman Empire.

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.

When suddenly left to themselves after some upheaval (Normans in England,
breakdown of the Roman Empire...), languages initially tend to evolve rapidly
to a what might be called a more stable situation, and then evolve according to
their own internal idiosyncrasies. And this internally driven rate of change
seems to behave in an irregular way. It seems that there are periods of
relative stability between periods of rapid - mostly phonological - change, as
if certain points in linguistic evolution were unstable or were like
crossroads: a new path is 'chosen'.  It looks a lot like chaos theory.
Obviously, socio-cultural change can be a trigger in this context, but it is
not a necessary condition.

I believe it is important to distinguish internally and externally caused
linguistic change, even when the two may be (more or less) overlapping at
times, e.g. the Great Vowel Shift (internal) and the Norman-French influence in
English.

> Take periods of known "great change": the English vowel shift for example,
> or French (Latin in Gaul?) between the end of the Western Roman empire (end
> of 5th century AD) and the Strasbourg Oaths (mid 9th century). Did these
> periods correspond to greater social change than earlier or later periods in
> the same geographic area, or when compared with the same historical period
> in other (but comparable) areas? I think that France in the high Middle Ages
> is a good example: the area of the langue d'oeil underwent noticeably more
> changes in both phonetics and morphology than did the arae of the langue
> d'oc. Is this because of more social changes in the north than in the south?

[Ed]

Early French was a typical case of the breakdown of linguistic unity, after the
fall of the Roman Empire.

In the high Middle Ages, the Langue d'Oïl was at the core of what was
becoming the great nation-state of France, while the Langue d'Oc (Occitan, and
Catalan in the Roussillon) was the language of a region ('Aquitaine', in its
later stages and extent) that was on its way to becoming a backwater and a
virtual colony of the actual France (i.e. the north). Some people in the Midi
think that is still the case today, according to the slogans you see sometimes.

> Standard Italian has undergone practically no changes in its phonological or
> morphological structure since Dante's time, yet standard English, French and
> Spanish have all changed considerably since then. Has Italy been a
> historical or social backwater in all this time? I hardly think so, what
> with constant invasions, the Risorgimento, Mussolini and the rest.

[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.

French has change more, but that is nothing compared to the way English and
Dutch have changed. For the last 500 years or so, only the pronunciation has
changed moderately, disregarding the modest regeneration of the vocabulary and
the gradual loss (mainly in coloquial speech) of more complex conjugation forms
('l'eûsses-tu cru?') that are still normal in Castilian. Even Rabelais can
still be read without too much preparation. Villon is a bit more difficult.

The biggest change in English, which makes Old English incomprehensible, has of
course been Norman French.

But without such a dramatic intervention, Old Dutch is just as incomprehensible
to modern speakers. Middle Dutch and even 16-17th c. Dutch are noticeably
harder to understand than Shakespeare. But Flemish/Dutch culture has always
been very open and exposed to many influences, just like modern English, with
the British colonial past and all that.

> And I haven't even broached the subject of contemporary life, probably the
> fastest changing social (and technical) environment ever known to mankind.
> Yet the phonological and morphological structures of contemporary languages
> are not changing that fast, or are they?

[Ed]

I think I explained that above: the key is normalization by mass media and
generalized literacy. That is: a totally 'abnormal' situation as compared to
the (remote) past.

> Just some thoughts for discussion...

> Best wishes,
> Gabor

[Ed]
I hope I have contributed to that (again).

Ed Selleslagh


From g_sandi at hotmail.com  Sat Jun 30 13:43:44 2001
From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi)
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 13:43:44 -0000
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
Message-ID: <SAT.30.JUN.2001.134344.0000.>

>From: Rick Mc Callister <RMCCALLI at SUNMUW1.MUW.EDU>
>Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 17:27:36 -0500

>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: <X99LYNX at AOL.COM>
>> Sent: Friday, June 15, 2001 7:13 AM

>>> Then he went on to point out that European Portuguese has the rolled r,
>>> but (Northern) Brazilian Portuguese has an /h/ reflex of /r/, to which I
>>> added that the Puerto Rican Spanish rolled ("double") rr is often
>>> pronounced as a velar like in French etc. The implication is that
>>> Brazilian may have passed through this stage in the evolution of r > h.

>> [Ed Selleslagh]

>> Isn't there a little confusion here? Isn't the Brazilian Portuguese r that's
>> pronounced as uvular r, as [rx] in final position, or as [x] or even [h],
>> the original rr (cf. Spanish), the rolling r (>3 taps)? Not the single r
>> (originally one tap, now often more). [Note that double r is not always
>> written as such, as orthography is different according to position in a
>> word, e.g. initially or finally].

> I think that's what he meant. Some varieties of Brazilian
>Portuguese use /h/ for trilled /rr/. I've heard it from people from the
>South as well, from Rio Grande do Sul and Rio de Janeiro. The northerners
>I've met used a type of uvular /R/. I've been told that /rr/ is also
>trilled in parts of Brazil

>> Did you mean that Puertoricans use the Brazilian pronunciation of double r?
>> I wasn't aware of that.

> Not all Puerto Ricans, but some. It was a rural pronunciation but
>is now found among urban working class people of rural origin in Puerto
>Rico and New York --or so I've been told by Puerto Ricans. It's also found
>among some Dominicanos and --I've been told-- among some Orientales (Far
>Eastern Cuba). You hear a lot among Hispanics from all over who have
>settled in New York and lived among Puerto Ricans --including one of my
>Costa Rican brothers-in-law

>> Maybe Portuguese influence stretched farther north than I thought: in
>> Curagao Papiamento there is a considerable Portuguese base, but that's still
>> far more to the south than P.R.

>> In the mid-southern Andes (parts of Perz, Bolivia, N. Argentina), the double
>> r is pronounced [Z] (French j), strongly reminescent of Polish rz or Czech
>> r-hacek, which - as far as I know - have the same origin (rolling r). All
>> seem to be results of retroflexion.

> This is common all over most of Spanish-speaking Latin America
>outside of the Caribbean and northern Mexico: Costa Rica, Guatemala,
>western Panama, southern Mexico, parts of Highland Columbia & Venezuela,
>parts of Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, etc.

Since in many varieties of Argentinian Spanish (as well as in Chile and
Uruguay), the phonetic realizations of orthographic <y> and <ll> 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


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Jun 30 19:21:03 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 15:21:03 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look
Message-ID: <SAT.30.JUN.2001.152103.EDT.>

I wrote:
<< So pick a *set* of changes that has occurred in at least five, preferably
ten languages, and the time it took for each of them to occur historically.

In a message dated 6/30/2001 2:54:10 AM, alderson+mail at panix.com writes:
<<Who gets to decide how long the changes took?  Or are you restricting the
sample only to historically attested changes?>>

Oh, yes.  It would have to be that way.  These have to be observable changes
in observable periods of time.  That makes the data "universal" and
reproducible - anyone can measure it.  Of course, you have some statistical
leeway in setting a range for the period the change took.   E.g.,  this set
of changes took 200 years, plus or minus 100 years, and this simply puts a
similar averaged margin of error on your results.  But yes the changes and
the average time they took would have to be measurable by disinterested
observers - just like in calculating half-lives, for example.

You also probably should test a few different sets, just to be sure you had
an adequate control - to show that this one particular set is not an anomaly.

<<In that case, are you prepared to accept the results if they contradict
your view of the prehistoric spread of the Indo-European languages?  Or will
you aver that unattested (that is to say, unwitnessed) changes must have
happened at a different rate? >>

Let me put it this way, this kind of statistical evidence would be very
powerful and would create a prima facie presumption that this statistically
derived "rate" is universal.  The more languages it shows in the more
"certain" it becomes in terms of probability theory.  It would be bad science
indeed to argue against that.

As far as discontinuity behind attested and unattested rates, that cannot be
assumed - as Prof Trask stated - without a clear demonstration that an
outside variable creates a statistical difference between "attested" and
"unattested" languages - e.g., absent something like a distinct iridium
layer, a Yucatan crater and dinosaur extinction at precisely 64 million years
BP.  Obviously, the strong assumption would have to be that this is a
universal (average) rate of change in both attested and unattested languages.
 And because of my training and experience, I'd have every reason to agree.

I should say that I'm not vested in any way in a particular "rate of change."
 I don't have family in Anatolia ready to open up an IE homeland theme park.
I am vested however in the use of proper scientific methodology.  However, on
this list you have some strong personalities with some very strong opinions.

So I find myself taking firm positions about Anatolian origins not because
I'm particularly sure of that idea, but because "strength of conviction"
counts for something in these discussions.  When you are in such a minority,
you simply have to take a devil's advocate position sometimes just to force a
balanced consideration of the evidence on the other side.

On the other hand, the kind of statistical analysis described above is pretty
independent of opinion - my opinion or anyone else's. It speaks for itself
and should go a good way towards settling the matter for everyone.  Or
practically everyone.

<<Suppose that no specific feature ever shows a correlatable average rate of
change?  Suppose that it is instead entire systems that change at a
comparable rate, with no particular change required?  What then?>>

Then the question becomes whether the difference between entire (attested)
systems is measurable.  This would seem to be analogous to the analysis of
differences in complex structural "states."  Again you find some set of
variables - perhaps a much larger set - that predictably matches the
difference you see in the entire system.  If that set (e.g., as an
off-the-cuff example: the twenty most common sounds used in a language) can
predictably identify items from the correct language from a random sample of
items from different languages (let's say 75% of the time) then you have a
pretty good indicator for the entire language system.

Once you have demonstrably shown that kind of correlation, it becomes a good
hypothetical tape measure for any attested language (unless the correlation
can be shown not to apply in other languages.)  More importantly, using that
"representative" set, one should be able to calculate a pretty precise degree
of (attested) change between the same language at two different points in
time.

Of course, one might say that such a representative set or sets cannot be
identified.  But I don't think anyone should be happy with that, since it
would apparently mean that the rate of change in languages is so random and
unpredictable that no scientific statement about it can be valid.

Regards,
Steve Long


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Sat Jun 30 07:49:27 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 07:49:27 -0000
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <SAT.30.JUN.2001.074927.0000.>

petegray (24 Jun 2001) wrote:

>The highly productive English morpheme -ess appears to derive (through Late
>Latin) from the Greek -issa which appears, from its phonetic shape and other
>factors, to be a loan into Greek from some substrate.

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
<Phoi'nissa> and <Ki'lissa> in which the final [-k-] of the ethnic stem was
palatalized by the feminine suffix [-ya]. This didn't happen to the
corresponding choronyms because their final Alpha was long and the preceding
Iota took the accent: <Phoiniki'a:>, <Kiliki'a:>, etc.

Similarly, stem-final [-t-] has been palatalized in <me'lissa> 'honeybee'
from *melit-ya, which nobody would dare to refer to substrate. Such words
resemble the toponyms and phytonyms in -issos which _are_ best explained as
coming from non-IE substrate, but the groups should be kept separate in
one's etymological thinking.

DGK


From connolly at memphis.edu  Sat Jun 30 23:29:29 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 18:29:29 -0500
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <SAT.30.JUN.2001.182929.0500.>

Rick Mc Callister wrote:

>         The normal order for verbs like Spanish gustar, Italian piacere, etc.
>                 is Indirect object pronoun-Verb-Subject, OVS
>         You certainly can change the order to SOV for the purpose of
> emphasis but my point was that there is a whole category of "reverse action
> verbs" in Romance languages.
>         I'm curious how the curious syntax arose

As an addendum to what I wrote a few days ago:  The construction is not
confined to Romance (it flourishes in Hindi and Russian, to name but a
few other IE languages) or even to Indo-European (cf. Japanese).  It's
obviously a phenomenon of "universal grammar" (whatever that really
means) and hence cannot be answered within the context of a single
language family.  Hence my appeal to a Case Grammar solution.

Leo Connolly


From g_sandi at hotmail.com  Sat Jun 30 22:21:28 2001
From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi)
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 22:21:28 -0000
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
Message-ID: <SAT.30.JUN.2001.222128.0000.>

> What happened here was this. In my student days, back in the Bronze Age, I
> was taught that the Hungarians were among those who had been prominent in
> Albania at various times in the past, and that there were Hungarian loan
> words in Albanian to prove it.

> Before sending out that posting, I checked a standard reference source on
> Albanian in my office, and I found that all the other languages I mentioned
> were cited as important sources of loans in Albanian, while Hungarian was not
> mentioned.

> Having already typed the word 'Hungarian', but now doubting it, I almost
> deleted it, but then I decided to leave it in. I figured "Well, if there are
> no Hungarian loans in Albanian, somebody will tell me about it."

> This is true. Honest.

> 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.

What's more, absolutely *everybody* in the neighbourhood bit off a bit (quite a
bit in many cases) of Hungary after World War I, except for the Albanians.
Sounds like a good basis for a beautiful friendship between the two peoples...
(Actually, King Zog of Albania had a beautiful Hungarian wife, adding to this
historical relationship).

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.

All the best,
Gabor


From dlwhite at texas.net  Sat Jun 30 12:58:42 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 07:58:42 -0500
Subject: Michif
Message-ID: <SAT.30.JUN.2001.075842.0500.>

> 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.
        By the way, it seems from Mr. Long's use of "theoretically possible"
in indirectly ridiculing my views that he thinks I think that language
mixture is theoretically impossible.  No.  Recall please, Mr. Long and
anyone else who may need to, that my first comment on the subject was
something along the lines of "there may be one out there, I just haven't
seen it yet."  My theoretical musings long ago led me to the conclusion that
mixed languages are possible.   Also, my conclusion that there are no
(non-lexically) mixed finite verbal morphologies was based on observation of
the evidence (such as it is!) in TK, not ratiocination (regardless of
whether Dr. Trask likes the particular ratiocinations that might have led to
that conclusion, if that had been what I was doing).  So Mr. Long has been
fighting phantoms here.  And not paying much attention to what people
actually say.
        In the intervals of dutiful slogging, I am preparing a combination
1) response to Dr. Trask and 2) coherent (hopefully) presentation of my
views.  Responding to individual isolated points tends, I think, to lead to
confusion (not to mention tangents, and tangents of tangents ...) when the
matter in question is of any complexity, which language contact certainly
is.

Dr. David L. White


From rao.3 at osu.edu  Fri Jun 29 13:30:10 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 09:30:10 -0400
Subject: -ca in Sanskrit and Bartholomae's law
Message-ID: <FRI.29.JUN.2001.093010.0400.>

"petegray" <petegray at btinternet.com> wrote:

>> could someone explain why Bartholomae's law never affects -ca ?

> It concerns the specific formation root + tos.  It raises a number of
> severe questions, and the "new phonoogy" of PIE mght even
> remove teh law entirely.

In Sanskrit, it affects the "infinitives" in -tum, -tave, -tos (not to
be comfused with PIE -*to), agent nouns in -tar and action noun in -ti.
It presumeably would have affected primary suffixes in -p and -c if they
had existed. [-ka seems to occur as primary suffix, but only with a
handful roots ending in vowels, and may very well go back root noun +
secondary suffix ka. This cannot be asserted synchronically because root
nouns ending in short vowels add -t.]

Are there any recent (in the last 2-3 years) about the "new phonologies"?

Regards
Nath


From Enrikay1 at aol.com  Fri Jun  1 00:58:50 2001
From: Enrikay1 at aol.com (Enrikay1 at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 20:58:50 EDT
Subject: SV: PIE
Message-ID: <THU.31.MAY.2001.205850.EDT.>

Takk for alle hjelpen din!

I will see what I can do with those references and let you know how your
suggestions have helped my progress.

Thanks again,
Eric


From Georg-Bonn at t-online.de  Fri Jun  1 07:49:59 2001
From: Georg-Bonn at t-online.de (Stefan Georg)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 09:49:59 +0200
Subject: PIE
In-Reply-To: <004401c0e618$39d46bc0$e45f073e@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.094959.0200.>

>Rami & Rami

Ramat & Ramat

(sorry, but the authors' names are essential in these days of
online-shopping and search engines)


>"The Indo-European Languages"  (Routledge)
>    Overpriced, but excellent.  A brief intorduction to PIE, then a very good
>discussion of each of the dialect groups, and how it got to be what it is.
>
--
Dr. Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn


From cbh at transmeta.com  Fri Jun  1 05:10:28 2001
From: cbh at transmeta.com (Colin Hunter)
Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 22:10:28 -0700
Subject: Linguistic Succession in Historic Comparison:
In-Reply-To: <f6.a793dae.28408e1b@aol.com>
Message-ID: <THU.31.MAY.2001.221028.0700.>

> For example, the dispersal of the Nguni language in early 19th
> century Africa saw speakers of Nguni moving out from a small nuclear
> area in what's now Kwa-Zulu/Natal as far north as Lake Victoria --
> 6000 miles, the equivalent of travelling from the Rhine to China.

On my map, the distance from Natal to Lake Victoria is more like 1600
miles than 6000 miles.


From edsel at glo.be  Fri Jun  1 09:31:44 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 11:31:44 +0200
Subject: Linguistic Succession in Historic Comparison:
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.113144.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: <JoatSimeon at aol.com>
Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2001 6:42 AM

> It's important to keep historic movements of languages and/or peoples in mind
> to show the sort of thing that _does_ happen.

> For example, the dispersal of the Nguni language in early 19th century Africa
> saw speakers of Nguni moving out from a small nuclear area in what's now
> Kwa-Zulu/Natal as far north as Lake Victoria -- 6000 miles, the equivalent of
> travelling from the Rhine to China.

[Ed]
You mean 3000 kilometers, I suppose? Or 2000 miles? (Brussels-Athens by road -
via Belgrade, when former Yugoslavia was still a touristic region).

> The number of actual original Zulu-speakers was tiny -- no more than a few
> thousand, probably less; possibly only a few hundred.

> In the course of 40 years, they moved 1000 miles from their original homeland
> and linguistically and culturally assimilated something hundreds of times
> their own numbers.

[Ed]
But the Zulus were fierce warriors who actually built a kind of empire.

> The Turkic expansion through Central Asia and the Eurasian steppe zone is
> another example; or the massive expansion of Germanic at the expense of
> Celtic in Central Europe.

[Ed]
I don't think Germanic expanded all that much, and the Celtic fringe (along the
Danube, mainly) that was colonized was probably no larger than the Slavic one.

Ed Selleslagh


From mcv at wxs.nl  Fri Jun  1 07:40:02 2001
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 09:40:02 +0200
Subject: FYI (pre-IE reconstructions)
In-Reply-To: <000e01c0e6c1$fa0b6020$05821dc3@219.205.255.5>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.094002.0200.>

On Sun, 27 May 2001 17:29:43 +0200, "Mate Kapovif"
<jozo.kapovic at zg.tel.hr> wrote:

>Just a brief note. In the MCV's text on pre-Indo-European there is a claim
>that Hittite ablative -az comes from PIE *-od-s. Considering the Luwian form
>of ablative -ati it can safely be assumed that the protoform of these two is
>*-oti.

>*o > a in both lgs, *t is palatalized to z in Hittite in front of *-i which
>is later omitted.

This interpretation is of course the generally accepted one, but I
have a few problems with it.  Luwian does not distinguish Abl. and
Ins., and the ending -ati (Lydian -(e)di) serves both functions.  It
should be compared to both Hitt. Abl. -az and Ins. -it.  While it is
true that Hitt. palatalizes *ti to (z)zi (e.g. the 3sg. vb. ending
-(z)zi), there is no rule that Hittite drops final -i (e.g. the 3sg.
vb. ending -(z)zi).  Within Hittite, it is preferrable to derive -az
regularly from *-od-s or *-ot-s, rather than irregularly from *-ot-i.
The comparison with Luwian strengthens the case for *-oti, but there
are alternatively explanations which are equally likely.  The evidence
from non-Anatolian Indo-European points to an Abl. *-od ~ *-ed (or:
*-ot ~ *-et, one cannot tell) and an Ins. *-eh1, with plural forms
*-[bhi-]os / **-[oi-]os and *-[bhi-](h1)s / *-[oi-](h1)s.  This
suggests to me an original distinction between Abl. **-od and Ins.
**-et, which was maintained in Hittite (albeit with Abl. -az instead
of expected -at, possibly from the plural form **-ods, which gives
*-os elsewhere [merging with Dat.pl. *-os]) and in "non-Anatolian"
(albeit with a proposed regular development *-t > *-h1 in the Ins.).
In the Luwian group, Abl. and Ins. added what is probably the same *-i
as we find in the Dat. (*-o-i) and Loc. (*-0-i), giving **-od-i and
*-et-i, which then merged (Luw. -ati, Lyd. -edi).  Within this
analysis (where the Abl. must have a different consonant from the
Ins.), deriving Hitt. -az < **-odi becomes doubly irregular: not only
is the loss of -i inexplicable, but *-di should palatalize to **-si,
not *-z.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl


From connolly at memphis.edu  Fri Jun  1 16:01:38 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 11:01:38 -0500
Subject: FYI (pre-IE reconstructions)
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.110138.0500.>

Mate Kapovi? wrote:

> Just a brief note. In the MCV's text on pre-Indo-European there is a claim
> that Hittite ablative -az comes from PIE *-od-s. Considering the Luwian form
> of ablative -ati it can safely be assumed that the protoform of these two is
> *-oti.

> *o > a in both lgs, *t is palatalized to z in Hittite in front of *-i which
> is later omitted. So the *-ods > -az etymology is not correct.

Problem: doesn't PIE 3sg. -ti yield Hittite -zi i.e. [-tsi]?  Why should
-i have dropped in the ablative but not in the verb ending?  Does final
-i *ever* drop in Hittite?  (Just asking on this last matter.)

Leo Connolly


From sarima at friesen.net  Fri Jun  1 13:05:55 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 06:05:55 -0700
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <B739F10C.DD4%xavier.delamarre@free.fr>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.060555.0700.>

At 12:37 AM 5/30/01 +0200, Xavier Delamarre wrote:
>     But in a flexional language, especialy of the old IE variety, they are
>of secondary importance. They belong to stylistics, not to grammar.

Not quite - word order in such languages belongs mostly to pragmatics,
which *is* part of the grammar.  There are rules, even if some of them are
optional.

>     Even in modern French the difference of meaning between 'une tres grande
>maison' and 'une maison tres grande' is minimal ; you can use both sentences
>freely to express exactly the same thing (no difference in style or
>emphasis).

Actually, those look like fragments to me, not sentences.

But, even so, I suspect they are only interchangeable in some contexts.  In
others, one or the other is probably atypical or improper.  Are there not
certain questions for which one or the other is a more appropriate response?

>     I maintain that the problem of word-order is irrelevant to the study of
>PIE grammar, as much as declension in Chinese or gender in Finnish.

Not quite - word order is always part of the grammar, inflection is not.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Fri Jun  1 17:58:12 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 13:58:12 -0400
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <F194TijlqzUrIz8Ut6500013f49@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.135812.0400.>

> To us it may look strange that the pronoun would have come after the verb and
> not before, but this may happen, and it is standard in modern Irish, isn't
> it?  E.g.: Scri'obhann SE' litir (he writes a letter).

but thats because Irish is VSO, i.e. subjects in general follow the
verb, whether they are pronouns or full NPs.  what you seem to be arguing
for here is that in PIE full NP subjects preceded the verb, while prnonoun
subjects followed it.  that's a very different thing, and would be rather
surprising, i think.  again, does anyone know of such a lanuage that is
actually attested?  pointing out (as you do below) that languages commonly
have postpositions on nouns is sort of orthogonal to the question.  of
course the fact remains that the personal endings
look a heck of a lot like the pronouns, so maybe the idea will turn out to
be right after all, i just think it should be regarded with
skepticism.  one alternative possibility (and im just making this up off
the top of my head.  i wont claim that its a priori more plausible than
the NP-V / V-PRO hypothesis, just that its another way to get out of the
problem) is that the agreement affixes started out as clitics on the
beginning of the verb, first became prefixes and then ended up as suffixes
because suffixes were generally preferred in the language.  just a
possibility.  it just seems to me that the key to the mismatch between
preverbal subjects and postverbal agreement affixes is more likely to have
arisen through the weirdnesses of affixal morphology (especially the
general preference for suffixes) than through an extremely marked
prehistoric word order.  or we can of course consider again the idea
that Pre-PIE was VSO at the stage when its agreement affixes
developed.

or its possible that PIE really was SOV, but had the type
of freedom in its word orders that we've been discussing for Latin
etc., and the affixes actually developed from those sentence types
where the subject followed the verb, again because suffixes are
preferred, so affixes couldn't develop in the unmarked orders.  this
is not as crazy as it might sound.  consider a language like German,
which arguably has a basic SOV order that is disrupted by
topicalization and V2 and other things (this argument works even if
you think that German is SVO based on the order in main clauses
instead of that in subordinate clauses).  in any case, you get a lot of
sentence types where an object or some other non-subject element precedes
the verb, and the subject follows it.  these orders have, arguably, had
their effect on some of the personal endings.  some have explained the
2sg. -st as being a resegmentation of forms like bistu as bist du < bis du
(although others have argued that the -st is from preterite-presents with
a dental final stem).  in the Bavarian dialects the 2pl. ending is -ts, as
opposed to -t in the standard language.  again this has two possible
explanations, one is that it is the preserved 2du. ending as in Goth. -ts
(wouldn't be surprising since in Bavarian the 2pl. pronoun is Nom. es/oes
Acc./Dat. enk, clearly the old dual).  the other possibility that has been
suggested is that the -ts is the inherited -t plus the cliticzed pronoun
's from es.  even if in both cases the other explanation turns out to be
right, it is clear that a variant that arises from cliticization in a
marked VS order in an otherwise SV language can be grammaticalized and
generalized to all orders.  again in Bavarian German (and a number of the
dialects and even to a certain extent in colloquial forms of the standard
language) the 1sg. pronoun in the nominative is mia, clitic ma both < mir
in place of standard wir.  this is transparently from the case where it
appears postverbally.  since the 1pl personal ending is -en, the following
wir assimilated to the nasal (and this pronunciation is common even in
fairly standard spoken forms when the pronoun is postverbal).  crucially,
this nasal-initial pronunciation was extended to all positions in the
relevant dialects, so that even sentence-initially this is what you get.

these are just a few possibilities.  it seems to me that the key to
the mismatch between preverbal subjects and postverbal agreement affixes
is more likely to have arisen through the weirdnesses of affixal
morphology (especially the general preference for suffixes) than through
an extremely marked prehistoric word order.  what we need is a language
where suffixal agreement markers are a more recent innovation, where maybe
we could actually trace their development.  any ideas?

Tom McFadden


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Fri Jun  1 18:06:51 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 14:06:51 -0400
Subject: No Proto-Celtic: word order
In-Reply-To: <E153iU1-0006St-00@virgo.cus.cam.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.140651.0400.>

> 2) Explanations based purely on pragmatic criteria risk being logically
> circular (first position is emphatic: therefore what is in first position
> must be emphatic; similarly for theme-first). Pragmatic analyses might be
> more informative if they attempted to integrate surrounding clauses in their
> explanations: for example, a following relative clause modifying the main
> clause subject will encourage VS, while a complement may encourage VO.

of course this is absolutely correct.  good recent work in pragmatics is
actually primarily concerned with how a sentence fits into the
discourse.  so for example using newness/oldness of a particular NP to
help explain its position in the clause implies that you read the
surrounding sentences to determine whether the referent of the NP has
already been mentioned in the discourse.  work of this type does not start
with assumptions like `first position is emphatic', but rather tries to
figure out, based on corpus data, what characteristics first position
has in a particular language under particular circumstances.  circularity
is not a danger if the work is done with a bit of care.

> In sum, word order appears to reflect 'weight to the right' (cf. Behaghel
> 1909 and many subsequent commentators).

absolutely.  another argument for the position that `free-word' order is
flexible, but principled.


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Fri Jun  1 18:27:08 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 14:27:08 -0400
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <B739F10C.DD4%xavier.delamarre@free.fr>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.142708.0400.>

>> Only that is not true.  Even a free word order language has a preferred,
>> *neutral* order.  In Latin that order was SOV.  Word order variations in
>> such languages are used to encode variations in emphasis and attitude -
>> they are *not* meaningless.

>     But in a flexional language, especialy of the old IE variety, they are
> of secondary importance. They belong to stylistics, not to grammar.

>   Even in modern French the difference of meaning between 'une tres
> grande maison' and 'une maison tres grande' is minimal ; you can use
> both sentences freely to express exactly the same thing (no difference
> in style or emphasis). Modern Slavic languages could provide many more
> examples.

of course it depends on what you mean by grammar, but under my conception
of the term i have to disagree with you strongly on this.  flexibility in
word order is actually regulated rather tightly by the grammatical system
of a given language, it seems.  take the French example you gave.  French
grammar allows the two possibilities that you gave, but not, e.g. `une
maison grande tres', or any number of others that are possible e.g. in
Greek.  German is another great example.  there is a great deal of
flexibility in what element comes first in a sentence, but once that has
been decided, the order of the rest of the elements is pretty rigidly
determined.  note also in comparison to French that German allows 'ein
sehr grosses Haus' but not 'ein Haus sehr grosses'.  it seems to me you
have to encode these possibilities in the grammar, rather than leaving it
up to something called stylistics outside the grammar.  if stylistics is
outside the grammar then it shouldn't be specific to a language, it should
be the same for all people, or maybe it could be culturally determined or
something like that, but those possibilities are clearly falsified by the
word order possibilities of world's languages.  each language has its own
distinct pattern of word order flexibility, so we can't say that such
flexibility results from a common human `stylistics'.  furthermore, a
person who grows up in a bilingual culture will not use a single
stylistics for the two languages that could be attributed to his culture
or his upbringing, i.e. a person in, say Alsace-Lorraine who is bilingual
French-German will have no trouble following the rules for the individual
langauges properly that are mentioned above.  the word order possibilities
are a part of the language itself.  of course what variant a person
produces at a particular moment will depend on external factors, but the
possibilities that are available to him are language-specific.

and for this argument its actually not crucial whether a big semantic or
pragmatic difference is tied to the choice between two variants like 'une
maison tres grande' and 'une tres grande maison'.  whats important is that
while these two variants exist in French, a whole bunch of others
don't.  and in most cases where multiple variants exist, there is an
identifiable difference, even if its hard to find.  usually it's not a
difference in the truth-conditional semantics, but there's perhaps a
difference in what is implied, or in the conditions where you would say it.


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Fri Jun  1 18:59:33 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 14:59:33 -0400
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <B739F10C.DD4%xavier.delamarre@free.fr>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.145933.0400.>

>     I maintain that the problem of word-order is irrelevant to the study of
> PIE grammar, as much as declension in Chinese or gender in Finnish. But of
> course you can write a monography on 'how to express gender in Finnish'.

again i don't think it's irrelevant, but it is incredibly hard (maybe
impossible) to reconstruct, in distinction to phonology and
morphology.  and it probably is irrelevant to the study of PIE phonology
and not terribly relevant to the study of PIE morphology.  so for all
intents and purposes arguments over PIE word order haven't and won't
have much of an effect on the general study of PIE, which is after
all largely restricted to phonology and morphology and the parts of
syntax that interface closely with the morphology, like case marking and
agreement.  but writing about PIE word order is not like writing about
Chinese declension.  PIE word order clearly existed, and it was relevant
to the grammar because it was a part of the grammar.  and the
counterargument that highly inflecting languages are different in this
respect simply doesn't go through.  note that German is more restricted
than French in the possible orders of nouns and adjectives, but German
has much more extensive agreement morphology than French.  note also
again that Finnish, a very highly inflecting language, allows a
considerable degree of word order variation, but not total freedom.  the
possibilities are constrained in a number of ways by the grammar.

writing about PIE word order is maybe a little more like writing about
what color the dinosaurs were.  it's interesting and relevant, and we can
make guesses based on what we know about similar animals in the present,
but it's really hard to do with any claim to certainty at this point, so
any hypothesis is going to be very tentative.


From edsel at glo.be  Fri Jun  1 10:58:50 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 12:58:50 +0200
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.125850.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: <X99Lynx at aol.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2001 9:47 AM

[snip]
> Damate:r - Dor., Arc., Thess. and Boeot. form of goddess Demeter

[Ed Selleslagh]
Don't exaggerate: isn't that 'god(dess)-mother'? (Cf. Jupiter: 'god-father')

> AND finally, starting with Homer -

> dama:r - wife, spouse

> NOTE that most of the early references above are to a variety of mostly
> domestic animals, but in the <damal-> form, specifically to cattle.

[Ed]
Wife = domesticated animal??????  I know those were backward times, but
still....

[snip]
> domo, domui, domitum (domtavi) - to tame, to break in

> COMPARE <domesticus> - of or belonging to the house (domus)

> Cf., Grk, domos - in Homer, often enclosure or abode for animals, e.g.
> sheepfold (Iliad 12:301); "Sanskrit root, dam-, da:m - ya:mi, to be tame."

> Regards,
> Steve Long

[Ed]
Is there really a relationship? What do the PIE etymologists say?

Ed.


From edsel at glo.be  Fri Jun  1 10:43:12 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 12:43:12 +0200
Subject: Pelasgian/was Etruscans
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.124312.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas G Kilday" <acnasvers at hotmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2001 4:29 PM

[snip]
> Heb. <ko:pher> lit. 'covering' (also
> 'village', 'pitch', 'ransom') was applied. The resemblance between this and
> <go:pher> seems fortuitous.

[snip]
> DGK

[Ed Selleslagh]
It doesn't look so fortuitious to me: pitch is also used to impermeate walls or
roofs (also in Antiquity, e.g. in (Semitic) Babylonia, according to a Latin
writer I once read), and is thus a 'covering'.

Villages consist of houses with a roof, and in the oldest villages, you could
walk over the roof from one house to the other (e.g. K?l Tepe), making it
look like 'one' roof; in Mediterranean countries, even today, the roof is often
more of a terrace (Sp. tejado<>techo) than in northern climates. A roof is a
'covering' (Cf. Lat. tectum/tegere).

As to 'ransom' : it 'covers' certain (unwelcome) obligations, doesn't it?

If <ko:pher> can mean 'pitch', and <go:pher> 'sticky stuff', couldn't there be
some semantic link, leading either to convergence of two originally different
words, or to two variants of the same original word?

Ed.


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Jun  1 15:01:24 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 16:01:24 +0100
Subject: Deer and Yellow words
In-Reply-To: <7c.1659b843.2840a917@aol.com>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.160124.0100.>

--On Saturday, May 26, 2001 2:37 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> 2. Based on some good evidence, I have an honest belief that there were no
> independent color words in *PIE.  All such words were similes, metaphors
> or by analogy with particular objects, materials or processes.  As some
> early Classicists pointed out, there was no word for "color" in Homer.
> The idea of independent colors was probably a later invention.  There
> were only very specific colored objects of specific hue to use by
> analogy, along with specific stains and natural pigments, few or none of
> which were modern primary colors.  References to reflected color waves,
> surface textures and brightness were all combined.  (The possible
> exception is the black/brown color word that may have been a modern-style
> color word in the Iliad.)

> Even Berlin & Kay, who I think go much too far in assuming consistency in
> pre-Newtonian color terms, say that Homeric Greek was a mere "3b stage
> level" language, with only four "basic color terms" versus more modern
> languages with as many as 14.  My assumption is that the Greeks were more
> advanced in standardizing color terms than PIE speakers and their
> dispersed immediate descendants.  From the Aegeanet and elsewhere, I've
> help collect large folders of notes over the past two years where serious
> analysts verify again and again that color terms cannot be identified
> with any confidence in Near Eastern and Linaer B texts

I'd like to draw attention to the following article on color terms, which I
suspect is little known, but which deserves to be read by anyone interested
in the topic:

John Lyons (1995), 'Colour in language', in Trevor Lamb and Janine Bourriau
(eds), Color: Art and Science, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 194-224.

After a survey, Lyons reaches a number of conclusions which are broadly
consistent with Steve Long's thinking.  Among his conclusions are these:

1. Color reference is far more prominent in some cultures than in others.

2. Color-term systems are typically more richly developed in languages
having a term for 'color', but are not necessarily absent from languages
lacking such a generic term.

3. In spite of its seeming salience, color is typically far less
universally , and far less richly, embedded in languages than are space,
time, size, shape, and other things.

4. The elaboration of color-term systems is undeniably a product of culture.

5. Many languages lack color terms altogether, as we understand them, but
nevertheless possess a number of strongly context-bound words for labeling
colors.

This article also has some interesting things to say about the troublesome
color terms of ancient Greek.

While I'm here, I might mention two other recent publications on color
terms; the first is probably well-known, while the second may not be:

Anna Wierzbicka (1996), Semantics: Primes and Universals, Oxford: Oxford
UP, ch. 10, 'The meanings of colour terms and the universals of seeing'.

C. L. Hardin and Luisa Maffi (eds) (1997), Color Categories in Thought and
Language, Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

The second contains articles on the linguistics, psychology and physiology
of color.

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  Fri Jun  1 17:26:01 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 12:26:01 -0500
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.122601.0500.>

--On Wednesday, May 23, 2001 11:48 am -0500 "David L. White"
<dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

[from Thomason and Kaufman]

>         Well, I can, on p. 14:  "... any linguistic feature can be
> transferred from any language to any other language."  No restrictions are
> mentioned, and TK consistently fail to note that not everything that could
> conceivably occur actually does.

LT:  Ah, I see.  But this statement seems very different from the position you
imputed to T and K: "Anything goes."  This quote plainly does not say that
anything can happen at all, but only that there are no linguistic features
that cannot be borrowed.  Are you aware of any features that cannot be
borrowed?

DLW:  There are apparently no cases of things like 1) singular personal
endings being borrowed without plural personal endings being borrowed, or 2)
past morphemes being borrowed without future morphemes.  Whether TK meant
"anything goes" or not depends on how strong a reading we give to their
statement.  They certainly did not exclude it.  It should be noted that
whether finite verbal morphology gets borowed at all is a matter of
definition, because if it is never mixed, then it could (or could not) be
taken as an indicator of genetic descent.

[on Thomason's agreement that Anglo-Romani is a variety of English]

>         So even the mixed language crowd now admits that a language which
> has grammar from source A and (non-grammatical) lexicon from source B is a
> form of language A?  That is pretty much what I have been saying.

TK: No; this is not at all what Thomason is saying.

DLW:  I am afraid that, given the nature of Anglo-Romani, that is what she
is saying.

TK:  She is saying that Anglo-Romani is a form of English, and no more. She is
not conceding or asserting any general point at all.  And it seems quite clear
that, in other cases, such as that of Laha, she concludes that a language with
grammar from source A but lexis from source B is in fact a variety of B.

DLW:  Which just goes to show that she has no clear standard, and might as
well be tossing coins.

LT:  By the way, I am troubled by this seemingly dismissive expression "the
mixed-language crowd".  Are you suggesting that no mixed languages can
exist at all?

DLW:  Yes, if the evidence in TK is all there is to support the idea.  But
recall that I have always held open the possibility that mixed languages do
exist.  I just said I had not yet seen any.  The Greek/Arabic example cited
below seems to be one.  (This example is also mentioned in TK, but the facts
given were, a usual, too vague to enable a critical observer to determine
what was going on.)

LT:  If so, let me ask this: in what respect does Michif fall
short of being a mixed language?  It looks to me like a paradigm case of a
mixed language.  If we encountered, or imagined, a real mixed language,
what features would it have that Michif lacks?

DLW:  The finite verbal morphology of Michif is all Cree.  Therefore, by the
Davidian standard, it is Cree.  That also answers the scond question.

>> [on my example of Takia, which has retained Austronesian morphemes but
>> borrowed grammatical patterns wholesale from the Papuan language Waskia]

>>>         It is Austronesian, and not much of a puzzle, except for TK, who
>>> must try to figure out, without any very clear standard, whether it is
>>> 1) Austronesian, 2) Papuan, or 3) a new "mixed" language.

[LT]

>> First, why is it Austronesian?  By what criterion does the origin of
>> morphemes wholly outweight the origin of morphological patterns?  Isn't
>> this rather arbitrary?

>         Categories can be transferred rather easily.  We do not call Old
> Lithuanian a mixed langage between Baltic and Finnic, or a form of Finnic,
> merely because it created (if I am remembering correctly) an allative.
> All this means is that the language was evidently imposed on a large
> number of Finnic speakers at some point.  (That there is substantial
> Finnic or Uralic sub-stratal influence in Baltic and Slavic is asserted
> by TK, by the way, though I do not recall that they mention this
> partiuclar example.)  Mere borrowing of categories does not affect
> genetic descent.

LT:  But the Takia case is not similar to that of Lithuanian.  Takia has not
merely acquired a single new grammatical form by contact:

DLW:  Old Lithuanian did not borrow a single new grammatical form.  A
re-read of the relevant section of TK, which does in fact treat this matter,
is advised.  Otherwise, the case for declaring Lithuanian a mixed language
will turn out to be distressingly strong.

That is the problem (or one of them) with TK's approach: it (mixing
metaphors more than a little bit) opens the Pandora's Box to sliding down
the slippery slope of declaring all cases of significant external influence
cases of language mixture.  Things like the current "No Proto" movement,
which you quite right decry, are the inevitable result.  TK's idea seems to
be that it takes "a lot" of external influence before a language can be
declared mixed, but how much is "a lot".  There are, predictably enough,
intermediate cases.

It is ironic, by the way, that TK should wind up in effect declaring that
all cases if significant external influence are cases of language mixture,
for they quite rightly heap scorn upon earlier attempts to regard all cases
of significant external influence as "creolization".  Substituting "language
mixture" for "creolizaton" is not progress:  it just lands us in the same
conceptual swamp under a new (and newly trendy) name.

LT:  instead, it has
imported the *entirety* of the Waskia morphological system, leaving behind
no original Takia morphological patterns at all.  In a strong sense, it has
imported the entire verbal (and nominal) morphology of Waskia, even though
it has not borrowed any morphemes.  Does this not make a very big
difference?

DLW:  Not really, no.  For L2 language learners to model L2 on L1 as much as
they can get away with is commonplace.  For (hypothetical) example, English
high-school learners of German who used natural gender, made all clauses
verb-medial, ignored final devoicing, etc., would still have to considered
as speaking German, however badly, because what they said would be
comprehensible as German, not as English.  The severity of influence does
not matter, unless we enjoy slipping down slopes, not to mention tossing
coins.

LT:  Consider a similar but hypothetical case.  Suppose English-Navaho
bilinguals were to create a new speech variety, consisting wholly of
English morphemes arranged wholly in Navaho grammatical patterns, with
Navaho grammatical distinctions but not English ones, and the long Navaho
sequences of morphemes but no English sequences.  By your reasoning, the
result would be clearly a form of English and not a form of Navaho.  Is
this reasonable?

DLW:  Obviously it is to me, or I would not have proposed it.  Foreign
accents (in all apsects) can occasionally be severe enough to preclude
native understanding, but this does not affect genetic descent.  Indian
English, for example, is often difficult or impossible for non-Indians to
understand, but this does not render it not English.

>> Second, why is it incumbent upon T and K to classify Takia, or any
>> language, in such a rigorous way?  Why aren't they free to decide "none
>> of the above"?

>         What would "none of the above be"?  The three possibilities given
> above exhaust those that are reasonable.

LT:  The missing possibility is this: it makes little sense to ask the question
in the first place.  It may well be that rigid categorization is not
appropriate for (some) mixed languages.  The choice among asserting that Takia
"is" Austronesian, or "is" Papuan, or "is" neither may simply be inadequate to
capture linguistic reality.

DLW:  Possibly, but I see not reason to believe it in this case.  If the
finite verbal morphology (morphemes, not categories) is Takia, it is Takia.
That may well seem arbitrary, but it is not.  Verbs are more basic than
nouns, and what is more basic is more indicative of descent.  For English,
it is easy to demonstrate this by considering the following sentence:

 The tanks crossing the bridge was/were not ideal.

 With "were", this is a statement (improbable as it may be) about the tanks.
With "were", it is a statement about the proposition in general.  In the
more normal reading, with "was", it is easy to see that the verb agrees with
"crossing", not with "tanks", and that therefore "crossing" is the head of
the NP. (Not to mention being a gerund, not a participle.)  If it is the
head of the NP, it is reasonable to suppose that it is also in some sense
the head of the corresponding sentence "The tanks crossed the bridge".  We
may also note that things that might be held to apply to an entire
proposition, like negation, are typically attached to or associated with
verbs, and that though there is a type of language, polysynthetic, in which
the verb and its mandatorily associated elements form a complete sentence,
there is no corresponding type of language where the subject noun and its
mandatorily associated elements form a complete sentence.  Thus upon
examination it is not arbitrary to regard vebal morphology as more basic
than nominal morphology.

 Consider the alternative:  if it is true that mixed nominal morphologies
occur but mixed (finite) verbal morphologies do not, this should be
explained, but how?  The Chomskyite "solution", no doubt, would be simply to
declare this an arbitrary "aspect of Universal Grammar", presumably coded
for by one of those many "grammar genes", the possession of which exalts us
above lower creation (thus repairing to some limited extent the damage done
to our collective self-esteem by Darwin).  In other words, declare victory
and go home.   Does this really get us anywhere?  I don't think so.

LT:  We've just had the census here in Britain.  The census form tries
desperately to classify every individual into one ethnic group or another.
But not everybody fits very well.  What ethnic group does Tiger Woods
belong to?  In fact, I understand, Mr. Woods, who clearly has a sense of
humor, has invented a new ethnic group for himself -- an ethnic group of
which he is possibly the only member.

Why should languages be simpler than people?

DLW:  Mis-formed question, does not compute.  Linguistic descent is only
vaguely and very abstractly relatable to genetic descent.

> And since when is the equivalent
> of a mental coin toss to be preferred to a clear standard?

LT:  No one is proposing a coin toss.

DLW:  In the absence of a clear standard, and in the presence of
intermediate cases, they might as well be.

LT:  Anyway, what is the value of having "a
clear standard" if that standard forces us into conclusions which fly in
the face of the facts?

DLW: Facts like what?

LT:  You have picked verbal morphology as your standard,
and now you have further selected the etymology of morphemes in preference
to the origin of morphological patterns.  All those seems wholly arbitrary
to me, and in no way to be preferred to any other arbitrary criterion.

DLW:  Reasons that neither is arbitrary have been given above.

But now consider another case discussed by Thomason: Kormakiti Arabic.
This variety is the mother tongue of the people in one village in Cyprus.
It is descended from the Arabic brought to the island in the twelfth
century.  It consists of a complex mixture of Arabic and Cypriot Greek.
The lexicon, based on a sample, is about 62% Arabic and 38% Greek, with the
Greek component including many items of basic vocabulary.  Arabic words are
built from Arabic phonemes and take Arabic morphology and phrasal syntax.
Greek words are built from Greek phonemes and take Greek morphology and
phrasal syntax.  Phrases are combined into sentences by rules which are a
mixture of Arabic and Greek.

So, in this language, Arabic verbs take Arabic verbal morphology, while
Greek verbs take Greek verbal morphology.  What does your "clear standard"
say about this case?

DLW:  That it is, if the facts are in order, a true mixed language.  But
note that even here the mixed verbal morphology is mixed according to the
origin of the verb, and does not involve a true across the board mixture. We
see nothing like Arabic third person endings and Greek 1st and 2nd person
endings.
>> Therefore, using David White's criterion, Laha has changed from being a
>> language entirely distinct from Malay to a mere variety of Malay.

>         If the fantasy scenario envisaged above is to be taken as a fact.

LT:  Who says this is "a fantasy scenario"?  The investigator has looked
carefully at Laha and concluded that it arose by massive replacement of the
original Laha grammar by Malay grammar.  Why does this unremarkable
conclusion bother you so much?

DLW:  Are the posited intermeidate stages attested?  If not, the term
"fantasy scenario", though a little harsh, is not unjustified.  More
critically, the whole case is in fact circular, for what Thomason asserts is
that if her view of how languages mix, apparently shared by Collins, is
correct, then her view of how languages mix is correct.  No kidding.

>> So, the possible conclusions:

>> (1) The speech variety called 'Laha' has indeed changed from being one
>> language to being another.

>> (2) Laha has always been, and remains, a language distinct from Malay,
>> even though it has imported almost the entirety of Malay grammar.

>         It is a language distinct from Malay but descended from Malay.
> Sudden re-lexification, as probably happened in both Anglo-Romani and
> Mednyj Aleut, can create this.

How do you know there was "sudden relexification"?  Isn't this just another
"fantasy scenario"?

For Laha, yes, but it is no longer disputed for Anglo-Romani.  Since
Thomason has changed her mind about this case, which in TK was presented as
if proof positive of language mixture, I suppose that the linguistic
equivalent of a doctrine of papal infallibilility is not to be applied.

> Such developments are unusual and should
> be recognized as distinct from the more normal sort of genetic descent,
> where mutual intelligibility across generations always exists, but, as
> Thomason in effect admits in her interpretation of Anglo-Romani, do not
> constitute non-genetic descent.

LT:  Now you are proposing that a language can arise so suddenly that there
is no mutual comprehensibility across generations?  This strikes you as more
plausible than gradual regrammaticalization?  Whew.

DLW:  What happened in Anglo-Romani?  Abrupt re-lexification created a form
of English that was not mutually comprehensible with other English.  More
technically, within the small world of the English Gypsies mutual
comprehensibility across generations did exist (lets not exaggerate), but
was made possible only by bilingualism.  I am not proposing that a situation
existed where parents and children could not understand each other.  With
regard to "gradual regrammaticalization", I have stressed above that the
presumed intermediate stages of mixed finite verbal morphology do not exist.

>> (3) Collins and Thomason are completely wrong in their interpretation,
>> and Laha must have had some other origin.

>         Probably.  If piecemeal borrowing of parts verbal morhpology,
>         which would seem to be possible under Thomason's scenario, is
> possible, we should (hopefully) be able to find some examples of the
> process caught in the act, resulting in mixed verbal morphology.  Unless
> Laha is one (and so far I have seen no evidence to show that it is), I
> can still assert that there are not any.

LT:  All right -- Kormakiti Arabic, then.

DLW:  This has been treated above.  Though it is an example of a mixed
language, it is not an example of mixed borrowing of finite verbal
morphology.

>         The scenario envisaged by Collins and Thomason is just that:  a
> scenario envisaged.  It is not a fact.  I would need to know what the "few
> bits of Laha grammar" are.  If they involve finite verbal morphology, then
> what I have been saying is wrong.  (Though pointing out that TK's examples
> did not in fact show this would still hardly be an outrage.)  If they
> involve nominal morphology, derivational or non-finite verbal morphology,
> or (worse yet) mere categories, then what I have been saying is not wrong.

LT:  I regret that I can't answer this, since Thomason doesn't provide that
much detail, and since our library doesn't take the journal in which Collins's
article appears.  However, I'm intrigued about this case now, so I'll see if I
can find out.  Unfortunately, I am now buried in the annual ordeal of exam
marking, so I won't be doing anything quickly.

DLW:  Obviously we need more real facts here.

> Malay, by the way, is by typology if not history a semi-creole, so I would
> also like to know what the parts of "Malay grammar" that have supposedly
> been imported supposedy are.

LT:  To be honest, I can't see why this is relevant.

DLW:  Well I can.  If Malay has no finite verbal morphology, then looking
for signs of it in Laha is obviously pointless, and Laha cannot possibly
provide counter-evidence to my main assertion, which has always been not
that mixed languages do not exist, but that mixed borrowing of finite verbal
morphologies does not occur.  (And that this can be used to trace genetic
descent.)

To back up a bit, my main point is that the genetic descent of any given
language is to be traced through the frame morphemes.  This is, after all,
how we demonrate to the na?ve natives that Englsh is not a Romance language:
the Romance words are always in a Germanic frame.  In situations where
external influences are more severe, the frame can be accordingly reduced.
The bare minimum that it is reduced to is finite verbal morphology, for this
is what is most basic to the sentence frame.  For example, if we say
"Revision necessitates significant re-conceptualization", the only thing
Germanic in there is the third person singular /-s/.  Not a coincidence.

Dr. David L. White


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Fri Jun  1 18:13:24 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 13:13:24 -0500
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.131324.0500.>

Dear Rich and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rich Alderson" <alderson+mail at panix.com>
Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2001 11:12 AM

> On 24 May 2001, Pat Ryan wrote:

>> 1. the opinion was expressed that the root should properly be reconstructed
>> as *g^enH(1)- rather than *g^en-; is this a majority opinion?

> Yes.  Its appearance in Sanskrit as _ja:-_ ~ _jani-_ and in Greek as _gene-_
> require it.

[PCR]
So they do, which I have never doubted.

Are you also asserting that, therefore, there is
no *g^en-?

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 Jun  1 18:16:00 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 13:16:00 -0500
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.131600.0500.>

Dear Pete and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "petegray" <petegray at btinternet.com>
Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2001 1:57 PM

>> 1. the opinion was expressed that the root should properly be reconstructed
>> as *g^enH(1)- rather than *g^en-; is this a majority opinion?

> Absolutely.  The laryngeal (h1) is very well established.
>   (a) set. (i.e. not anit) forms exist in Sanskrit:  janitos, janitvi, etc;
> janisyati etc;
>   (b) non-lengthening in Sanskrit causative:  janayati (suggests a closed
> syllable, *genH-eye-ti.   Likewise the desiderative jijanis.ate.
>    (c) Forms with syllabic n (zero grade before consonant) show reflexes in
> Sanskrit of long syllabic n, which implies nh.  eg ja:yate, ja:ta etc.
>   (d) Latin perfect genui (from gigno) is an absolute give-away for a
> laryngeal.

I will ask you the same question I asked Rich:

does that, in your opinion, mean there was no *g^en-?

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 philjennings at juno.com  Fri Jun  1 21:34:09 2001
From: philjennings at juno.com (philjennings at juno.com)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 16:34:09 -0500
Subject: European Genetics/IE
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.163409.0500.>

My fondness for half-assed pronunciamentos has served me well, as I grow
educated thanks to the kindly and informative rebuttals of people like
JoatSimeon and Steve Long.  I have read the two papers that Steve Long
mentioned a few steps back along this topic and now realize that the same
genetic information can be used to argue that the neolithic Anatolian-
farmer contribution to the European gene pool amounts to (1) ten percent
and (2) two-thirds.  Since experts draw such varied conclusions from the
same body of data, perhaps we're not yet ready to use their findings in
support of one origins-theory or the other.  My inclination, therefore, is to
take back much of what I've said recently on this topic.  Someone better
equipped than I to sort among genetics papers may return to enlighten us
all, and I will be very interested when that happens.

I find the JoatSimeon emails very interesting, esp. the one regarding
memes and their reproduction/progression from phratry A through
bruderbund Z.  I would guess that linguistic rate-of-change would be at a

maximum during the process he describes.  How could it be otherwise?
Yet the end result consists of IE daughter dialects still mutually
intelligible
in many cases.  Could we possibly agree that before this process began,
when PIE was a genetic language (comparatively unexposed to outside
factors) rather than a radical way-of-life language, it may have loitered

along at a much slower rate of change?  And this must have been
s-l-o-o-o-w indeed, given that even during the meme-transmission era,
battle-axes and such, the rate of change doesn't seem to have been all
that fast.  Warp two versus warp one.  Warp three during the iron age
and into classical times?  Warp four thereafter until the spread of
nation-
states and printing-press literacy?

(Things get clouded afterward.  Linguistic innovations bring languages and
cultures together as much as they set them apart, we get meldings and
French Academies as well as schisms.)

I am still curious whether any proto-language requiring reconstruction, has
ever been reconstructed as a creole?  Not PIE, JoatSimeon says, but what about
proto-Sino-Tibetan, or proto-Dravidian, or any of the other protoi?  Because if
the answer is a universal no, is that really likely?  The world must have been
a different kind of place than it is now.  But that's the idea I'm toying with
in the paragraphs above, with all that talk about "warp factors."  The world
was different, and rates-of-change were slower.


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Jun  2 03:20:54 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 23:20:54 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.232054.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/1/2001 1:34:38 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com writes:
<< -- well, this is a little odd, considering your argument is that a language
spoken in 7000 BCE and spread over three-quarters of Eurasia was still so
undifferentiated in and around 1000 BCE that whole sentences from Celtic,
Italic, Greek, Slavic, Baltic and Indo-Iranian were still mutually
comprehensible.>>

First of all, I still know enough Greek and Latin and heard enough Greek and
Latin a long time ago to know that the two languages were 99.9%
unintelligible to one another.  Except of course for what they overtly
borrowed from one another.

Your "whole sentences" logically prove nothing when those sentences are few
indeed compared to whole languages.  If there were no close resemblances at
all, no one would dare claim that these languages were even related in
anyway.  There has to be some, but there are very very few.

If you compare the actual corpus of what we have in Latin and Greek from
before the current era - and that is hundreds of thousands of sentences -
actual matching sentences are pathetically minuscule, even if you include
clearly borrowed phrases.

<<so undifferentiated in and around 1000 BCE that whole sentences from Celtic,
Italic, Greek, Slavic, Baltic and Indo-Iranian were still mutually
comprehensible.>>

This is the kind of statement that would embarrass any serious scientist.
You have no evidence of what Italic or Slavic or Baltic was like in 1000BC.
To go on and say they were mutually comprehensible is unprovable and
unfortunately typical of the things you write.

<<After 5000 years and 7000 miles of separation.>>

We've been through this before.  You have never given any rational measure of
rate of language change.  I don't believe there can be any real certainty
about the rate of change among the IE languages.  I respect the opinions of
real linguists on this list regarding their insights about such things, but I
must note that there has been differences in the past between qualified
opinions.

An objective observer would have to conclude this is something not yet
solvable scientifically.  And it is something about which reasonable persons
may differ.  Reasonably.

You normally compare "cognates" and an isolated (typically religious) phrase
to show how "close" the IE languages are.  I've been reading up on the work
of the Australian linguists and there was something relevant to all this
mentioned by Harold Koch at ANU.  He wrote the following regarding work where
the comparative method had been used to reconstruct languages in various
parts of Australia [Western Australia (O'Grady 1966, Austin 1981), Cape York
Peninsula (Hale 1964, Sutton 1976, Black 1980, Dixon 1991), New England
(Crowley 1976 and This volume), and Central Australia (Koch )]:

----"In many of these cases, certain languages had undergone radical sound
changes while close relatives remained unchanged. Thus the proto-forms for a
subgroup often turn out to be identical to forms surviving intact in other
languages of the subgroup." (from "Comparative linguistics and Australian
prehistory" in "Understanding ancient Australia: perspectives from
archaeology and linguistics." Melbourne: Oxford University Press (1997))

To my surprise, I was told the time of separation between some of those
related language subgroups were estimated as being as much as 3000 years or
more.

This would be equivalent (given a final dispersal date of 4500BC for PIE or
*PIE) to a language containing duplicate of PIE forms co-existing along side
of, say, Mycenaean in 1500BC.  How is it possible to be confident about
estimating rate of change considering such information?

<<Or are words uncannily stable when it suits your argument, but change like
bandits when that's convenient? >>

No.  And I know you know what I'm talking about.

Meanings can change radically.  Phonology seems to be a very different story.

Regards,
Steve Long


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Jun  1 15:05:28 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 16:05:28 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <l03130322b735c0ac564b@[209.147.211.33]>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.160528.0100.>

--On Saturday, May 26, 2001 3:22 pm -0500 Rick Mc Callister
<rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu> wrote:

[quoting]

>> English speakers
>> have no trouble with names like Vladivostock or words like zloty.

> I don't know about that. Most Americans pronounce zloty /zl-/ rather than
> /zw-/

Yes, but the point is that we have no trouble pronouncing /zl-/ in this
word even though this initial cluster occurs in no native or ordinary
words, and perhaps in no word at all apart from this one.  Anyway, the
choice of /zl-/ is determined by the spelling.  We have no trouble with the
alien /zw-/, either: we use this in 'zwiebach' and in the chemical term
'zwitterion',
even though the German originals have /tsv-/.

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 connolly at memphis.edu  Fri Jun  1 15:54:29 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 10:54:29 -0500
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.105429.0500.>

Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Leo A. Connolly" <connolly at memphis.edu>
> Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2001 6:04 PM

>> ERobert52 at aol.com wrote:

>>> In a message dated 20/05/01 10:35:02 GMT Daylight Time,
>>> connolly at memphis.edu writes:

>>> [referring to [c,] and [x] in German]

>> I checked in the Duden Aussprachew?rterbuch of 1962 and found Chaldi
>> [xaldi], Chalid [xali:t], Chalil [xali:l], and Charga [xarga], all with [x-]
>> rather than [?], while Chamaphyte [?amEfy:t] (!), Cham?zephalie
>> [?amEtsefali:], Chasma [?asma] with [?].  I also found Chatte
>> ([?at@] beside [kat@]) but Chatti [xati].  So no, if these pronunciations
>> are factually correct, your rule doesn't work.  It would in any event be
>> very strange for the pronunciation of a consonant in a Germanic language to
>> be determined by a noncontiguous consonant.

>> Leo Connolly

> [Ed Selleslagh]

> All these are 'foreign' words. It looks like German tries to
> imitate/approximate the original sound: [x] e.g. in (Arabic and oriental)
> Chalid, Chalil, and [?] e.g. in words perceived to be French or introduced
> via French ( for [S]). I think the choice between [?] and [x] , or the
> choice for following the general rule ([?] with front vowels) or not, is
> mainly determined by a word's history. Note that <ch> is often pronounced
> [k], also historically determined.

Oh, indeed they are foreign.  It's only in Schwyzer D??tsch that we find
initial [x] in native words, and no variety has initial [?] in them.
But that's beside the point.  If Duden's pronunciations are factually
correct -- a rather large assumption -- then [x] and [?] do contrast in
initial position and must therefore be assigned to different phonemes.
Unless we want to say that foreign words *as foreign* have a different
set of phonemes than native ones, quod Deus avertat. -- I would note,
BTW, that Swiss German lacks [?] completely, so that whatever analysis
of standard German proves correct, Swiss has only one phoneme, viz. /x/.

Leo Connolly


From lmfosse at online.no  Fri Jun  1 15:03:16 2001
From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 17:03:16 +0200
Subject: SV: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.170316.0200.>

petegray [SMTP:petegray at btinternet.com] skrev 26. mai 2001 20:43:
> be very quaint, if understood at all.  It also contains words such as:
>    Bayard
>    hoodman-blind
>    kinnikinic
>    kinkajou
>    kino
>    kintal
>    rahat lakoum
>    raff
>    sleuth-hound
>    ubiety
>    xoanon   etc.

Have you any way of supplying us with meanings? I am an Indologist, and I
hardly understand a word of this. However, "ubiety" sound like a word to
have fun with. ("Have you seen my ubiety", "what in ubiety is that supposed
to mean", "did you remember your ubieties" etc.

Lars Martin Fosse

Dr. art. Lars Martin Fosse
Haugerudvn. 76, Leil. 114,
0674 Oslo
Norway
Phone: +47 22 32 12 19
Mobile phone: +47 90 91 91 45
Fax 1:  +47 22 32 12 19
Fax 2:  +47 85 02 12 50 (InFax)
Email: lmfosse at online.no


From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com  Fri Jun  1 18:18:57 2001
From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 14:18:57 -0400
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <004201c0e618$3714fda0$e45f073e@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.141857.0400.>

I won't comment on the others, but <kinkajou> is the ordinary
vernacular English name for the Meso- and South American
mammal _Potos flavus_.  It's in the 6th edition (1999) of _Walker's
Mammals of the World_, a standard zoological reference, and in all
four of the competing American 1-vol. desk dictionaries I've
checked (Merriam-Webster, Random House, Webster's New
World, American Heritage).  Etymology is curious--a
misapplication of a North American French word for the wolverine,
borrowed from Algonquian languages.

Jim Rader

> Undoubtedly true, but wastage still occurs.  My copy of the Concise Oxford
> of 1911, 3rd edition 1934, contains many Anglo-Indian words which would now
> be very quaint, if understood at all.  It also contains words such as:
>    Bayard
>    hoodman-blind
>    kinnikinic
>    kinkajou
>    kino
>    kintal
>    rahat lakoum
>    raff
>    sleuth-hound
>    ubiety
>    xoanon   etc.
> I have no way of checking if these are in the modern editions, but I don't
> mind guessing that many of them are not.

> Peter


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Fri Jun  1 21:24:18 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 16:24:18 -0500
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <004201c0e618$3714fda0$e45f073e@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.162418.0500.>

	kinnikkinnik, kinnickkinnick, etc. --a type of smoking mixture, is
from a North American Indian language. I think it's Algonquin. Unless, of
course, there was a homonym in Anglo-(Asian) Indian

[snip]
>Undoubtedly true, but wastage still occurs.  My copy of the Concise Oxford
>of 1911, 3rd edition 1934, contains many Anglo-Indian words which would now
>be very quaint, if understood at all.  It also contains words such as:
>   Bayard
>   hoodman-blind
>   kinnikinic
>   kinkajou
>   kino
>   kintal
>   rahat lakoum
>   raff
>   sleuth-hound
>   ubiety
>   xoanon   etc.
>I have no way of checking if these are in the modern editions, but I don't
>mind guessing that many of them are not.

>Peter

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sat Jun  2 16:29:23 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2001 17:29:23 +0100
Subject: thy thigh, etc. (external sandhi in English)
Message-ID: <SAT.2.JUN.2001.172923.0100.>

Quite how we got onto biology I don't know, but while we're there, can I ask
when cattle began to be fed hay?   In some countries even more blessed by
nature, there is no period when cattle have to be fed hay - the grass grows
in winter.   So if we are projecting hay-feeding back into PIE times, where
is the evidence for it?

Peter

> As regards the farting of the bucks, in springtime the diet of herbivores
> changes with the coming of new grass.  You will probably notice (if you
> are a milk drinker) that suddenly the flavor makes a switch when the cows go
> off hay and out into pasture.  As with any dietary change, the colon takes
> time to adjust, and during the transition, unpleasant phenomena are noticed.

> One of the proofs of the benignity of nature is that by the time the ground
> is dry and you have to yoke your oxen to the plow, this transition period has
> run its course.

> I'm sure with deer the farting is not uncommonly loud, although any sound
> at all would be worth notice.  Deer are remarkably silent.


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sat Jun  2 16:32:49 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2001 17:32:49 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc. (external sandhi in English)
Message-ID: <SAT.2.JUN.2001.173249.0100.>

>> English speakers
>> have no trouble with names like Vladivostock or words like zloty.

> I don't know about that. Most Americans pronounce zloty /zl-/ rather than
> /zw-/

We were talking about initial fricative + /l/, and I offered the English
pronunciation of zloty as an example.  The "proper" pronunciation is not
relevant - my point is that English speakers have no trouble pronouncing
/zlOti:/, so the combination /zl-/, although not found in English words, is
not impossible for an English speaker.

Peter


From dlwhite at texas.net  Fri Jun  1 17:35:51 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 12:35:51 -0500
Subject: Phonemes of New York Dialect
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.123551.0500.>

----- Original Message -----
From: Leo A. Connolly <connolly at memphis.edu>
Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2001 8:41 PM

> Sombody wrote:

>>> An example that I am very familiar with concerns the tensing and raising of
>>> [ae] (that is "ash") in the New York City area.  ...

> David White replied:

>> Perhaps I am missing something here (other than the opportunity for more
>> dutiful slogging), but it seems to me that the facts may be acounted for if
>> we posit 1) that tensing/raising always occurs before two moraic consonants
>> (as in "can't, presumably even under high stress), and 2) that otherwise
>> tensing/raising occurs before one moraic consonant (save voiceless plosives)
>> in words of middling stress ("can", unlike "can't", always has either high
>> or low stress, or so it seems to me).  (The second phenomenon might happen
>> because words of high stress tend to have a sort of circumflex tone, which
>> in its end part, the part that is relevant when we are dealing with
>> following consonants, is similar to un-stress.  Thus high and low stress
>> might pattern together, against middling stress.)  Under this scenario,
>> agentive "adder" would have to be syllabified as /aed.R/ (or whatever /R/ is
>> in this dialect), as opposed to /ae.dR/.  This is a bit odd, but I do not
>> see any way around it, if a remotely unified account is to be attempted.
>> The question is whether such a syllabification is permitted.

> This solution seems wrong, since with the sole exception of non-standard
> _yeah_, raised and tensed [E:] and normal [ae] both occur only in closed
> syllables.  Neither do I see what morae have to do with it.

        Since every word that ends with a consonant ends with a moraic
consonants, bringing moras in permits a unified account.

> Stress?  Maybe, since it is contrastive stressing of the normally unstressed
> modal that underlies such forms as _if I [kaen]_ ('am able') beside _if I
> [kE:n] (put up tomatoes).  A neat minimal pair, that,. since the stresses on
> the two forms are equal.

        If the two "can"s contrast under high stress, then they are indeed a
minimal pair.  I do not know how any other interpretation could be taken.
But I also do not know if they do.  Beyond all this, there is the question
of how the contrast ever arose (what was going on the pre-phonemic phase),
and here I think moras are unavoidable.

Dr. David L. White


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Fri Jun  1 18:41:51 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 13:41:51 -0500
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.134151.0500.>

Dear Bob and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Whiting" <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2001 10:15 AM

> On Mon, 21 May 2001, Larry Trask wrote:

>> --On Thursday, May 17, 2001 2:17 pm +0300 Robert Whiting
>> <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:

>>> I'm perfectly happy to accept 'thy' as a ModE word.  But
>>> 'thigh' and 'thy' are as perfect a minimal pair as German
>>> 'Kuhchen' and 'Kuchen' or 'Tauchen' and Kuchen'.

<snip>

[PCR]
A very impressive argument, one ro which I subscribe, and not the least
impaired by the following small inaccuracy.

> Otherwise, <dh> usually represent the phryngeal [d.] (sometimes referred to
> as "emphatic") in Arabic transcription, as in the place name 'Riyadh'.

[PCR]
In my experience, /dh/ (dha:l) is never used to represent Arabic emphatic /d./
(d.a:d). They are two separate sounds and letters. Riyadh has dha:l.

<snip>

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  Fri Jun  1 20:31:18 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 22:31:18 +0200
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.223118.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Whiting" <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2001 5:15 PM

> Now for the interesting part.  The Latin alphabet did not have a
> sign for the [w] sound (mostly because it disappeared from Greek)
> and used the <u/v> graph instead.

[Ed Selleslagh]
I doubt that: the Romans didn't have the English v-sound, and the letter u
(written as v) was used as a semi-vowel close to w, or as a vowel. So they
didn't need an extra letter to transcribe Greek wau, if they had had to.

They did introduce Greek z and y [?] in their alphabet, because these sounds
didn't exist in Latin. Other letters were assimilated to existing Latin ones,
like eta > (long) e:, or represented by combinations like ch, th, ph resulting
in approximately the same sound.

BTW, the Greeks had their own problems with transcription of Latin: I think it
was in Delphi (or was it Olympia - now Olimb?a - ?) where I saw AKOAI on an
ancient bath house, for Latin AQUAE.

> Much later, the medieval Norman scribes began writing the u/v graph doubled
> (uu/vv) to indicate the English [w] sound because they were unfamiliar with
> the English letter wyn or wen.  This Norman double-u (or to the French,
> double-vay) became the normal sign for the [w] sound and once again, this is
> the only letter whose name reflects its shape rather than its sound.
> Outrageous coincidence that the old <w> and the new <w> are the only letters
> in their alphabets named for their shapes?
> <snip>
> Bob Whiting

[Ed]
For your information: in Dutch, w is called 'we', pr. like Eng. 'way' (some
Dutchmen will say 'vay').

And Double-U (pr. Dub'ya) is still another thing, nothing to do with its shape
either :-)

Ed.


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Sun Jun  3 07:10:18 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2001 07:10:18 -0000
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
Message-ID: <SUN.3.JUN.2001.071018.0000.>

Robert Whiting (29 May 2001) wrote:

>Now for the interesting part.  The Latin alphabet did not have a
>sign for the [w] sound (mostly because it disappeared from Greek)
>and used the <u/v> graph instead.  Much later, the medieval
>Norman scribes began writing the u/v graph doubled (uu/vv) to
>indicate the English [w] sound because they were unfamiliar with
>the English letter wyn or wen.  This Norman double-u (or to the
>French, double-vay) became the normal sign for the [w] sound and
>once again, this is the only letter whose name reflects its shape
>rather than its sound.  Outrageous coincidence that the old <w>
>and the new <w> are the only letters in their alphabets named for
>their shapes?  Not really -- if the [w] sound hadn't disappeared
>from Greek, the letter would probably have made its way into the
>Latin, and thence into the English alphabet with a name
>reflecting its sound and wouldn't have had to be reinvented.
>What it shows is that what goes around, comes around.

What goes around may also take a "disastrously wrong turn". The Greek letter
for [w] _did_ make its way into Latin as the letter F, and the loss of [w]
from the Attic and Ionic dialects has nothing to do with it. The Italian
alphabets are derived from the Chalcidian, whose dialect retained [w]. The
key player here is [f], which occurred in Etruscan and the IE Italic
languages, but not in ancient Greek. Early Archaic Etruscan used the digraph
FH or HF (transcribed <vh>, <hv>) for this sound. Late Arch. Etr. introduced
the symbol 8, which superseded the digraph for writing [f]. By this time,
the Latins of Praeneste had acquired the alphabet from Etruscans, including
the convention of writing FH for [f]. As the Latin alphabet went its
separate way, FH was reduced to F, and the less common usage of F for [w]
was replaced by V, which now stood for [u] or [w] in Latin.

As for W being the only (English) letter whose "name reflects its shape
rather than its sound", what about H? The etymology of ModE <aitch> is
disputed, but derivation from MFr or OFr <hache> is hardly questioned, and
this word also means 'battle-axe'. It seems better IMHO to posit naming the
letter in OFr on the basis of resemblance to the double blade of a
battle-axe, rather than referring it to an unattestable VL *hacca or *accha,
supposedly invented out of nothing to exemplify the former sound of a silent
letter (among illiterates).

DGK


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Fri Jun  1 21:33:40 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 16:33:40 -0500
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <177041807.3200291392@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.163340.0500.>

/da:k at rti:/ is common in the Northeast, i.e. where more recent arrivals
from Ireland are found
but /do:@rti:/ & /dorti:/ are more common elsewhere in the US --where the
most common spellings are Doherty and Dougherty

[snip]

>I've just checked the pronunciations of a couple more of these troublesome
>Irish names in John Wells's pronouncing dictionary.  For 'Docherty', Wells
>gives the pronunciation with [x] (a velar fricative) as usual in Britain,
>and the pronunciation with /k/ as usual in the US and not uncommon in
>Britain, but he doesn't recognize a variant with /h/, even though I'm
>pretty sure I've heard this on occasion.  I use [x], just as I do in
>'Bach'.
[snip]
> Do any of you Yanks out there *really*
>pronounce an /h/ in 'vehicle'?

	Only when I'm plowing the back forty ;p

>Larry Trask

[ moderator snip ]

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From connolly at memphis.edu  Fri Jun  1 21:57:27 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 16:57:27 -0500
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <FRI.1.JUN.2001.165727.0500.>

Larry Trask wrote:

> Incidentally, I've just noticed that John Wells reports that 33% of his
> American panel preferred the pronunciation of 'vehicle' with /h/, and a
> further five percent actually put the main stress on the second syllable.
> Sheesh.  Either John is using a remarkably catholic panel, or something has
> happened here since I left home.  Do any of you Yanks out there *really*
> pronounce an /h/ in 'vehicle'?

Lord knows I don't, but I live in Memphis, and Lord knows, the majority
of the folks here think it's quite the elegant thing to do.  But it's
the first syllable that has primary stress, though the second has a
strong secondary stress.  For some speakers, the effect is like the
classic southern American accent retraction seen in "U-nited States" and
"PO-lice". But in my native New Jersey, there is no [h] in the word.

Leo Connolly


From alrivera at southern.edu  Sat Jun  2 12:58:39 2001
From: alrivera at southern.edu (Muke Tever)
Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2001 08:58:39 -0400
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <SAT.2.JUN.2001.085839.0400.>

From: "Robert Whiting" <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
> And no English speaker who doesn't speak Arabic would ever pronounce
> 'dhal' with [D] unless he looked it up in the dictionary.  It would
> simply be pronounced with [d] because that is how English <dh> in
> initial position is reallized.

That, by the way, is a rule I was never taught.  I always had the spelling
pronunciation [D] for <dh> words before I learned about Sanskrit.  (It took
me a while to link [dArm@] with <dharma>...)  Even now I still have
dental/interdental [d] in those words (instead of the regular alveolar or
whatever), and in words like <dhole>, the [D] still persists.


From mclasutt at brigham.net  Sat Jun  2 18:50:15 2001
From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin)
Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2001 12:50:15 -0600
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <l03130321b735bf680a3c@[209.147.211.33]>
Message-ID: <SAT.2.JUN.2001.125015.0600.>

[From Rick Mc Callister, giving Larry Trask some Scrabble words]
	Another <dh-> word that should be acceptable in Scrabble is dhole.
Perhaps dhoti

[From me]

Before 'dhole' gets mixed up in the [D]/[T] discussion, 'dhole' is
pronounced with initial [d] (it's from some Indian voiced aspirate), not
[D].

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 RAHammitt at aol.com  Sat Jun  2 19:00:50 2001
From: RAHammitt at aol.com (RAHammitt at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2001 15:00:50 EDT
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <SAT.2.JUN.2001.150050.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/1/2001 2:12:53 PM Central Daylight Time,
larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:

> In my vernacular, even in proper names, I absolutely can't have /h/ before
> schwa or before unstressed /I/.  I might also point out that, in the US,
> the word 'vehicle' is a traditional shibboleth for spotting country
> bumpkins: if you pronounce an /h/ in 'vehicle', you're a bumpkin.  Even the
> folk singer Arlo Guthrie, hardly the personification of cosmopolitan
> sophistication, used this word to great effect on one of his records to
> identify a southern policeman as a bumpkin.  But this pronunciation
> nevertheless forces the presence of a stress on the second syllable, and
> /h/-schwa is still impossible.

> Incidentally, I've just noticed that John Wells reports that 33% of his
> American panel preferred the pronunciation of 'vehicle' with /h/, and a
> further five percent actually put the main stress on the second syllable.
> Sheesh.  Either John is using a remarkably catholic panel, or something has
> happened here since I left home.  Do any of you Yanks out there *really*
> pronounce an /h/ in 'vehicle'?

       Ok, I'll bite.  I was raised in Texas (but have travelled extensively
throughout the eastern half of the U.S.) and have spent as much time with
rural folks ("bumpkins") as I have with urban folks.  I do not pronouce the
h, and I have never heard anyone pronounce the h (except in movies where
someone was portraying "bumpkins").
       Of course, my exposure to the word is limited; the word is just not
used so much anymore.  In its place, people I talk to approximate by using
"car", whether referring to a car, a truck, a van, or any other 4-6 wheeled,
motorized vehicle.
       As for what you said about not tolerating /h/ before schwa, my speech
agrees except with the h in word-initial position.  I pronounce the word
"hull" with a schwa.  That being said, when I add syllables (ending in many
different consonants or vowels) before it in hypothetical words, I keep
dropping the h.

Richard Hammitt


From semartin at pacifier.com  Sun Jun  3 02:59:54 2001
From: semartin at pacifier.com (Sam Martin)
Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2001 19:59:54 -0700
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <177041807.3200291392@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SAT.2.JUN.2001.195954.0700.>

On Larry's inquiry about American speakers and their vehicular
(vee-HICK-y at -l@r) haitchiness:

I have always pronounced "vehicle" as VEE-hick- at l.
The first eighteen years of my life were spent in Kansas.
Since then many words have changed pronunciation in my speech as I
moved around the US, but "vehicle" remains untouched. I have become
familiar with the h-less version; it strikes my ear as remarkably
close to collapsing into VICK- at l.


From g_sandi at hotmail.com  Sun Jun  3 09:21:41 2001
From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi)
Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2001 09:21:41 -0000
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <SUN.3.JUN.2001.092141.0000.>

> From: Robert Whiting <WHITING at CC.HELSINKI.FI>
> Reply-To: Indo-European at xkl.com
> To: <INDO-EUROPEAN at XKL.COM>
> Subject: Re: Return of the minimal pairs
> Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 14:14:06 +0300 (EET DST)

> As for 'duinhewassel', OED seems to have missed this pronunciation,
> although they have the spelling. I wouldn't be surprised that this
> comes from Chamber's which is well known for its Scottish bias. But
> the word is Gaelic in origin where initial [d] and [D] vary depending
> on the phonetic environment (external sandhi). Scots dialects can't
> really be used to define English phonology (otherwise English has to
> have a phoneme [x] as in 'loch' contrasting with 'lock').

I do not know how Scottish Gaelic has entered the discussion, or how it could
have any possible relevance.

In Scottish Gaelic, just as in Irish, the grapheme <dh> is pronounced (insofar
as it is pronounced at all, as quite often it is silent) as the voiced velar
fricative [G] in "broad" environments (i.e. next to written a, o, u), and as
the approximant [j] (like English y in yet) in "slender" environments (i.e.
next to written e, i). If you want a reference, see Mackinnon, R.: Teach
Yourself Gaelic (Hodder &amp; Stoughton, 1971), p.1, and Calder, George: A
Gaelic Grammar (Glasgow: Gairm, 1972), p.60.

The only Celtic language that has kept the voiced interdental fricative [D] is
Welsh, which spells it <dd> . The only Welsh loanword containing this that I
can think of is "eisteddfod" (a congress of Welsh bards, according to the OED).
The OED does say that this is pronounced as /eisteDv at d/ - but I doubt that any
English speaker would pronounce the word like that except when consciously
imitating Welsh.

On the broader issue, I am with you when you wish to exclude marginal, recently
borrowed, words from the analysis of English phonology. What I don't understand
is why you wish to exclude a phoneme because its initial occurrence is limited
to a semantic subclass of words.

Best wishes,
Gabor Sandi


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Jun  4 13:42:26 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 14:42:26 +0100
Subject: Rate of Change
In-Reply-To: <25.161a477f.2849b596@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.144226.0100.>

--On Friday, June 1, 2001 11:20 pm +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

[replying to Joat Simeon, on similarities among early IE languages]

> Your "whole sentences" logically prove nothing when those sentences are
> few indeed compared to whole languages.  If there were no close
> resemblances at all, no one would dare claim that these languages were
> even related in anyway.  There has to be some, but there are very very
> few.

I'm sorry, but I can't agree.  Resemblances, close or otherwise, have
nothing at all to do with comparative linguistics.  The evidence for
genetic relationship consists wholly of systematic correspondences, and
resemblances are irrelevant.  Of course, the presence of resemblances aids
human beings in spotting possible genetic links.  And, in practice,
languages seldom undergo such dramatic phonological changes as to
obliterate resemblances while preserving correspondences.  But, if we did
find a case of this, we could cope with it.

And some of the Australian languages discussed below come tolerably close
to this state of affairs.  Certain of the Pama-Nyungan languages have
undergone such dramatic phonological changes that words in them look very
little like their cognates in related languages that have not undergone
such dramatic changes.  Australianists were at first baffled by the
position of these strange-looking languages, but then Barry Blake -- in an
undergraduate dissertation -- spotted the clear patterns underlying the
superficial absence of resemblances, and the problem languages then proved
to be easily assignable to Pama-Nyungan.  The main casulaty here was our
ideas about possible phonological changes, which took something of a
hammering.

> You normally compare "cognates" and an isolated (typically religious)
> phrase to show how "close" the IE languages are.  I've been reading up on
> the work of the Australian linguists and there was something relevant to
> all this mentioned by Harold Koch at ANU.  He wrote the following
> regarding work where the comparative method had been used to reconstruct
> languages in various parts of Australia [Western Australia (O'Grady 1966,
> Austin 1981), Cape York Peninsula (Hale 1964, Sutton 1976, Black 1980,
> Dixon 1991), New England (Crowley 1976 and This volume), and Central
> Australia (Koch )]:

> ----"In many of these cases, certain languages had undergone radical sound
> changes while close relatives remained unchanged. Thus the proto-forms
> for a subgroup often turn out to be identical to forms surviving intact
> in other languages of the subgroup." (from "Comparative linguistics and
> Australian prehistory" in "Understanding ancient Australia: perspectives
> from archaeology and linguistics." Melbourne: Oxford University Press
> (1997))

I think there may be a misunderstanding here, resulting from Koch's
unfortunate choice of words.  Koch is not, I'm pretty sure, claiming that
certain languages have changed dramatically while other and closely related
languages have not changed *at all*.  Rather, he is only reporting that
some related languages have failed to undergo the rather dramatic changes
observed in their relatives, and that certain *individual* words may remain
unchanged in one language while undergoing dramatic changes of form in a
close relative.

This is hardly new.  Recall Merritt Ruhlen's favorite example: Romanian
<nepot> 'nephew', virtually unchanged from PIE *<nepo:t-> 'nephew'.  But
this is probably the only Romanian word which has remained unchanged since
PIE.

> To my surprise, I was told the time of separation between some of those
> related language subgroups were estimated as being as much as 3000 years
> or more.

I am puzzled by this.  I can find no such statement in Koch's article.
Moreover, Evans and Jones, in an article in the same volume, conclude that
Proto-Pama-Nyungan cannot be assigned a time depth greater than 5000 BP,
and so a figure of 3000 years for the time depth of a rather low-level
branch of the family does not look plausible.

> Meanings can change radically.  Phonology seems to be a very different
> story.

Er -- what?  Phonology can't change radically?  But Koch's very point,
cited above, is that certain Australian languages have undergone such
dramatic changes in phonology that their words no longer even appear to
resemble their cognates in closely related 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 alderson+mail at panix.com  Mon Jun  4 18:30:57 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 14:30:57 -0400
Subject: Rate of Change
In-Reply-To: <25.161a477f.2849b596@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com)
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.143057.0400.>

On 1 Jun 2001, Steve Long wrote:

> I've been reading up on the work of the Australian linguists and there was
> something relevant to all this mentioned by Harold Koch at ANU.  He wrote the
> following regarding work where the comparative method had been used to
> reconstruct languages in various parts of Australia [Western Australia
> (O'Grady 1966, Austin 1981), Cape York Peninsula (Hale 1964, Sutton 1976,
> Black 1980, Dixon 1991), New England (Crowley 1976 and This volume), and
> Central Australia (Koch )]:

> ----"In many of these cases, certain languages had undergone radical sound
> changes while close relatives remained unchanged. Thus the proto-forms for a
> subgroup often turn out to be identical to forms surviving intact in other
> languages of the subgroup." (from "Comparative linguistics and Australian
> prehistory" in "Understanding ancient Australia: perspectives from
> archaeology and linguistics." Melbourne: Oxford University Press (1997))

> To my surprise, I was told the time of separation between some of those
> related language subgroups were estimated as being as much as 3000 years or
> more.

> This would be equivalent (given a final dispersal date of 4500BC for PIE or
> *PIE) to a language containing duplicate of PIE forms co-existing along side
> of, say, Mycenaean in 1500BC.  How is it possible to be confident about
> estimating rate of change considering such information?

No, it's equivalent to finding forms in Old Lithuanian (c. 1500 CE) which
correspond to Vedic Sanskrit (c. 1200 BCE)--which, of course, no linguist will
argue we do not.

You have taken a _pars pro toto_ approach here:  Koch says "forms" and you have
understood him to mean "entire languages".  I sincerely doubt that linguists
studying the Australian languages have found what you want them to have found;
if they have, I would first have to suspect them of a pre-Schleicher style of
reconstruction methodology, rather than to throw out what we *do* know about
the Indo-European languages.

[ here quoting from "a message dated 6/1/2001 1:34:38 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com" ]

> <<Or are words uncannily stable when it suits your argument, but change like
> bandits when that's convenient? >>

> No.  And I know you know what I'm talking about.

> Meanings can change radically.  Phonology seems to be a very different story.

Meanings do not change as fluidly as you want them to:  You wish to have the
word which means "red deer" in all daughter languages, even those spoken where
the fallow deer is present, to have once meant "fallow deer", because the red
deer is not present in Anatolia.  (Mr. Stirling has pointed out that words for
horse, ox, yoke, etc., have not undergone any such radical change.)  Ockham
calls for a simpler explanation, such as "The fallow deer was not present in
the IE homeland".

								Rich Alderson


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon Jun  4 15:06:32 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 11:06:32 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.110632.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/4/01 4:48:13 AM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com
writes:

> First of all, I still know enough Greek and Latin and heard enough Greek and
> Latin a long time ago to know that the two languages were 99.9%
> unintelligible to one another.

-- actually, in their earliest attested forms, the languages are
transparently quite closely related, both lexically and in terms of syntax;
it's much more easily apparent than, say, for instance, the relationship
between modern English and German.

Try doing a list of basic vocabulary (kinship terms or numerals, for
instance).  Or sentences having to do with elementary activities; "Ten horses
of my father are pregnant", or "My mother gives me cows to plow the field",
"I eat porridge with my teeth", etc.

And Italic and Greek aren't even particularly close _as early IE languages or
language-families go_.

> You have never given any rational measure of rate of language change.

-- What you are asserting is that for 5000 years, _all_ areas of changed more
slowly than _any_ IE language has in the time we can observe them directly.

Ie., you are claiming that _all_ IE languages before a certain date changed
more slowly than the _most_ conservative IE language of which we know,
Lithuanian.

This is roughly equivalent, to use an analogy, to claiming that the freezing
point of water was different back then and then challenging people to prove
that it wasn't.

You can't just say "well, because linguistic change is uneven over time, maybe
the languages all changed very very slowly back then" and expect to be taken
seriously.

>I don't believe there can be any real certainty

-- you're confusing certainty in terms of knowing exactly what happened in
_each_ IE language and comparative ranges using _all_ the IE languages.  The
fact that one languge is at the extreme end of a curve says nothing as to the
distribution of the others on the curve, nor to the implications of that.

We can't say "lexical items are lost at a rate of X per millenium"; we can
say "change occurs roughly with the range of X", and then compare this to a
postulate or hypothesis and determine whether or not it correponds to the
general range of the possible.

As opposed to blithely assuming that you can arbitrarily assume rates of
change in prehistory completely outside the _range_ of rates of change
observed since.  1000 years is 1000 years, whether it occurs from 6000 to
5000 BCE, or from 0 to 1000 CE.

> An objective observer would have to conclude this is something not yet
> solvable scientifically.  And it is something about which reasonable persons
> may differ.  Reasonably.

-- not to the degree you're doing, which is unreasonable.

> You normally compare "cognates" and an isolated (typically religious) phrase
> to show how "close" the IE languages are.

-- false statement.  Actually I usually prefer items related to family
relationships and basic technologies.

Incidentally, by putting "cognates" in quotation marks, are you trying to
imply that there is something questionable about the concept of cognates?

This would be exceedingly strange.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon Jun  4 15:08:15 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 11:08:15 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.110815.EDT.>

>steve long says

> ----"In many of these cases, certain languages had undergone radical sound
> changes while close relatives remained unchanged. Thus the proto-forms for a
> subgroup often turn out to be identical to forms surviving intact in other

-- ah... you _are_ aware that this is a commonplace of linguistics and has
been for a very long time?

In fact, it's one of the basic features of linguistic development which
underlies the comparative method.

Eg., the Germanic languages change PIE initial *p ==>f, (*phater ==> fadir)
and the Celtic languages drop initial *p altogether (*phater ==> athair),
while most other IE languages preserve the *p.  (*phater ==> pater, patros,
pitar, pacer, etc.)

That's precisely how we know that there _was_ a PIE *p, by observing "the
proto-forms for a subgroup often turn out to be identical to forms surviving
intact in other
languages of the subgroup."

By this we determine consistent patterns of change.  As 'enry 'iggins found
out when looking at Cockney.

Try looking at Latvian and Lithuanian, for instance; Lithuanian serves rather
well as a "proto-language" for Latvian.

Again, your argument requires a terminus ad quem for PIE of around 7000 BCE;
and that simply isn't compatible with the observable data and the basic
assumption of uniform causation.

>>Baltic and Slavic

-- Proto-Slavic is one of the better-established reconstructions, since the
Slavic languages are so similar, and the process of their dispersal and
differentiation is so recent and so well-attested historically.

It seems you have a problem not with my arguments, but with the comparative
method itself.

I'm simply repeating the commonplace, consensus positions.


From edsel at glo.be  Mon Jun  4 09:57:12 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 11:57:12 +0200
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.115712.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Thomas McFadden" <tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu>
Sent: Friday, June 01, 2001 7:58 PM

[snip]

> Again in Bavarian German (and a number of the
> dialects and even to a certain extent in colloquial forms of the standard
> language) the 1sg. pronoun in the nominative is mia,

[Ed Selleslagh]
Isn't that just an Anglo-Saxon perception of the pronunciation (cf. British
English pronunciation -a < -er)?

> clitic ma both < mir
> in place of standard wir.  This is transparently from the case where it
> appears postverbally.  Since the 1pl personal ending is -en, the following
> wir assimilated to the nasal (and this pronunciation is common even in
> fairly standard spoken forms when the pronoun is postverbal).  Crucially,
> this nasal-initial pronunciation was extended to all positions in the
> relevant dialects, so that even sentence-initially this is what you get.

[Ed]
I have serious doubts about this explanation: isn't w<v<m , cf. the 1sg marker?
Cf. Eng. 'with' <> Ger. 'mit', Du. 'met'.

I don't mean that the assimilation you describe doesn't actually happen in the
modern language, only that it is not related to the problem of the genesis of
the 1pl marker.

BTW, e.g. Latin and Greek have a m-type 1pl verbal marker: habeMus, echouMe .

In Brabant Dutch dialects, e.g. 'Wat doen we?' (What do we do?) is pronounced:
[watu:~ m@]. (~ = nasalization of [u]). This is very similar to German.


From g_sandi at hotmail.com  Mon Jun  4 10:24:10 2001
From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 10:24:10 -0000
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.102410.0000.>

From: Gabor Sandi g_sandi at hotmail.com
Reply to: Thomas McFadden <tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu>
Subject: Re: No Proto-Celtic?

>> To us it may look strange that the pronoun would have come after the verb
>> and not before, but this may happen, and it is standard in modern Irish,
>> isn't it?  E.g.: Scri'obhann SE' litir (he writes a letter).

>but thats because Irish is VSO, i.e. subjects in general follow the
>verb, whether they are pronouns or full NPs.  what you seem to be arguing
>for here is that in PIE full NP subjects preceded the verb, while prnonoun
>subjects followed it.  that's a very different thing, and would be rather
>surprising, i think.  again, does anyone know of such a lanuage that is
>actually attested?

Actually, I don't think that I said anything about the position of full NP
subjects relative to verbs. Still, having a different order for personal
pronouns is not that unusual, is it? In the Romance languages the direct
object of the verb normally comes after the verb if it is an NP (Je vois le
chien), but before the verb if it is a personal pronoun (Je te vois).

Whether a similar switchover can happen with the subject is another
question. I don't think that there is a theoretical reason why it can't.

For pre-PIE there is also the possibility that it was an ergative language,
with the subject of an intransitive verb behaving differently from that of a
transitive one (and like the object of a transitive verb).

For the sake of argument, let us say that *me *se *te are the singular
pronouns serving as the subject of intransitive verbs and as the object of
transitive ones, and that they normally follow the verb.

According to this hypothesis, *es me, *es se, *es te are normal for "I am",
"thou art", "(s)he/it is". If, for the sake of argument again (I am really
sticking my neck out here), we hypothesize a particle *so (coincidentally
identical to the ergative 3rd person pronoun) as the ergative particle, the
phrases "the bear sees me/thee/him" would have been sg. like *harkto-so weid
me/se/te. Here the pronoun (in the accusative) still comes after the verb
(which would be unmarked for person in the 3rd pers.sing.), i.e. the normal
word order would have been transitive EVS (with E for ergative case and S
for the case functioning as object of a transitive and subject of an
intransitive verb) and intransitive VS.

Admittedly there are problems here, including the fact that older IE
languages definitely favour VSO word order, and the PIE second person
pronouns begin with a *t, but I shall leave discussion of these issues to
another time.

All the best,

Gabor


From sarima at friesen.net  Mon Jun  4 13:46:52 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 06:46:52 -0700
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.4.21.0106011407510.12722-100000@babel.ling.upenn.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.064652.0700.>

At 02:27 PM 6/1/01 -0400, Thomas McFadden wrote:

>of course it depends on what you mean by grammar, but under my conception
>of the term i have to disagree with you strongly on this.  flexibility in
>word order is actually regulated rather tightly by the grammatical system
>of a given language, it seems.

I am with you here.

>don't.  and in most cases where multiple variants exist, there is an
>identifiable difference, even if its hard to find.  usually it's not a
>difference in the truth-conditional semantics, but there's perhaps a
>difference in what is implied, or in the conditions where you would say it.

The last is quite frequent.  Often one way to get at this sort of thing is
by asking what question each of the variants might be an answer to.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From sarima at friesen.net  Mon Jun  4 13:49:29 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 06:49:29 -0700
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.4.21.0106011445050.12722-100000@babel.ling.upenn.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.064929.0700.>

At 02:59 PM 6/1/01 -0400, Thomas McFadden wrote:

>> I maintain that the problem of word-order is irrelevant to the study of
>> PIE grammar, as much as declension in Chinese or gender in Finnish. But of
>> course you can write a monography on 'how to express gender in Finnish'.

>again i don't think it's irrelevant, but it is incredibly hard (maybe
>impossible) to reconstruct, in distinction to phonology and
>morphology.  and it probably is irrelevant to the study of PIE phonology
>and not terribly relevant to the study of PIE morphology.

I would not be that certain - PIE probably had sanddhi phenomena , which
require some knowledge of word order to completely reconstruct.  Certainly
I suspect that some of the apparent irregularities in word endings may be
due to such a thing.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Mon Jun  4 17:27:28 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 13:27:28 -0400
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.4.21.0106011317460.12722-100000@babel.ling.upenn.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.132728.0400.>

woops, that should of course be '...the 1st plural pronoun in the
nominative is mia...'

> generalized to all orders.  again in Bavarian German (and a number of the
> dialects and even to a certain extent in colloquial forms of the standard
> language) the 1sg. pronoun in the nominative is mia, clitic ma both < mir
> in place of standard wir.  this is transparently from the case where it


From xavier.delamarre at free.fr  Mon Jun  4 20:43:28 2001
From: xavier.delamarre at free.fr (Xavier Delamarre)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 22:43:28 +0200
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010601055853.00b29d10@getmail.friesen.net>
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.224328.0200.>

le 1/06/01 15:05, Stanley Friesen ? sarima at friesen.net a ?crit?:

XD :
>> Even in modern French the difference of meaning between 'une tres grande
>> maison' and 'une maison tres grande' is minimal ; you can use both sentences
>> freely to express exactly the same thing (no difference in style or
>> emphasis).

SF :
> Actually, those look like fragments to me, not sentences.

> But, even so, I suspect they are only interchangeable in some contexts.  In
> others, one or the other is probably atypical or improper.  Are there not
> certain questions for which one or the other is a more appropriate response?

You suspect wrongly. Here is your sentence :

1/ Hier j'ai achete une maison tres grande a Vaucresson

2/ Hier j'ai achete une tres grande maison a Vaucresson

Absolutely no difference in meaning, style or emphasis. I am sorry.

But this is not PIE, only a late IE language with a fairly fixed word-order,
with some pockets of freedom in this matter.

I am convinced that a more intimate practice of old IE languages like Latin,
Greek, Sanskrit,or Lithuanian would convince you that word-order is not an
essential part of their grammar.

In the previous posting, I made the (nasty) supposition that the obsession
for word-order in some circles was due to the mother-tongue of their
scholars. In fact I suspect that the reason is of a more general type : the
overinterest for general linguistics with its theoretical fashions,
generativism among others. It is always easier to build a general theory on
something (e.g. word-order) than to be confronted with facts, i.e. existing
languages.

gloria inuidiam uicisti
inuidiam gloria uicisti
uicisti inuidiam gloria
gloria uicisti inuidiam

etc.

X. Delamarre
Vaucresson (France)
in a not so big house.

>
> --------------
> May the peace of Syntax be with you.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon Jun  4 03:59:42 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2001 23:59:42 EDT
Subject: Linguistic Succession in Historic Comparison:
Message-ID: <SUN.3.JUN.2001.235942.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/3/01 9:56:42 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
cbh at transmeta.com writes:

> On my map, the distance from Natal to Lake Victoria is more like 1600
> miles than 6000 miles.

--- ooops!  Just checked; it's around 2000 miles.  I'm more wrong than you!
That'll teach me to check before I work from memory.


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Mon Jun  4 09:31:56 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 09:31:56 -0000
Subject: About the Yew1
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.093156.0000.>

Steve Long (21 May 2001) wrote:

>One will note there that at the end of the Younger Dryas (7000-6000BC), the
>tree distribution in Europe was completely different than it is today.  In the
>north, we appear to have steppes.  In the south as far as Crete, "'northern'
>deciduous species (e.g. hornbeam - Carpinus, deciduous oaks) were either
>dominant or abundant in what is presently savanna evergreen oak woodland, pine
>woodland or scrub."  In the north, the steppes were gradually replaced by
>conifers where there are deciduous trees today.  The yew mainly occurs as
>groves in oak forests (sub-oceanic, moisture wise) and this should be relevant
>to where the yew was back then.  (The famous "iceman" of the Alps is carrying
>yew bow and axe handle in a region where the yew is rare today.)

You wouldn't need much yew-wood for that, would you? The bow and axe weren't
necessarily manufactured in the region where the "iceman" was found.

If memory serves, Taxus baccata has a strong preference for calcareous
substrates. The amount of lime in the soil is an important factor in its
distribution, probably more so than the co-occurrence of oaks.

>In "The archaeology of wood", in the S. Econ. Botany newsletter (1998:1), Jon
>Hather wrote:  "The postglacial colonisation of Northern Europe - by trees
>such as oak, elm, lime, beech, pine and spruce - was more than just an
>ecological event.  From well before the advent of agriculture, and some 5500
>years ago, the long straight dogwood and hazel struts of a fishtrap found in
>Zealand, Denmark, are some of the earliest evidence of woodland management....
>Woodland ecology and local culture were evolving together...  A strange find
>by the Thames in east London has been yew - a wetland situation quite unlike
>its current habitats.... Evidence for the gradual disappearance of large trees
>can be gleaned from the carving of bowls sideways, i.e. not from transverse
>sections."

What kind of "management" is that? Today, similar evidence can be gleaned
from the ousting of plywood by pressed-chip "boards" at construction sites.

>I am not clear on this, but I suspect that 6000 years ago, most of the
>Ukraine's pine forest would have been deciduous oak and therefore may have
>included yew.  This might suggest that the yew premise either puts PIE on the
>steppes with no tree names at all.  Or farther to the north in tall pine
>Russia.  Or -- of course -- in Anatolia or along the Danube.

Obviously, we need more palynological data from 4000 BCE to address this
matter, and I am guilty of blithely assuming that today's yew-free zones
were yew-free back then.

>My real problem with all this is that the "yew" is not really that
>recognizable as a tree or as a wood.  And there is evidence that the name was
>not altogether that stable, even among cultures that had writing and could
>communicate long-distances about something as local and variable as the
>appearance of a tree.  Even if PIEists knew the tree, chances are they would
>have soon confused it with other trees.

I'm well aware that cognate dendronyms can refer to different trees in
different languages, and examples from IE and Semitic occur in my own
postings. But in fact Taxus baccata _is_ quite distinctive as trees go.
First, it has prominent red berries. Second, its wood is prized for making
bows and arrows. Third, its leaves are highly toxic (unusual, if not unique,
for a tree native to Europe). The Belgic king Catuvolcus took his own life
with yew-poison (Caes. B.G. VI.31). A persistent superstition (Diosc. IV.79)
holds that anyone sleeping under a yew will die: hence the epithet "albero
della morte". It is very unlikely that a name for this particular tree, once
established among a body of speakers, would be applied by those speakers to
any other tree. They could, of course, migrate out of its habitat and forget
the name.

>The main problem I think with using the yew word to locate PIE is, of course,
>that the "yew" was not always a "yew."  And this only makes sense, since trees
>don't move and that means what you call a yew or don't call a yew and what I
>call a yew in the next valley could be two different trees -- up until such
>time as we obtain Polaroid cameras. Or up until we get around to cutting them
>down and selling the wood, scrapping their bark for extract or perhaps in the
>case of the yew, eating their berries.  It would be the by-products, not the
>tree, that we could discuss in common.

I don't see that Polaroid cameras are necessary. If you and I belong to the
same tribe, and we don't agree on what to call trees in the next valley,
then our use of language is dysfunctional. Do you really believe that
prehistoric humans were linguistically incompetent?

I don't think any serious objections have been presented to the thesis that
PIE-speakers didn't know the yew. As I mentioned before, "yew" itself has
ancient congeners only in Celtic and Germanic, plausibly derived from PIE
*eiw- 'berry'. Latv. <ive> and Old Pr. <iuwis> are from MLG <i:we>, not
Proto-Baltic. Evidently northern IE-speakers _did_ name the tree after its
distinctive "by-products" when they encountered it by moving west. Other
groups of IE-speakers entered yew-country by other routes and either adopted
pre-IE names or fixated on other features.

Celtic has preserved pre-IE *ebur- 'yew' rather extensively in toponyms,
ethnonyms, and personal names, and also Irish <ibhar> 'yew; bow' beside <eo>
'yew'. The stem *ebur- also appears in toponyms in Iberia, Liguria,
Campania, and probably Greece (Ephura:, old name of Corinth and other
places). In my opinion *ebur- belongs with the Old European substrate
associated with the expansion of Neolithic farmers across Europe (ca.
5500-4000 BCE). If you believe, like Renfrew, that these farmers (who
entered Europe from Anatolia) spoke PIE, then you must explain why "IE"
*ebur- should have been superseded by *eiw- in the north and by other words
in the south and east. This can be done if you posit movement of IE-speakers
out of Anatolia and east of yew-country, then back into Europe. But then
we're begging the question of what IE and non-IE are. It is pointless IMHO
to extend "Indo-European" back to the first European farmers, and equally
pointless to regard PIE as arbitrarily old.

It should be noted that Hans Krahe, whose research did much to substantiate
the Old European substrate, regarded this substrate as IE. I think Krahe
succeeded in showing that Old European shares a few suffixes with PIE and is
probably related, but again I disagree with the characterization of
something this old as "Indo-European".

DGK


From alderson+mail at panix.com  Mon Jun  4 18:10:23 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 14:10:23 -0400
Subject: *G^EN-
In-Reply-To: <003601c0eac6$8d497680$fbf1fea9@swbell.net>
 (proto-language@email.msn.com)
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.141023.0400.>

On 1 Jun 2001, Patrick Ryan wrote, with respect to *gen{H_1}:

> Are you also asserting that, therefore, there is no *g^en-?

Yes.

And don't come at me with arguments about Wurzeldeterminativa usw.  If such are
not simply the result of over-analysis of the data, they are clearly so early
in the prehistory of the IE language that they may well be Nostratic, and in
any case are irrelevant to the question as posited.

								Rich Alderson


From douglas at nb.net  Mon Jun  4 02:27:26 2001
From: douglas at nb.net (Douglas G. Wilson)
Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2001 22:27:26 -0400
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.4.30.0105261300260.17830-100000@vesuri.Helsinki.FI>
Message-ID: <SUN.3.JUN.2001.222726.0400.>

>... they don't don't much affect the Engish initial [T] - [D] situation.

"Dhal" and "duinhewassel" were my "contributions". I don't claim any
particular effect. But I think Larry Trask's point was that English would
accommodate adopted lexical words beginning in /D/ -- or perhaps even
"native" words, although I can't think of any -- and these are valid
examples using what I think is a reasonable criterion (inclusion in
dictionaries). If it is "arbitrary" which words appear in a dictionary, I
guess it isn't a very good dictionary ... and I will submit that the
dictionary criterion is much less arbitrary than one which refers to
whether or not a word elicits a derogatory response from one or another of
the esteemed scholars subscribing to a certain list. "Dhal" is from the
Random House Unabridged (RHUD), the other word from Webster's Second (M-W).
If my criterion is considered unsatisfactory, one should attack the
criterion and propose an improved one rather than making special objections
for each proposed word: for example, one could assert that only the OED is
a valid reference, or that only words correctly pronounced by a majority of
a standard sample of 8-year-olds should be permitted, or that only those
words having an indisputable reflex in Old English are "English words".

>... If this makes it an English sound, so then are all the names of Arabic
>letters English sounds.

By my criterion, these letter-names are all English words if they're all in
a standard English dictionary. I haven't checked them all.

>Since other alphabets have names for their letters as well, then all the
>sounds that these alphabets represent become English sounds simply by
>including them in an English dictionary.

No. I refer to words (i.e., dictionary entries), not "sounds". I believe
that the RHUD, for example, includes Greek letter-names (but not, e.g.,
Thai letter-names) for a reason ... although one is free to disagree with
the reasoning. Apparently at least some Arabic letter-names are English
words by my criterion, since they're in the RHUD. Note that the RHUD does
not include "delta" with /D/; it shows the English pronunciation only ...
but for "dhal" only /Dal/ is shown (thus this is an English pronunciation
by my criterion!).

>... And no English speaker who doesn't speak Arabic would ever pronounce
>'dhal' with [D] unless he looked it up in the dictionary.

The majority of the words in the English language are unknown to me, and I
wouldn't be sure how to pronounce any of these unknown words except by
looking in a dictionary. In some cases I would make a guess, but not in
this one. Some might be more willing than I to make a guess, but I would
not like to think that the English language is defined ONLY by the wild
guesses of the ignorant and careless.

>... So 'dhal' is no more of an English word than 'ghayn' is despite the
>fact that the former is in the dictionary as an entry and the latter only
>appears in the table of alphabets.

The same dictionary showing "dhal" also shows the entry "ghain" /Rein/.

>... (otherwise English has to have a phoneme [x] as in 'loch' contrasting
>with 'lock').

And it does, according to my judgement. That's why I pronounce "loch" with
/x/ when speaking English (and at least some of the dictionaries support me
in this). Are Scots words English words? Referring again to my criterion,
at least some of them are: those which are in the English dictionaries. [I
might not argue too strongly against the proposition that they all are ....]

>This is really scraping the bottom of a very shallow barrel.

True. If there were hundreds of common lexical items beginning with /D/,
the discussion would never have occurred. Perhaps someone has a better
example than "dhal" or whatever that other monstrosity was ....

-- Doug Wilson


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Jun  4 09:14:38 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 10:14:38 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <F15KlnVwQyUBcwgwhli00015af6@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.101438.0100.>

--On Monday, May 28, 2001 3:19 pm +0000 Douglas G Kilday
<acnasvers at hotmail.com> wrote:

[on my objection to his assertion that the lexicon of English is remaining
roughly constant in size, and my observation that desk dictionaries get
bigger with each edition]

> The tendency to equate the physical size of desk dictionaries with the
> size of the underlying lexicon (or "lexis" if you prefer) should be
> avoided. Several factors favor the continued growth of desk dictionaries
> (with the literary exception of the Newspeak dictionary in Orwell's
> "1984", which got smaller every year).

> First, and most importantly, it's much easier to attest a word than it is
> to "unattest" it. Someone once said "it's hard to write an epitaph for a
> word". I'd say "hard" is understated; it's comparable to proving the
> extinction of an obscure tropical bug. If a lexicographer asserted that a
> given word was extinct, resulting in its being pruned from the desk
> dictionary, and the word reappeared in actual use, the publisher could
> have considerable egg on his face. What sane lexicographer would
> jeopardize his job in this manner? Unless he managed to break into the
> ranks of professional Scrabble, an unemployed lexicographer (fired for
> cause) would be facing tough times indeed.

Indeed, but overly cautious.  Serious dictionaries these days are prepared
from corpora, and a word that failed to appear in the corpora for a long
time would be singled out for possible removal.  Of course, lexicographers
don't drop a word after failing to encounter it for three weeks.  Instead,
they start attaching usage labels, like 'rare', 'archaic' or 'obsolete'.
They do this for excellent reasons.  First, as you say, the word may come
back from the dead.  This seems to have happened with 'albeit', which was
virtually dead a decade or so ago (OED2 has no 20th-century attestations),
but which has suddenly reappeared with a vengeance.  Second, readers often
want to read works written fifty or a hundred years ago, and they may
encounter obsolete words which they want to look up.  A good dictionary
will try to cater to this demand as best it can, within its space
limitations.  A few dictionaries even adopt a policy of entering *all*
words found in Shakespeare, and one or two extend the same courtesy to
Milton and Spenser.

But eventually some of these words have to go.  For example, readers of
George Eliot will recall the quaint word 'pocket-pistol', denoting
something resembling a hip flask.  OED2 does not record this word later
than 1882, and not one of my desk dictionaries enters it.  It's gone from
the language, and now it's gone from the dictionaries, and readers of
19th-century fiction will have to cope as best they can, or get hold of the
OED.

> Nevertheless, words do become
> extinct (or "obsolete"). A hard-core dictionary like the OED or my
> ponderous Funk & Wagnalls Standard (1903) will give thousands of words
> marked as obsolete. It's not the job of a desk dictionary to track
> extinction.

Ah, but the OED is very far from being a desk dictionary.  Its task is to
record all the English words ever significantly attested, and nothing is
*ever* removed from later editions, apart from the odd blunder.  Nor is
(was) Funk and Wagnall a desk dictionary: it was what we Americans call an
"unabridged" dictionary: far too bulky and cumbersome to serve as a desk
dictionary.

I'm thinking of real desk dictionaries, like Collins in Britain and
Merriam-Webster in the US.  And these really do drop words after a while.
Ask a professional lexicographer.

> Second, consumers would feel short-changed if each edition were _not_
> larger than the previous one. If the new dictionary couldn't boast of
> being "new, improved, and _enlarged_", why would anyone buy it? If they
> didn't already have an older edition, they could find one at a garage
> sale. Publishers need to make money.

A fair point, but perhaps overly cynical.  Desk dictionaries really do get
bigger because there really are more and more words to be included.  I
really do not think that the total number of words pertaining to cars,
planes and spacecraft is about equal to the number of words pertaining to
oxcarts and buggies.

> Third, this enlargement can be made at marginal cost, since the core of
> the new dictionary already exists in the old one. Why bother paying
> lexicographers to tramp around the boondocks trying to verify the
> extinction of obscure words? Leave 'em in! Anyone using a _desk_
> dictionary is likely to regard it as a prescriptive authority (not as a
> bank of scholarly data, like the OED) and anything in it is _eo ipso_ a
> valid word.

Yes, but this is an attitude adopted by (many) users of desk dictionaries,
not a piece of truth.  For a linguist, a word exists if people use it,
regardless of whether it's in any dictionary at all.

I've just been marking a pile of final-year dissertations.  Some of our
students chose to write on such topics as text messaging, graffiti,
internet chat-rooms, the slang associated with drugs, and obscenities.  I
was startled to discover, in these writings, a very large number of words
which were wholly unknown to me, but which are apparently commonplace among
young people.  I haven't had the time to try looking these words up in a
couple of recent desk dictionaries, but I'll bet that quite a few of them
are not entered.

Anyway, lexicographers just *can't* "leave 'em in" all the time.  Cost, and
therefore size, is just too important, and something has to give.

Nor do lexicographers even rush to enter new words.  For example, the
language has recently sprouted a number of new formations in '-wise', such
as 'moneywise', 'clotheswise' and 'healthwise'.  These have been frequent
in speech for years, and they are not rare in journalistic writing.  But
they're still not entered in my desk dictionaries.

> It's easy enough to point to new words that don't replace anything. It's
> less easy to find extinct words that weren't replaced by anything, but
> they do (or did) exist: words pertaining to obsolete tools, equipment,
> manufacturing processes, agricultural practices, social groups, dishes,
> beverages, etc. They can be found in hard-core dictionaries which dare to
> mark words "obsolete" or give dates of final attestation. All things
> considered, net stasis of lexical size makes more sense than continuous
> expansion.

I'm afraid I can't agree.  A large and expensive dictionary can often
afford to make room for lots of obsolete words, and of course the OED must
do this by remit.  But an ordinary desk dictionary has to be cheap enough,
and hence small enough, to sell large numbers of copies -- and that means
that old words have to be pruned from time to time in order to make way for
new ones.

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 Georg-Bonn at t-online.de  Mon Jun  4 18:01:10 2001
From: Georg-Bonn at t-online.de (Stefan Georg)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 20:01:10 +0200
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <3B17BAB6.BDA9FD71@memphis.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.200110.0200.>

>Oh, indeed they are foreign.  It's only in Schwyzer D??tsch that we find
>initial [x] in native words, and no variety has initial [?] in them.
>But that's beside the point.  If Duden's pronunciations are factually
>correct -- a rather large assumption -- then [x] and [?] do contrast in
>initial position and must therefore be assigned to different phonemes.
>Unless we want to say that foreign words *as foreign* have a different
set of phonemes than native ones, quod Deus avertat.

Qua de causa avertat ? When I'm pronouncing /Chalid/ as /xali:d/ I'm
using a patch of Arabic in my German discourse, whether I know much
Arabic apart from that or not.

If Duden gave the "correct" pronunciation of /Xhosa/ with the correct
click, we would have a click phoneme in German. Give me a job in that
editors' board and I'll triple the number of phonemes in this
language.

Those pronunciations for /Chalid/ etc. are indeed artificial. Duden
people just want to be educational when they indicate how these words
should be pronounced, i.e. as close to the pronunciation in the
source language as possible. The set of words given to illustrate the
initial ?:x contrast is of a sort that I'm sure I've never met a
German speaker who can take an oath to have used each one of them at
least once in his life in some meaningful context. In English words
and names we try to (are told to) observe /th/, /w:v/ as in the
source language as well. I'm pretty sure Duden tells us to, too. So
what, is there a /w : v/ contrast in G. ? Not for sose vis a
Hollyvood G. accent, who still are se majorrity ...

StG
--
Dr. Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn


From jmott at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Mon Jun  4 22:23:09 2001
From: jmott at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Justin M. Mott)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 18:23:09 -0400
Subject: note on 'dhole'
In-Reply-To: <MABBIJNNPBOFHEBNBMEHCEKBCLAA.mclasutt@brigham.net>
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.182309.0400.>

On Sat, 2 Jun 2001, Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote:

> [From me]

> Before 'dhole' gets mixed up in the [D]/[T] discussion, 'dhole' is
> pronounced with initial [d] (it's from some Indian voiced aspirate), not
> [D].

> John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
> Associate Professor, English
> Utah State University

It's a minor point, but there is no evidence that the etymon of this word
had an initial voiced aspirate.  There are no clear sources for it from
any of the (major) Indo-Aryan languages; the most plausible source for it
is rather Kannada 'tola' "wolf".  Kannada, being Dravidian rather than
Indo-Aryan, lacks voiced aspirates.  If this etymology is correct, the
initial <dh> may just be a spurious (and isolated) spelling of initial
/t/ (which, and I may be mistaken, could surface as [d]).

-Justin Mott


From hstahlke at gw.bsu.edu  Wed Jun  6 17:50:07 2001
From: hstahlke at gw.bsu.edu (Herb Stahlke)
Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2001 12:50:07 -0500
Subject: Chronology and history of Germanic Consonant Shift
Message-ID: <WED.6.JUN.2001.125007.0500.>

Prokosch, in his Comparative Germanic Grammar (Secs 16-24), lays out a
linguistic and historical chronology of the Germanic Consonant shift, stating
(. 56) that "it began several centuries B.C. and ended about 500 A.D."  In the
various histories of English and more recent standard surveys of Indo-European,
I haven't seen this matter dealt with much.  Where could I find current
discussion of this and the more general chronology of early Germanic.  The
recent discussion on the etymology of Goth was helpful to some degree.

Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN  47306
hstahlke at bsu.edu


From Enrikay1 at aol.com  Tue Jun  5 18:37:29 2001
From: Enrikay1 at aol.com (Enrikay1 at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 14:37:29 EDT
Subject: PIE
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.143729.EDT.>

I'd like to thank you very much for the suggestion.  I checked that book out
on-line and it seems to be as good as you say it is.

Thanks again,
Eric


From edsel at glo.be  Tue Jun  5 07:58:40 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 09:58:40 +0200
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.095840.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: <JoatSimeon at aol.com>
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2001 5:06 PM

[snip]

> 1000 years is 1000 years, whether it occurs from 6000 to
> 5000 BCE, or from 0 to 1000 CE.

[Ed Selleslagh]

Although this is strictly true, it is highly debatable: you have to take into
account the rate of change of local society. E.g. during the Middle Ages
society hardly changed over 100 or more years; in more recent times, however...

Language is part of culture, and its rate of change is certainly influenced by
that of culture in general, e.g. technological evolution (new words), foreign
exposure, ...

How else could we have such conservative languages like Lithuanian or Basque,
as compared to e.g. English or German? (Phonetically, German is one step
further than e.g. Dutch), if rates of change weren't different. In very ancient
societies cultural rate of cheange was undoubtedly slower than in the last 2000
years, except in periods of upheaval, relatively sudden migrations etc.

Ed.


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Wed Jun  6 05:06:37 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2001 01:06:37 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <WED.6.JUN.2001.010637.EDT.>

I wrote:
<< If there were no close resemblances at all, no one would dare claim that
these languages were even related in anyway.  >>

In a message dated 6/4/2001 9:18:46 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:
<<I'm sorry, but I can't agree.  Resemblances, close or otherwise, have
nothing at all to do with comparative linguistics.  The evidence for
genetic relationship consists wholly of systematic correspondences, and
resemblances are irrelevant.  Of course, the presence of resemblances aids
human beings in spotting possible genetic links.>>

But what you're saying - up until the last sentence - seems to make out that
"systematic correspondence" come out of thin air.

Where a comparative analysis has to begin - not where it ends up - is
similarities and resemblances between two or more languages.  It HAS to be
that way, because at the beginning of the process, NO GENETIC RELATIONSHIP
has yet been established.  No "systematic correspondence" has been done.

At that point, there can be NO difference between resemblances that turn out
to show systematic correspondence and those that turn out not to.  Everything
is either a resemblance or no resemblance at all -- and that's all there is.

This has been a problem in understanding between us all along.  A proper and
objective audit of the comparative method should begin at the beginning of
that process.  At that point, logically, NOTHING can be presumed to be
genetic.  Because the analysis that calls something genetic or non-genetic
has NOT yet occurred.  And it is precisely at that point that resemblances
and similarities have everything to do with the process.

The whole history of Indo-European studies and the comparative method was
motivated by nothing but the unexplained similarities and resemblances in
European and Asian languages.

To say that I can't back up to that starting point, where everything is at
best similarities and resemblances -- before any judgments about genetic
relationships would have been made -- is to queer the game.  It makes the
comparative method immune to critical analysis.

The problem I perceive and have been getting at does not arise after a
judgment is made about "genetic" relationships.  It happens before.  Romani
and Anglo-Romani obviously resemble one another in some way.  Upon analysis,
one discovers a "systematic correspondence" between Romani and the lexicon in
Anglo-Romani.  But does that yield a genetic relationship? No, because one
only gets one genetic relationship per customer?  Why?  Because a language
can only represent one "system"?  But Anglo-Romani represents two systematic
correspondences, and therefore presumably two different systems.  In
Anglo-Romani, the problem is clear, because the language is historic.  In IE
languages, the problem is hidden in prehistory.

I suspect part of the problem begins back when no analysis has yet been done
and there can be nothing but resemblances between two languages.  That's
where the presumption starts that there WILL be only one genetic relationship
and therefore there should be only one original systematic correspondence
between the languages.  If you start by presuming that all "genetic"
relationships can only relate to one parent, than all your results will tend
towards that presumption, whether true or not.

(The Australian example you give -- Blake and "the clear patterns underlying
the superficial absence of resemblances,..." could only happen in a
historical and geographical context where relationships were already
expected, for extrinsic reasons.  I don't imagine you would have much
patience with anyone establishing a close genetic relationship between
Mexican and Phoenician despite "the superficial absence of resemblances"
between the two languages.)

I wrote:
<<To my surprise, I was told the time of separation between some of those
related language subgroups were estimated as being as much as 3000 years or
more.>>

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:
<<I am puzzled by this.  I can find no such statement in Koch's article.
Moreover, Evans and Jones, in an article in the same volume, conclude that
Proto-Pama-Nyungan cannot be assigned a time depth greater than 5000 BP,
and so a figure of 3000 years for the time depth of a rather low-level
branch of the family does not look plausible.>>

I'm pretty positive some of the languages listed by Koch were not
Pama-Nyundan.  I'm on the road and don't have my notes, but in one of the
actual studies themselves these dates are given.  It may have been Grady.
3000 years is not a long time at all for speakers in the Northern Territory
and northwestern Australia, where these languages have been spoken in situ
for a very long time.  Even if it was Pama-Nyundan and that particular
chronology is out of date now or not, any of the languages involved, even
low-level languages, could be old enough to make my larger point stand.  Of
course, if you anything that directly contradicts this,...

<<I think there may be a misunderstanding here, resulting from Koch's
unfortunate choice of words.  Koch is not, I'm pretty sure, claiming that
certain languages have changed dramatically while other and closely related
languages have not changed *at all*.  Rather, he is only reporting that
some related languages have failed to undergo the rather dramatic changes
observed in their relatives, and that certain *individual* words may remain
unchanged in one language while undergoing dramatic changes of form in a
close relative.>>

Certain *individual* words is all you need to make my point.  For all I know,
those were the very words that were used to establish relatedness.  How many
words do you need to establish relatedness?  Rate of change in this forum
always seems to be not how much entire languages change or don't change, but
how much cognates change.

I wrote:
<<Meanings can change radically.  Phonology seems to be a very different
story.>>

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:
<<Er -- what?  Phonology can't change radically?  But Koch's very point,
cited above, is that certain Australian languages have undergone such
dramatic changes in phonology that their words no longer even appear to
resemble their cognates in closely related languages.>>

We've been through this.  What you call often call "change" is actually
continuity to me, because you still call what remains "cognate", which means
there must be something that stayed the same.  If you can still recognize a
relationship, how much it has changed logically has no relevance to its
"relatedness."  On the other hand, how much a word has "changed" is always
relevant to "meaning."

How about this, then:  "Meanings often change unsystematically and therefore
radically.  Phonology seems to be a different story."

Regards,
Steve Long


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Jun  7 10:02:23 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2001 11:02:23 +0100
Subject: European Genetics/IE
In-Reply-To: <20010601.163410.-210143.0.PhilJennings@juno.com>
Message-ID: <THU.7.JUN.2001.110223.0100.>

--On Friday, June 1, 2001 4:34 pm -0500 philjennings at juno.com wrote:

> I would guess that linguistic rate-of-change would be at a
> maximum during the process [Joat Simeon] describes.  How could it be
> otherwise?

> Yet the end result consists of IE daughter dialects still mutually
> intelligible in many cases.  Could we possibly agree that before this
> process began,
> when PIE was a genetic language (comparatively unexposed to outside
> factors) rather than a radical way-of-life language, it may have loitered
> along at a much slower rate of change?  And this must have been
> s-l-o-o-o-w indeed, given that even during the meme-transmission era,
> battle-axes and such, the rate of change doesn't seem to have been all
> that fast.

We can imagine a lower rate of change, but there seems to be no good
evidence for it.  Without some hard evidence, we have no right to assume
that linguistic change was any slower in the remote past than it has been
in the historical period.  Such an assumption would violate our linguistic
Uniformitarian Principle: languages and speakers in the remote past behaved
much as languages and speakers have behaved in the historical period.

And consider the case of Basque.  With Basque, it is only for the phonology
that we can track the language back as far as 2000 years.  But we can do
this much, and the results are interesting.  Almost all of the big changes
in Basque pronunciation seem to have occurred in the early Middle Ages,
roughly AD 800-1200.  At that time, the Basque Country was a rural
backwater, largely cut off from the great political and social currents
sweeping across western Europe.  After 1200, though, most of the country
was absorbed by Castile.  It was at this time that the Basques began to
acquire their reputation as formidable seafarers, developing fishing,
whaling and trade.  They began to play an important role in Spanish
affairs, and they played a great part in the Spanish discovery and
settlement of the Americas.  Basque society was transformed by massive
emigration; Basque ports became bustling and prosperous; shipbuilding
became a great Basque industry, as did iron and steel, and eventually
manufacturing.  Yet, during all of these remarkable political, social and
economic transformations, the pronunciation of the language scarcely
changed at all.  Moreover, the scraps of evidence that we have suggest that
the rich and distinctive Basque morphology has not changed significantly
since the 9th century, at least.

So, in the Basque case, rate of social change does not appear to correlate
at all with rate of linguistic change.  It appears that the language
changed fastest when it was spoken in a stable and largely closed society,
but much less rapidly after it was caught up in dramatic social changes.

> I am still curious whether any proto-language requiring reconstruction,
> has ever been reconstructed as a creole?  Not PIE, JoatSimeon says, but
> what about proto-Sino-Tibetan, or proto-Dravidian, or any of the other
> protoi?

To the best of my knowledge, no language yet reconstructed looks like a
creole.  That doesn't mean that such an outcome is impossible, of course,
but so far it seems not to have happened.

> Because if the answer is a universal no, is that really likely?
> The world must have been a different kind of place than it is now.

Well, not necessarily.  Today there are nearly 7000 mother tongues.  Of
these, probably no more than a few dozen are creoles (I exclude pidgins),
even though the European expansion of several centuries ago created
exceptionally favorable circumstances for creole-formation in several parts
of the world.  If fewer than one percent of today's languages are creoles,
we should not be surprised to find that creoles were not exactly thick on
the ground in the remote past.

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  Tue Jun  5 09:35:21 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 10:35:21 +0100
Subject: Genetic Descent
In-Reply-To: <000901c0eabf$fdd93ea0$fa2863d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.103521.0100.>

--On Friday, June 1, 2001 12:26 pm -0500 "David L. White"
<dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

[on Thomason and Kaufman]

>>         Well, I can, on p. 14:  "... any linguistic feature can be
>> transferred from any language to any other language."  No restrictions
>> are mentioned, and TK consistently fail to note that not everything that
>> could conceivably occur actually does.

> LT:  Ah, I see.  But this statement seems very different from the
> position you imputed to T and K: "Anything goes."  This quote plainly
> does not say that anything can happen at all, but only that there are no
> linguistic features that cannot be borrowed.  Are you aware of any
> features that cannot be borrowed?

> DLW:  There are apparently no cases of things like 1) singular personal
> endings being borrowed without plural personal endings being borrowed, or
> 2) past morphemes being borrowed without future morphemes.

But these, even if they stand up, are not counterexamples.  T & K say
"anything can be borrowed"; you reply with "Y can only be borrowed after X
is borrowed".  There is no contradiction here.

Suppose I say the following to my students:

1. "You may read any book on IE linguistics you like."

2. "However, you may only read Szemerenyi if you have first read a more
elementary introduction."

Have I contradicted myself?  I think not.

> Whether TK
> meant "anything goes" or not depends on how strong a reading we give to
> their statement.

But why should we impute to them a position which they have never asserted
or endorsed?  Is this fair?

> They certainly did not exclude it.

Well, they also do not expressly exclude the possibility that some
languages were introduced to earth by Martians.  Should we therefore darkly
suspect them of harboring such beliefs? ;-)

> It should be noted
> that whether finite verbal morphology gets borowed at all is a matter of
> definition,

Sorry; I can't agree.  If language A gradually replaces most of its
inherited verbal morphology with morphology taken from language B, while at
the same time retaining much of its inherited lexicon and grammar, then
there is no definition about it: the language has borrowed verbal
morphology, and that is the end of the matter.  T & K's stance is that we
should consider this a possibility and look to see if there are any
examples of it.  Thomason now concludes that Laha, at least, is indeed an
example of this very thing.  Whether she is right in this is a matter for
empirical investigation, not a matter of definition.

> because if it is never mixed, then it could (or could not) be
> taken as an indicator of genetic descent.

Well, Laha is on the table.  The chief investigator, Collins, has concluded
that Laha has indeed borrowed almost all of its verbal morphology from
Malay.  What is there to discuss, apart from the possibility that Collins
may be in error?  We can't just wave the case away by invoking arbitrary
"definitions".  And why should we want to, anyway?

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  Tue Jun  5 09:42:57 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 10:42:57 +0100
Subject: Genetic Descent
In-Reply-To: <000901c0eabf$fdd93ea0$fa2863d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.104257.0100.>

--On Friday, June 1, 2001 12:26 pm -0500 "David L. White"
<dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

> LT:  If so, let me ask this: in what respect does Michif fall
> short of being a mixed language?  It looks to me like a paradigm case of a
> mixed language.  If we encountered, or imagined, a real mixed language,
> what features would it have that Michif lacks?

> DLW:  The finite verbal morphology of Michif is all Cree.  Therefore, by
> the Davidian standard, it is Cree.  That also answers the scond question.

OK.  My friend Homer is a specialist in nouns.  He loves nouns, and he
regards them as paramount in languages.  According to Homer, the ancestry
of a language is determined by the origin of its nouns.  Therefore, by the
Homeric definition, Michif is French.  End of discussion. ;-)

Why is Homer's position more arbitrary than yours?

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  Tue Jun  5 14:32:46 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 15:32:46 +0100
Subject: Genetic Descent
In-Reply-To: <000901c0eabf$fdd93ea0$fa2863d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.153246.0100.>

--On Friday, June 1, 2001 12:26 pm -0500 "David L. White"
<dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

[on Takia]

> If the
> finite verbal morphology (morphemes, not categories) is Takia, it is
> Takia. That may well seem arbitrary, but it is not.  Verbs are more basic
> than nouns, and what is more basic is more indicative of descent.

I'm sorry, but I cannot agree that verbs are more basic than nouns.  This
seems to me an arbitrary fiat.  Anyway, I've never seen a language without
nouns, and that suggests to me that nouns are about as basic as anything
can be in languages.  But I'll discuss this in terms of what follows.

A little quibble first, though.  Arguably, I possess no characteristic more
"basic" than my biological sex, which is male.  Does it therefore follow
that I am more closely related to my father than to my mother? ;-)

> For English, it is easy to demonstrate this by considering the following
> sentence:

>  The tanks crossing the bridge was/were not ideal.

>  With "were", this is a statement (improbable as it may be) about the
>  tanks.  [snip an incomprehensible sentence]

> In the more normal reading, with "was", it is easy to see that the verb
> agrees with "crossing", not with "tanks", and that therefore "crossing"
> is the head of the NP. (Not to mention being a gerund, not a participle.)
> If it is the head of the NP, it is reasonable to suppose that it is also
> in some sense the head of the corresponding sentence "The tanks crossed
> the bridge".

The position that the verb is the head of the sentence is embraced in
certain syntactic theories, especially in most dependency grammars and in
some relational grammars.  But it is rejected in other approaches,
including other relational approaches and all Chomskyan approaches.  The
Chomskyan view takes the head of the sentence to be an abstract element,
and not the verb.  I am not a Chomskyan, but I don't think it can simply be
taken for granted that the verb is the head of the sentence.  This is an
analytical stance, not a piece of truth.

There is also a fascinating counter-argument here.  Consider this example:

  'That Martians are green is well known.'

Now, the subject of 'is' is plainly the complement clause 'That Martians
are green'.  Fine.  Now, what is the head of this clause?  Is it the verb,
as David seems to be implying?  Then the head of the subject is 'are'.  But
-- whoops -- this is plural, and yet the whole clause takes singular
agreement.
Oh, dear. ;-)

> We may also note that things that might be held to apply to
> an entire proposition, like negation, are typically attached to or
> associated with verbs,

It is true that sentence operators, such as negation and tense, are most
typically associated with verbs.  But this is not true without exception.
For example, in Sanskrit -- I am told -- the negative marker can appear
anywhere in a sentence at all, and need not be attached to the verb.  (OK;
I'm ready for flak from the Sanskritists on this list. ;-) )

> and that though there is a type of language,
> polysynthetic, in which the verb and its mandatorily associated elements
> form a complete sentence, there is no corresponding type of language
> where the subject noun and its mandatorily associated elements form a
> complete sentence.

It is true that, in *some* languages, a sentence may consist entirely of an
affixed verb.  But it is equally true that, in *some* languages, a sentence
may consist entirely of nominal elements, with no verb-form present at all.
Both observations are interesting, but why should one be more "central"
than the other?

> Thus upon examination it is not arbitrary to regard
> vebal morphology as more basic than nominal morphology.

Ah, no -- for several reasons.  I've just mentioned two: it is not an
obvious truth that the verb is the head of the sentence, and it is not true
that verbs are universally more indispensable than nominals.  But there is
more, much more.

What David White is arguing, successfully or not, is that the *lexical
verb* plays a central role in sentence structure.  Even if we grant this,
it *does not follow* that verbal morphology is somehow more central than
any other morphology, such as nominal morphology.  Verbal morphology is not
the same thing as a lexical verb.

Moreover, David's arguments here seem self-contradictory.  Consider a
language with native verbal morphology but with many borrowed lexical verbs
-- such as English or Basque.  In such a language, it is the (borrowed)
lexical verb which serves as the sentential head, in David's account, and
which determines the syntactic properties of the sentence.  At the same
time, the native verbal morphology merely follows the requirements of the
lexical verb in a wholly passive manner.  But now consider David's
position: the (borrowed) lexical verb is the most central element in the
sentence, and its properties determine the structure of the sentence,
including the associated morphology.  Yet it is the native verbal
morphology which is somehow (I haven't followed this) more central in
identifying the genetic origin of the language, because this morphology is
now what is "central".
Have I missed something?  This line of thinking seems wholly inconsistent
to me.

Take a real example.  Basque, like English, has a native transitive verb
meaning 'like', as in English 'I like this.'  Spanish has no such verb, and
expresses the same notion with its intransitive dative-subject verb
<gustar> 'be pleasing (to)'.  As it happens, Basque has borrowed the
Spanish verb as <gustatu> 'be pleasing (to)'.  This borrowed verb is taken
over into Basque with wholly Spanish syntax, as a dative-subject verb, even
though dative-subject verbs are virtually nonexistent in Basque.  The
associated verbal morphology is, of course, wholly native Basque, since
Basque has borrowed almost no verbal morphology.  But that verbal
morphology is simply pressed into service to follow the dictates of the
borrowed lexical verb, producing things like <gustatzen zait> 'I like it'
(literally, 'it is pleasing to me'), entirely parallel to Spanish <me
gusta> 'I like it', and wholly at odds with the native construction
<atsegin dut> 'I like it', a simple transitive construction, like its
English equivalent.

It seems that David is telling us that, at one and the same time, the
borrowed lexical verb is paramount, while the native verbal morphology is
also paramount.  And I can't follow this.  Surely it has to be one or the
other, at best.

Finally, let me advance a counter-argument.  As David's own 'tank' example
illustrates, it is commonplace in languages for verbs to agree with nominal
arguments -- that is, for intrinsic features of nominals (person, number,
gender, maybe others) to be copied onto verbs.  But it is virtually unknown
-- perhaps entirely unknown -- for verbal features to be copied onto
nominals.  Is this not a splendid argument that nominals are more
autonomous, more central, more "basic", and that verbs are merely the
slaves of nominals? ;-)

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 petegray at btinternet.com  Tue Jun  5 19:20:14 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 20:20:14 +0100
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.202014.0100.>

>does that, in your opinion, mean there was no *g^en-?

One senses an unfriendly trap - which is fun - but I do prefer a more open
sharing of ideas.

Studiously trying to avoid your trap, I say that the existence of the root
(or roots) *g'enH / g'neH says nothing at all about the existence of *g'en.
I do however allow that I am not aware of any IE forms that would point to
such a root, rather than to *genH with loss of H.

Is that carefully enough worded for you?

Peter


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Tue Jun  5 16:15:28 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 11:15:28 -0500
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.111528.0500.>

Dear Rich and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rich Alderson" <alderson+mail at panix.com>
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2001 1:10 PM

> On 1 Jun 2001, Patrick Ryan wrote, with respect to *gen{H_1}:

>> Are you also asserting that, therefore, there is no *g^en-?

> Yes.

> And don't come at me with arguments about Wurzeldeterminativa usw.

[PCR]

I think that perhaps you missed, in my first statement of this question, the
advice that I was not planning to argue for one view or the other. I am merely
interested in reading what your (and others') opinion is on this question. I am
sure you could probably more eloquently argue the question than I could if you
had the opposite opinion so what would be served by rehearsing it?

[RA]

> If such are not simply the result of over-analysis of the data, they are
> clearly so early in the prehistory of the IE language that they may well be
> Nostratic, and in any case are irrelevant to the question as posited.

[PCR]

I have no problem with that opinion. Thus, *g^enH1- would constitute an
exception to the general proposition that IE roots have the form CVC-. Every
good "rule" needs an exception or two.

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 dcarswell at home.com  Tue Jun  5 03:17:20 2001
From: dcarswell at home.com (Douglas Carswell)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 23:17:20 -0400
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.4.21.0106011317460.12722-100000@babel.ling.upenn.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.231720.0400.>

Couldn't modern colloquial French be considered on its way to a Subject-Verb
and Verb-Pronoun language?  Since the original pronouns have become weak, many
speakers now append the emphatic pronouns to the verb.  I viens, lui.  You can
also append it after a noun is used, i.e. Jean viens, lui.  Even though the
pronouns looks like an afterthought, many French speakers always append the
pronoun now (especially when there is no noun phrase), so it is no longer used
for emphasis, but is normal.  Emphasis is created by shifting the pronoun to
the beginning of the sentence, i.e. Lui, i viens.  However, in the standard
language, it is currently not required after the verb, and is often interrupted
by a noun phrase object.  I'm not saying it is a Verb-Pronoun language yet, but
it certainly is looking like one.  I can't think of a "standard" language that
is, however.  Any other thoughts on this?

 -----Original Message-----
From: 	Indo-European mailing list [mailto:Indo-European at xkl.com]
	On Behalf Of Thomas McFadden
Sent:	Friday, June 01, 2001 1:58 PM
To:	Indo-European at xkl.com
Subject:	Re: No Proto-Celtic?

> To us it may look strange that the pronoun would have come after the verb and
> not before, but this may happen, and it is standard in modern Irish, isn't
> it?  E.g.: Scri'obhann SE' litir (he writes a letter).

but thats because Irish is VSO, i.e. subjects in general follow the verb,
whether they are pronouns or full NPs.  what you seem to be arguing for here is
that in PIE full NP subjects preceded the verb, while prnonoun subjects
followed it.

[ moderator snip ]


From sarima at friesen.net  Tue Jun  5 05:47:50 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 22:47:50 -0700
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <F371d66HcASHMZNNA8500001dfa@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.224750.0700.>

At 10:24 AM 6/4/01 +0000, Gabor Sandi wrote:

>Actually, I don't think that I said anything about the position of full NP
>subjects relative to verbs. Still, having a different order for personal
>pronouns is not that unusual, is it?

Yes, but when that is the case, the pronoun almost always comes *earlier*
in the sentence than a noun would.  What you are suggesting is the reverse,
with he pronoun coming *later* than the noun.  This is, at best, highly
unusual.

>In the Romance languages the direct
>object of the verb normally comes after the verb if it is an NP (Je vois le
>chien), but before the verb if it is a personal pronoun (Je te vois).

Yep, as I said, pronouns tend to come earlier than nouns.

>Whether a similar switchover can happen with the subject is another
>question. I don't think that there is a theoretical reason why it can't.

It can, but it would lead to VSO for noun subjects and SVO for pronoun
subjects.

One of the pragmatic factors that co-determines word order is constituent
weight, with heavier constituents being later and lighter ones being earlier.

>For pre-PIE there is also the possibility that it was an ergative language,
>with the subject of an intransitive verb behaving differently from that of a
>transitive one (and like the object of a transitive verb).

Not quite.  In an ergative language the subject of an intransitive verb
takes the *case* *marking* of the transitive object, but otherwise tends to
act like a subject, including position in the sentence (though there are
exceptions).

>For the sake of argument, let us say that *me *se *te are the singular
>pronouns serving as the subject of intransitive verbs and as the object of
>transitive ones, and that they normally follow the verb.

As stated, this would be highly unlikely.  Even if nominal subjects of
intransitive verbs followed the verb, pronoun subjects would still likely
precede it, by the weight rule (unless cliticized).

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From petegray at btinternet.com  Mon Jun  4 19:11:57 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 20:11:57 +0100
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.201157.0100.>

>.. note that German is more restricted
> than French in the possible orders of nouns and adjectives, but German
> has much more extensive agreement morphology than French.

"Much more extensive" seems to me an overstatement.  French adjectives will
normally indicate gender and number, while German adjectives may do neither
if the article is present. For example:
   Ich gebe es dem kleinen Mann   (masc)
   Ich gebe es der kleinen Frau       (fem)
   Ich gebe es dem kleinen Kind     (neuter)
   Ich gebe es den kleinen Kinder   (plural)
and:
   des kleinen Mannes (genitive)
   dem kleinen Mann (dative
   den kleinen Mann (accusative)
   die kleinen Maenner (plural, nominative & accusative)
   der kleinen Maenner (plural genitive)
etc.
If the article is not present, the adjective carries the morphological
burden of indicating gender, case and number, but even so, to claim much
more extensive morphological agreement is pushing it a bit, especially since
most nouns have very little, or no, morphological indication of case.

Peter


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Tue Jun  5 16:44:02 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 11:44:02 -0500
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.114402.0500.>

Dear Gabor and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gabor Sandi" <g_sandi at hotmail.com>
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2001 5:24 AM

> From: Gabor Sandi g_sandi at hotmail.com
> Reply to: Thomas McFadden <tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu>
> Subject: Re: No Proto-Celtic?

<snip>

> For the sake of argument, let us say that *me *se *te are the singular
> pronouns serving as the subject of intransitive verbs and as the object of
> transitive ones, and that they normally follow the verb.

> According to this hypothesis, *es me, *es se, *es te are normal for "I am",
> "thou art", "(s)he/it is". If, for the sake of argument again (I am really
> sticking my neck out here), we hypothesize a particle *so (coincidentally
> identical to the ergative 3rd person pronoun) as the ergative particle,

[PCR]

I certainly would support the idea that "nominative" *-s began life as a marker
of the ergative case but rather than terming it a "particle", I consider the
likeliest origin for it as a postposition corresponding to an IE *-so, 'with',
cognate with Slavic proposition *so.

[GS]

> the phrases "the bear sees me/thee/him" would have been sg. like *harkto-so
> weid me/se/te. Here the pronoun (in the accusative) still comes after the
> verb (which would be unmarked for person in the 3rd pers.sing.), i.e. the
> normal word order would have been transitive EVS (with E for ergative case
> and S for the case functioning as object of a transitive and subject of an
> intransitive verb) and intransitive VS.

> Admittedly there are problems here, including the fact that older IE
> languages definitely favour VSO word order, and the

[PCR]

I know that you are familiar with all the arguments which have been advanced to
"prove" a SOV word-order for IE but I would be greatly interested to learn your
arguments for VSO.

<snip>

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 tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Tue Jun  5 17:37:38 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 13:37:38 -0400
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <002501c0ecdf$c1f9a740$4401703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.133738.0400.>

>> Again in Bavarian German (and a number of the dialects and even to a certain
>> extent in colloquial forms of the standard language) the 1sg. pronoun in the
>> nominative is mia,

> [Ed Selleslagh]

> Isn't that just an Anglo-Saxon perception of the pronunciation (cf. British
> English pronunciation -a < -er)?

works on the Bavarian dialects generally say that coda r and l have been
vocalized (and in all but stage speech coda r has vocalized in standard
spoken German as well).  you can debate how the current pronunciation of
what was MHG -ir should be represented orthographically, -ia is just an
approximation (and is the usual one i think in representing the dialect
when special characters and diacritics arent used).  anyway it doesnt
matter here since im not talking about the coda of the word, but just the
initial consonant.

>> clitic ma both < mir
>> in place of standard wir.  This is transparently from the case where it
>> appears postverbally.  Since the 1pl personal ending is -en, the following
>> wir assimilated to the nasal (and this pronunciation is common even in
>> fairly standard spoken forms when the pronoun is postverbal).  Crucially,
>> this nasal-initial pronunciation was extended to all positions in the
>> relevant dialects, so that even sentence-initially this is what you get.

> [Ed]

> I have serious doubts about this explanation: isn't w<v<m , cf. the 1sg
> marker?  Cf. Eng. 'with' <> Ger. 'mit', Du. 'met'.

> I don't mean that the assimilation you describe doesn't actually happen in
> the modern language, only that it is not related to the problem of the
> genesis of the 1pl marker.

i wasn't being as clear as i should have.  i didnt mean to say that this
had any role in creating the 1pl agreement marker, i only meant to show
that variants of grammatical forms that are created by phonological
processes that are triggered only in marked word order configurations can
spread outside the environment where they are phonologically regular and
be generalized to all environments.  that is, an m-initial pronunciation
of the 1sg pronoun is only phonologically justified when the verb is
immediately preceding.  while examples VS are rather common in modern
forms of German, the unmarked order is SVO in main clauses and SOV in
subordinate clauses.  nonetheless, in some dialects, the pronunciation
of this pronoun that is at home in VS clauses has spread to ones that are
SVO and SOV.  if that can happen, it's not implausible that an agreement
affix created by phonological processes (ultimately from reduction of
subject clitics) operating in just such a marked VS environment could
have spread to the more common SOV/SVO orders.  and the only reason i gave
this example is that the only two i could come up with where we actually
had personal endings being affected in that environment admittedly have
other explanations.

> BTW, e.g. Latin and Greek have a m-type 1pl verbal marker: habeMus, echouMe .

> In Brabant Dutch dialects, e.g. 'Wat doen we?' (What do we do?) is
> pronounced:  [watu:~ m@]. (~ = nasalization of [u]). This is very similar to
> German.

yeah, just to be clear, im not arguing that the example of the 1sg pronoun
affected the 1sg agreement affix in this example, rather the opposite,
that the final -n of the agreement affix triggered assimilation in the
initial consonant of the pronoun, just as you point out has happened in
Brabant Dutch.


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Tue Jun  5 17:57:05 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 13:57:05 -0400
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010604064517.00aa7f00@getmail.friesen.net>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.135705.0400.>

>> don't.  and in most cases where multiple variants exist, there is an
>> identifiable difference, even if its hard to find.  usually it's not a
>> difference in the truth-conditional semantics, but there's perhaps a
>> difference in what is implied, or in the conditions where you would say it.

> The last is quite frequent.  Often one way to get at this sort of thing is
> by asking what question each of the variants might be an answer to.

yes, a very good point.  it's generally very difficult for people to
explain their intuitions about this sort of variation (like if you asked
somebody 'when would you say it like this and when would you say it like
that').  the best way to investigate this sort of stuff seems to be by
looking at corpora.  when you get 100 examples the one way and 100 the
other of how people actually use various constructions, the patterns, that
are hard for a speaker to describe, often become extremely clear.


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Tue Jun  5 17:52:50 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 13:52:50 -0400
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <F371d66HcASHMZNNA8500001dfa@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.135250.0400.>

> Actually, I don't think that I said anything about the position of full NP
> subjects relative to verbs. Still, having a different order for personal
> pronouns is not that unusual, is it? In the Romance languages the direct
> object of the verb normally comes after the verb if it is an NP (Je vois le
> chien), but before the verb if it is a personal pronoun (Je te vois).

> Whether a similar switchover can happen with the subject is another
> question. I don't think that there is a theoretical reason why it can't.

if you were arguing that PIE was VSO, no matter whether the subject was
full NP or pronoun, then fine, that's no problem if it can be
supported.  there's nothing at all implausible about the idea that clitic
pronouns in such a situation could have developed into agreement suffixes,
of course.  appologies.  and no, there's nothing unusual in personal
pronouns having a different order than full NPs, it is very common, but i
think the specific case where full NP subjects precede the verb and
pronoun subjects follow it would be very odd, simply because the examples
of ordering differences that im familiar with are like the one you mention
above, where full NP objects follow the verb and pronouns precede,
presumably because, being lighter elements, they're more susceptible to
cliticization.

> Admittedly there are problems here, including the fact that older IE
> languages definitely favour VSO word order,

i may be betraying a lack of important knowledge here, but what makes you
say this?  which older IE languages favor VSO?  i suppose this is why i
misinterpreted your previous post, because i didn't understand the
positing of VSO as the basic order.  (and i am honestly asking here, not
just looking for trouble!)

Tom McFadden


From edsel at glo.be  Tue Jun  5 08:09:08 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 10:09:08 +0200
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.100908.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Xavier Delamarre" <xavier.delamarre at free.fr>
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2001 10:43 PM

[snip]

> 1/ Hier j'ai achete une maison tres grande a Vaucresson

> 2/ Hier j'ai achete une tres grande maison a Vaucresson

> Absolutely no difference in meaning, style or emphasis. I am sorry.

[Ed Selleslagh]

Yes, but consider:
1) De Gaulle ?tait un tr?s grand homme.
2) De Gaulle ?tait un homme tr?s grand.

The meaning is completely different.

Of course, I speak only Belgian French.

Ed.


From sarima at friesen.net  Tue Jun  5 13:01:07 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 06:01:07 -0700
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
In-Reply-To: <B741BF90.E51%xavier.delamarre@free.fr>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.060107.0700.>

At 10:43 PM 6/4/01 +0200, Xavier Delamarre wrote:

>le 1/06/01 15:05, Stanley Friesen ? sarima at friesen.net a ?crit :

>> But, even so, I suspect they are only interchangeable in some contexts.  In
>> others, one or the other is probably atypical or improper.  Are there not
>> certain questions for which one or the other is a more appropriate
>> response?

>You suspect wrongly. Here is your sentence :

>1/ Hier j'ai achete une maison tres grande a Vaucresson

>2/ Hier j'ai achete une tres grande maison a Vaucresson

>Absolutely no difference in meaning, style or emphasis. I am sorry.

There are absolutely NO discourse contexts in which these are not
interchangeable??  There is nothing that could go before that would rule
out one of the alternatives? I find that rather surprising.

>But this is not PIE, only a late IE language with a fairly fixed word-order,
>with some pockets of freedom in this matter.

>I am convinced that a more intimate practice of old IE languages like Latin,
>Greek, Sanskrit,or Lithuanian would convince you that word-order is not an
>essential part of their grammar.

That would be practically impossible, since all of the grammar books I
trust on those languages say exactly the opposite.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Thu Jun  7 19:50:54 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2001 15:50:54 -0400
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
In-Reply-To: <B741BF90.E51%xavier.delamarre@free.fr>
Message-ID: <THU.7.JUN.2001.155054.0400.>

> You suspect wrongly. Here is your sentence :

> 1/ Hier j'ai achete une maison tres grande a Vaucresson

> 2/ Hier j'ai achete une tres grande maison a Vaucresson

> Absolutely no difference in meaning, style or emphasis. I am sorry.

this proves nothing.  as i think i said a few days ago, the type of
difference we expect in this type of variation can be very difficult to
measure based on a speaker's intuitions about a particular sentence.  they
are best studied by looking for patterns of how the variants are
actually used in texts.  note that i am insisting on consulting actual
texts here, in spite of what you imply in your remarks below.  but, as i
have also mentioned before, even if it turns out that you are right in
this instance, that there is absolutely no difference in the meaning,
implication or contextual conditions on the usage of the two variants you
list above, that still does not bear on the question of whether the
variation between them is regulated by the grammar.  no matter what they
mean, they are specified as possibilities in French, while a number of
other imaginable word orders are NOT possible in French.  this can NOT be
reduced to some vague notion of stylistics.  and the fact remains that for
the most part, word order variation within a language CAN be connected
with variation in meaning, or implication, or discourse context, at least
variation on the level involving subject verb and object.

> But this is not PIE, only a late IE language with a fairly fixed word-order,
> with some pockets of freedom in this matter.

of course.  it is obvious that word order is grammatically determined, it
is less obvious in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, etc.

> I am convinced that a more intimate practice of old IE languages like Latin,
> Greek, Sanskrit,or Lithuanian would convince you that word-order is not an
> essential part of their grammar.

and i am equally convinced that a detailed study of actual texts would
reveal consistent patterns of word order correlating in some way with the
discourse context.  hopefully i will be able to offer references to such
work very soon, so that i can do more than claim that i'm right.

> In the previous posting, I made the (nasty) supposition that the obsession
> for word-order in some circles was due to the mother-tongue of their
> scholars. In fact I suspect that the reason is of a more general type : the
> overinterest for general linguistics with its theoretical fashions,
> generativism among others. It is always easier to build a general theory on
> something (e.g. word-order) than to be confronted with facts, i.e. existing
> languages.

i let the original comment about obsession with word order pass, but you
continue to make prejudiced blanket statements that are non-arguments and
actually incorrect, so now i'm forced to respond.  argue against
generativism if you like, i won't mind, but there's no need to call it a
`theoretical fashion.'  it's been around too long and proved too useful
for that.  there is no question that a common flaw in generative work is
an exaggerated concern with terminology and the inner-workings of a
particular theory, and a concommitant relative ignorance of real
linguistic data.  but it's simply inaccurate to assume that this
characterizes all of generativism, or even most of it.  good
generative work constructs hypotheses about how language works based
on extensive real language data.  other theoretical
leanings have their own shortcomings too.  but what i have been talking
about here is not guilty of ignoring data.  (and by the way, i must
admit to being confused by your statement `It is always easier to build
a general theory on something (e.g. word-order) than to be confronted with
facts, i.e. existing languages.'  in what way are attested word-order
patterns from existing languages not facts??) i'm making no arguments
based on a specific theory, and in fact my position is not specifically a
generative one.   and i am insisting that what i am arguing for needs to
be tested on actual textual data, because what i know about effects on
word order in `free word order' languages comes from corpus-based studies,
not on native-speaker intuitions and not on argumentation from a
pre-existing theory.

please argue against what i am actually saying rather than slinging mud at
a distorted picture of a theory that you have associated me with.  if you
can convince me that Latin (or any of those other languages) does not have
its own language-specific patterns of word order that are conditioned by
semantics/pragmatics etc., then i'll admit i was wrong.

(i do realize that the burden of proof is on my side, since i'm the one
who's arguing for something.  i'm working on it.)

Tom McFadden


From petegray at btinternet.com  Mon Jun  4 19:23:51 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 20:23:51 +0100
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.202351.0100.>

>> dama:r - wife, spouse ...> Wife = domesticated animal... domo, domui,
>> domitum (domtavi) - to tame, to break in
...
>>  Cf., Grk, domos - in Homer, often enclosure or abode for animals, e.g.
>> sheepfold (Iliad 12:301); "Sanskrit root, dam-, da:m - ya:mi, to be tame."

Probably there are different roots here.  One of them refers to building,
the other to taming.

damar (short a) genitive damartos is clearly < *dam + rt, as Pokorny says.

Greek domos, Latin domus Sanskrit damas are the "building" root, while Latin
domo and Sanskrit dam- is the taming root.

Peter


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Wed Jun  6 04:54:03 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2001 00:54:03 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <WED.6.JUN.2001.005403.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/4/2001 2:30:01 AM, edsel at glo.be writes:
>> Damate:r - Dor., Arc., Thess. and Boeot. form of goddess Demeter

> [Ed Selleslagh]

> Don't exaggerate: isn't that 'god(dess)-mother'? (Cf. Jupiter: 'god-father')

Or Demeter, the goddess of domestication?  Sometimes I suppose the chicken
comes first.  Sometimes the egg.  But in the context of all those other
words, and with an open-mind, the possibilities do expand.

> dama:r - wife, spouse

> [Ed]
> Wife = domesticated animal??????  I know those were backward times, but
> still....

OR spouse.  Are you familiar with how the wildman Enkidu was tamed in
Gilgamesh, an epic that might predate the earliest IE texts by 1500 years?
(And then again there's "the taming of the shrew.")

And by the way, the word means "tame" or "break-in"- not necessarily
"domesticate."

Regards,
Steve Long


From bronto at pobox.com  Thu Jun  7 06:04:15 2001
From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood)
Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2001 23:04:15 -0700
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <WED.6.JUN.2001.230415.0700.>

> X99Lynx wrote

>> AND finally, starting with Homer -

>> dama:r - wife, spouse

>> NOTE that most of the early references above are to a variety of
>> mostly domestic animals [...]

Eduard Selleslagh wrote:
> Wife = domesticated animal??????  I know those were backward times,
> but still....

Or a domesticatING animal.
`Dame' is related to `domestic' as well as `dominate'...

--
Anton Sherwood  --  br0nt0 at p0b0x.com  --  http://ogre.nu/


From dlwhite at texas.net  Tue Jun  5 14:37:09 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 09:37:09 -0500
Subject: Red Deer in Anatolia
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.093709.0500.>

----- Original Message -----
From: Rich Alderson <alderson+mail at panix.com>

> You wish to have the word which means "red deer" in all daughter languages,
> even those spoken where the fallow deer is present, to have once meant
> "fallow deer", because the red deer is not present in Anatolia.

        Not that it matters greatly, but red deer are (or perhaps were?)
present in Anatolia.  They are one of the more successful recent species,
with a strikingly wide distribution.

Dr. David L. White


From sarima at friesen.net  Tue Jun  5 13:10:53 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 06:10:53 -0700
Subject: About the Yew1
In-Reply-To: <F113FutJLtosJ3Ih7jt00000100@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.061053.0700.>

At 09:31 AM 6/4/01 +0000, Douglas G Kilday wrote:

> I'm well aware that cognate dendronyms can refer to different trees in
> different languages, and examples from IE and Semitic occur in my own
> postings. But in fact Taxus baccata _is_ quite distinctive as trees go.

Very distinctive.  I would almost say unique among northern hemisphere trees.

>> The main problem I think with using the yew word to locate PIE is, of
>> course, that the "yew" was not always a "yew."  And this only makes sense,
>> since trees don't move and that means what you call a yew or don't call a
>> yew and what I call a yew in the next valley could be two different trees --
>> up until such time as we obtain Polaroid cameras. Or up until we get around
>> to cutting them down and selling the wood, scrapping their bark for extract
>> or perhaps in the case of the yew, eating their berries.  It would be the
>> by-products, not the tree, that we could discuss in common.

> I don't see that Polaroid cameras are necessary. If you and I belong to the
> same tribe, and we don't agree on what to call trees in the next valley,
> then our use of language is dysfunctional. Do you really believe that
> prehistoric humans were linguistically incompetent?

More than that, people who live close to nature are often very good at
identifying what they live among.   A good example of this can be found in
a monograph on rainforest trees of Borneo that I know of.  Guess how the
author identified the trees.  Yep, he used a native guide.  As I remember
it, he even discovered one or two new species based on the fact that his
native guide gave them different names.

A tribal people would have to be truly incompetent to mistake the yew for
anything else, or vice versa.

> Celtic has preserved pre-IE *ebur- 'yew' rather extensively in toponyms,
> ethnonyms, and personal names, and also Irish <ibhar> 'yew; bow' beside <eo>
> 'yew'. The stem *ebur- also appears in toponyms in Iberia, Liguria,
> Campania, and probably Greece (Ephura:, old name of Corinth and other
> places). In my opinion *ebur- belongs with the Old European substrate
> associated with the expansion of Neolithic farmers across Europe (ca.
> 5500-4000 BCE).

It has that appearance to me also.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From PolTexCW at aol.com  Wed Jun  6 03:18:36 2001
From: PolTexCW at aol.com (PolTexCW at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 23:18:36 EDT
Subject: About the Yew1
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.231836.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/5/1 3:55:01 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:

<< I don't see that Polaroid cameras are necessary. If you and I belong to the
same tribe, and we don't agree on what to call trees in the next valley,
then our use of language is dysfunctional. Do you really believe that
prehistoric humans were linguistically incompetent? >>

George Gordon Meade, victor of the battle of Gettysburg, was born, raised and
flourished in a culture largely dependant on the horse.  He spent his entire
career as a professional officer profondly involved with horses. In reading
his writings, it is obvious that he was far from "inguistically incompetent".
It is just as obvious that  George didn't know squat about horses.

John Biskupski


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Wed Jun  6 15:26:07 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2001 11:26:07 EDT
Subject: About the Yew1
Message-ID: <WED.6.JUN.2001.112607.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/5/2001 2:55:01 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<< I'm well aware that cognate dendronyms can refer to different trees in
different languages, and examples from IE and Semitic occur in my own
postings. But in fact Taxus baccata _is_ quite distinctive as trees go.
First, it has prominent red berries. Second, its wood is prized for making
bows and arrows. Third, its leaves are highly toxic (unusual, if not unique,
for a tree native to Europe)... It is very unlikely that a name for this
particular tree, once established among a body of speakers, would be applied
by those speakers to
any other tree. They could, of course, migrate out of its habitat and forget
the name.>>

Quick note.  Allow me to address this in more detail once I get back to my
papers.

But I did want to just point out that "Greek has (s)mi:lax" from the earlier
post is a good place to start to examine the simplification being attempted
above.

The statement that "It is very unlikely that a name for this particular tree,
once established among a body of speakers, would be applied by those speakers
to any other tree" just won't work with Greek.

In fact, the Greeks used "smilax" to apply at least four other forms of
flora.  And the original associations they were making appear to be to
carving or perhaps sharpness of the leaves.  As far as, "red berries" goes,
one of the trees-smilax was the "Hollyoak" or "Holmoak", which of course has
red berries, provides an excellent carving wood and has sharp leaves.  The
odd thing, of course, is that there is little or no reference to the smilax
being poisonous in Classical Greek.  When we do have a connection between
poisonous and arrows, it is in words like "ion", which is often associated
with the violet, although there are texts where it is pretty clear this
association is arbitrary and that the word has multiple meanings in reference
to flora also.

The closer we look, in fact, the more we understand that the ancients were
more concerned with wood and pitch and bark and juice than they were with the
modern-style scientific taxonomy of trees (except for the occasional natural
historian) and that the names they actually used reflected this.  More
importantly, if we don't look closely, we may inadvertantly use Occam's Razor
to remove a good chunk of the truth.

Regards,
Steve Long


From semartin at pacifier.com  Tue Jun  5 14:49:38 2001
From: semartin at pacifier.com (Sam Martin)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 07:49:38 -0700
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <197933305.3200638478@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.074938.0700.>

Larry Trask mentions the revival of the properly buried "albeit". He may
be amused that I have heard this resurrected word pronounced as if it were
German, riming with "Arbeit". The latter, by the way, was borrowed into
Japanese (arubaito) with the meaning "part-time job, side job".

He also mentions the proliferating use of -wise. This is a productive
bound particle, rather than a derivative suffix. Sentence-wise it can go
anywhere, syntax-wise. Usage-wise, I have collected some delightful
examples, wise-wise. Notice that "street-wise" can have two different
meanings: "street-wise youngsters" has the derivative suffix, but
"Street-wise, this city is a mess!" has the particle. The meaning of the
particle is very similar to that of the Japanese particle of backgrounding
focus wa "as for, when it comes to". As a particle the -wise can attach to
a plural, and I could have substituted "Streets-wise" for "Street-wise" in
the example above. Like Japanese multiple-wa phrases, the
particle can occur two or three (or more?) times in a single sentence.
Afterthought-wise, at least. Structure-wise the particle belongs with focus
devices, I think.


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Tue Jun  5 16:07:56 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 11:07:56 -0500
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.110756.0500.>

Dear Stefan and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stefan Georg" <Georg-Bonn at t-online.de>
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2001 1:01 PM

<snip>

So what, is there a /w : v/ contrast in G. ? Not for sose vis a Hollyvood G.
accent, who still are se majorrity ...

[PCR]

When I begin to learn German, I attempted to pronounce [w] in all positions as
/v/.

I found that in words of the form C+[w], my pronunciation was in the extreme
minority. Germans from many different parts of Germany, with whom I grew up,
(almost) universally pronounced C+[w] as a bilabial (/w/) rather than as a
labiodental (/v/).

 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 connolly at memphis.edu  Tue Jun  5 22:13:49 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 17:13:49 -0500
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.171349.0500.>

I (Connolly) wrote:

>> Oh, indeed they are foreign.  It's only in Schwyzer D??tsch that we find
>> initial [x] in native words, and no variety has initial [?] in them.
>> But that's beside the point.  If Duden's pronunciations are factually
>> correct -- a rather large assumption -- then [x] and [?] do contrast in
>> initial position and must therefore be assigned to different phonemes.
>> Unless we want to say that foreign words *as foreign* have a different
>> set of phonemes than native ones, quod Deus avertat.

Stefan Georg wrote:

> Qua de causa avertat ? When I'm pronouncing /Chalid/ as /xali:d/ I'm
> using a patch of Arabic in my German discourse, whether I know much
> Arabic apart from that or not.

Certainly if you say [d] rather than [t].

> If Duden gave the "correct" pronunciation of /Xhosa/ with the correct
> click, we would have a click phoneme in German. Give me a job in that
> editors' board and I'll triple the number of phonemes in this
> language.

Get people to say them and you certainly would.

> Those pronunciations for /Chalid/ etc. are indeed artificial. Duden
> people just want to be educational when they indicate how these words
> should be pronounced, i.e. as close to the pronunciation in the
> source language as possible. The set of words given to illustrate the
> initial ?:x contrast is of a sort that I'm sure I've never met a
> German speaker who can take an oath to have used each one of them at
> least once in his life in some meaningful context. In English words
> and names we try to (are told to) observe /th/, /w:v/ as in the
> source language as well. I'm pretty sure Duden tells us to, too. So
> what, is there a /w : v/ contrast in G. ? Not for sose vis a
> Hollyvood G. accent, who still are se majorrity ...

I agree, of course, that no German has had the opportunity to use *all*
of the examples in normal speech.  But haven't you noticed an increased
tendency to say [xa-] in some words of foreign origin spelt with <cha->?

 Channukah comes to mind.  Once they're in, beside others in <cha->
pronounced [?a-] (not to mention [ka-]), it's hard to say that the
phonemes haven't become established.  Such things do happen.  In OE, [v
z] were allophones of /f s/, restricted to medial position.  Yet modern
English is full of words with initial [v- z-], of which only _vat_ and
_vixen_ (and possibly two others) are native, though they entered the
standard language from southern dialects which now show initial voicing.

 Of course, it's too early to say whether /x-/ and /?-/ will become
established in German, but the process seems to have begun.

Leo Connolly


From petegray at btinternet.com  Tue Jun  5 19:32:25 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 20:32:25 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.203225.0100.>

<kinkajou>

I'm pleased, but not surprised, that it's in American dictionaries, since
it's an American animal.  Is it still in the concise English ones, I wonder?
because that's what my point was.

Peter


From petegray at btinternet.com  Tue Jun  5 19:30:24 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 20:30:24 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.203024.0100.>

> Have you any way of supplying us with meanings?

Yes of course - the dictionary I quoted them from!   They were just a random
sample, and you may find the Anglo-Indian ones (which I didn't include) more
interesting than these, but for what it's worth, here are the definitions
(abbreviated, because I can't be bothered typing the whole thing out.)

>>    Bayard           chivlarous person
>>    hoodman-blind    Blind-man's bluff
>>    kinnikinic       tobacco substitute
>>    kinkajou         N American animal, like a racoon
>>    kino             tree gum
>>    kintal           100 lbs, 100 kg, 112 lbs. (an interesting weight!)
>>    rahat lakoum     Turkish sweetmeat
>>    raff             = riff-raff
>>    sleuth-hound     blood hound
>>    ubiety           being in a definite place, whereness
>>    xoanon   etc.    image of deity fallen from heaven.

Peter


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Thu Jun  7 10:37:03 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2001 10:37:03 -0000
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <THU.7.JUN.2001.103703.0000.>

Larry Trask (4 Jun 2001) wrote:

>I'm thinking of real desk dictionaries, like Collins in Britain and
>Merriam-Webster in the US.  And these really do drop words after a while.
>Ask a professional lexicographer.

>I really do not think that the total number of words pertaining to cars,
>planes and spacecraft is about equal to the number of words pertaining to
>oxcarts and buggies.

You may well be right, but I believe that if we had a reliable way of
tracking the "death" of English words, we would find that the number of
words lost from common use every year roughly equals the number gained.
Since you have given 'cellphone', 'hahnium', and other examples of new words
which don't replace anything, let's look at some words marked as obsolete on
a page chosen at random from the 1903 F&W Standard:

nicker  n. 'night-brawler in London in 18th cent.'
nicker  n. 'water-sprite; nixy'
nicknack  n. 'feast to which every guest contributes'
nicotian  n. 'tobacco'
nictate  v.i. 'wink; nictitate'
nictation  n. 'winking; nictitation'
nidary  n. 'collection of nests'
niddicock  n. 'fool; simpleton; ninny; niddy; noddy'
nide  n. 'clutch; brood; flock of pheasants'
nidgery  n. 'trifle; foolery'
nidget, nigget  n. 'simpleton; idiot'
niding, nithing  adj. 'wicked; infamous; dastardly'
niding, nithing  n. 'infamous fellow; coward'
nief  n. 'neaf; fist'
nifle  n. 'trifle; article of female apparel in 15th cent.'
nifling  adj. 'of trifling importance'
nift  n. 'niece'
nig  v.i. 'be stingy or niggardly'
nig  adj., n. 'niggard; niggardly'
nigerness  n. 'blackness'
niggardship, niggardy  n. 'niggardliness'
niggish  adj. 'niggardly'
nigh  v.t., v.i. 'draw near (to); approach'

Most of these have living variants or synonyms, but not all. 'Nicker' in the
first sense, 'nifle' in the second, and probably 'nidary' appear to have
gone out of use without being replaced.

>I've just been marking a pile of final-year dissertations.  Some of our
>students chose to write on such topics as text messaging, graffiti,
>internet chat-rooms, the slang associated with drugs, and obscenities.  I
>was startled to discover, in these writings, a very large number of words
>which were wholly unknown to me, but which are apparently commonplace among
>young people.  I haven't had the time to try looking these words up in a
>couple of recent desk dictionaries, but I'll bet that quite a few of them
>are not entered.

I suspect that similar studies made in 1900 would reveal large numbers of
words unfamiliar to the older generation and largely forgotten today. Most
of what we call "slang" is short-lived; since it is used to grab attention,
it depends heavily for effect on relative novelty. A few slang terms like
'cool' and 'square' have been around for generations and might be considered
"standard slang", but these are exceptional.

>Anyway, lexicographers just *can't* "leave 'em in" all the time.  Cost, and
>therefore size, is just too important, and something has to give.

>Nor do lexicographers even rush to enter new words.  For example, the
>language has recently sprouted a number of new formations in '-wise', such
>as 'moneywise', 'clotheswise' and 'healthwise'.  These have been frequent
>in speech for years, and they are not rare in journalistic writing.  But
>they're still not entered in my desk dictionaries.

Are you referring to adverbs like 'piece-wise', or determinative compounds
like 'penny-wise'? Both types are formed regularly, and one would not expect
desk dictionaries to be cluttered with them, any more than with regular
plurals, participles, adverbs in -ly, etc.

>I'm afraid I can't agree [with lexical stasis].  A large and expensive
>dictionary can often afford to make room for lots of obsolete words, and of
>course the OED must do this by remit.  But an ordinary desk dictionary has to
>be cheap enough, and hence small enough, to sell large numbers of copies --
>and that means that old words have to be pruned from time to time in order to
>make way for new ones.

This _a priori_ economic argument only works if the processes required to
manufacture dictionaries are stable in cost. During the past century and
more, this has certainly _not_ been the case. Improvements in typesetting
and reproduction, and more recently in information technology, have steadily
driven down the actual cost of producing dictionaries. I believe this is the
principal factor in the increasing size of desk dictionaries, _not_
purported expansion of the lexis. When these costs have reached equilibrium,
so will the size of a given brand of dictionary.

I think a good analogy can be drawn with newspapers. Today's typical
regional paper (circulation on the order of 20k-200k) is much larger and
more colorful than its counterpart of 100 years ago. That doesn't mean that
we have much more, and more colorful, news than folks did in 1900, or that
our lives are much larger and more colorful. It reflects the much lower
cost, with modern technology, of producing newspapers and reproducing
photographs.

DGK


From dlwhite at texas.net  Tue Jun  5 14:44:02 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 09:44:02 -0500
Subject: note on 'dhole'
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.094402.0500.>

----- Original Message -----
From: Justin M. Mott <jmott at babel.ling.upenn.edu>

> It's a minor point, but there is no evidence that the etymon of this word
> had an initial voiced aspirate.  There are no clear sources for it from
> any of the (major) Indo-Aryan languages; the most plausible source for it
> is rather Kannada 'tola' "wolf".  Kannada, being Dravidian rather than
> Indo-Aryan, lacks voiced aspirates.  If this etymology is correct, the
> initial <dh> may just be a spurious (and isolated) spelling of initial
> /t/ (which, and I may be mistaken, could surface as [d]).

       I agree that that is what the usual supects say, on the linguistics
side, but on the biology side, all my sources agree that wolves do not occur
in south India, and therefore in the Kannada area.  (Why is not entirely
clear to me.  They did not spread from China into SE Asia either.  Dislike
of tropcal heat?)  Therefore there is something not quite right here.

Dr. David L. White


From sarima at friesen.net  Tue Jun  5 05:28:37 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 22:28:37 -0700
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <3B180FC4.52D487BD@memphis.edu>
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.222837.0700.>

>Larry Trask wrote:

>> happened here since I left home.  Do any of you Yanks out there *really*
>> pronounce an /h/ in 'vehicle'?

It depends on register for me.  If I am speaking formally, or carefully, I
pronounce the /h/, otherwise I drop it.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From sarima at friesen.net  Tue Jun  5 05:31:57 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 22:31:57 -0700
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSO.4.33.0106021951590.9145-100000@shell.pacifier.com>
Message-ID: <MON.4.JUN.2001.223157.0700.>

At 07:59 PM 6/2/01 -0700, Sam Martin wrote:

>On Larry's inquiry about American speakers and their vehicular
>(vee-HICK-y at -l@r) haitchiness:

>I have always pronounced "vehicle" as VEE-hick- at l.
>The first eighteen years of my life were spent in Kansas.

Ah, that explains it.  I am also from Kansas, but I have lived in
California for over 15 years now, so I apparently vacillate between the
Kansas and the California pronunciation.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Jun  5 08:03:11 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 09:03:11 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <d1.7773c4f.284a91e2@aol.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.090311.0100.>

--On Saturday, June 2, 2001 3:00 pm +0000 RAHammitt at aol.com wrote:

>        As for what you said about not tolerating /h/ before schwa, my
>        speech agrees except with the h in word-initial position.  I
> pronounce the word "hull" with a schwa.

OK; thanks, and I guess I'd better clarify a bit.  In Britain, it is the
tradition to identify the 'cut' vowel as a wholly distinct phoneme from
schwa.  In the US, of course, there is something of a tradition of treating
the 'cut' vowel, on grounds of phonetic similarity, as merely the stressed
form of schwa.  If this second analysis is preferred, then I must modify my
account of my own speech as "no /h/ before unstressed schwa".  I too, of
course, have /h/ before the 'cut' vowel in 'hull', 'hut', 'hush', 'hum',
'hung', 'hustle', 'huddle', and many other words.

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 whiting at cc.helsinki.fi  Wed Jun  6 17:59:05 2001
From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting)
Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2001 20:59:05 +0300
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
In-Reply-To: <004a01c0eaca$867546a0$fbf1fea9@swbell.net>
Message-ID: <WED.6.JUN.2001.205905.0300.>

On Fri, 1 Jun 2001, proto-language wrote:

<snip>

>>> --On Thursday, May 17, 2001 2:17 pm +0300 Robert Whiting
>>> <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:

>>>> I'm perfectly happy to accept 'thy' as a ModE word.  But
>>>> 'thigh' and 'thy' are as perfect a minimal pair as German
>>>> 'Kuhchen' and 'Kuchen' or 'Tauchen' and Kuchen'.

> <snip>

> [PCR]

> A very impressive argument, one ro which I subscribe, and not the least
> impaired by the following small inaccuracy.

>> Otherwise, <dh> usually represent the phryngeal [d.] (sometimes referred to
>> as "emphatic") in Arabic transcription, as in the place name 'Riyadh'.

> [PCR]

> In my experience, /dh/ (dha:l) is never used to represent Arabic emphatic
> /d./ (d.a:d). They are two separate sounds and letters. Riyadh has dha:l.

No, Riyadh had d.a:d.  Look it up in your Wehr (the root is RWD., not RYD.
as one might expect).  The symbol "<dh>" identifies a written sequence,
not a phonetic one and I was fairly specific about indicating that is is
an English graphic sequence.  The point is that English <dh> is not used
to indicate Arabic dha:l except in the month names beginning with <Dhu>
and in <dhal> which is the name of the letter used to write the sound.
Otherwise, English <dh> in transcriptions frequently represents Arabic
[d.] the phryngeal ("emphatic") d, while Arabic [D] is usually represented
by <d> (e.g. dahabeeyah, from the root Dhb "to go back and forth."

<snip>

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi


From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi  Wed Jun  6 18:24:12 2001
From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting)
Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2001 21:24:12 +0300
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
In-Reply-To: <003701c0eadc$8b50b1c0$f903703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <WED.6.JUN.2001.212412.0300.>

On Fri, 1 Jun 2001, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Robert Whiting" <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
> Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2001 5:15 PM

>> Now for the interesting part.  The Latin alphabet did not have a
>> sign for the [w] sound (mostly because it disappeared from Greek)
>> and used the <u/v> graph instead.

> [Ed Selleslagh]

> I doubt that: the Romans didn't have the English v-sound, and the letter u
> (written as v) was used as a semi-vowel close to w, or as a vowel. So they
> didn't need an extra letter to transcribe Greek wau, if they had had to.

Originally Latin had a vocalic [u] and a semi-vowel [w], both written with
the <u/v> graph (the two shapes were simply variants of the same
grapheme).  Since [u] or [w] was predictable from the context, separate
signs were not needed.  This is exactly paralleled by the use of <i> for
both [i] and [j].  Later the semi-vowel [w] shifted to [v], but was still
predictable so there was still no need to specify with different signs,
but there was an increasing tendency to specialize the graphic variants
<u> and <v> for [u] and [v] respectively.  However, they remained more or
less interchangeable until the late middle ages.

<snip>

> BTW, the Greeks had their own problems with transcription of Latin: I think
> it was in Delphi (or was it Olympia - now Olimb?a - ?) where I saw AKOAI
> on an ancient bath house, for Latin AQUAE.

Comes from not having a [w] sound.

>> Much later, the medieval Norman scribes began writing the u/v graph doubled
>> (uu/vv) to indicate the English [w] sound because they were unfamiliar with
>> the English letter wyn or wen.  This Norman double-u (or to the French,
>> double-vay) became the normal sign for the [w] sound and once again, this is
>> the only letter whose name reflects its shape rather than its sound.
>> Outrageous coincidence that the old <w> and the new <w> are the only letters
>> in their alphabets named for their shapes?
>> <snip>
>> Bob Whiting

> [Ed]
> For your information: in Dutch, w is called 'we', pr. like Eng. 'way' (some
> Dutchmen will say 'vay').

As usual, Dutch is stuck in the middle between German and English.  German
has no [w] sound so they use the <w> graph for [v] (since they use the <v>
graph for [f]).  To them the name of the <w> graph is 'vay' (just like
the name of the Hebrew letter waw is vav in German).  Dutch has a [w]
sound and uses the <w> graph for it, but has adapted the name from German
('vay' > 'way').

> And Double-U (pr. Dub'ya) is still another thing, nothing to do with its
> shape either :-)

cf VV and W or UU and W.  With a little imagination you can see how
double-u (or double-vay) got its name.  Interestingly, Finnish does not
have a [w] sound, but has the letter (originally used for writing [v], in
fact, words with <w> and <v> are alphabetized together as one letter).
The name of the letter in Finnish? -- kaksois-v "double-vay".  Kaksois-v
is not a loan translation of dub'ya, but it is of double-v.

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Fri Jun  8 03:34:34 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2001 23:34:34 EDT
Subject: Chronology and history of Germanic Consonant Shift
Message-ID: <THU.7.JUN.2001.233434.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/7/01 7:55:55 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
hstahlke at gw.bsu.edu writes:

> Where could I find current discussion of this and the more general
> chronology of early Germanic.  The recent discussion on the etymology of
> Goth was helpful to some degree.

-- Mallory and Adams note that the Celtic loanwords of the 1st millenium BCE
undergo the first Germanic soundshift.


From richard.schrodt at aon.at  Fri Jun  8 07:37:33 2001
From: richard.schrodt at aon.at (Richard Schrodt)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 09:37:33 +0200
Subject: Chronology and history of Germanic Consonant Shift
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.093733.0200.>

> linguistic and historical chronology of the Germanic Consonant shift, stating
> (. 56) that "it began several centuries B.C. and ended about 500 A.D."  Where
> could I find current discussion of this and the more general chronology of
> early Germanic.

Not very new, but perhaps useful for some discussions: Richard Schrodt, Die
germanische Lautverschiebung und ihre Stellung im Kreise der
indogermanischen Sprachen, 2. Aufl. Wien 1976 (without Vennemanns theories,
which came later).


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sat Jun  9 08:24:51 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 09:24:51 +0100
Subject: Chronology and history of Germanic Consonant Shift
Message-ID: <SAT.9.JUN.2001.092451.0100.>

> Prokosch, in his Comparative Germanic Grammar (Secs 16-24), lays out
> a linguistic and historical chronology of the Germanic Consonant shift,
> stating (. 56) that "it began several centuries B.C. and ended about 500
> A.D."  ... Where could I find current discussion of this and the more
> general chronology of early Germanic?

There has been some discussion of this earlier in one of the language
lists - about a year ago, I think.   You might be able to find it on the
'net somewhere.

Some confusion might be around because the Germanic sound changes a re a
complex of different phenomena, not all of which were completed before the
different languages separated.   Some of the later changes were still being
worked out (e.g in Middle Frankish) as late as the 10th century AD.

As for the first sound shift, I'm not up to date with the most recent stuff,
but I quote the following from the dtv-Atlas:

   "For the date of the 1st sound shift, we can use the word Hanf, which
comes from the Greek word kannabis.  This word is a loan word out of
Scythian, which did not enter Greek till the 5th century BC.  In Germanic we
meet the word in its shifted form *hanap-.  Since Germanic could not have
borrowed this word very early, we can assert that at this time the rules *k
> h and *b > p were still in force.  But it does not tell us how long this
rule had existed.  That it no longer was in force in the 3rd and 2nd
centuries before Christ can be concluded from loan words from Latin, none of
which have shifted forms.  (The first contact of Germans with Romans as in
this period.)"

Walker-Chambers supports this.  He says:  "It is estimated that the First
Sound Shift was completed by c 500BC;  but we only know that it was finished
before the Germanic peoples established contact with the Romans in the1st
century BC, since none of the words borrowed from Latin were affected by
it."

Hope that helps.

Peter


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Fri Jun  8 03:36:34 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2001 23:36:34 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <THU.7.JUN.2001.233634.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/7/01 9:16:05 PM Mountain Daylight Time, edsel at glo.be
writes:

> E.g. during the Middle Ages society hardly changed over 100 or more years;
> in more recent times, however...

-- there's a genuine discontinuity over the past 500 years or so in Western
society, and historical change has accelerated greatly.  However, prior to
the Renaissance, this doesn't apply.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Fri Jun  8 04:01:21 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 00:01:21 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.000121.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/7/01 9:45:18 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com
writes:

>   We've been through this.  What you call often call "change" is actually
> continuity to me, because you still call what remains "cognate", which means
> there must be something that stayed the same.

-- cognate means "derived from the same source", neither more nor less.

Cognate words in related languages need bear no phonetic resemblance to each
other at all, as such.  Only when the systemic _patterns_ of change over time
are understood does their relationship become obvious, in many cases.

Eg., "pita" (Hindi) and "father" (English) are cognates, as are "pad" and
"foot", despite having no surface similarity at all.

This is not apparent until you know the rules for the relevant sound-changes.
 (PIE *p ==> p in Indo-Aryan, *p ==> f in Germanic, etc.)


From bmscott at stratos.net  Fri Jun  8 04:18:26 2001
From: bmscott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 00:18:26 -0400
Subject: Rate of Change
In-Reply-To: <002c01c0ed96$d9dd2500$c802703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.001826.0400.>

On 5 Jun 2001, at 9:58, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

>> 1000 years is 1000 years, whether it occurs from 6000 to
>> 5000 BCE, or from 0 to 1000 CE.

> Although this is strictly true, it is highly debatable: you have
> to take into account the rate of change of local society. E.g.
> during the Middle Ages society hardly changed over 100 or more
> years; in more recent times, however...

The basic point is probably sound enough, but you'd have a hard time
finding a medieval historian who would agree that 'during the Middle
Ages society hardly changed over 100 or more years'.  Pick any 100-
year period you like during the MA, and you'll find significant social
changes.

Brian M. Scott


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Jun  8 10:06:49 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 11:06:49 +0100
Subject: Rate of Change
In-Reply-To: <d.15c1a474.284f145d@aol.com>
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.110649.0100.>

--On Wednesday, June 6, 2001 1:06 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

Folks, I'm buried in exam marking, and I don't have time now to respond to
all of Steve Long's points.  For now, I'll have to content myself with
replying to just one, on the comparative method.

> To say that I can't back up to that starting point, where everything is at
> best similarities and resemblances -- before any judgments about genetic
> relationships would have been made -- is to queer the game.  It makes the
> comparative method immune to critical analysis.

No; certainly not.  The comparative method is not immune to critical
analysis.  If it were, nobody would have any confidence in it.  Any
attempted application of the method must stand or fall on the quality of
the evidence offered to support it.  If that evidence is not good enough,
then the claimed conclusions will be rejected.

> I suspect part of the problem begins back when no analysis has yet been
> done and there can be nothing but resemblances between two languages.
> That's where the presumption starts that there WILL be only one genetic
> relationship and therefore there should be only one original systematic
> correspondence between the languages.  If you start by presuming that all
> "genetic" relationships can only relate to one parent, than all your
> results will tend towards that presumption, whether true or not.

Not so, I'm afraid.  The comparative method cannot possibly reconstruct an
ancestor that never existed -- not if it's competently applied, anyway.
Incompetent attempts are prominent in the fringe literature, of course, but
these are simply laughed away by professional linguists.

> (The Australian example you give -- Blake and "the clear patterns
> underlying the superficial absence of resemblances,..." could only happen
> in a historical and geographical context where relationships were already
> expected, for extrinsic reasons.

Again I disagree.  Of course, it made more sense for Blake to try to spot
patterns linking the troublesome Australian languages to other Australian
languages, rather than to, say, Eskimo-Aleut.  But he would not have found
those patterns if they had not already been there, waiting to be discovered.
He didn't create patterns that didn't already exist.  The comparative
method can't do that.

> I don't imagine you would have much
> patience with anyone establishing a close genetic relationship between
> Mexican and Phoenician despite "the superficial absence of resemblances"
> between the two languages.)

Depends on the evidence.  If "Mexican", whatever that is, and Phoenician
really do exhibit systematic correspondences, then those correspondences
are sitting there waiting to be discovered.  If somebody discovers them,
then that is the end of the matter.

I get the distinct impression that Steve believes that the comparative
method is a sham, a toy that does no more than to spit back the assumptions
built into it in the first place.  'Tain't so, Steve.

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 rao.3 at osu.edu  Fri Jun  8 15:33:44 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 11:33:44 -0400
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.113344.0400.>

S. Long <X99Lynx at aol.com> wrote:
> But what you're saying - up until the last sentence - seems to make out that
> "systematic correspondence" come out of thin air.

> Where a comparative analysis has to begin - not where it ends up - is
> similarities and resemblances between two or more languages.

The point is that such similarities and resemblances are considered to
be coincidences till systematic correspondences have been established.
The difference is between collection of discrete facts and establishment
of general laws. Only the latter is (nowadays) considered science.


From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi  Fri Jun  8 04:47:10 2001
From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 07:47:10 +0300
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.074710.0300.>

[Larry Trask:]

>Certain of the Pama-Nyungan languages have undergone such dramatic
>phonological changes that words in them look very little like their
>cognates in related languages that have not undergone such dramatic
>changes.  Australianists were at first baffled by the position of these
>strange-looking languages, but then Barry Blake -- in an undergraduate
>dissertation -- spotted the clear patterns underlying the superficial
>absence of resemblances, and the problem languages then proved to be
>easily assignable to Pama-Nyungan.  The main casulaty here was our ideas
>about possible phonological changes, which took something of a hammering.

Just out of curiosity: how strange are the changes in these Pama-Nyungan
languages?

Most examples of bizarre changes that I know are from various Samoyedic
languages, e.g. *w- > q-, *j- > q-, *V- > ngV-, *mp > ngf and even *s- >
k- before /e/ and /i/! But I'd be most interested in other examples of
uncommon phonetic developments.

And, if anyone can make any sense of the phonetic side of the change *s >
*k mentioned above, I'd be glad to hear it...

Regards,

Ante Aikio


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Tue Jun 12 05:03:33 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2001 01:03:33 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look
Message-ID: <TUE.12.JUN.2001.010333.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/7/2001 11:19:18 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:
<< We can imagine a lower rate of change, but there seems to be no good
evidence for it.  Without some hard evidence, we have no right to assume
that linguistic change was any slower in the remote past than it has been
in the historical period.  Such an assumption would violate our linguistic
Uniformitarian Principle: languages and speakers in the remote past behaved
much as languages and speakers have behaved in the historical period. >>

While I respect the trained linguist's ability to "feel" the relative age of
a language, I must be firm in pointing out that "rate of change," as Prof
Trask is using it, has little scientific validity - at least without
confirmable numbers that anybody can double-check.

That's the price of admission if you are going to start claiming scientific
validity and a "linguistic Uniformitarian Principle."

What specific changes is Prof Trask referring to?  How is the "rate" is
measured in terms of IE languages?  Are all the changes in a language added
together?  Or are all the changes irrelevant and do only certain changes
count?  Which changes and why?  How much do each of these changes equal in
years?  How much is a sound shift worth in years?  How do you measure the
difference between two morphologies and how do you calculate the time it's
been since they were once one morphology?  Why do any of these better reflect
the actual rate of change than let's say rate of borrowings?

Do you count up all the cognates in two "daughter" languages, divide by the
total words in each and then multiply by ten years?  Or do you count the
sound shifts in "core" words, whatever that means?

I helped prepare a presentation before a board of physicists at the National
Science Foundation a few years back.  You got to know if you went in front of
them with phrases like "rate of change", you'd be expected pinpoint exactly
what you were measuring, how you measured it, how many times you measured it
and convey a clear assurance that if anyone else measured it they would come
up with the same result.

If they expect this kind of specificity about "rates of change" in quantum
mechanics and animal behavior experiments, they can expect it in historical
linguistics.

Some observations:

1. The basic rate change formula for function [f] in the time interval [a,a +
h] is:  Rate of Change = f(a + h) - f(a).  This is true in physics,
psychology and pina coladas.  If there is no way to measure the quantitative
difference between languages, there is no way to validly measure "rate" of
change.  ("Rate" being defined in English and in science as a change in unit
quantity per another unit quantity.)

If we are talking about sound changes that separate two daughter languages,
we should be able to show that those specific sound changes took a certain
number of years, days, hours and with historical evidence.  If we are
claiming that that rate is somehow universal - justifying the application of
a uniformity assumption - we should be prepared to show that the same rate
per sound change can be observed in a large enough number of other languages.
 Or explain why they vary.

2.  An example.  In biology, we talk about the rate of mutation.  That is the
rate of particular chromosomal change per unit of time.  And here we actually
count the chromosomes that change per unit of time and can even project from
that correlation.  And it is also understood in what way that rate is
variable.  For example, when we artificially induce mutation, the rate at
which such change occurs is actually correlatable to the strength of the
radiation.  Or, as another example, at the age of fifty a man's sperm cells
will contain three times as many mutated chromosomes as they do when he is
twenty, plus or minus .062.  These are different quantifiable vectors that
affect the rate of change.

2. Others on this list invoke the close "resemblance" of cognates and
inherited morphology to suggest a lack of change.

In point of fact, this might be the worst indicia.

An example: Most mammals had body hair, a distinguishing "inherited"
characteristic.  So what does body hair tell us about "rate of change?"  50
million years ago, most mammals had body hair.  About 20 million years ago,
several branches of mammals developed that did not have body hair.  Elephants
who developed before humans have less body hair than humans. But today 40
million years later, most mammals still have lots of body hair.  So, the last
thing we would use to measure "rate of change" is the identifying "cognate"
of body hair.  Because it is sure to tell us the opposite of what we are
looking for.  It might even lead us to dubious conclusions like Greek and
Latin were in some way mutually comprehensible in 1000BC.

3. How much has English changed in the last thousand years?  Can that rate be
represented in a number?  How is that number derived, what specific feature
in the languages that changed is reflected in the number?  A sound change?
How does one measure sound changes?  How many sound changes? Why are other
features not being measured?  Is the rate of borrowing a more accurate
measure of rate of diversity among related languages?

How does the formula derived from changes in English in 1000 years measure up
when applied to French in 1000 years?  To Old Norse?  To Slavic?

How do you propose to measure the rate of change in modern preliterate
languages?  How do they measure up against written languages?  Do they give
any evidence that rate is affected by the acquisition of writing?

Are these results reproducible?

Can any scientist sit down with the same data and apply the same formula and
come up with the same results?

4. As I said, this is not meant to be disrespectful of linguistic expertise.
It is however what is required before any claim of any Uniformitarian
Principle can be seriously claimed in any scientific sense.  Before you can
make any claims about knowing "rates of change" in the preliterate past of IE
languages, you should at minimum be able to show some coherent, reproducible
formula for present IE languages.

But of course if Prof Trask's use of "Uniformitarian Principle" was
metaphorical or casual, and not meant to imply any real level of scientific
certainty, then I can have no objection to it.

Regards,
Steve Long


From rao.3 at osu.edu  Fri Jun  8 15:15:43 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 11:15:43 -0400
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.111543.0400.>

I am troubled with the claim that Anglo-Romani is a form of English.
There was paper in the early 70's (72 I think) in Language by Kulkarni
on the language of the Konkan Sarasvat Brahmins. This language is IA,
but has lost many of the IA syntactic patterns that do not exist in
Kannada (the major language of the region where KSB live), with the
Kannada patterns being used instead. Due to the convergence/substratum
influence, the difference between IA and Dravidian was much smaller to
begin with than between English and Romani. But the development is
clear: The patterns of the more frequently used language (Kannda being
used everywhere except when all participants were KSB) crept into the
minority language till the former ousted the latter. [From personal
knowledge the same can be said of Maratti speakers in Madurai.]

H. W. Hatting wrote:
> If this information is correct, English Romani is indeed basically English
> relexified with Romani vocabulary.

But how was the lexicon preserved? That today's speakers just learn the
"code words" does not mean that is how it happened in the first
place. A better hypothesis would be that as Romani became restricted in
use and essentially a "learnt language", the substratum influence of
English caused the grammar changes. That makes Anglo-Romani a dialect of
Romani with strong English influence, rather than English "relexified"
with Romani.

---

I am also uncomfortable with the idea of assigning "verbal morphology"
the primary place in ascertaining genetic relationships. It seems that
verbal categories are subject to remaking as much as nominal categories.
In particular, progressive -> imperfective/non-past and perfect ->
perfective/past seem to quite common, with the antecedents arising quite
often.

Perhaps what is being asserted is that morphemes used in conjugation are
more resistant to borrowing or external influence. This may be the case,
but seems to be arguable given what has been said so far.

Regards
Nath


From rao.3 at osu.edu  Fri Jun  8 19:36:43 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 15:36:43 -0400
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.153643.0400.>

"Larry Trask" <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk> wrote:
> It is true that sentence operators, such as negation and tense, are
> most typically associated with verbs.  But this is not true without
> exception. For example, in Sanskrit -- I am told -- the negative
> marker can appear anywhere in a sentence at all, and need
> not be attached to the verb.
> (OK; I'm ready for flak from the Sanskritists on this list. ;-) )

No flak on this specifically. Just that when making statements about
Sanskrit, we must pay attention to diachrony and genre, due to the
length of time and substratum influences.

For a more detailed analysis, see Gonda's "La place de la particule
n?gative "na" dans la phrase en vieil indien.", Leiden, E. J. Brill,
1951.  I have forgotton the his precise conclusions. My impression is as
follows: In the oldest prose texts, negation (na') occurs most often in
the clause initial position or with the verb. In the medieval
commentaries,  the last position in the sentence is common and this
position starts appearing in Mahabhashya a 1st c. BCE commentary, but
this is generally considered to be Dravidian influence (where negation
is indicated by a particle cliticized to the finite verb that would
otherwise be at the end of the sentence).


From dlwhite at texas.net  Fri Jun  8 22:25:08 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 17:25:08 -0500
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.172508.0500.>

[ moderator edited ]

>> Whether TK meant "anything goes" or not depends on how strong a reading we
>> give to their statement.

> LT:  But why should we impute to them a position which they have never
> asserted or endorsed?  Is this fair?

DLW:  My point is that their formulation includes possibilities that do not
actually occur, _in their own evidence_, which I presume they can reasonably
be expected to be familiar with.  Their failure to note this is surely a
failure of some sort, and whatever we choose to call it, it is fair to call
it something not good.

>> It should be noted that whether finite verbal morphology gets borowed at all
>> is a matter of definition,

> LT:  Sorry; I can't agree.  If language A gradually replaces most of its
> inherited verbal morphology with morphology taken from language B, while at
> the same time retaining much of its inherited lexicon and grammar, then
> there is no definition about it: the language has borrowed verbal
> morphology, and that is the end of the matter.  T & K's stance is that we
> should consider this a possibility and look to see if there are any
> examples of it.

DLW:  There aren't, save by hypothesis.  To both assume and conclude that
the "gradual replacement" scenario has happened is entirely circular.  It is
indeed a matter definition, or at least of theoretical stance.  We have one
simple fact:  there are no attested mixed finite verbal morphologies.  This
can be viewed either as reflecting a mystic pricinple that "There is no
partial borrowing of finite verbal morphologies" or as indicating that
"Genetic descent can always be traced through finite vebal morphology (where
applicable)".   Or we can 1) assume that in the past there were mixed finite
verbal morphologies, so that their absence in the present (and the attested
past) is therefore simply a misleading coincidence, and then 2) triumphantly
conclude that mixed finite verbal morphologies are possible, QED.  This is a
sub-case of the "it was different in those days" view of language change, by
which all sorts of bizarre things happened in the past, in situations we are
not able to observe, in this case mixed languages lurking under every rock,
a la Steve Long.  You quite rightly decry this sort of approach in a very
recent posting.  Good luck, by the way, answering Steve Long's objections to
what might be called "mono-descent", in view of what you have recently said
concerning the supposed applicability Tiger Woods' genetic descent to this
matter.

> LT:  Thomason now concludes that Laha, at least, is indeed an
> example of this very thing.  Whether she is right in this is a matter for
> empirical investigation, not a matter of definition.

DLW:  Unless there is something in the facts that can prove that a partial
Malay finite verbal morphology existed at one point (not likely, since Malay
has no finite verbal morphology) it remains fundamentally a matter of
theoretical stance.

> LT:  Well, Laha is on the table.  The chief investigator, Collins, has
> concluded that Laha has indeed borrowed almost all of its verbal morphology
> from Malay.  What is there to discuss, apart from the possibility that
> Collins may be in error?

DLW:  That, even if true, is not proof that a partial Malay finite verbal
morphology existed in Laha at some point in the past.  And "borrowing" of an
entire verbal morphology may just as well be taken as descent from the
supposed source of this.  Consider the case of Mednyj Aleut.  If Collins
claims (with good evidence) that Laha at one point had part of its finite
verbal morphology from Malay, that would be different, and Laha would indeed
be a mixed language.  But we are, to use DGK's phrase, playing ping pong in
the dark without access to the original article.

>>> LT:  If so, let me ask this: in what respect does Michif fall
>>> short of being a mixed language?  It looks to me like a paradigm case of a
>>> mixed language.  If we encountered, or imagined, a real mixed language,
>>> what features would it have that Michif lacks?

>> DLW:  The finite verbal morphology of Michif is all Cree.  Therefore, by
>> the Davidian standard, it is Cree.  That also answers the scond question.

> OK.  My friend Homer is a specialist in nouns.  He loves nouns, and he
> regards them as paramount in languages.  According to Homer, the ancestry
> of a language is determined by the origin of its nouns.  Therefore, by the
> Homeric definition, Michif is French.  End of discussion. ;-)

> Why is Homer's position more arbitrary than yours?

DLW:  You seem to be repeatedly missing some basic points here.  Not only is
there a good case to be made for the proposition that verbs are more
fundamental ("higher") than nouns, but there are some mixed nominal
morphologies, whereas there are no mixed verbal morphologies.  The cases are
not parallel.  Among other things, "Homer's" standard would not yield a
clear verdict in cases of mixed nominal morphology.  He would also have to
say why nominal morphology is to be regarded as the most "framish" part of
the frame, and therefore the most reliable indicator of genetic descent,
when the evidence suggests very strongly that this honor goes to verbal
morphology.

[on Takia]

>> If the finite verbal morphology (morphemes, not categories) is Takia, it is
>> Takia. That may well seem arbitrary, but it is not.  Verbs are more basic
>> than nouns, and what is more basic is more indicative of descent.

> LT:  I'm sorry, but I cannot agree that verbs are more basic than nouns.
> This seems to me an arbitrary fiat.  Anyway, I've never seen a language
> without nouns, and that suggests to me that nouns are about as basic as
> anything can be in languages.

DLW:  It is not a matter of what is or is not basic in some binary sense,
but of what is more basic in the sense of being higher in the tree.  Nouns
depend on verbs, not the other way around.

> LT:  But I'll discuss this in terms of what follows.
> A little quibble first, though.  Arguably, I possess no characteristic more
> "basic" than my biological sex, which is male.  Does it therefore follow
> that I am more closely related to my father than to my mother? ;-)

DLW:  Vague analogies with biology are not really relevant here.

> LT:  The position that the verb is the head of the sentence is embraced in
> certain syntactic theories, especially in most dependency grammars and in
> some relational grammars.  But it is rejected in other approaches,
> including other relational approaches and all Chomskyan approaches.  The
> Chomskyan view takes the head of the sentence to be an abstract element,
> and not the verb.  I am not a Chomskyan, but I don't think it can simply be
> taken for granted that the verb is the head of the sentence.

DLW: It is not being taken for granted.  It is in effect part of what is
being posited:  "if we assume that verbs are more basic than nouns .."  By
they way, the Chomskyite "INFL" (if they are still doing that:  I know
little and care less) is historically descended from the inflection of the
verb, so their position too would have to be that verbal inflection (in this
case finite) is more basic.

> LT:  There is also a fascinating counter-argument here.  Consider this
> example:

>   'That Martians are green is well known.'

> Now, the subject of 'is' is plainly the complement clause 'That Martians
> are green'.  Fine.  Now, what is the head of this clause?  Is it the verb,
> as David seems to be implying?  Then the head of the subject is 'are'.  But
> -- whoops -- this is plural, and yet the whole clause takes singular
> agreement.
> Oh, dear. ;-)

DLW:  This is not so fascinating, or problematic.  It is fairly easy to say
that the subject of the verb is "that", which would explain why it cannot,
in such cases, be deleleted.

>> We may also note that things that might be held to apply to
>> an entire proposition, like negation, are typically attached to or
>> associated with verbs,

> LT:  It is true that sentence operators, such as negation and tense, are most
> typically associated with verbs.  But this is not true without exception.
> For example, in Sanskrit -- I am told -- the negative marker can appear
> anywhere in a sentence at all, and need not be attached to the verb.  (OK;
> I'm ready for flak from the Sanskritists on this list. ;-) )

DLW:  You do not have to wait for flak from Sanskritists.  What you say is
true not only of Sanskrit, but also, marginally, for English:  "I see not
any good cause ."  To use "no" would be more normal, but "not any" seems
possible.  In any event, it is not relevant.  I said "typically", not
"universally".   And we do not, for example, find markers of tense attached
to subject nouns.

>> and that though there is a type of language,
>> polysynthetic, in which the verb and its mandatorily associated elements
>> form a complete sentence, there is no corresponding type of language
>> where the subject noun and its mandatorily associated elements form a
>> complete sentence.

> LT:  It is true that, in *some* languages, a sentence may consist entirely of
> an affixed verb.  But it is equally true that, in *some* languages, a
> sentence may consist entirely of nominal elements, with no verb-form present
> at all.

DLW:  There is no _type_ of language where the subject noun and its
mandatorily associated elements (which would include tense) form a complete
sentence.  And except for cases of BE-deletion (which only occurs in the
present), adjetives that serve as (and are marked as) verbs, and NPs uttered
when context makes clear what the higher VP would be, I venture to doubt the
validity of your assertation.

>> Thus upon examination it is not arbitrary to regard
>> vebal morphology as more basic than nominal morphology.

> LT:  Ah, no -- for several reasons.  I've just mentioned two: it is not an
> obvious truth that the verb is the head of the sentence, and it is not true
> that verbs are universally more indispensable than nominals.  But there is
> more, much more.

> What David White is arguing, successfully or not, is that the *lexical verb*
> plays a central role in sentence structure.  Even if we grant this, it *does
> not follow* that verbal morphology is somehow more central than any other
> morphology, such as nominal morphology.  Verbal morphology is not the same
> thing as a lexical verb.

DLW:  This is a point you yourself seem to miss, in attributing to me
beliefs about lexical verbs which were intended to apply only to verbal
morphology.

> LT:  Moreover, David's arguments here seem self-contradictory.  Consider a
> language with native verbal morphology but with many borrowed lexical verbs
> -- such as English or Basque.  In such a language, it is the (borrowed)
> lexical verb which serves as the sentential head, in David's account, and
> which determines the syntactic properties of the sentence.  At the same
> time, the native verbal morphology merely follows the requirements of the
> lexical verb in a wholly passive manner.  But now consider David's
> position: the (borrowed) lexical verb is the most central element in the
> sentence, and its properties determine the structure of the sentence,
> including the associated morphology.  Yet it is the native verbal
> morphology which is somehow (I haven't followed this).

DLW:  No kidding.

> LT:  .more central in identifying the genetic origin of the language,
> because this morphology is now what is "central".  Have I missed something?
> This line of thinking seems wholly inconsistent to me.

DLW:  Let me back up (or off) and attempt to restate what I am saying.
Finite verbal morphology is the most "framish" of the frame.  As the frame
is reduced, under severe external influence, finite verbal morphology is the
last to go.  (If it does, then genetic descent has truly been lost.  But
this is astronomically rare.)  To put it another way, when genetic descent
is backed into a corner, finite verbal morphology is that corner.  Yes, this
is all "by hypothesis".  But the hypothesis is, of course, intended to serve
a useful prurpose or two, and has not been invented out of sheer
counter-trendy perversity (though I am surely guilty of that too).

The main "useful purpose" served is to explain why we find mixed nominal
morphologies but not mixed (finite) verbal morphologies.  People will borrow
nominal morphology ("alumni", "crises") before they will borrow verbal
morphology.  (Note that nobody even bothers to worry about the "proper"
preterites of Romance verbs in English, for example.  They just will not
intrude so much foreign-ness into "the frame".)

Another "useful purpose" is to provide a clear standard for assigning
genetic descent in doubtful cases.  (See just above for why the standard is
_not_ arbitrary.  I am getting tired of hearing about how it supposedly is.)
I note that no answer has been given to my assertion that TK might as well
be tossing a coin in some of their assignments.  I presume this is because
there is no valid answer.  There is indeed little to be said for a
theoretical framework that in one case of "Language A morphology, Language B
words" assigns the language in question to Language A, but in another case
assigns the language in question to Langage B.  If things like this are TK's
main selling points, I hope they give up sales.  Be that as it may, with a
clear standard, we can avoid not only coin-tossing but also finding mixed
languages (or worse, semi-mixed languages) under every pre-historic rock.
Thus we have an answer to the "No Proto" crowd, which is more than TK can
manage.

I will give a quite relevant example of what I mean by this.  If genetic
descent is to be traced through non-sound features (I notice you are no
longer actively claiming this), then why isn't Celtic a mixed language, so
that there was never really any such thing as Proto-Celtic?  The non-sound
convergence of (Insular) Celtic to Semitic, or something like it, is quite
striking, and extends even down to the level of fairly minor details like
the Northern Subject Rule and Interior Possession ("You killed my horse"
rather than "You killed to me the horse")  I suppose you and others could
claim that the level of Semitic-seeming non-sound resemblances in Celtic,
though it is "a lot", is not "enough", but who is to deny the Steve Longs
and other No-Protos of the world when they come back and say "Yes it is."?

> LT:  It seems that David is telling us that, at one and the same time, the
> borrowed lexical verb is paramount, while the native verbal morphology is
> also paramount.  And I can't follow this.  Surely it has to be one or the
> other, at best.

DLW:  I said nothing about lexical verbs being "paramount" in genetic
descent.  You made that one up yourself.  The argument about verbs
(presumably lexical verbs) being heads (not the same thing) was made in
support of the arguments about the primacy of verbal morphology in the frame
of language, and therefore in genetic descent.  It was not an argument about
the primacy of lexical verbs.  Two different primacies.  In my example with
"necesitates", the verb is the head (more than any of the nouns, anyway),
but the ending is part of the frame, in a neo-Swadeshian sense of being the
most basic morpheme.  Speaking of waxing Neo-Swadeshian, note that if we
included "preterite" (more or less) as a basic meaning and took "/o/-grade"
as its phonic instantiation, the IE-ness of Germanic would be evident on
that basis alone. On a smaller scale, the Germanicness of all Germanic would
be evident from dental preterites alone.

> LT:  Finally, let me advance a counter-argument.  As David's own 'tank'
> example illustrates, it is commonplace in languages for verbs to agree with
> nominal arguments -- that is, for intrinsic features of nominals (person,
> number, gender, maybe others) to be copied onto verbs.  But it is virtually
> unknown -- perhaps entirely unknown -- for verbal features to be copied onto
> nominals.  Is this not a splendid argument that nominals are more autonomous,
> more central, more "basic", and that verbs are merely the slaves of nominals?
> ;-)

DLW:  Not really, no.   Polysynthetic languages have been described as
having their nouns dependent on verbs like planets orbiting the sun.  I
think that is a good analogy.  Thus in Swahili if you were to say the
equivalent of  "The crocodile ate the book", the sentence would have (I
forget the ordering) a noun meaning 'crocodile', a noun meaning 'book', and
a verb meaning (more or less) "he ate it".    Class markers would bind the
element meaning 'he' to 'crocodile' and the element meaning 'it' to 'book'.
(Theoretically if 'crocodile' and 'book' were in the same class as there
would be ambiguity.)  The verb is a complete sentence, with its associated
nouns clearly (I would think) dependent on it.  If, by your argument, the
class concords indicate that the verb is to best regarded as dependent on
one of the nouns, which is it?  Are we going to diagram the sentence as
having its verb under two nouns?  I hope not.

 By the way, pronouns are often cliticized and effectively bound to the
verb.  Thus it is that "look up the answer" is possible whereas "look up it"
(with the same meaning) is not.  I note that TK's only two examples of
pronouns supposedly having been borrowed involve English supposedly
borrowing pronouns from other Germanic languages (Norse, Dutch) that had not
necessarily (far from it) diverged to the point of mutual
incomprehensilibility.  This is surely a suspicious coincidence, and I do
hereby officially venture to doubt that there are any examples of personal
pronouns being borrowed in cases of unequivocal mutual unintelligibility.
(Other than silly things like the joke usage of "moi" in English.)  So prove
me wrong.

Dr. David L. White


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Tue Jun 12 12:18:10 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2001 08:18:10 EDT
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
Message-ID: <TUE.12.JUN.2001.081810.EDT.>

There is a larger issue that has come up in this discussion of "finite verb
morphology"  as an indicator of language relatedness.  Awhile back we saw the
following exchange:

Larry Trask wrote:
<< The lexicon of Laha is largely native, though partly borrowed from Malay.
But the grammar is almost 100% Malay, with only a few fragments of native
Laha grammar surviving.  So, my question for David White is this: is Laha a
variety of Malay, or not?  Since the grammar is almost entirely Malay, it
would seem that he must answer "Yes; it's Malay." >>

In a message dated 5/25/2001 8:15:42 PM, dlwhite at texas.net replied:
<< I would need to know what the "few bits of Laha grammar" are.  If they
involve finite verbal morphology, then what I have been saying is wrong....
If they involve nominal morphology, derivational or non-finite verbal
morphology, or (worse yet) mere categories, then what I have been saying is
not wrong.>>

Let's look at Dr White's approach here and what it might mean:

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.

Situation #2: Same as above, but Language A's "finite verbal morphology" is
shared with Language C

RESULT:  ENTIRE "nominal morphology, derivational or non-finite verbal
morphology,.." etc., are now "non-genetic."  Language A is now genetically
related to Language C.

So, a large part of Language A goes abruptly from "genetic" to "non-genetic"
depending on the presence of certain verb morphology.

I think any good scientist would, in the example above, call the distinction
between "genetic" and  "non-genetic" operationally useless.  The second you
can see the interpretation of the whole data (the whole language) turned 180
degrees based on the presence or absence of one element ("finite verbal
morphology"), you know that nothing else is really being measured BUT that
one element.

Operationally, this simply means "genetic" equals "finite verbal morphology."
 What happens in its absence, doesn't matter.  The rest of the language can
only be a relative statistical indicator.  The correlation between "finite
verbal morphology" and "genetic" is determinative, no matter how the theory
behind the operation explains it.

The road that Dr. White goes down in the quote above is one inevitable result
of the assumption that languages can be "genetically" descended from ONLY one
ancestor.  Sooner or later, you will have one "genetic" element coming up
against another.  The contest then becomes which "genetic" element is the
winning "genetic" element.  Everything else loses and becomes non-genetic.
And you will have Dr. White always trumping the table because "finite verbal
morphology" is never "borrowed" or has some other claim to being preemptive.
He wins by definition, so the game is pointless.

None of this has anything to do with comprehension of the languages in
question.  None of it has to do with the possibility that each element has
its own independent, inherent claims to being genetic.  Claims to being
genetic that should not change whether or not Dr. White's trump card is
present.

dlwhite at texas.net also writes:
<<So even the mixed language crowd now admits that a language which

has grammar from source A and (non-grammatical) lexicon from source B is a

form of language A?  That is pretty much what I have been saying. >>

Common sense and half-way decent science would suggest that it is a form of
both source languages.  Why should one genetic element make another
non-genetic?

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.

Haitian Creole speakers were largely descended from West African speakers.
Haitian Creole used West African lexicon and 17th Century French affixes.
What is the possible usefulness of calling it French and not African?  What
did those speakers of African descent do exactly?  Learn French, temporarily
forget West African and then later borrow West African words from themselves?

Common sense and half-way decent science would suggest that there is
something wrong here.  Obviously there are different elements in Haitian
Creole and they obviously come from different sources.  The older source
among the generations of speakers who passed on the language was West
African.  The later French element may be "more genetic."  But why would that
make the West African elements "non-genetic"?  They can lay claim to being
original, continuous and native with those speakers.  How could they suddenly
become totally non-genetic?

Isolating systematic elements of two languages to find a common ancestor is a
powerful methodology.  But why would we conclude from that process that
either of those languages as a whole can only descend from one ancestor?
What makes one element genetic and a similar element borrowed?

Back in 1997, Stefan Georg - who was and may still be a member of this list -
discussed on the HistLing list his work on Itel'men and Chukchi-Koryak.
There he wrote something that has always struck me as being just on the brink
of the cross-over in thinking.  He wrote:
<<There *are* degrees of language relationship (certainly there are degrees
of *discernability* of language relationship), relationship is simply not
always a binary +/- thing.>>

Once you perceive relationship as a matter of degree, you leave room for less
than 100% singular descent.  And for multiple descent.  You are not stuck
with relating a language as a single lump, so you don't need to define a
whole language by a single ancestor.  You can look at the parts.  You can
avoid the situation where the map of human language development is just a
trail of "finite verbal morphology" - which is nothing but a part of a
language and a part that doesn't come close to defining the essence of a real
life working language.

Regards,
Steve Long


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Fri Jun  8 17:55:06 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 12:55:06 -0500
Subject: European Genetics/IE
In-Reply-To: <213705456.3200900543@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.125506.0500.>

[snip]

>And consider the case of Basque.  With Basque, it is only for the phonology
>that we can track the language back as far as 2000 years.  But we can do
>this much, and the results are interesting.  Almost all of the big changes
>in Basque pronunciation seem to have occurred in the early Middle Ages,
>roughly AD 800-1200.  At that time, the Basque Country was a rural
>backwater, largely cut off from the great political and social currents
>sweeping across western Europe.  After 1200, though, most of the country
>was absorbed by Castile.  It was at this time that the Basques began to
>acquire their reputation as formidable seafarers, developing fishing,
>whaling and trade.  They began to play an important role in Spanish
>affairs, and they played a great part in the Spanish discovery and
>settlement of the Americas.  Basque society was transformed by massive
>emigration; Basque ports became bustling and prosperous; shipbuilding
>became a great Basque industry, as did iron and steel, and eventually
>manufacturing.  Yet, during all of these remarkable political, social and
>economic transformations, the pronunciation of the language scarcely
>changed at all.  Moreover, the scraps of evidence that we have suggest that
>the rich and distinctive Basque morphology has not changed significantly
>since the 9th century, at least.

>So, in the Basque case, rate of social change does not appear to correlate
>at all with rate of linguistic change.  It appears that the language
>changed fastest when it was spoken in a stable and largely closed society,
>but much less rapidly after it was caught up in dramatic social changes.

	It seems logical that increased communication and mobility between
areas would have a leveling effect

[snip]

>Well, not necessarily.  Today there are nearly 7000 mother tongues.  Of
>these, probably no more than a few dozen are creoles (I exclude pidgins),
>even though the European expansion of several centuries ago created
>exceptionally favorable circumstances for creole-formation in several parts
>of the world.  If fewer than one percent of today's languages are creoles,
>we should not be surprised to find that creoles were not exactly thick on
>the ground in the remote past.

[snip]

	Wouldn't it be possible that some languages or dialects may have
started out as creoles and then have become standardized through increased
contact with the parent language. Something like this is claimed for
African-African English Vernacular and it seems plausible that (some) early
regional forms of Romance may have initially been more like Latinate
creoles than daughter languages.

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From g_sandi at hotmail.com  Fri Jun  8 12:36:01 2001
From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 12:36:01 -0000
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.123601.0000.>

Reply to: Thomas McFadden <tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu>

>> Actually, I don't think that I said anything about the position of full NP
>> subjects relative to verbs. Still, having a different order for personal
>> pronouns is not that unusual, is it? In the Romance languages the direct
>> object of the verb normally comes after the verb if it is an NP (Je vois le
>> chien), but before the verb if it is a personal pronoun (Je te vois).

>> Whether a similar switchover can happen with the subject is another
>> question. I don't think that there is a theoretical reason why it can't.

>if you were arguing that PIE was VSO, no matter whether the subject was
>full NP or pronoun, then fine, that's no problem if it can be
>supported.  there's nothing at all implausible about the idea that clitic
>pronouns in such a situation could have developed into agreement suffixes,
>of course.  appologies.  and no, there's nothing unusual in personal
>pronouns having a different order than full NPs, it is very common, but i
>think the specific case where full NP subjects precede the verb and
>pronoun subjects follow it would be very odd, simply because the examples
>of ordering differences that im familiar with are like the one you mention
>above, where full NP objects follow the verb and pronouns precede,
>presumably because, being lighter elements, they're more susceptible to
>cliticization.

I think that it is odd as well, yet I can't help noticing that personal
markings of verbs in IE (and Uralic and Altaic as well, for all you
Nostraticists) consistently come after the verb stem and not before it.
What's more, some of these endings contain consonants identical or similar
to what is found in the corresponding personal pronoun. -m- in the first
person is the most obvious (in PIE and Uralic, plus some other proto
languages), as is the -t- in the 2nd person plural (also, 2nd person sing.
in Uralic), -t- in the third person less so, the -s- in the 2nd person sing.
not at all. There are three competing hypotheses:

1. coincidence
2. agglutination of the pronoun
3. there is a relationship, but the ending is not the result of an
agglutination of the verbal root with a pronoun

If the answer is no.2 above, I would like to come up with a succession of
linguistic changes that look reasonable and result in the pattern we see.

>> Admittedly there are problems here, including the fact that older IE
>> languages definitely favour VSO word order,

>i may be betraying a lack of important knowledge here, but what makes you
>say this?  which older IE languages favor VSO?  i suppose this is why i
>misinterpreted your previous post, because i didn't understand the
>positing of VSO as the basic order.  (and i am honestly asking here, not
>just looking for trouble!)

Sorry about that. I meant SOV. And part of my job description in my
non-linguistic life is being a proofreader! Shame on me...

With my best wishes,

Gabor


From xavier.delamarre at free.fr  Fri Jun  8 20:07:32 2001
From: xavier.delamarre at free.fr (Xavier Delamarre)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 22:07:32 +0200
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
In-Reply-To: <002d01c0ed96$da204880$c802703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.220732.0200.>

le 5/06/01 10:09, Eduard Selleslagh ? edsel at glo.be a ?crit?:

>> 1/ Hier j'ai achete une maison tres grande a Vaucresson

>> 2/ Hier j'ai achete une tres grande maison a Vaucresson

>> Absolutely no difference in meaning, style or emphasis. I am sorry.

> Yes, but consider:
> 1) De Gaulle ?tait un tr?s grand homme.
> 2) De Gaulle ?tait un homme tr?s grand.

> The meaning is completely different.

    Of course, classical example of handbooks. You have (semantic) freedom
with the substantive maison but not with homme.
    What is in question here is that when there is the possibility of free
word order, it does not induce _systematically_ a difference in meaning,
style, emphasis etc.
    But there again it is not PIE, where these possibilities were much more
extended than in Modern french.
    And to reduce PIE syntax to word-order (Lehmann, Friedrich) is simply
nonsense.

    XD


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sun Jun 10 08:19:51 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 09:19:51 +0100
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
Message-ID: <SUN.10.JUN.2001.091951.0100.>

>>...a more intimate practice of old IE languages like Latin,
>>Greek, Sanskrit,or Lithuanian would convince you that word-order is not an
>>essential part of their grammar.

>That would be practically impossible, since all of the grammar books I
> trust on those languages say exactly the opposite.

The role of word order in these languages is very well known, and the debate
is in danger of becoming more unhelpful, as it becomes more polarised.  Of
course there is a sense in which both of you are right.

There is an expected, but not necessary word order.  The degree of
expectation is reasonably strong compared with say German, where very small
contextual changes can provoke adjustment of the first element of a
sentence.  In both Latin and Greek, a change from the expected order usually
brings a noticeable emphasis.   Sanskrit is more easily varied.

So word order is not an essential part of the grammar, in one sense, but it
is an essential element of the whole linguistic communication.

Peter


From jalonsom at arrakis.es  Sun Jun 10 10:16:49 2001
From: jalonsom at arrakis.es (Juan Alberto Alonso)
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 12:16:49 +0200
Subject: One single vocalic phoneme in PIE?
Message-ID: <SUN.10.JUN.2001.121649.0200.>

Dear IEists,

I'm new in the list, so the point I wanted to raise might have been
discussed already (in that case I apologize for coming back to the issue).

As far as I have read in the specialized literature, some reconstructions
assume a single vocalic phoneme */e/ for the early stages of
(pre-inflectional) Proto-Indoeuropean, probably with two alophones [e] and
[o] that would later become phonemes of their own and the
origin of the (e/o/0) ablaut phenomenon (cf. Gr /steixo:/, /stoixos/,
/'estixon/).

The point is of course that such a reduced vocalic inventory is quite
unusual throughout the world's languages. The only example I know of
are some languages of the Abkhaz-Adygean family, (e.g. Kabardian), spoken in
the Caucasus, with only two vowels. By the way, these
languages are ergative and they have a big number of consonantal phonemes
(up to 80 in Ubykh).

Juan A. Alonso

[ Moderator's note:
  I have already directed Mr. Alonso to the archives for the recent discussion
  of languages with putative small inventories of vowels.
  --rma ]


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Fri Jun  8 14:07:54 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 09:07:54 -0500
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.090754.0500.>

Dear Peter and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "petegray" <petegray at btinternet.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2001 2:20 PM

[PCRp]
>> does that, in your opinion, mean there was no *g^en-?

[PG]
> One senses an unfriendly trap - which is fun - but I do prefer a more open
> sharing of ideas.

[PCR]
Seriously, I am not trying to "trap" anyone --- just soliciting informed
opinions.

The reason for my question is that, in another context, I had a difference of
opinion with someone on this question.

Like Pokorny, I believe that an Old Indian form like _j?nati_ points to
*g^en- rather than *g^enH-.

Secondarily, everything I have investigated leads me to believe that the basis
of the CVC definition of a root is pretty universal.

Methodologically, if it (and some others) can be derived from *both* *g^en- and
*g^enH-, I see no reason to assume the non-existence of *g^en- just because all
forms can be derived from *g^enH-. My preference would be to assume that a
root, *g^en- (which I would consider to be *basic*) and a root with extension,
*g^enH- have been conflated into a single paradigm.

This scenario seems to me to be a logical possibility (and, if one is commmited
to the CVC-model as I am: necessary) but I do understand that if Occam's Razor
is vigorously applied, there is, of course, no necessity to posit *g^en-.

> Studiously trying to avoid your trap, I say that the existence of the root
> (or roots) *g'enH / g'neH says nothing at all about the existence of *g'en.
> I do however allow that I am not aware of any IE forms that would point to
> such a root, rather than to *genH with loss of H.

> Is that carefully enough worded for you?

[PCR]
Certainly.

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 Jun  8 17:14:07 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 13:14:07 -0400
Subject: *G^EN-
In-Reply-To: <007d01c0edde$baf1b820$fbf1fea9@swbell.net>
 (proto-language@email.msn.com)
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.131407.0400.>

On 5 June 2001, Patrick Ryan wrote:

> Thus, *g^enH1- would constitute an exception to the general proposition that
> IE roots have the form CVC-. Every good "rule" needs an exception or two.

The general proposition that IE roots are CeC is directly related to the notion
that IE roots involve extensions, or determinatives.  The root is abstracted
from the stem, that portion of the word which is left after all inflectional
and derivational morphemes are abstracted away; since the stem can be very
messy, its analysis into a root plus a (poosibly zero) suffix plus one or more
extensions simplifies things.

Lehmann has a discussion of this in his 1952 monograph on phonology, derived
from Benveniste's long exposition in _Origines de la formation des noms en
indoeurop'een_.

So the exception is only apparent.

								Rich Alderson


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri Jun  8 18:35:43 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 19:35:43 +0100
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.193543.0100.>

> *g^enH1- would constitute an exception to the general proposition that IE
> roots have the form CVC-.  Every good "rule" needs an exception or two.

There are many exceptions of this kind, Pat.  Are you being, perhaps, a
little disingenuous?   Just for the pattern Ce(/R)TH (T= stop), one can
suggest:
  *keubH2   lie down, lay down
  *sekH        cut
  *wedhH1   hit
  *wetH2      say
  *krepH      creep
The pattern of g'enH,  CeRH, is even commoner.

Peter


From sarima at friesen.net  Sun Jun 10 00:32:50 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 17:32:50 -0700
Subject: *G^EN-
In-Reply-To: <007d01c0edde$baf1b820$fbf1fea9@swbell.net>
Message-ID: <SAT.9.JUN.2001.173250.0700.>

At 11:15 AM 6/5/01 -0500, proto-language wrote:

>Dear Rich and IEists:

>I have no problem with that opinion. Thus, *g^enH1- would constitute an
>exception to the general proposition that IE roots have the form CVC-. Every

I actually doubt any such rule exists.  For one thing, I suspect the idea
is due at least in part to what Rich called "over-analysis".  That is, many
of the supposed CVC- roots that only occur with root determinatives are
better treated as CVCVC- roots (or even CVCC or CCVC roots).  There are
also a fair number of roots that apparently originally ended in laryngeals,
which now masquerade as CVC- roots.

I find it better to just take PIE roots as they come, without trying to
force them into some preconceived mold.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Fri Jun  8 19:24:34 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 14:24:34 -0500
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.142434.0500.>

Dear Steve and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: <X99Lynx at aol.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2001 11:54 PM

> In a message dated 6/4/2001 2:30:01 AM, edsel at glo.be writes:

>>> Damate:r - Dor., Arc., Thess. and Boeot. form of goddess Demeter

<snip>

> OR spouse.  Are you familiar with how the wildman Enkidu was tamed in
> Gilgamesh, an epic that might predate the earliest IE texts by 1500 years?
> (And then again there's "the taming of the shrew.")

[PCR]
I believe that's: "the taming with the screw".

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 Jun  8 21:30:39 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 17:30:39 -0400
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
In-Reply-To: <5b.16ff6271.284f116b@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com)
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.173039.0400.>

NB:  In the following, I transcribe <omega> as <O:> and <eta> as <E:>.

On 6 June 2001, Steve Long wrote:

> In a message dated 6/4/2001 2:30:01 AM, edsel at glo.be writes:

>>> Damate:r - Dor., Arc., Thess. and Boeot. form of goddess Demeter

>> [Ed Selleslagh]

>> Don't exaggerate: isn't that 'god(dess)-mother'? (Cf. Jupiter: 'god-father')

Actually, Ed, it's "sky-father", from *dyu:-, a variant of *dye:w- "(bright)
sky"; cf. _Zeu pater_, vocative epithet of Zeus, and Skt. _dyauh. pita:r_.  The
first element in the name of the harvest goddess is, I think, unrelated.

> Or Demeter, the goddess of domestication?  Sometimes I suppose the chicken
> comes first.  Sometimes the egg.  But in the context of all those other
> words, and with an open-mind, the possibilities do expand.

Steve has misled himself with his transcriptions.  The name of the goddess is
_dE:mE:tE:r_, Doric et al. _da:ma:tE:r_, Aeolic _dO:ma:tE:r_, not comparable to
_domos_, _demO:_ "I build", etc., nor to _dama:r, damartos_.  Quantities are
vitally important.

								Rich Alderson


From alderson+mail at panix.com  Fri Jun  8 21:33:30 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 17:33:30 -0400
Subject: Red Deer in Anatolia
In-Reply-To: <001101c0edcd$113776a0$a76063d1@texas.net> (dlwhite@texas.net)
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.173330.0400.>

On 5 June 2001, David White wrote:

> From: Rich Alderson <alderson+mail at panix.com>

>> You wish to have the word which means "red deer" in all daughter languages,
>> even those spoken where the fallow deer is present, to have once meant
>> "fallow deer", because the red deer is not present in Anatolia.

> Not that it matters greatly, but red deer are (or perhaps were?)  present in
> Anatolia.  They are one of the more successful recent species, with a
> strikingly wide distribution.

I haven't had the time to review all the recent postings regarding the habitat
of the red deer vs. that of the fallow deer, but if Dr. White is correct, then
my point is _a fortiori_ made.

								Rich Alderson


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Tue Jun 12 03:34:19 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 23:34:19 EDT
Subject: Ockham's Razor
Message-ID: <MON.11.JUN.2001.233419.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/4/2001 10:08:22 PM, alderson+mail at panix.com writes:
<<Meanings do not change as fluidly as you want them to:..>>

The substantive word I said the most yesterday, "money", found its name into
my language from a temple, dedicated to a goddess who had nothing to do with
financial matters, that by pure accident was located across the street from a
Roman mint.  When important words like this one arise in such a negligent
fashion, it's hard for me to accept that that less important ones travel any
less fluidly - at least without closer examination.

And it's not a matter of what I want to believe.  It's where the facts lead
me.

 <<You wish to have the word which means "red deer" in all daughter
languages, even those spoken where the fallow deer is present, to have once
meant "fallow deer", because the red deer is not present in Anatolia.>>

As Dr White pointed out I believe, the red deer was present in Anatolia and
even Mesopotamia.

I do not "wish" anything. I simply know of no differentiation between the
fallow and the red deer in the Anatolian languages, where we know that both
deer were present.  I also know of no sure differentiation made in Greek (in
Ionia or otherwise), where the fallow and red appear to have been present in
many form (live, as skins, antlers, food, images.)  And suspect that there
was no specific word that differentiated between the two species before the
imported fallow became the favorite of medieval European aristocrats creating
deer parks.  It's worthy of note in this connection that in English today,
the red and the fallow are both "deer,"  but in America the red is not a deer
anymore but an "elk," while the fallow deer is still very much a "deer."  So
much for non-fluidity.

There are two words in Greek that might have referred to the fallow - one is
<stago:n>, spotted, in the form <stagosi> which I believe is how Pliny used
it referring to an antlered animal (and therefore not a generic spotted
fawn).  English etymologies seem to ignore the Greek word, possibly because -
following the highly influential Pliny - stag came to mean a mature male
deer.  But in the early English texts it often appears in connection with the
precise age of the deer, which suggests perhaps that these were at least
captive deer - whether red or fallow.  But <stagoni> may have also referred
originally to the Axis deer, which like "Indian dogs", may have already been
imported into Greece in Herodotus' time (pre 500BC).  The Axis deer has red
deer-style antlers but adult spots, even more so than the fallow.

<Hellos> in Greek might also have referred to the fallow, rather than the red
deer, as in the text I've seen it seems to refer to a smaller antlered adult
deer.  But the dictionaries usually make it almost synonymous with <nebros>,
a fawn, and there's really no way to tell.   <Elaphos> shows no specificity
at all.  <Dama> may refer to a tamed deer, and in Latin may refer to a tamed
deer let loose.  Or may refer to an antlerless doe or buck in contrast to an
antlered <cervus>, which is the way Virgil seems to use it.

As far as the deer words that Mr. Stirling brings up, I don't have enough
information about those eastern languages to know whether there was an
ancient contrast between red and fallow in for example Armenian (where there
may have been fallow deer), and it appears that today the deer are simply
contrasted by addition of the word "yellow" to the usual deer word.  So none
of this can prove very much.  Especially since Buck tells me that Sanskrit
uses a horse word for deer.  And "buck" itself is a cow word, for that
matter.  So much for non-fluidity.

<<(Mr. Stirling has pointed out that words for horse, ox, yoke, etc., have
not undergone any such radical change.)>>

You mean the words for deer, aurochs and joined pieces of wood, etc.  Give me
some time and I'll get to those, too.

<<Ockham calls for a simpler explanation, such as "The fallow deer was not
present in
the IE homeland".>>

Actually Ockham's Razor states: "Entities are not to be multiplied beyond
necessity."

Distinguishing between fallow and red deer is definitely multiplying entities
not only beyond the necessity, but clearly beyond the evidence.  I've seen no
evidence for the distinction between fallow and red in deer words in the
Anatolian languages, where this premise begins and ends.  There is no
necessity for it.  The distinction obviously violates Ockham's rule.  The
whole scheme proves nothing one way or another about the Anatolian/Danubian
hypothesis.

Next thing, we'll be hearing about how there was no word for left-handed
bowlers in *PIE.

Regards,
Steve Long


From sarima at friesen.net  Sun Jun 10 00:47:36 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 17:47:36 -0700
Subject: About the Yew1
In-Reply-To: <7c.16ca7e85.284efb0c@aol.com>
Message-ID: <SAT.9.JUN.2001.174736.0700.>

At 11:18 PM 6/5/01 -0400, PolTexCW at aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 6/5/1 3:55:01 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:

><< I don't see that Polaroid cameras are necessary. If you and I belong to the
>same tribe, and we don't agree on what to call trees in the next valley,
>then our use of language is dysfunctional. Do you really believe that
>prehistoric humans were linguistically incompetent? >>

>George Gordon Meade, victor of the battle of Gettysburg, was born, raised and
>flourished in a culture largely dependant on the horse.  He spent his entire
>career as a professional officer profondly involved with horses. In reading
>his writings, it is obvious that he was far from "linguistically incompetent".
>It is just as obvious that  George didn't know squat about horses.

I am not sure this is really cogent.  There is a big difference between
citified societies and tribal societies.  In citified societies, extreme
specialization is the norm, and individuals are often relatively uninformed
outside of their functional area.  On the other hand, in tribal societies
everyone has to be relatively less specialized, and able to perform most
functions required in that culture.

Me, I know squat about automobile mechanics, and I have never been harmed
by that lack.  But if I lived in a tribal society, I had better have been
able to hunt, and make basic tools, and live off the land at need.  And the
latter, at least, requires one know the identities of the various plants in
the area (and hunting really is more efficient if you can recognize the
different habitats, and know where to look for the prey).

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi  Sun Jun 10 05:11:40 2001
From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio)
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 08:11:40 +0300
Subject: About the Yew1
In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010605060413.00b27e20@getmail.friesen.net>
Message-ID: <SUN.10.JUN.2001.081140.0300.>

On Tue, 5 Jun 2001, Stanley Friesen wrote:

> More than that, people who live close to nature are often very good at
> identifying what they live among.   A good example of this can be found in
> a monograph on rainforest trees of Borneo that I know of.  Guess how the
> author identified the trees.  Yep, he used a native guide.  As I remember
> it, he even discovered one or two new species based on the fact that his
> native guide gave them different names.

> A tribal people would have to be truly incompetent to mistake the yew for
> anything else, or vice versa.

An example of Uralic tree names is perhaps interesting in this connection.
At least five tree names can be reconstructed in Proto-Uralic, and all of
them show identical meanings in all the cognate languages. Hence, no
change in meaning in some 7000-8000 years. (The reconstructed tree names
include at least 'birch', 'spruce', 'Siberian pine', 'bird cherry', and
'rowan'.) The corpus of PU etymologies is very small, so it seems that at
least in the case of Uralic, the tree names have belonged to the most
stable part of the lexicon.

 -Ante AIkio


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Mon Jun 11 21:27:58 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 17:27:58 EDT
Subject: The Iceman's Berries
Message-ID: <MON.11.JUN.2001.172758.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/5/2001 2:55:01 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<< I don't think any serious objections have been presented to the thesis that
PIE-speakers didn't know the yew.  >>

Actually what becomes fairly apparent is that if "PIE-speakers" did know
about the yew, there would be no way of telling.

The exercise of looking into the real history of these plants and animals is
worthwhile, but not because it provides any flash answers about PIE.  What it
does do is take one beyond cognates and into the language itself and what
these people were actually talking about.  The simplistic connections that
are used to trace many of these words - like "yew" and "red deer" - very
quickly disappear.

<<As I mentioned before, "yew" itself has ancient congeners only in Celtic
and Germanic, plausibly derived from PIE *eiw- 'berry'.>>

This statement gives me pause.  Is any one on this list who is uncomfortable
with the idea that its plausible that yew comes from PIE *eiw- 'berry'?

I watched the "Iceman" feature on the Discovery channel the other day.  He's
the fellow if you recall who got caught up crossing the Alps back in @ 3200BC
and provided us with the "oldest mummy" from prehistory.  He was found just a
short distance south of the Italy-Austrian border.

The iceman was dressed in a cloak woven from an unspecified bark and carried
a yew bow and arrows.  The bow and arrows apparently were not functional, not
being finished.  There were actually also a dozen types of trees represented
on his person.

He was from the south but the arrowheads and firestone he carried were made
from flint whose provenance placed them 300 miles to the north - on the other
side of the Alps from his home, in southern Germany.  And he had all kinds of
other stuff with him or on him.  A bearskin cap and bearskin as the soles of
his shoes.  (You can tell bears were already in trouble at that point.)
Items made from leather that apparently were from both domesticates and
non-domesticates.

He also carried an axe with a copper axehead.  They show the Iceman and his
buddies smelting the copper with a skin bellows and pouring it into a pretty
nifty two-piece stone mold, carved inside to the split shape of the axehead,
strapped with leather tongs.  Looked like a lot of work for a small village
for such a project and my guess was that it was really something they picked
up from the same trade routes that brought the flint.  One might even suspect
that the yew bow - not yet notched by the user - and arrows may also have
been "store bought."

The Iceman also had a nice sized pouch completely full of dried berries.

In the reenactment and the commentary, they spent a bit of time on the
berries.  They show the Iceman and his folk harvesting the berries and a
British academic makes the point that these berries are quite tart unless
they are soaked and dried.

What amazed me was how bright red these berries were on the boughs these
reenactors were carrying.  And they even show a big bush or a small tree with
the same bright summer(?) berries on them.  And the Brit comes on and talks
about how, despite the domesticated grains they were growing, these people
would have depended on the "sloe" to round out their nutritional needs.

Two different members of this list wrote to me that they had never even heard
of the fallow deer before they saw the word on the list.  I imagine many
would have the same reaction to the "sloe."

Looking into the yew, of course, I've discovered that its "red berries" are
hardly unique, that they only appear for a short time on only some trees and
therefore are pretty much less prominent feature than the red berries on the
hawthorn (edible) and the holly (highly toxic), as well as a number of other
trees and bushes of the region -- all of which would have been more common
than the yew, and that would have included the Iceman's favorite, the sloe.

Given all this, it becomes difficult to see why its particularly plausible
that yew comes from PIE *eiw- 'berry' - except that the yew is one of
hundreds of trees and bushes that produce "berries."

No doubt it would be convenient phonologically to have yew < PIE *eiw-
'berry'.  But I think that is where the problem may be.  The history of the
yew name and the yew tree and its place in European history is both more
intricate and interesting than this, and the more you know about it, the less
likely the connection becomes.

And rather than confirming something about the IE homeland, the yew probably
demonstrates how much interchange there was between IE languages after
dispersal and how much a mistake it might be to rely on superficial history
to support a dubious paleolinguistics.  I hope to have more on this soon.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Wed Jun 13 22:55:52 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 18:55:52 EDT
Subject: The Yew and the Native Guide
Message-ID: <WED.13.JUN.2001.185552.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/5/2001 2:55:01 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<< I don't see that Polaroid cameras are necessary. If you and I belong to the
same tribe, and we don't agree on what to call trees in the next valley,
then our use of language is dysfunctional. Do you really believe that
prehistoric humans were linguistically incompetent? >>

In a message dated 6/8/2001 3:24:17 PM, sarima at friesen.net writes:
<< More than that, people who live close to nature are often very good at
identifying what they live among.   A good example of this can be found in
a monograph on rainforest trees of Borneo that I know of.  Guess how the
author identified the trees.  Yep, he used a native guide.  >>

Actually, no, they are not always very good at it.  In fact, frequently, in
preliterate situations, they can be quite inconsistent in "naming" plants and
animals.

A really interesting paper on all this is, Boster, J.S. (1985) "Requiem for
the omniscient informant: There is life in the old girl yet" in "Directions
in Cognitive Anthropology",  J. Dougherty (ed.) Univ. Of Illinois Press. Pp
177-197.

In the paper, Boster cites a list of studies over the decades that show a
serious amount of naming variance among members of individual villages, and
his list is hardly complete.  The items include plants and animals, wild and
domesticated.

Boster is actually a proponent of the idea that there is less variance in
preliterate "naming" then has been found in many studies.  The above paper
provides a relatively strong statistical argument that there is reasonable
"naming consensus" in preliterate villages speaking the same language, but
they will invariably be limited to only certain members of the village
regarding certain objects.  In fact, there is an indication there are
multiple systems, each giving a different consensus name to the plant (or
animal.)

Factors that allowed Boster to pick out the different consensus names for the
manioc plant among speakers in the same Peruvian Aguaruna village were
demographics (age, gender, occupation) and very much a factor was the kind of
functional importance the plant had to the different groups.  Even among
females, naming or awareness of varieties of manioc varied according to age
and other factors.  Some male groups had names for the plant, some had none.

(For a view that is much more skeptical of preliterate naming consistency
among members of the same villages speaking the same language, see Gardner,
P., (1976), "Birds, words, and a requiem for the omniscient informant,"
American Ethnologist 446-468.  Cf., Weller, S. C. (1984), "Consistency and
consensus among informants: disease concepts in a rural Mexican town",
American Anthropologist, 966-975.)

*PIE/PIE speakers presumably would have shown the same kind of
multiple-naming practices.  Woodcutters may have a different name for the yew
than bark-strippers, wood-carvers, tanners, herders and concerned mothers.
I've counted eight different non-ritual or ornamental uses for the yew,
including pest and vermin control, so include in that group the ancient
equivalent of the Roach Motel makers. (They check in, but they don't check
out.)

Obviously, if this "universal" applied to PIE, it's not hard to see how one
or the other "consensus names" might have passed into different daughter
languages, and how we  have only what made it to writing, depending on who
was in charge of writing when writing came around.

The Colorado Dept of the Natural Resources commissioned a study a while ago
designed to catalogue plant resources in rural areas.  They concluded: "1)
Most plants have no common name. 2) Some plants have several common names.?
This frequently leads to misunderstandings.. about the identification of a
plant.  3) One common name often refers to many plants in a genus, not to one
specific plant, e.g., ...Pine, Fir. 4) Some unrelated plants have the same
common name, e.g., ...Fir..."

This inconsistency is of course the very reason that a scientific system was
first begun about 400 years ago.

But even today the different functional perspectives on naming causes
problems. So  we see in this recent review of the exhaustive 776 page The
Cactus Family by Edward F.Anderson: "Plant taxonomy faces a big problem in
that the naming systems it produces is used by people with widely differing
needs. The botanist needs a system which can reveal how plants and groups of
plants are related and might have evolved while the horticulturalist needs
labels for plants which they will be producing and distributing which will
distinguish plants of differing appearance and attributes."

Probably the most illustrative story is the one about "the canoe-tree" that
comes out of 19th Century Native American studies.  And what it might show is
that modern humans may think quite differently about tree names and the
transfer of meaning from ancient names must be done carefully.  There were
I'm told a slew of papers at the Museum of the American Indian in New York
all arguing about what the Algonquins called "the canoe-tree."  It was
settled apparently when someone showed that the name canoe-tree applied not
to trees of a particular species, but rather to trees that were suited for
canoe-making during a particular season.  I would love to actually read those
papers.  They might even look a bit like our arguments about the yew.

A very interesting piece in this same regard is Boster, J. S., and J. C.
Johnson, (1989), "Form or function: a comparison of expert and novice
judgments of similarity among fish." American Anthropologist 91(4):866-889.

To sum up, with regard to the statements above, I think it's pretty clear
that it is reasonable to think that the facts could be otherwise.  And that
the name for yew may prove nothing about IE origins.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Jun  9 19:14:15 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 15:14:15 EDT
Subject: The News in 1900 and 2001
Message-ID: <SAT.9.JUN.2001.151415.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/8/2001 6:45:50 PM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<< I think a good analogy can be drawn with newspapers. Today's typical
regional paper (circulation on the order of 20k-200k) is much larger and
more colorful than its counterpart of 100 years ago. That doesn't mean that
we have much more, and more colorful, news than folks did in 1900, or that
our lives are much larger and more colorful. >>

This looks like it is not true.  The advertising industry in the US presents
studies on a regular basis about the sharp increase in news sources and that
one of the major factors is simply the fact that there are many more people
in the US and the world than there was in 1900, and 1950 - the usual
comparison date.   There are simply more "human events" happening in the
world today and it is an open question whether coverage has expanded
commensurately.

Another factor is the increase in the total mass of "knowledge." Neil de
Grasse Tyson, the astronomer, has talked about scientific information expandin
g exponentially every four years, paralleling the "rule" for the expansion of
technology.  Not too long ago I was asked to compare an college-level
astronomy textbook from the 1930's with a current one.  Literally, the entire
old book corrresponded to the first three chapters of the new book, which was
32 chapters long.

What this has done is essentially make the news and general information
media, in their dependence on encyclopedias and any kind of science texts,
rely on a good deal of obsolete information, quite simply because there is
too much information moving too quickly.  This is not something that was
considered a problem in 1900 or even 1950.

Researchers in the "public sector' like David Kirsh at UCSD have pointed to
hard quantitive evidence of "cognitive overload" that equates to the ad
industry's notion of "clutter."  This has intensified the investment in the
competition for attention (not even "comprehension") so that the modern news
media (including newspapers) must spend more money in promoting themselves
then in gathering news.  And because of advertising revenues and how they
have come to pinpoint and dictate preferred audiences, new organizations must
be much more calculating (than in 1900) in what news they can or will cover.

There is simply a great deal more quantitative information that is available
and that is being generated and exchanged in the world today than there was
in 1900.  That a language must alter itself to accomodate this situation is a
logical conclusion.

One last observation.  The discussion of dictionaries did not touch upon the
fact that for example American English is not a single entity but rather
represents a fair number of linguistic communities.  To the extent that
uniform education and the electronic media has served to standardize that
language, it has also created a situation where many of these linguistic
communities are now being represented as valid sources of words and meanings.
 And where therefore the selective "elite" English of the old dictionaries
may no longer apply.

Regards,
Steve Long


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sun Jun 10 08:23:22 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 09:23:22 +0100
Subject: bishop
Message-ID: <SUN.10.JUN.2001.092322.0100.>

There was discussion a while ago of the word "bishop", coming from Greek
episkopos.    I think it was Piotr who said the loss of the initial vowel
was not an issue, but the voicing of the "p" was uncommon.  (Pardon me if
I've mis-remembered who it was!)

It occurred to me that there is another example in the Italian bottega,
Spanish (whence English) bodega, meaning shop or inn, from the Greek
apotheke.

Peter


From leo at easynet.fr  Wed Jun 13 00:07:23 2001
From: leo at easynet.fr (Lionel Bonnetier)
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 02:07:23 +0200
Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc.
Message-ID: <WED.13.JUN.2001.020723.0200.>

It's funny that Latin suffixed -cum in mecum, tecum, etc.
has created some special -go case marker in Spanish with
conmigo, contigo, consigo. I suppose -cum is a remnant of
an older time when prepositions were either postpositions
or relatively mobile adverbs. Is there any obvious reason
why -cum is the only instance of the archaic system? May
*kom (cum) and *ko (cis) and *kwe (-que) be related
etymologically around the idea of "here-nearby-with"?


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Wed Jun 13 05:57:34 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 05:57:34 -0000
Subject: Pelasgian Place-names
Message-ID: <WED.13.JUN.2001.055734.0000.>

On 19 May 2001, I wrote:

>Not likely, since Etruscan orthography _usually_ distinguishes the
>semivowel
>(written F, transcribed <w>) from the vowel (written V, transcribed <u>).

The Etruscan semivowel written F is conventionally transcribed <v>, not <w>.
This was a typing error on my part.

DGK


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Wed Jun 13 09:06:35 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 09:06:35 -0000
Subject: Munda in Early NW India
Message-ID: <WED.13.JUN.2001.090635.0000.>

Vidhyanath Rao (21 Apr 2001) wrote:

>I am not sure if "Douglas G Kilday" <acnasvers at hotmail.com> is for or
>against *gh etc being affricates. But I will use his post to to hang my
>questions on.

>> [...] A language
>> with an inventory of stops comparable to Sanskrit ought to have 3 or 4
>> distinct fricatives in addition to /h/.

>Does that mean that Sanskrit itself `should' have had 3 or 4 distinct
>fricatives?  [Nor am I sure what distinct means: Sanskrit had voiceless
>fricatives produced at various places, but these where all allophones of
>/s/.
>There is the sound commonly transcribed h, but this is voiced and results
>from (Brugmannian *gh', and less often from *dh. Then there are three
>sibilants.]

What I meant, and should have specified, was _phonemically_ distinct. I am
labeling voiced /h'/ and the sibilants /s/, /s./, /s'/ as "fricatives".
Macdonell calls them "spirants". In my usage, "fricatives" are continuants
produced with audible friction, and "sibilants" are fricatives in which the
primary articulation is formed by the extensible part of the tongue.

I don't have the advantage of formal instruction in Sanskrit. Macdonell
describes Visarga /h./ as a "hard spirant" (i.e. unvoiced fricative) and, if
I am reading correctly, [x] and [f] are "obsolete" allophones of Visarga,
which sounds [h] when unassimilated. Hence it appears that Sanskrit has 5
phonemically distinct fricatives.

>>[...] OTOH if the traditional (Brugmannian) voiced aspirates were
>> "really" voiced fricatives, the transition to voiced aspirates in Indic
>> could be viewed as systematic substrate-induced fortition, if the
>> Munda-substrate hypothesis is in the ballpark.

>How do we explain Germanic? Or for that matter, Iranian where *dh etc
>became d etc (at least intervocalic)? And if substratum explanation is
>in the ballpark, why did the aspirated series go to a voiced fricative?
>[in Vedic, this already had happened with intervocalic *dh in verbal
>endings such as mahe (< PI-Ir *madhai), as well as all intervocalic PI-Ir
>*jh and this speads to all (intervocalic) voiced aspirates in MIA.]

It's not hard to find examples of voiced fricatives becoming voiced stops.
This is sufficiently common that no substratal invocation is necessary: I
certainly wouldn't posit "Pre-Chicagoan" substrate to explain "Da Bears" or
"Da Bulls". In the hypothesis under discussion, Brugmannian *dh etc. are
presumed to have _originally_ been voiced fricatives, which became voiced
aspirates in Indic only. The phonetic systems in Iranian and MIA are thus
viewed as more conservative than the Sanskrit system, and there is no need
to explain "the aspirated series going to a voiced fricative". The trouble
lies in explaining the reverse, namely the voiced aspirated series in Indic,
and this is where substrate may be in the ballpark.

Of course, if PIE is presumed _not_ to have had aspirates, there is the
difficulty of explaining why both Greek and Sanskrit avoid successive
aspirated stops. Some form of Grassmann's Law must have operated in Late
South PIE. Since I don't understand the phonetic basis for Grassmann's Law
in the first place (which looks like the result of a cyclic suprasegmental),
I am neither "for" nor "against" *gh etc. being the traditional voiced
aspirates, at least in Late PIE.

My main point was that traditional PIE is short on fricatives and long on
"laryngeals". Historically, unvoiced fricatives lead a precarious existence,
like frogs living in a toilet-bowl. The next phonetic shift may flush one of
them down the larynx to become /h/, which is subject to further reduction
into a glide or even outright loss. I think the H-series in PIE represents
undetermined unvoiced fricatives, probably varying greatly among dialects
and more rapidly in time than most other PIE sounds. Their characterization
as "laryngeal" properly belongs to their final stage as fricatives, and I
doubt that any synchronic speech had more than two literally laryngeal
fricatives (fortis and lenis, perhaps). Otherwise we must conclude that PIE
was spoken by a tribe of ventriloquists (which could, of course, help
explain the difficulty in locating their homeland).

DGK


From bronto at pobox.com  Thu Jun  7 07:09:07 2001
From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood)
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2001 00:09:07 -0700
Subject: history of hay?
Message-ID: <THU.7.JUN.2001.000907.0700.>

petegray wrote:
> Quite how we got onto biology I don't know, but while we're there,
> can I ask when cattle began to be fed hay? . . .

I have the dim impression that it was a medieval innovation,
but maybe that was a particular kind of hay.

--
Anton Sherwood  --  br0nt0 at p0b0x.com  --  http://ogre.nu/


From philjennings at juno.com  Tue Jun 12 00:46:48 2001
From: philjennings at juno.com (philjennings at juno.com)
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 19:46:48 -0500
Subject: Five Antiquities of Hay (was Thy Thigh, etc)
Message-ID: <MON.11.JUN.2001.194648.0500.>

(1) Straw was a seasonally abundant product from the beginning of
agriculture, and the ingenuity of early farmers would have applied the
use of this material to hats, mats, fire-starters, bedding, roofing
(thatch), flooring, et cetera.  In the off seasons, cut grass might have
substituted for some of these uses, and the iceman used cut grass for
clothing material.  Nothing in all this relates to "hay" as cut grass
used as fodder.

(2) An alternative very early origin of "hay" may have related to the
taming of wild animals.  There may have been a time when experimental
taming was the style, and captured young plant-eating animals would have
been kept in enclosures, and supplied with hay during the taming period.
Some of these creatures would have been successfully tamed, most not.
Continuity in the use of "hay" in these sorts of experiments is not
likely.  Either the animals became tame, or they were failures.  Either
way, it was not an interminable necessity to cut and store inventories of
cut grass.

(3) Another early occasion for the invention of "hay" also related to
enclosures.  These were not enclosures used for taming, but rather for
the protection of herd animals at night.  The animals would have been
more comfortable in their stockades, protected against predators, if food
was available.  The LBK people used stockades, but I know of no evidence
that they supplied their night cattle with cut grasses.  If they did, no
large inventories were required.  It might have happened as the spirit
moved them.

(4) The LBK people, or the Corded Ware people who came after, trying to
make efficient use of the land near their settlements, without risking
the lives of their valuable cattle, would have sent young churls out to
problematic wet and half-boggy lands to cut grass and bring it back to
where the animals might eat safely.  This late scenario for the invention
of "hay" is connected to the settlement of northern Europe, short of the
heavy snow zone.  As the proto-Germanic word for hay, and the
Baltic-Slavic word for hay, seem not to be related, I suspect that these
two groups went their own ways northward into separate boggy zones,
neither an origin for the other.

(5) the final theory for "hay" relates to regions where snow covers the
ground thickly for several months of the year, and hay has to be cut in
summer, to keep cattle alive in winter.  However, the peoples who moved
into snow country, must necessarily have come from bog country, and so
already knew of "hay" and did not have to invent the stuff.


From edsel at glo.be  Sat Jun  9 09:25:03 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 11:25:03 +0200
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <SAT.9.JUN.2001.112503.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sam Martin" <semartin at pacifier.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2001 4:49 PM

[snip]
> He also mentions the proliferating use of -wise. This is a productive
> bound particle, rather than a derivative suffix. Sentence-wise it can go
> anywhere, syntax-wise. Usage-wise, I have collected some delightful
> examples, wise-wise. Notice that "street-wise" can have two different
> meanings: "street-wise youngsters" has the derivative suffix, but
> "Street-wise, this city is a mess!" has the particle.
[snip]
> As a particle the -wise can attach to
> a plural, and I could have substituted "Streets-wise" for "Street-wise" in
> the example above. [snip]
> Structure-wise the particle belongs with focus devices, I think.

[Ed Selleslagh]

Of course, the two 'wise' words are originally two homonyms, one an adjective
meaning 'knowing, savvy,...' like in 'wise men', the other a noun meaning 'way,
manner' (Cf. Ger. Weise, Du. wijze).

In 'street-wise' it is the adjective, with a prepositioned qualifier, in
'streets-wise' it is the noun with the second meaning, and serves as a
adverb-forming particle meaning something like 'when speaking of, in the
context of...'. Whether you can call this a focus device, I don't know. One
thing is certain: there has been a slight semantic shift away from the original
meaning '(in the) way/manner (of)'.

It looks rather American to me, if I ignore the usual world-wide
'contamination' phenomena that accompany American neologisms.

Ed.


From Georg-Bonn at t-online.de  Sat Jun  9 09:22:39 2001
From: Georg-Bonn at t-online.de (Stefan Georg)
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 11:22:39 +0200
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <3B1D599A.696B7A0D@memphis.edu>
Message-ID: <SAT.9.JUN.2001.112239.0200.>

>>  Qua de causa avertat ? When I'm pronouncing /Chalid/ as /xali:d/ I'm
>>  using a patch of Arabic in my German discourse, whether I know much
>>  Arabic apart from that or not.

>Certainly if you say [d] rather than [t].

Good point.

>>  If Duden gave the "correct" pronunciation of /Xhosa/ with the correct
>>  click, we would have a click phoneme in German. Give me a job in that
>>  editors' board and I'll triple the number of phonemes in this
>>  language.

>Get people to say them and you certainly would.

Also a good point.

>>  Those pronunciations for /Chalid/ etc. are indeed artificial. Duden
>>  people just want to be educational when they indicate how these words
>>  should be pronounced, i.e. as close to the pronunciation in the
>>  source language as possible. The set of words given to illustrate the
>>  initial ?:x contrast is of a sort that I'm sure I've never met a
>>  German speaker who can take an oath to have used each one of them at
>>  least once in his life in some meaningful context. In English words
>>  and names we try to (are told to) observe /th/, /w:v/ as in the
>>  source language as well. I'm pretty sure Duden tells us to, too. So
>>  what, is there a /w : v/ contrast in G. ? Not for sose vis a
>>  Hollyvood G. accent, who still are se majorrity ...

>I agree, of course, that no German has had the opportunity to use *all*
>of the examples in normal speech.  But haven't you noticed an increased
>tendency to say [xa-] in some words of foreign origin spelt with <cha->?

Maybe. But that's an increased tendency to be aware of foreign
phonemes, an increased openness for the outside world, and certainly
an increase which increases with education. Whatever this means for a
phoneme system.

StG

--
Dr. Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Sat Jun  9 15:49:52 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 10:49:52 -0500
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <000e01c0ee66$0fec6780$bb66073e@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <SAT.9.JUN.2001.104952.0500.>

kintal, then, is Portuguese [& Spanish] quintal "hundred weight"

[snip]
>>>    kintal           100 lbs, 100 kg, 112 lbs. (an interesting weight!)
[snip]

This one is an odd sounding Latinism. Does it shows up anywhere else?

>>>    ubiety           being in a definite place, whereness

>Peter

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi  Sun Jun 10 06:02:26 2001
From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio)
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 09:02:26 +0300
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <3B1D599A.696B7A0D@memphis.edu>
Message-ID: <SUN.10.JUN.2001.090226.0300.>

On Tue, 5 Jun 2001, Leo A. Connolly wrote:

>  Of course, it's too early to say whether /x-/ and /?-/ will become
> established in German, but the process seems to have begun.

I don't think that the fact that some speakers "correctly" pronounce
phonemes alien to the language in loan words implies that these phonemes
would be in the process of being established in the language. People have
always tried to mimic foreign pronunciation in loan words whenever it is
considered fashionable. But give it a couple of hundred years and the
words often become nativized. Not always, of course; foreign phonemes and
phonotactic patterns are sometimes introduced through loan words.

Consider the following. Present day colloquial Finnish is swarming with
english loan words, and words and expressions like "about" (in the meaning
'approximately'), "anyway", "fuck it", "shit", "come on", "all right",
etc. show very high frequency in young people's speech. Often the english
words and expressions are pronounced with full English phonology and
phonotaxis, with no nativization at all. Should we then say that in
Finnish a process has begun through which *ALL* the English phonemes alien
to Finnish may become established in the language? This would be bizarre,
because a Finnish teenager who injects English discourse particles in
every sentence he says, knows that these words are not Finnish (that's why
he chose to use them in the first place). The same person can equally well
pronounce /piolokia/ for 'biology' in some other connection.

In historical linguistics, when we uncover prehistoric loan word layers
through etymological research (such as, say, the numerous Proto-Germanic
loans in Proto-Finnic), we usually find very neat substitution patterns
for foreign sounds (e.g. *x- > *k-, as in PG *xanan- > PF *kana 'hen').
One almost gets the impression that 2,000 years ago people just were in
general unwilling to try to pronounce foreign sounds "correctly". But
observations from present-day borrowing reveal that the process was, in
all probability, quite different. I'm sure that there have been many
speakers of Proto-Finnic who have tried to mimic the pronounciation of /x/
- it was, after all, a high-frequency phoneme in a prestige language from
which they borrowed more than 500 words (probably a lot more, actually;
these survive to the present day). But probably after a while they just
got bored with straining their tongues trying to say [xana] every time
they were talking about hens, and started saying [kana] instead.

Regards,
Ante Aikio


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sun Jun 10 08:36:15 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 09:36:15 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <SUN.10.JUN.2001.093615.0100.>

> [German bilabial (/w/) rather than ... labiodental (/v/)]

The sound is sometimes described as neither bilabial nor labiodental, but in
between.  IPA has a separate sign for it.  The bottom lip makes simultaneous
contact with both the upper lip and the front teeth.

Because it is an "in between" sound, English speakers often hear what it is
not, so Germans appear to the English to be saying /v/ for w and /w/ for v,
when in fact they are producing the same non-English sound for both.

Having said that, it must be acknowledged that both the bilabial and
labiodental pronunciations are also widely heard in Germany.

Peter


From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com  Mon Jun 11 13:17:47 2001
From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader)
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 09:17:47 -0400
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <000f01c0ee66$10acaa40$bb66073e@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <MON.11.JUN.2001.091747.0400.>

Well, it's in the 6th ed. of the _Concise Oxford_ (1982), and in
somewhat older editions of comparable one-volume dictionaries by
Collins and Chambers.  I'm not sure the editors have seen fit to
include it in more recent UK dictionaries.

Jim Rader

> <kinkajou>

> I'm pleased, but not surprised, that it's in American dictionaries, since
> it's an American animal.  Is it still in the concise English ones, I wonder?
> because that's what my point was.

> Peter


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Jun 11 13:40:01 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 14:40:01 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSO.4.33.0106050731001.2194-100000@shell.pacifier.com>
Message-ID: <MON.11.JUN.2001.144001.0100.>

--On Tuesday, June 5, 2001 7:49 am -0700 Sam Martin <semartin at pacifier.com>
wrote:

> Larry Trask mentions the revival of the properly buried "albeit". He may
> be amused that I have heard this resurrected word pronounced as if it were
> German, riming with "Arbeit".

Not so much amused as flabbergasted.  However, I guess I shouldn't be
surprised.  This word must have been resurrected via reading, and I guess
it's not unusual for a reader who is eager to collect fancy-looking words
to see this as [indigestible glob], and to assign a pronunciation
accordingly.

I once came across a woman who had learned the word 'misled' through
reading, and who pronounced it like 'mild', blissfully unaware that it had
anything to do with 'mislead'.  Honest.

> He also mentions the proliferating use of -wise. This is a productive
> bound particle, rather than a derivative suffix. Sentence-wise it can go
> anywhere, syntax-wise. Usage-wise, I have collected some delightful
> examples, wise-wise. Notice that "street-wise" can have two different
> meanings: "street-wise youngsters" has the derivative suffix, but
> "Street-wise, this city is a mess!" has the particle. The meaning of the
> particle is very similar to that of the Japanese particle of backgrounding
> focus wa "as for, when it comes to". As a particle the -wise can attach to
> a plural, and I could have substituted "Streets-wise" for "Street-wise" in
> the example above. Like Japanese multiple-wa phrases, the
> particle can occur two or three (or more?) times in a single sentence.
> Afterthought-wise, at least. Structure-wise the particle belongs with
> focus devices, I think.

Yes; on reflection, I think I must agree with this.  Many thanks for the
correction.

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  Mon Jun 11 13:49:08 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 14:49:08 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <000e01c0ee66$0fec6780$bb66073e@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <MON.11.JUN.2001.144908.0100.>

--On Tuesday, June 5, 2001 8:30 pm +0100 petegray <petegray at btinternet.com>
wrote:

>>>    kintal           100 lbs, 100 kg, 112 lbs. (an interesting weight!)

This is the British hundredweight.  As I recall, there are scraps of
evidence showing that Germanic 'hundred' could mean anything from '100' to
'120'.  The hundredweight has shown considerable regional variation in
value, with the US finally settling on 100 pounds, but the UK on 112
pounds.

When I first came to Britain in 1970, I was a teacher of physics and
chemistry, and British science education in those days still used Imperial
units.  Every time I did a physics problem involving hundredweights, I got
the wrong answer -- until I finally discovered that the local hundredweight
was 112 pounds.  That was a shock, I can tell you.  The British ton, being
twenty hundredweight, is of course 2240 pounds.

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 jrader at Merriam-Webster.com  Mon Jun 11 15:59:34 2001
From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader)
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 11:59:34 -0400
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <F88cU6xfPTeip68V8zD00002698@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <MON.11.JUN.2001.115934.0400.>

Seems like this is drifting rather far from Indo-European, but...

I think the production people here (Merriam-Webster) would be very
surprised to hear that dictionaries--at least the monolingual general-
audience desk dictionaries that I think are at issue--have become
cheaper to produce.  I couldn't give you the figures because the
accounting people here would never give them to me, but I bet each
of the editions of our desk dictionary that have appeared since
1897 or so has cost more adjusted for inflation.  The size of the
editorial staff has slowly increased as means to create citations
have become easier and more and more new citations have to be
scanned.  Forty years ago starting editors were paid ridiculously
low wages and turnover was extremely high--now even an editorial
assistant with a fresh B.A. gets a tolerable wage plus medical
benefits, and given the vagaries of the American economy,
employees tend to stay, meaning they get annual raises.  Paper
costs more even adjusted for inflation.  Typesetting has been
digitized and is faster, but given the expense of software and
hardware, I doubt very much that it's cheaper, because everything
becomes obsolete so fast that the cash outlay just to keep up is
constant.  The typesetting for our Collegiate dictionary is
customized, so every time I decided to use a new diacritic-letter
combination for an exotic language etymon, it has be digitally
created--it doesn't matter that I myself can print out virtually any
combination possible by downloading free character sets from the
Internet--no good for the typesetter's purposes.

What really constrains commercial dictionary size is price.  It took
a long time for the $19.95 ceiling for an American hardbound desk
dictionary was broken--when a hardbound novel, undiscounted,
often sold for $24.95 or more.  Now we've reached $24.95,
ridiculously low for a fairly well-printed and produced book of 1,557
pages.  The profit margin on dictionaries is exceedingly small, and
dictionary publishers can only make money if they sell in
enormous volume.  Every new fascicle in a new edition squeezes
things tighter.  In this regard, comparison with a newspaper is
totally inappropriate, because in the last half century I suspect
many newspapers have at least trebled in price.  If our desk
dictionary had done that, we'd be out of business.

I could say a lot more about commercial dictionaries.  I'd rather
read about Indo-European, though....

Jim Rader

> [Douglas Kilday:]
> This _a priori_ economic argument only works if the processes required to
> manufacture dictionaries are stable in cost. During the past century and
> more, this has certainly _not_ been the case. Improvements in typesetting
> and reproduction, and more recently in information technology, have steadily
> driven down the actual cost of producing dictionaries. I believe this is the
> principal factor in the increasing size of desk dictionaries, _not_
> purported expansion of the lexis. When these costs have reached equilibrium,
> so will the size of a given brand of dictionary.

> I think a good analogy can be drawn with newspapers. Today's typical
> regional paper (circulation on the order of 20k-200k) is much larger and
> more colorful than its counterpart of 100 years ago. That doesn't mean that
> we have much more, and more colorful, news than folks did in 1900, or that
> our lives are much larger and more colorful. It reflects the much lower
> cost, with modern technology, of producing newspapers and reproducing
> photographs.


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue Jun 12 14:21:49 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2001 15:21:49 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <F88cU6xfPTeip68V8zD00002698@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.12.JUN.2001.152149.0100.>

--On Thursday, June 7, 2001 10:37 am +0000 Douglas G Kilday
<acnasvers at hotmail.com> wrote:

[Folks, I'm still buried in exam marking, and I'm having to economical with
my e-mail, so this response will be unavoidably brief.]

> I believe that if we had a reliable way of
> tracking the "death" of English words, we would find that the number of
> words lost from common use every year roughly equals the number gained.

OK.  On this point we flatly disagree.  Sadly, I have no hard data at my
fingertips to back up my position, and no time to look for any, so I'll
just repeat myself.  Today we have cell phones, planes, computers, cars,
trains, spacecraft, TVs, VCRs, faxes, CDs, the Internet, e-mail, credit
cards, genetic engineering, nuclear reactors, and all manner of modern
technology
-- all of them with a large and growing body of associated terminology.  We
had none of them 200 years ago, and we didn't have some of them 30 years
ago.  Is it really plausible to assume that the vast number of words
brought into English by this technology has been effectively balanced out
by the loss of words pertaining to obsolete technology?  I don't think so.
We may have lost some words pertaining to windmills, but I'll bet we have
gained a very much larger number of words pertaining to nuclear power
stations.  How many parts does a windmill have, anyway?

[snip several points -- no time; sorry]

> This _a priori_ economic argument only works if the processes required to
> manufacture dictionaries are stable in cost. During the past century and
> more, this has certainly _not_ been the case. Improvements in typesetting
> and reproduction, and more recently in information technology, have
> steadily driven down the actual cost of producing dictionaries. I believe
> this is the principal factor in the increasing size of desk dictionaries,
> _not_ purported expansion of the lexis. When these costs have reached
> equilibrium, so will the size of a given brand of dictionary.

Well, an interesting position, but two things: (1) we'll have to wait a
while to find out if the prediction is true; (2) even if dictionary sizes
do stabilize, that doesn't falsify my position: it only means that pruning
must become more ruthless, and that dictionaries must become more
selective.

> I think a good analogy can be drawn with newspapers. Today's typical
> regional paper (circulation on the order of 20k-200k) is much larger and
> more colorful than its counterpart of 100 years ago. That doesn't mean
> that we have much more, and more colorful, news than folks did in 1900,
> or that our lives are much larger and more colorful. It reflects the much
> lower cost, with modern technology, of producing newspapers and
> reproducing photographs.

Well, interesting, but I can't see that this is a striking analogy.  It may
well be the case that the total amount of daily news in the world is
roughly constant over time, but I can't see that it follows that the size
of the English lexicon must therefore also remain roughly constant.

During the last century, the number of mother tongues on earth has
declined.  Yet the terminology of linguistics has been growing steadily in
size.  This is true even in my own field of historical linguistics, which
has been established far longer than any other branch of the subject.  In
writing my dictionary, I found only a tiny handful of terms which were once
prominent but which have now dropped out of use, such as 'surd' and
'proethnic'.  But I found myself including several hundred terms which have
entered the literature only in the last few years: 'accretion zone',
'decliticization', 'lexical diffusion', 'weak-ties theory', 'punctuated
equilibrium', 'exaptation', 'junk', 'abrupt pidgin', 'Northern Cities
Shift', 'Monte Carlo test', 'historicization', 'language missionary',
'language cluster', and loads of others.  Is there any reason to suppose
that linguistics is atypical?

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  Fri Jun  8 09:28:14 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 09:28:14 -0000
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.092814.0000.>

Larry Trask (31 May 2001) wrote:

>I might also point out that, in the US, the word 'vehicle' is a traditional
>shibboleth for spotting country bumpkins: if you pronounce an /h/ in
>'vehicle', you're a bumpkin.  Even the folk singer Arlo Guthrie, hardly the
>personification of cosmopolitan sophistication, used this word to great effect
>on one of his records to identify a southern policeman as a bumpkin.

It's noteworthy here that Varro reports <veha> as a rustic pronunciation of
<via>: "rustici etiam quoque viam veham appellant, et vellam non villam"
(R.R. I.2.14).

>Incidentally, I've just noticed that John Wells reports that 33% of his
>American panel preferred the pronunciation of 'vehicle' with /h/, and a
>further five percent actually put the main stress on the second syllable.
>Sheesh.  Either John is using a remarkably catholic panel, or something has
>happened here since I left home.  Do any of you Yanks out there *really*
>pronounce an /h/ in 'vehicle'?

I don't, unless I'm trying to imitate a rustic stereotype. However, I
recently heard 'vehicle' with an /h/ in the smooth, cosmopolitan
pronunciation of one of the "CNN Headline News" announcers. It may be
gaining ground.

I've never heard 'vehicle' with the main stress on the second syllable. This
must be influenced by 'vehicular'. It might be interesting to test the 5% on
'mandible' and 'crucible'. Would 'mandibular' influence 'mandible'? Since
there is no *crucibular, would 'crucible' follow the others by analogy? What
about 'icicle' and 'bicycle'?


From rao.3 at osu.edu  Fri Jun  8 14:53:58 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 10:53:58 -0400
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <FRI.8.JUN.2001.105358.0400.>

M. Tuver wrote:

> That, by the way, is a rule I was never taught.  I always had the spelling
> pronunciation [D] for <dh> words before I learned about Sanskrit.  (It took
> me a while to link [dArm@] with <dharma>...)  Even now I still have
> dental/interdental [d] in those words (instead of the regular alveolar or
> whatever), and in words like <dhole>, the [D] still persists.

Don't feel so bad. "dh" is interdental (stop not spirant though) in
modern Indian pronunciation, and was dental (i.e. tongue tip on teeth)
[or where the enamel meets the gum, according to some] in the ancient
pronunciation.

Preserving the place instead of the quality does not strike me as being
worse. But then the interdental spirants of English are realized in my
mouth (as in that of many Tamil speakers) as interdental stops [while
the alveolar stops become retroflex stops]. So your pronunciation will
sound perfectly OK while the typical pronunciation of dharma as dArma is
what I do when I make fun of (would be)Anglophones


From douglas at nb.net  Sat Jun  9 14:59:50 2001
From: douglas at nb.net (Douglas G. Wilson)
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 10:59:50 -0400
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <177041807.3200291392@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SAT.9.JUN.2001.105950.0400.>

>In my vernacular, even in proper names, I absolutely can't have /h/ before
>schwa or before unstressed /I/.

Does Larry Trask really mean that he (in his American persona) doesn't say
"habitual" with /h@/ (@ = schwa)? I think most Americans say it so, and my
talking (Yankee) dictionary does. Similarly: "habiliment", "rehabilitate",
etc., etc., and one frequent pronunciation of "harass".

Finding the /h/ between TWO schwas is a little more difficult ... some
pronounce "Abraham" /eibr at h@m/, and I wouldn't have trouble reading the
imaginary but conceivable "ultra-habituating" as /Vltr at h@bItSueitIN/ or so
... I think "intrahabenular" = "inside the habenula" is an acceptable word
(medical/anatomical) which would be pronounced /Intr at h@bEnjul at r/ usually ....

-- Doug Wilson


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sun Jun 10 08:01:18 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 09:01:18 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <SUN.10.JUN.2001.090118.0100.>

> In Britain, it is the tradition to identify the 'cut' vowel as a wholly
> distinct phoneme from schwa.

I've been following this debate with interest.
I just want to remind linguists, in case anyone's interested - in NZ, there
is no schwa.  The vowel in "bit" is used instead.  So there is no problem
whatever with h before schwa - it just doesn't occur.

Peter


From g_sandi at hotmail.com  Sat Jun  9 12:48:11 2001
From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi)
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 12:48:11 -0000
Subject: note on 'dhole'
Message-ID: <SAT.9.JUN.2001.124811.0000.>

>        I agree that that is what the usual supects say, on the linguistics
>side, but on the biology side, all my sources agree that wolves do not occur
>in south India, and therefore in the Kannada area.  (Why is not entirely clear
>to me.  They did not spread from China into SE Asia either.  Dislike of
>tropcal heat?)  Therefore there is something not quite right here.

>Dr. David L. White

Could the Dravidian word refer to a different carnivore?

Your question is very interesting: why have wolves not penetrated south
India or SW Asia? It can't be just the heat - north India (where there ARE
wolves) can be as hot as any place on this earth in the summer, as I know
from experience (48 degrees in May/June are not unusual in New Delhi, for
example). Maybe it's the humidity they don't like, or there are carnivores
who thrive better than wolves in the year-round humid heat.

Gabor


From edsel at glo.be  Sat Jun  9 10:12:51 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 12:12:51 +0200
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
Message-ID: <SAT.9.JUN.2001.121251.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Whiting" <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2001 8:24 PM

[snip]

>> [Ed]
>> For your information: in Dutch, w is called 'we', pr. like Eng. 'way' (some
>> Dutchmen will say 'vay').

> As usual, Dutch is stuck in the middle between German and English.  German
> has no [w] sound so they use the <w> graph for [v] (since they use the <v>
> graph for [f]).  To them the name of the <w> graph is 'vay' (just like
> the name of the Hebrew letter waw is vav in German).

[Ed]
Modern Israelis say 'vav' too.

I think your statement about Germans pronouncing w as v and v as f goes a bit
too far. These are relatively modern pronunciations (which tend to propagate to
Holland), with lots of exceptions, almost exclusively for w. In certain
contexts (like C+w), as Pat mentioned, and in a lot of regional speech, w is
pronounced w. Similar things can be said about e.g. r (more, or less,
velarized).

It seems to me that German pronunciation is still evolving in a perceptible
(and uneven) way. And so is the the pronunciation of Dutch in the Netherlands,
but emphatically not in Flanders, Belgium, which is phonetically and lexically
more conservative, even though it's the original homeland of Dutch as we know
it (but since the (religious-political) secession in the 16-17. c. and the
ensuing mass emigration to Holland, it has become more peripheral).

> Dutch has a [w] sound and uses the <w> graph for it, but has adapted the name
> from German ('vay' > 'way').

>> And Double-U (pr. Dub'ya) is still another thing, nothing to do with its
>> shape either :-)

[Ed]
I meant George W.


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sun Jun 10 08:40:33 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 09:40:33 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
Message-ID: <SUN.10.JUN.2001.094033.0100.>

>> Greeks ...transcription of Latin: AKOAI
>> ...for Latin AQUAE.

> Comes from not having a [w] sound.

Greek found the same solution as French.  In both languages the vowel
written <u> is fronted, so the back /u/ is written ou.  It is this back /u/
which is used to represent the /w/ sound, as in Oualerios (Valerius) or
"oui" or Touareg /twareg/.

Peter


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sun Jun 10 08:29:01 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 09:29:01 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
Message-ID: <SUN.10.JUN.2001.092901.0100.>

> Originally Latin had a vocalic [u] and a semi-vowel [w], both written with
> the <u/v> graph (the two shapes were simply variants of the same
> grapheme).  ...., they remained more or
> less interchangeable until the late middle ages.

The u shape was unknown to the Romans.  They had only capital V.  When small
letters were developed, about 600 AD or so, the small form of V was u, in
all contexts.  This is how the Oxford Classical texts are still printed:
   Vbi at the beginning of a sentence, ubi elsewhere.
   Venit at the beginning of a sentence, uenit elsewhere.

But this pattern is totally unroman.

The late development also explains why Greek and Latin developed different
small forms from the same capitals (eg from A B M N K etc).  If this had
happened earlier, the two scripts might have been more similar!

Peter


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Sun Jun 10 17:18:23 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 12:18:23 -0500
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
Message-ID: <SUN.10.JUN.2001.121823.0500.>

Dear Bob and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Whiting" <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2001 12:59 PM

<snip>

>> [PCRp]
>> In my experience, /dh/ (dha:l) is never used to represent Arabic emphatic
>> /d./ (d.a:d). They are two separate sounds and letters. Riyadh has dha:l.

[RW]
> No, Riyadh had d.a:d.  Look it up in your Wehr (the root is RWD., not RYD.
> as one might expect).  The symbol "<dh>" identifies a written sequence,
> not a phonetic one and I was fairly specific about indicating that is is
> an English graphic sequence.  The point is that English <dh> is not used
> to indicate Arabic dha:l except in the month names beginning with <Dhu>
> and in <dhal> which is the name of the letter used to write the sound.
> Otherwise, English <dh> in transcriptions frequently represents Arabic
> [d.] the phryngeal ("emphatic") d, while Arabic [D] is usually represented
> by <d> (e.g. dahabeeyah, from the root Dhb "to go back and forth."

[PCR]
Oops! I am so used to indicating the voiced interdental with [dh] that I
thought I remembered **riya:dh when, as you point out, it is riya:D.

I ASSumed.

Sorry for the misinformation.

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 dsalmon at salmon.org  Tue Jun  5 19:42:59 2001
From: dsalmon at salmon.org (David Salmon)
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 12:42:59 -0700
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <TUE.5.JUN.2001.124259.0700.>

Larry Trask wrote:

>> In my vernacular, even in proper names, I absolutely can't have /h/ before
>> schwa or before unstressed /I/.  I might also point out that, in the US, the
>> word 'vehicle' is a traditional shibboleth for spotting country bumpkins: if
>> you pronounce an /h/ in 'vehicle', you're a bumpkin.  Even the folk singer
>> Arlo Guthrie, hardly the personification of cosmopolitan sophistication,
>> used this word to great effect on one of his records to identify a southern
>> policeman as a bumpkin.  But this pronunciation nevertheless forces the
>> presence of a stress on the second syllable, and /h/-schwa is still
>> impossible.

>> Incidentally, I've just noticed that John Wells reports that 33% of his
>> American panel preferred the pronunciation of 'vehicle' with /h/, and a
>> further five percent actually put the main stress on the second syllable.
>> Sheesh.  Either John is using a remarkably catholic panel, or something has
>> happened here since I left home.  Do any of you Yanks out there *really*
>> pronounce an /h/ in 'vehicle'?

Richard Hammitt replied:

> Ok, I'll bite.  I was raised in Texas (but have travelled extensively
> throughout the eastern half of the U.S.) and have spent as much time with
> rural folks ("bumpkins") as I have with urban folks.  I do not pronouce the
> h, and I have never heard anyone pronounce the h (except in movies where
> someone was portraying "bumpkins").

> Of course, my exposure to the word is limited; the word is just not used so
> much anymore.  In its place, people I talk to approximate by using "car",
> whether referring to a car, a truck, a van, or any other 4-6 wheeled,
> motorized vehicle.

> As for what you said about not tolerating /h/ before schwa, my speech agrees
> except with the h in word-initial position.  I pronounce the word "hull" with
> a schwa.  That being said, when I add syllables (ending in many different
> consonants or vowels) before it in hypothetical words, I keep dropping the h.

To which I add:

I do pronounce the "h," though also being a native Texan who has lived
abroad-from-Texas for many years, and not, I trust, a country bumpkin.  It
is simply a Southernism, necessary to the drawl.  I don't really know how
one could pronounce "vehicle" in a Southern way without an "h."   Which is
probably why we just say "pickup."

David


From Oliver.Neukum at lrz.uni-muenchen.de  Thu Jun 14 18:56:18 2001
From: Oliver.Neukum at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Oliver Neukum)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 20:56:18 +0200
Subject: -ca in Sanskrit and Bartholomae's law
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.205618.0200.>

Hi,

could someone explain why Bartholomae's law never affects -ca ?

	TIA
		Oliver Neukum


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 14 03:25:56 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 23:25:56 EDT
Subject: Chronology and history of Germanic Consonant Shift
Message-ID: <WED.13.JUN.2001.232556.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/13/2001 9:18:17 PM, petegray at btinternet.com writes:

<< For the date of the 1st sound shift, we can use the word Hanf, which
comes from the Greek word kannabis.  This word is a loan word out of
Scythian, which did not enter Greek till the 5th century BC.  In Germanic we
meet the word in its shifted form *hanap-.  Since Germanic could not have
borrowed this word very early, we can assert that at this time the rules *k
> h and *b > p were still in force.  But it does not tell us how long this
rule had existed.  That it no longer was in force in the 3rd and 2nd
centuries before Christ can be concluded from loan words from Latin, >>

Two quick notes:  I think the word first appears in Herodotus and he treats
it as if his audience does not know hemp, comparing it to linen.  But he says
the Thracians know it and are expert at weaving with it.  In "Europe Before
History," Kristiansen describes the evidence for a powerful Scythian push
into central Europe, forcing Halstatt west of the Tisza, with a similar
westward withdrawal in the North.  At the same time, there is some serious
evidence of Scythian contact in Denmark, including a rich royal golden
Scythian necklace found in the bogs.  This happens I believe beginning around
the sixth century BC.

So, though I am inclined to find Greek influences early in northern places,
it appears that *hanap- could have found its way into German at an earlier
time, from Scythian or even Thracian.  As I don't think it is apparent how
Germanic would have borrowed the word from either of these two languages or
some intermediary, or when, the date of the borrowing and the mechanics given
above might be at best a conjecture.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 14 04:17:01 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 00:17:01 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.001701.EDT.>

I wrote:
>   We've been through this.  What you call often call "change" is actually
> continuity to me, because you still call what remains "cognate", which means
> there must be something that stayed the same.

JoatSimeon at aol.com replies:
<<-- cognate means "derived from the same source", neither more nor less.
Cognate words in related languages need bear no phonetic resemblance to each
other at all, as such.  Only when the systemic _patterns_ of change over time
>>

But that doesn't contradict what I wrote.  "Systematic patterns of change"
allow one to show that cognates are "derived from the same source."  So there
must be some continuity between the source and what is derived from the
source.  The alternative is no continuity, no relatedness, no cognacy.  All
that becomes obvious when linguists use the word "genetic" to describe
"cognate" relationships.

And I should point out that borrowed words can of course be "derived" from
the same source as a cognate.  The events at the Olympics described in Englis
h as "equestrian" use a word that is obviously "derived" from the same source
as <equus>, but would not be considered "genetically" transmitted and
therefore would not in theory be "cognate."

<<Eg., "pita" (Hindi) and "father" (English) are cognates, as are "pad" and
"foot", despite having no surface similarity at all.>>

If you said "pita" and "brassiere" have no surface similarity, well that
would be different.  If you said "pad" and "philadelphia" have no surface
similarity, that might work.  But "pita" and "father" clearly do have some
prima facie structural similarities.  All these similarities and differences
are clearly a matter of degree.  I would suspect that "found" cognates that
truly have no recognizable resemblances are rare.  And I would suspect that
any attempt to find a systematic pattern of change that included "pita" and
"brassiere" as cognates would not get very far.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 14 04:40:51 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 00:40:51 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.004051.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/13/2001 10:56:45 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:
<< I get the distinct impression that Steve believes that the comparative
method is a sham, a toy that does no more than to spit back the assumptions
built into it in the first place.  'Tain't so, Steve. >>

Larry, you really shouldn't go by your impressions.  Aside from being
incorrect, they are a little inflammatory, don't you think?  Especially if
you choose to pick up my points selectively as you have.

It's not the comparative method that I'm criticizing.  It's the conclusion
you come to that you claim OBVIOUSLY follow from the comparative method.   I
can accept the comparative method and still find fault with those
conclusions, which you gave in your first post in this thread.

It's not the comparative method but what you read into it.  After all, even
the devil can quote Scripture to his purpose.

The part that you avoided is what I'm after.  It has to do with the oneness
of PIE.  I'll repeat what I wrote here so that when you get around to it, you
can get past your misinformed impressions, and we can get to the meat of the
matter:

<<The problem I perceive and have been getting at does not arise after a
judgment is made about "genetic" relationships.  It happens before.  Romani
and Anglo-Romani obviously resemble one another in some way.  Upon analysis,
one discovers a "systematic correspondence" between Romani and the lexicon in
Anglo-Romani.  But does that yield a genetic relationship? No, because one
only gets one genetic relationship per customer?  Why?  Because a language
can only represent one "system"?  But Anglo-Romani represents two systematic
correspondences, and therefore presumably two different systems.  In
Anglo-Romani, the problem is clear, because the language is historic.  In IE
languages, the problem is hidden in prehistory.>>

Regards,
Steve Long


From sarima at friesen.net  Thu Jun 14 04:42:36 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 21:42:36 -0700
Subject: Rate of Change
In-Reply-To: <3B2019D2.32736.141020A6@localhost>
Message-ID: <WED.13.JUN.2001.214236.0700.>

At 12:18 AM 6/8/01 -0400, Brian M. Scott wrote:

>The basic point is probably sound enough, but you'd have a hard time
>finding a medieval historian who would agree that 'during the Middle
>Ages society hardly changed over 100 or more years'.  Pick any 100-
>year period you like during the MA, and you'll find significant social
>changes.

Quite so, even based on my amateur studies of post-Norman England I cannot
name any 100 year period without any social change.  Sometimes change was
even fast by modern standards.  The changes after the end of Stephen's
reign were extremely rapid, as Henry didn't tolerate much guff.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 14 05:04:34 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 01:04:34 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.010434.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/13/2001 11:20:36 PM, rao.3 at osu.edu writes:

<< The point is that such similarities and resemblances are considered to
be coincidences till systematic correspondences have been established.
The difference is between collection of discrete facts and establishment
of general laws. Only the latter is (nowadays) considered science. >>

I have no problem with this.  My  point that there is that the "general laws"
should not go further than the facts permit.  It's one thing to say that a
systematic pattern shows the absence of coincidence -- which is all that you
have said in the statement above. It's another to say that that pattern
proves a single ancestor, which was Prof Trask's point.  That's where we
leave science behind.

If I looked at your personal genetic chart assuming you would had only one
parent, it would most likely affect my selection "of discrete facts."  And
there would a good chance that I could "prove" you only had one parent by
those facts.  When you collect facts, it's important to remember that your
criteria of selection can affect the outcome.

Regards,
Steve Long


From hstahlke at gw.bsu.edu  Thu Jun 14 12:30:51 2001
From: hstahlke at gw.bsu.edu (Herb Stahlke)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 07:30:51 -0500
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.073051.0500.>

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.  The comparative method hasn't been applied to a
lot of these languages, although that is changing.  So how do you decide what
to compare.  At least heuristically, you want to give yourself the best chance
you can of being able to get somewhere with the comparative method, and so
Africanists have frequently used methods not based on regular sound
correspondences to find a place to start.  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.

Herb Stahlke

>>> larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk 06/08/01 05:06AM >>>
--On Wednesday, June 6, 2001 1:06 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> To say that I can't back up to that starting point, where everything is at
> best similarities and resemblances -- before any judgments about genetic
> relationships would have been made -- is to queer the game.  It makes the
> comparative method immune to critical analysis.

> I suspect part of the problem begins back when no analysis has yet been
> done and there can be nothing but resemblances between two languages.
> That's where the presumption starts that there WILL be only one genetic
> relationship and therefore there should be only one original systematic
> correspondence between the languages.  If you start by presuming that all
> "genetic" relationships can only relate to one parent, than all your
> results will tend towards that presumption, whether true or not.

Not so, I'm afraid.  The comparative method cannot possibly reconstruct an
ancestor that never existed -- not if it's competently applied, anyway.
Incompetent attempts are prominent in the fringe literature, of course, but
these are simply laughed away by professional linguists.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Thu Jun 14 07:50:20 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 03:50:20 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.035020.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/13/01 11:03:54 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> I must be firm in pointing out that "rate of change," as Prof Trask is using
> it, has little scientific validity - at least without confirmable numbers
> that anybody can double-check.

-- anybody can acquire the necessary knowledge base to know what Professor
Trask is talking about.

You can even reinvent it yourself.

It will take about twenty years, and you'll have to learn a round two dozen
languages or so (a hundred would be better),  and you'll be redoing stuff
that thousands of others have done before you, but you can do it, if you want
to.  Just as anyone can drop weights off the Leaning Tower of Pisa and time
weather the heavy ones hit before the light ones.


> I helped prepare a presentation before a board of physicists at the National
> Science Foundation a few years back.

-- linguistics is a descriptive-historical field, not an experimental one.
It's much more like paleontology than physics; digging up fossils, not
working with subatomic particles.   We describe what happened in the past,
not things which can be repeated at will in a laboratory.  This limits the
degree of quantification which can be done.

> If they expect this kind of specificity about "rates of change" in quantum
> mechanics and animal behavior experiments, they can expect it in historical
> linguistics.

-- no, they can't.  This is not an experimental science.  The field of data
available is of an entirely different order.

Give us a time machine and a tape recorder, and we can obtain results similar
to those of physics.

As it is, we're more like a technical kind of historian or archaeologist,
ferreting through scraps of waste-paper and bits of bone and doing
connect-the-dots.

It's been demonstrated repeatedly that the comparative method of historical
linguistics works; it has predictive power.  Many times we have found new
evidence anticipated beforehand using this method.

But it isn't physics.

> If we are talking about sound changes that separate two daughter languages,
> we should be able to show that those specific sound changes took a certain
> number of years, days, hours and with historical evidence.

-- no, the best we can do is to say that the observable languages indicate that
rates of change vary between a low of X, a high of Y, and average around Z.

When you talk about changes to a language, you're talking about thousands of
discrete events, most of them irreversably lost to entropy.

Quantification is necessarily fuzzy in this field.  It doesn't mean that
there are no boundaries and that anything goes; it just means that the
evidence is, by its nature, imprecise.

We have ranges of possible rates, not _a_ rate.  We can say, "this is
probable, that is improbable, the other thing is for all practical purposes
impossible because it would require a concentration of highly unlikely
chances".

> 2.  An example.  In biology, we talk about the rate of mutation.

-- not applicable.

> So what does body hair tell us about "rate of change?"?

-- not an applicable analogy, even remotely.

_Everything_ in a language eventually changes.  Eventually, it changes so
much that relationships are no longer detectable.

By way of contrast, even a bacterium and a human being share a fair number of
genes are are demonstrably related.

Presumably Basque and English have a common linguistic ancestor _somewhere_;
it's just so far back in time that all detectable links have vanished in the
steady "churning".

Remember, that the _form_ of a word bears no _necessary_ relationship at all
to its semantic _function_.  It's an arbitrary symbol.  Thus a language can
change _totally_, and still fulfill all the same functions it did before.
This is not true with genes.

Degree of _overall_ similarity is a good rough-cut indicator of how long
languages have been separated, and is in fact analagous to the
comparative-DNA tests used to determine the time-depth of the evolutionary
relationship between related animal species.

You can use this method with a high degree of accuracy.  Take a quick look
at, say, two Slavic languages, or two Romance ones, and then a Slavic and
Germanic or Germanic and Romance, or a Slavic, Romance and Germanic.

You will get precisely accurate _relative_ chronology from such a cursory
investigation; without any historical data besides the languages themselves,
you can immediately tell that the common ancestor of Romance is not far away
in time, that Common Slavic is even closer, that the common ancestor of any
Germanic language and any Slavic or Romance one is much further away in time
than that.

> 4. As I said, this is not meant to be disrespectful of linguistic
> expertise.

-- well, it certainly sounds that way.  If you want to talk about
linguistics, you have to come at it from the inside.  You're attempting to
apply inappropriate methodologies, and to do so without the necessary
knowledge base.


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Jun 14 09:23:43 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 10:23:43 +0100
Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look
In-Reply-To: <d2.7e49fc2.2856fca5@aol.com>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.102343.0100.>

--On Tuesday, June 12, 2001 1:03 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

[LT]

> In a message dated 6/7/2001 11:19:18 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:
> << We can imagine a lower rate of change, but there seems to be no good
> evidence for it.  Without some hard evidence, we have no right to assume
> that linguistic change was any slower in the remote past than it has been
> in the historical period.  Such an assumption would violate our linguistic
> Uniformitarian Principle: languages and speakers in the remote past
> behaved much as languages and speakers have behaved in the historical
> period. >>

> While I respect the trained linguist's ability to "feel" the relative age
> of a language, I must be firm in pointing out that "rate of change," as
> Prof Trask is using it, has little scientific validity - at least without
> confirmable numbers that anybody can double-check.

Oh, I agree with this.  Linguistic change has so many dimensions that no
one has yet been able to devise a metric for it, and I suspect that no
metric is possible.

However, perhaps Steve is reading a little too much into my words.  I was
certainly not claiming that the rate of linguistic change is constant.
Rather, I was only objecting to any suggestion that the rate of change, or
any other linguistic property, should have been *wholesale* different in
the remote past from what we see in the historical period.  If you have
good evidence for such a conclusion, then fine.  But, without such
evidence, it is out of order to assume any such thing merely because you
find the assumption convenient.

Have to stop here, I'm afraid: I still have a large pile of exam scripts to
be marked, and they have to be finished by tomorrow.  If I'm still alive
next week, I'll try to catch up a bit on these postings.

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 sarima at friesen.net  Thu Jun 14 13:25:41 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 06:25:41 -0700
Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look
In-Reply-To: <d2.7e49fc2.2856fca5@aol.com>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.062541.0700.>

At 01:03 AM 6/12/01 -0400, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

>If we are talking about sound changes that separate two daughter languages,
>we should be able to show that those specific sound changes took a certain
>number of years, days, hours and with historical evidence.  If we are
>claiming that that rate is somehow universal - justifying the application of
>a uniformity assumption - we should be prepared to show that the same rate
>per sound change can be observed in a large enough number of other languages.
>  Or explain why they vary.

This assumes a constant rate of change, something I doubt anybody
proposes.  What is suggested is a *statistical* median or mean rate, and a
variance in rate.  Given those one can determine a range of reasonable
values for when a *set* of changes took place.  One can certainly determine
a maximum amount of time that could reasonably correlate with a given
amount of change - that is how statistics works.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From mclasutt at brigham.net  Mon Jun 18 07:59:53 2001
From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin)
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 01:59:53 -0600
Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look
In-Reply-To: <d2.7e49fc2.2856fca5@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.18.JUN.2001.015953.0600.>

[[Steve Long wrote:]]

How do you propose to measure the rate of change in modern preliterate
languages?  How do they measure up against written languages?  Do they give
any evidence that rate is affected by the acquisition of writing?

[[I respond:]]

I'm not going to attempt to address your entire point, but I recently had an
article published that illustrates what can be done with preliterate
languages.

John E. McLaughlin.  2000.  "Language Boundaries and Phonological Borrowing
in the Central Numic Languages," _Uto-Aztecan:  Structural, Temporal, and
Geographic Perspectives_.  Ed. Eugene H. Casad and Thomas L. Willet.
Hermosillo, Mexico:  Universidad de Sonora.  Pp. 293-303.

Basically, it all depends on how well the language has been documented
during its history of contact with literate languages.  In the case of
Comanche, we know that the pre-Comanche physically moved away from their
Shoshoni ancestors in the first decade of the 18th century.  The earliest
record of the language is from 1786 and it is clear that Shoshoni and
Comanche were still very, very close at that time, if not still virtually
identical in phonological and morphological structure.  Today, there are
five main phonological changes that separate Shoshoni from Comanche and make
the two mutually incomprehensible without extensive practice.
(Impressionistically, the same magnitude of difference as between American
English and Scots.)  The next documentation in 1828 shows a language in
transition with most of the 5 phonological changes in full process of taking
charge.  The next major documentation in 1861 shows that all five of the
phonological changes have finished the job of restructuring the language.

During this entire period, Comanche society was preliterate and still
nomadic, having been forced onto the reservation only in 1872.  So, during
this 75-year span, 5 fairly important sound changes occurred.  The extensive
records made of Comanche in the late 1940s and 1950s by the first
professional linguists to visit them show that virtually no sound changes
occurred during the following 75-year span.  This measurement, of course,
only deals with phonological changes and not the morphological and syntactic
changes which also occurred in the three centuries between the physical
split with Shoshoni and the present day.  (The 18th and 19th century
documents are exclusively word lists.)  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.  BTW, none of the five changes are
due to the influence of English or Spanish.  Only one of them was due to
influence from a neighboring language--the loss of nasals in nasal-stop
clusters from the Southern Ute dialect of Colorado River Numic (most of you
may know this language as "Southern Paiute").

I can't really tell you how this stacks up against figures for literate
societies because I'm not an Indo-European expert, but I do seem to recall
from my general reading in historical linguistics that this seems to be the
general pattern found in all language change, whether the language is
written or not.  The true Indo-Europeanists can undoubtedly provide detailed
information to verify or correct this impression.

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 larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Jun 18 13:16:50 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 14:16:50 +0100
Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look
In-Reply-To: <d2.7e49fc2.2856fca5@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.18.JUN.2001.141650.0100.>

--On Tuesday, June 12, 2001 1:03 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> But of course if Prof Trask's use of "Uniformitarian Principle" was
> metaphorical or casual, and not meant to imply any real level of
> scientific certainty, then I can have no objection to it.

No.  My use of the term was not metaphorical or casual.  I intended to use
it in the same sense that it has in any other discipline.  In particular, I
meant this:

In the absence of hard evidence to the contrary, we must assume that the
following is true:

Languages and speakers in the remote past did not behave differently from
the way languages and speakers have behaved in the historical period.

To reject this position is to make historical linguistics impossible.  If
the Uniformitarian Principle is rejected, then there is no obstacle to any
far-fetched hypothesis about the remote past that anybody might want to put
forward.  Without the UP, we could claim that PIE spread across Europe and
then remained everywhere unchanged for 5000 years, or we could claim that
Proto-Germanic was an artificial language invented by a Polish oculist, or
we could claim that every IE language is the direct result of PIE in the
inept mouths of substrate-speakers.  Without the UP, historical linguistics
would be no more orderly or principled than a Michael Moorcock fantasy
novel.  We need it.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)


From R.S.Georg at let.leidenuniv.nl  Thu Jun 14 16:59:33 2001
From: R.S.Georg at let.leidenuniv.nl (R.S.Georg)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 09:59:33 -0700
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SGI.4.21.0106080727120.22693186-100000@paju.oulu.fi>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.095933.0700.>

>And, if anyone can make any sense of the phonetic side of the change *s > *k
>mentioned above, I'd be glad to hear it...

Armenian has a somewhat similar development (although the details are
by far not as simple; I don't know them from the top of my head, so
please look it up).

In some New Indian languages, under the so-called ruki-rule, *s went
as far as (at least) /x/. The ruki-rule decrees that /s/, after /r/,
/u/, /k/, /i/ goes to /sh/ (in Iranian, and Indic /s-retrofl./.
Ah, yes, (I'm not fully awake yet), it holds in Slavic, too, where
the outcome, at least after /u/, is /x/, too  (ru. snoxa, lat. nurus,
skt. snuSa:, Gk. nuos).
The phonetic ratio, if any, has to do with retroflexion. If you
retroflect your tongue *a lot* when pronouncing, say, Sanskrit /S/
(s-subscript dot), the acoustic impression is already very close to
(velar, not uvular) /x/. IOW, /S/ and /x/ have quite adjacent places
of articulation. The whole process from /s/ to /x/ is, thus,
describable as a gradual movement of place of articulation. OK, in
the end /x/ has to lose its friction to turn into the stop /k/, but
then you have it.
In early European writings on things Indian, I encountered the term
/upaniSad/ rendered as <Oup'nekhad>  (I think it was in Schopenhauer,
but he certainly got it from someone else); the ultimate source of
this impressionistic notation may have been Bengali Brahmin
pronunciation of Sanskrit, but I'm not so sure about that.

Stefan
--
Dr. Stefan Georg
Heerstrassse 7
53111 Bonn

Vakroep Vergelijkende Taalwetenschappen
Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu Jun 14 09:15:38 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 10:15:38 +0100
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SGI.4.21.0106080727120.22693186-100000@paju.oulu.fi>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.101538.0100.>

--On Friday, June 8, 2001 7:47 am +0300 Ante Aikio
<anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi> wrote:

> Just out of curiosity: how strange are the changes in these Pama-Nyungan
> languages?

OK.  First, a correction.  I gave Barry Blake credit for working this stuff
out, but I was quoting from memory.  In fact, it was Ken Hale who did the
initial work, and then it was Terry Crowley who did the undergrad
dissertation which figured out the nasty cases.  Apologies all round.

The changes I had in mind were the initial-dropping languages of Australia.

In a typical Pama-Nyungan language, the phoneme inventory is small; there
are no fricatives; every word must begin with a single consonant; and
monosyllabic word-forms are prohibited.  All of these statements fail to
hold in the exceptional languages.

What happened in the exceptional languages was this.  First, all
word-initial consonants were lost.  Second, in most cases, the first mora
of the following vowel was also lost.  So, for example, before we consider
the rest, original *<guda> becomes <da>, while original *<guuda> becomes
<uda>.  But there's more.

Phonetic features of the lost segments, such as labiality and palatality,
were copied onto the remaining material in one way or another (and lost
velars often produced rhoticity in the surviving material).  In addition,
there were a number of lenitions in the surviving consonants (often
producing fricatives), but also some fortitions (especially of nasals and
liquids).  Finally, some word-final material was frequently also lost or
gained.

The changes in any given language are usually highly regular, though it
took a long time to work out the rules, and in fact it took a long time
even to identify the cognates.  It is not obvious, for example, that
Mbabaram <dOg> 'dog' (O = turned c; the word is amusingly identical to
English 'dog'), Mpalityanh <twa> 'dog', and Ntra?ngith <u?a> 'dog' are
cognate and all derived from original *<gudaga> -- which survives unchanged
in Yidiny (hiya, Steve).

In Yinwum, original *<wanta-> 'put' becomes <ntra->, and original *<yinta->
'(to) spear' becomes <nti->.  In LinngithiG (G = gamma), original
*<ngungku> 'there' becomes <ko>, and original *<ngantu> 'where' becomes
<tro>.  You can see why it took a while to find the cognates.

For an overview of this, see pp. 195-207 of this book:

R. M. W. Dixon (1980), The Languages of Australia, Cambridge UP.

For more information, see several of the papers in this book:

P. Sutton (ed.) (1976), Languages of Cape York, Canberra: Australian
Institute of Aboriginal Studies.

> Most examples of bizarre changes that I know are from various Samoyedic
> languages, e.g. *w- > q-, *j- > q-, *V- > ngV-, *mp > ngf and even *s- >
> k- before /e/ and /i/! But I'd be most interested in other examples of
> uncommon phonetic developments.

Look up the entry for 'unnatural change' in my dictionary:

R. L. Trask (2000), Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics,
Edinburgh UP.

This cites, with references, a number of odd-looking changes (N = [eng]):

  t > k
  -b- > -k-
  l > Ng
  w > ts-, -nts-
  ts > kw OR p OR f
  t > w
  d > N
  l > N

The examples come from Austronesian, Papuan and Athabaskan.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)


From mcv at wxs.nl  Thu Jun 14 09:25:08 2001
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 11:25:08 +0200
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SGI.4.21.0106080727120.22693186-100000@paju.oulu.fi>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.112508.0200.>

On Fri, 8 Jun 2001 07:47:10 +0300, Ante Aikio
<anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi> wrote:

>Most examples of bizarre changes that I know are from various Samoyedic
>languages, e.g. *w- > q-, *j- > q-, *V- > ngV-, *mp > ngf and even *s- >
>k- before /e/ and /i/! But I'd be most interested in other examples of
>uncommon phonetic developments.

>And, if anyone can make any sense of the phonetic side of the change *s >
>*k mentioned above, I'd be glad to hear it...

Well, *s > *t in Samoyedic (whether *s was really /s/ or perhaps
something like /T/ is a matter we discussed some time ago).  Then, /t/
before a front vowel palatalizes to /t^/, a sound intermediate between
/t/ and /k/.  Then it further shifts to /k/ (cf. Egyptian Arabic */d^/
> /g/).

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Fri Jun 15 05:13:03 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 01:13:03 EDT
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.011303.EDT.>

[ moderator edited ]

In a message dated 6/13/2001 11:41:57 PM, anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi writes:

<< Most examples of bizarre changes that I know are from various Samoyedic
languages, e.g. *w- > q-, *j- > q-, *V- > ngV-, *mp > ngf and even *s- > k-
before /e/ and /i/! But I'd be most interested in other examples of uncommon
phonetic developments.... >>

A catalogue of some "unusual sound shifts" by Benji Ward is on the web
somewhere (I've lost the URL) as part of a public list, in the course of
which he brought up some issues that might be of interest: (this is part of
what I saved)

   "[It's not apparent] that "t > h" via the route evident for Sabaki recurs
    elsewhere.  However, that does not convince me that it should be considered
    an unusual sound change in the manner of the arch example of the
    correspondence between Armenian [erk] and IE *dw.  Incidentally, Marc
    Picard cautioned me to distinguish between "correspondences" and "changes".
    But I didn't understand the point until I thought of this example (he
    remained abstract).  I still don't know how this correspondence came about,
    because even though it recurs ad nauseam in the literature, it is always to
    make Marc's point, and I guess it is only explained in specialist
    discussions.  It is obviously not a sound change, but at best a
    coincidental series of such things.  In contrast, the following is about
    sound changes.  The main question is: why should there be an "unusual"
    sound change?  If a sound change CAN occur, why doesn't it occur more
    often?  There will be hints about the answer to this mystery below.

    Many of the messages were about the Irish and Gaelic change of t > h,
    apparently via the stage theta. Strictly speaking, then, this is not the
    "same" as the Bantu *t > h change, since it was clear from my introductory
    discussion that the Bantu change was from post-alveolar rather than dental
    "t" (because I mentioned that the intermediate voiceless /r/ was attested).
    Nevertheless, I appreciated the example, and could not fault the
    respondents, since dental and alveolar t's are both t's, as far as "t > h"
    is concerned.

    In fact, whether the *t is dental or not, the principle may be more or less
    the same.  First it weakens to something retaining some of the buccal
    features, and the voicelessness, and finally it weakens to the ultimate
    voiceless segment /h/.  Meanwhile, the dental t also made me wonder what
    happened in the course of Germanic, because Grimm's law shows that original
    *t was dental, but the t that comes from IE *d has become alveolar in
    Germanic, for the most part.  Why?...

    Similarly with interest in the intermediate stages, which are indeed of
    central importance to understanding *t > h (and any other "unusual"
    change), Marc Picard pointed out that stages of the Bantu change occur
    independently elsewhere.  Thus, he recognised the tapped American English
    /t/ as akin to the flap that I described for the voiceless /r/ intermediate
    stage (or more similar to the occasional flapped "t" in Mombasa Swahili).
    Then he went on to point out that European Portuguese has the rolled r, but
    (Northern) Brazilian Portuguese has an /h/ reflex of /r/, to which I added
    that the Puerto Rican Spanish rolled ("double") rr is often pronounced as a
    velar like in French etc.  The implication is that Brazilian may have
    passed through this stage in the evolution of r > h.

    This might seem to support what I understood to be his thesis that the
    Machame R (Parisian voiceless R) should be counted as a stage in *t > h
    even in Sabaki.

    I had suggested this for Siha (and will back off that below), but I
    disagreed for Sabaki since no R stage is attested. I don't see why there
    had to be one.  That is, a velar or uvular does not seem to be a necessary
    waystation to /h/.  That doesn't happen with s > h, and obviously wasn't
    happening in the Charmey theta-h variation, so why should it be necessary
    with hr > h?

    In essence, my objection is that Occham's razor should not be applied to
    THEORIES about possible paths, but to EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE, there being no
    empirical evidence for a R intermediate stage between hr and h in Sabaki.

    Yes, I realise that that's a strong statement for people doing historical
    reconstruction, but all the better for us sound change in progress
    devotees..."

As for a hypothetical chain of possible changes, from a quoted post in the
same message:

   "Likewise, note the change of /dh/ > /gh/ is attested in Gaelic (????), and
    the change of /gh/ > /y/ in the Ripuarian, Brandenburgian, etc., dialects
    of German including those of the cities of Berlin, Magdeburg, Cologne, and
    Aachen (Zhirmunskij 1956:284-285).  Hence, there is a sequence of sound
    changes in the languages of the world which can get us from /dh/ to /y/."

Steve Long


From adiego at fil.ub.es  Wed Jun 13 22:21:17 2001
From: adiego at fil.ub.es (Ignasi Adiego)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 00:21:17 +0200
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.002117.0200.>

> And, if anyone can make any sense of the phonetic side of the change *s >
> *k mentioned above, I'd be glad to hear it...

> Regards,
> Ante Aikio

I don't know the circumstances of Samoyedic historical phonology, but a
change *s > *k could be acceptable if one assumes an intermediate step *h or
*x or the like, so *s > *h > *k. or *s > *h > *k or even *s > *h > *x > *k
Both *s > *h and *x/h > *k are banal (for *s > *h cf. Ancient Greek or
Avestan; for *x > *k or *h > *k, cf. Lycian or Carian).

Regards,
Ignasi-Xavier Adiego.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Thu Jun 14 07:59:17 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 03:59:17 EDT
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.035917.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/13/01 11:25:42 PM Mountain Daylight Time, rao.3 at osu.edu
writes:

> But how was the lexicon preserved?

-- it's a common phenomenon for social groups to either preserve or invent
jargons precisely to limit communication so that they can speak without
outsiders being able to follow their conversation.

Much slang has exactly this function; and often in-group slang changes
precisely when it becomes generally known and therefore loses its ability to
exclude.

Examples range from thieves' cant to the speech of 19th-century Classics
professors, where even when speaking English so many elements of Latin and
Greek vocabulary were used, and so many "learned tags", that people outside
the academic field often couldn't understand them at all.  Technical jargon
often both aids precision in a recondite field, and serves as a social
barrier to outsiders.

In the case of Anglo-Romani, it's clearly a case of a community becoming
English-speaking, but preserving the Rom lexicon as a way of maintaining a
form of communication that non-Rom couldn't understand.

Given the rather specialized social-economic ecological niche occupied by the
Rom, it's virtually inevitable that they would maintain some sort of cant or
in-group slang even when they became basically English-speaking.  It's an
occupational necessity as well as an aid to group identity.


From dlwhite at texas.net  Thu Jun 14 16:14:49 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 11:14:49 -0500
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.111449.0500.>

> Perhaps what is being asserted is that morphemes used in conjugation are
> more resistant to borrowing or external influence. This may be the case,
> but seems to be arguable given what has been said so far.

        Just briefly, yes:   what I am asserting is that the morphemes used
in conjugation are very resistant to borrowing.  External influence, if this
is "non-sound", is another matter.  I see no reason to imagine that speakers
of a given Language A might not somehow create in some Language B an ending
to correspond with something in Language A, if feeling the lack of such a
thing Language B, though I cannot think of any examples at the moment.  This
would not affect genetic descent.

Dr. David L. White


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Thu Jun 14 21:15:23 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 16:15:23 -0500
Subject: Genetic Descent
In-Reply-To: <000901c0f069$f017d560$1f6063d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.161523.0500.>

	But would syntax in and of itself be a determining factor?

	Romance languages also have some odd syntax patterns --although
these are limited to certain types of verbs,
	e.g. Spanish OVS

	Me gustan los libros.
	"To me please (3p) the books."
	"I like books."

	Se venden libros.
	"Themselves (mediopassive pronoun) sell (3pl) books"
	"Books are sold."

	Se me acabo/ el dinero.
	"Itself (mediopassive/reflexive pronoun) to me finished (3s) the
money."
	"My money ran out."

	Old Spanish often used VSO forms such as

	Gusto/me el libro.
	"Pleased-(3s)-me the book."
	"I liked the book."

[snip]
>I will give a quite relevant example of what I mean by this.  If genetic
>descent is to be traced through non-sound features (I notice you are no
>longer actively claiming this), then why isn't Celtic a mixed language, so
>that there was never really any such thing as Proto-Celtic?  The non-sound
>convergence of (Insular) Celtic to Semitic, or something like it, is quite
>striking, and extends even down to the level of fairly minor details like
>the Northern Subject Rule and Interior Possession ("You killed my horse"
>rather than "You killed to me the horse")  I suppose you and others could
>claim that the level of Semitic-seeming non-sound resemblances in Celtic,
>though it is "a lot", is not "enough", but who is to deny the Steve Longs
>and other No-Protos of the world when they come back and say "Yes it is."?
[snip]

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Wed Jun 20 15:17:02 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 16:17:02 +0100
Subject: Genetic Descent
In-Reply-To: <000901c0f069$f017d560$1f6063d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <WED.20.JUN.2001.161702.0100.>

--On Friday, June 8, 2001 5:25 pm -0500 "David L. White"
<dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

I'm still too busy to reply to this long posting in detail, so I'll have to
settle for responding to just a few points.

[on the supposed centrality of verbs]

> DLW:  You seem to be repeatedly missing some basic points here.  Not only
> is there a good case to be made for the proposition that verbs are more
> fundamental ("higher") than nouns,

Why?  I have yet to see any convincing argument that this is so.  Anyway,
even if it *were* so, the centrality of verbs is an entirely different
matter from the supposed centrality of verbal morphology.  Elsewhere in
this very posting, you have taken me to task for arguing that you were
confusing lexical verbs with verbal morphology -- and yet here you are,
apparently doing the same thing again.

> but there are some mixed nominal
> morphologies, whereas there are no mixed verbal morphologies.

This remains to be established, I'm afraid.  "I can't cite any" is not the
same thing as "There are none."  For that matter, I can't name too many
languages with mixed nominal morphology, either.

>> LT:  I'm sorry, but I cannot agree that verbs are more basic than nouns.
>> This seems to me an arbitrary fiat.  Anyway, I've never seen a language
>> without nouns, and that suggests to me that nouns are about as basic as
>> anything can be in languages.

> DLW:  It is not a matter of what is or is not basic in some binary sense,
> but of what is more basic in the sense of being higher in the tree.  Nouns
> depend on verbs, not the other way around.

First, this is once again an argument about lexical verbs, and not about
verbal morphology.  I still think you are confusing the two badly.

Second, why is the verb "higher in the tree"?  I have already pointed out
that such a configuration is not a piece of truth, but only an analytical
stance, and not even a stance adopted by most syntacticians.

Thid, in what sense do nouns "depend on verbs"?  The central property of
verbs -- indeed, virtually the definition of verbs -- is that they
intrinsically require nominal arguments.  Nominals, in contrast, do not
intrinsically require verbs.  How does this lead to your conclusion?

>> LT:  I am not a Chomskyan, but I don't think it can simply
>> be taken for granted that the verb is the head of the sentence.

> DLW: It is not being taken for granted.  It is in effect part of what is
> being posited:  "if we assume that verbs are more basic than nouns .."

Er -- what?  If we assume that verbs are more basic than nouns, then we are
simply assuming the conclusion you are trying to establish.

> By
> they way, the Chomskyite "INFL" (if they are still doing that:  I know
> little and care less) is historically descended from the inflection of the
> verb, so their position too would have to be that verbal inflection (in
> this case finite) is more basic.

Well, I'm not a Chomskyan, and I don't care for Chomskyan analyses, but I
don't think this is a fair summary of the Chomskyan position.

First, the Chomskyan I (= INFL) is emphatically not verbal in nature: in
particular, it is not a projection of V(erb).

Second, only *some* verbal morphology (in English) is assigned to I, while
the rest is assigned to the verb.  Chomskyan theory makes a sharp
distinction between the two kinds of morphology, even though -- in English
-- they all surface on the verb.

Third, the Chomskyans considered it a great vindication of their analysis
when Ken Hale reported that the Australian language Walbiri has an overt
'auxiliary' constituent in every sentence which carries much of the
morphology attached to verbs in other languages but which is wholly
non-verbal in nature.

Fourth, in English, most of the verbal morphology is attached to
auxiliaries when these are present -- but, for the Chomskyans, auxiliaries
are emphatically not verbs.

I'm afraid the Chomskyan stance offers no support for David White's
position, and it is out of order to argue that the Chomskyans are "really"
embracing a position which they are manifestly, and very explicitly, not
embracing.

On all this, see any textbook account of Chomskyan syntax.  I've just
consulted pp. 303-313 of Andrew Radford (1988), Transformational Grammar,
CUP -- which, in spite of its odd title, is a textbook of Chomsky's
Principles and Parameters approach.

>> LT:  There is also a fascinating counter-argument here.  Consider this
>> example:
>
>>   'That Martians are green is well known.'
>
>> Now, the subject of 'is' is plainly the complement clause 'That Martians
>> are green'.  Fine.  Now, what is the head of this clause?  Is it the
>> verb, as David seems to be implying?  Then the head of the subject is
>> 'are'.  But -- whoops -- this is plural, and yet the whole clause takes
>> singular agreement.
>> Oh, dear. ;-)
>
> DLW:  This is not so fascinating, or problematic.  It is fairly easy to
> say that the subject of the verb is "that", which would explain why it
> cannot, in such cases, be deleleted.

It may be "fairly easy", but it's wrong.

I know of no syntactician anywhere, of whatever persuasion, who takes the
complementizer of a sentential subject as the subject of the matrix verb.
I presume this suggestion boils down to the proposal that the
complementizer should be taken as the head of the complement clause -- but
I don't know anybody who endorses that, either.

Moreover, the argument from undeletability fails.  Consider another example:

  She realizes (that) Martians are green.

Here the complementizer can readily be deleted.  So, by David's account,
'that' cannot be the head of the complement clause in this case, even
though it is in the other case.  And this is incoherent.

Finally, this whole argument sems to me to clash badly with David's
insistence that the verb is "higher" than anything else.

>> LT:  It is true that, in *some* languages, a sentence may consist
>> entirely of an affixed verb.  But it is equally true that, in *some*
>> languages, a sentence may consist entirely of nominal elements, with no
>> verb-form present at all.
>
> DLW:  There is no _type_ of language where the subject noun and its
> mandatorily associated elements (which would include tense) form a
> complete sentence.  And except for cases of BE-deletion (which only
> occurs in the present), adjetives that serve as (and are marked as)
> verbs, and NPs uttered when context makes clear what the higher VP would
> be, I venture to doubt the validity of your assertation.

OK; let's look.

First, what on earth do you mean by "type of language"?  What is a type of
language?  Who decides what types there are?  Who decides on what basis
languages should be assigned to types?  And why should we believe anything
he says?

Second, what is "BE-deletion"?  Many languages have no copula at all.  So
why should we speak of "deletion" when the copula predictably fails to show
up?

Third, consider Turkish.  Here are some entirely typical Turkish sentences.
In Turkish, the third-singular marker is zero, while the past-tense marker
is <-(y)di>, with vowel harmony; the variable <y> appears after a vowel but
not after a consonant.  This is true whether or not the tense-marker is
attached to a verb.

  Ali hazIr  'Ali is ready'

This consists of <Ali> plus <hazIr> 'ready', with no verbal element at all.

Now try it in the past:

  Ali hazIrdI  'Ali was ready'

Here the past-tense suffix <-dI> has been attached directly to the
adjective, and there is still no verb.

  Ali evde  'Ali is at home'

The second word is <ev> 'house' plus <-de> Locative.  No verb.  In the past:

  Ali evdeydi  'Ali was at home'

Again, the tense-marker goes onto the nominal, and there is no verb.

(These examples do not represent the only possible constructions in
Turkish, but they do illustrate the ordinary and unmarked constructions.)

Now, I have no idea whether these facts qualify Turkish for some particular
"type" of language, but they're still facts.  Who needs verbs when you can
put the tense-marking onto nouns or adjectives?  And why are Turkish facts
less important than the facts of some other (unidentified) languages with
other kinds of sentence structure?

[LT]

>> What David White is arguing, successfully or not, is that the *lexical
>> verb* plays a central role in sentence structure.  Even if we grant
>> this, it *does not follow* that verbal morphology is somehow more
>> central than any other morphology, such as nominal morphology.  Verbal
>> morphology is not the same thing as a lexical verb.

> DLW:  This is a point you yourself seem to miss, in attributing to me
> beliefs about lexical verbs which were intended to apply only to verbal
> morphology.

But, just above, you have twice again appealed expressly to verbs, and not
to morphology.

Sorry, folks: gotta go now.  A pile of work beckons.  Sigh.

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  Thu Jun 14 08:25:24 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 04:25:24 EDT
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.042524.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/14/01 12:36:12 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> The road that Dr. White goes down in the quote above is one inevitable result
> of the assumption that languages can be "genetically" descended from ONLY one
> ancestor.

-- demonstrably, virtually all the languages which we can observe are so
descended. "But it was different long ago" doesn't cut it.

> Common sense and half-way decent science would suggest that it is a form of
> both source languages.  Why should one genetic element make another
> non-genetic?

-- well, English is not a form of French, nor is it a Romance language,
despite having nearly half its vocabulary derived from those sources.

You won't find one single, solitary linguist who'd say that it is.

I suggest that if you want to argue in this field, you have to learn its
vocabulary and how words are defined.  To question them, you must first
understand them in their own terms.

> A language is made up of many totally independent parts.  Why should the
> "genetics" of one part affect the "genetics" of another part.

-- no, a language is a system of interrelated parts (or rules) in a
continuous process of change.

It is a single "thing"; rather like a living organism, in fact, particularly
considered in its development through time.  (Please note that "rather like"
is not the same as "identical to").


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Thu Jun 14 08:54:27 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 04:54:27 EDT
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.045427.EDT.>

Steve Long wrote:

> Haitian Creole speakers were largely descended from West African speakers.

-- there is no such thing as a "West African speaker"; that would be like an
"Asian speaker" or a  "European speaker" or an "American speaker".

If you're going to try to use Haitian Creole as an example to support your
argument, first you have to get the facts about it right, or nobody is going
to take you very seriously.

The slaves imported to French Santo Domingo were speakers of many language
families and quite literally scores of different, often mutually
incomprehensible, languages.  A monoglot Fon speaker can no more understand a
Hausa or baKongo than a monoglot English-speaker can understand Chinese.

That's why they ended up speaking pidgin French to each other, as well as to
their French-speaking overlords.  They had no common language.

> Haitian Creole used West African lexicon and 17th Century French affixes.

-- ah... this is not an accurate description of Haitian Creole, most of the
lexicon of which is and always was French, with substantial amounts of
vocabulary from Fon and a number of other (often unrelated) West African
languages.

> What is the possible usefulness of calling it French and not African?

"Accuracy", among other things.  For example, "French" is a linguistic term,
and "African" a geographical one.

Simply asking your question in these terms shows that it's devoid of meaning.

You would have to say something like "What is the possible usefulness of
calling it French-based and not Fon-based?"

(Or Yoruba-based or Peul-based or baKongo-based, or whatever.)

Once rephrased in those more accurate terms, the answer is obvious:  because
it's not based on Fon, or Peul, or baKongo.

Take a little Haitian Creole:

"Bas 'genoux, fi' de malheu'!  Fai'e moa honneu!
 Li es' royaume moan --
 Li est moa qui 'regne 'ci!
 Ne pas passer par' li
 Sans hommage 'rendu --"

Or:

"Ogoun vini caille nous!
 Li gran'gout, li grangran soif!
 Grand me'ci, Ogoun Badagris!
 Manger! Bueh! Sat'!"

Note the characteristic pidgin-derived Creole features:  reduplication for
emphasis, for example:  "grangran" instead of "tres grande".  English-based
pidgins use exactly the same feature -- "big-big" instead of "very big".  And
simplification of the pronouns, etc.  English-based pidgins generally use
"him" uniformly instead of forms like "he"; "him bigbig man".

Anyone looking at the above text, with no knowledge of the history involved,
could say:  "This is a form of creolized pidgin French."   With a little more
text, you could go on to say:  "The contact languages involved in the
creation of the pidgin from which the creole developed were mostly West
African."

Note that both "creolized" and "pidgin" have rather precise meanings, and
that pidgins and creoles have similar structural characteristics irregardless
of the languages which go into their creation.

In fact, someone with a general knowledge of Indo-European linguistics but
who didn't know there was such a thing as a French language could also look
at a Haitian Creole text and say "and it's an Indo-European language", thus
neatly tying up its ultimate "genetic" origins.

> What did those speakers of African descent do exactly?  Learn French,
> temporarily forget West African and then later borrow West African words from
> themselves?

-- what they did -- exactly -- was (in cooperation with native
French-speakers) learn pidgin French, speak that to each other and their
children, and then (as the children grew up speaking it) it developed into a
creole language.  With some vocabulary and features due to the -- various,
different -- languages the slaves spoke originally, as a sort of multiple
substrate.

A pidgin, one should note, is a _lingua franca_ language which is not spoken
by anyone as their native tongue.

This later became a creole language, as new generations grew up speaking it
as their native tongue.  It therefore underwent certain -- highly distinctive
-- developments common to creoles.

> The older source among the generations of speakers who passed on the
> language was West African.

-- no.   The input of (various, different) West African languages and French
was simultaneous, and French was the linguistic scaffolding on which the
pidgin rested from the first.

It was pidgin _French_, not pidgin Fon or pidgin Yoruba.

Simplifying the grammar of French and tacking on some Fon words does not make
a language any less French-derived, any more than discarding inflection and
tacking on a lot of Romance vocabulary makes English a form of French.

A native French speaker could make the pidgin out, more or less, with a
little trial and effort.  Like all pidgins, it had a restricted vocabulary
and a radically simplified grammar.

A native Fon or Yoruba speaker could not understand it at once, despite
lexical borrowings from those languages.  They had to learn it.  It would be
easier for them to learn than standard French, of course -- partly because of
lexical borrowings from their languages, but mostly because of the features
all pidgins share.  Not many words, radically simplified grammar.

This is all quite natural, since the primary purpose of the pidgin was
communication between French speakers and speakers of various (different,
mutually incomprehensible) West African languages.


From parkvall at ling.su.se  Thu Jun 14 12:30:21 2001
From: parkvall at ling.su.se (Mikael Parkvall)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 14:30:21 +0200
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
In-Reply-To: <51.cd6cb1a.28576282@aol.com>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.143021.0200.>

Steve Long wrote:

>Haitian Creole speakers were largely descended from West African speakers.
>Haitian Creole used West African lexicon and 17th Century French affixes.
>What is the possible usefulness of calling it French and not African?

My comment doesn't really address the issue under debate, but only this
specific detail of Steve's argumentation.

To the best of my knowledge, no variety of Haitian Creole has ever been
attested in which African words make up more than a couple of per cent (at
the very best) of the vocabulary. The lexicon of Haitian is normally
considered to be more than 80% (citing from memory, but I could probably
come up with references if neccessary) of French origin, regardless of
whether you consider the core lexicon or the whole vocab. Given that most
French affixes -- though they do exist -- have got lost on their way, it
would make more sense (which doesn't mean it would be correct) to describe
Haitian as French lexicon and no affixes rather than Afro lexicon and
french affixes.

More relevant to the debate, I think it is unfortunate that creoles
sometimes are cited on par with intertwined languages in debates on genetic
descent. A pidgin or a creole is not neccessarily -- contrary to belief
among non-experts (and quite a few experts) -- particularly mixed, and it
should be obvious to anyone who bothers to take a closer look that Tok
Pisin and Michif certainly aren't very structurally alike.

A deliberate oversimplification which would need to be taken by more than a
grain of salt, but which have some truth to it is that while a non-contact
language has one parent, an intertwiner has two, and a pidgin or creole none.

Mikael Parkvall


From dlwhite at texas.net  Thu Jun 14 17:02:06 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 12:02:06 -0500
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.120206.0500.>

> Let's look at Dr White's approach here and what it might mean:

> 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.

         Just briefly again (I have bailed back into the Finland conference,
which I had bailed out of) ...
        Actually, I would be quite happy to call such a language an isolate.
It is 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 traceabe to Language B, we are not
justified in blithely proceeding as if it is, or ignoring it.

        But the point is, we have a fact here that cries out for
explanation:  that there are no mixed finite verbal morphologies.  What I
have suggested, essentially that finite verbal morphology is so basic that
it is not borrowable,  explains this, while nothing else that has been
proposed does.

        We do, by the way, have at least one mixed finite verbal morphology,
though the nature of its "mixture" is rather different than might be
expected:  Kormakiti "Arabic", where (if the facts have been reported
correctly) Arabic verbs use Arabic morphology and Greek verbs use Greek
morphology.  (Thus it is not the case that, as an example, singular personal
morphemes are Greek and plural personal morphemes are Arabic.  This would be
a true mixed finite verbal morphology, of the sort that evidently does not
occur.)   It is interesting to consider why mixture has occcured in this
case but not the case of Kupwar.  The answer is fairly obvious:  Greek and
Arabic have two different kinds of verbal morphology, concatenative and
non-concatenative respectively, so that the two can mix without getting in
each other's way.  The parallel expedient applied to Kupwar, Kannada endings
for Kannada verbs and Marathi endings for Marathi verbs (to simlify a bit)
would produce a situation where two different morphemes meaning the same
thing would occur in exactly the same place and pattern, which would be
rather pointless.  Therefore mixture is more difficult to pull off and does
not occur.   The nature of the languages in contact makes a difference.
        I cannot say more at this time (I am working on my own rival
theoretical framework to oppose to TK's "shift" versus "borrowing"), but I
would ask those sharing their views on this matter to PLEASE ANSWER THE
QUESTION  why it is that truly mixed finite verbal morphologies do not
occur.  Continued ducking will qualify you folks to seek a career in
politics.

Dr. David L. White


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon Jun 18 14:51:00 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 15:51:00 +0100
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
In-Reply-To: <51.cd6cb1a.28576282@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.18.JUN.2001.155100.0100.>

--On Tuesday, June 12, 2001 8:18 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

I'm still marking, so I'll again have to be brief.

[on certain hypothetical examples, and replying to David White]

> So, a large part of Language A goes abruptly from "genetic" to
> "non-genetic" depending on the presence of certain verb morphology.

This is a response to David White's position, not to mine.

> I think any good scientist would, in the example above, call the
> distinction between "genetic" and  "non-genetic" operationally useless.

I'll leave David White to reply to this from his point of view, if he wants
to.  From my point of view, the distinction is very far from "operationally
useless".  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.  Recall the case of Tlingit and
Eyak-Athabaskan: loads of common elements; no patterns; hence no
demonstrable common ancestry.

> The road that Dr. White goes down in the quote above is one inevitable
> result of the assumption that languages can be "genetically" descended
> from ONLY one ancestor.  Sooner or later, you will have one "genetic"
> element coming up against another.  The contest then becomes which
> "genetic" element is the winning "genetic" element.  Everything else
> loses and becomes non-genetic.

No.  David White aside, this is simply not the way comparative linguistics
is done.  We do not count up elements of varying origins and then base any
genetic conclusions on our totals.

In English, we now have far more elements of French, Latin and Greek origin
than we have of native Germanic origin.  But no comparative linguist wants
to conclude, therefore, that English is no longer a Germanic language.
English is Germanic because we can identify the correspondences linking it
to the other Germanic languages, and because -- as a result of these
correspondences -- we can trace the ancestry of English back to
Proto-Germanic.  No matter how many Latino-Romance elements we find in
English, we cannot move English into the Romance family: the required
patterns are just not there.

In the same vein, Basque is not a Romance language, in spite of the vast
number of Latino-Romance elements it contains, and Romanian is not a Slavic
language, in spite of the very large number of Slavic elements in it.  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.

[on a hypothetical mixed language]

> Common sense and half-way decent science would suggest that it is a form
> of both source languages.  Why should one genetic element make another
> non-genetic?

It doesn't.  When we borrowed the word 'kangaroo' from Guugu-Yimidhirr,
English acquired no Guugu-Yimidhirr ancestry at all, and the inherited
Germanic elements became no less inherited.

> 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.

This is not the way we use 'genetic' in linguistics.  We do 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.

[on Haitian Creole]

> Common sense and half-way decent science would suggest that there is
> something wrong here.  Obviously there are different elements in Haitian
> Creole and they obviously come from different sources.  The older source
> among the generations of speakers who passed on the language was West
> African.  The later French element may be "more genetic."  But why would
> that make the West African elements "non-genetic"?  They can lay claim to
> being original, continuous and native with those speakers.  How could
> they suddenly become totally non-genetic?

I don't know enough about Haitian Creole to make any pronouncements about
it -- though I have the impression that HC has a rather more complex origin
than a standard average creole.  Still, the position among those who have
studied it appears to be that HC is not the direct descendant of any
ancestor -- in other words, it is what we now call a 'non-genetic language'.
Whether this conclusion is correct is an empirical matter, but it least
it's coherent.

> Isolating systematic elements of two languages to find a common ancestor
> is a powerful methodology.  But why would we conclude from that process
> that either of those languages as a whole can only descend from one
> ancestor? What makes one element genetic and a similar element borrowed?

Patterns, patterns, patterns.

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  Thu Jun 14 09:05:29 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 05:05:29 EDT
Subject: European Genetics/IE
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.050529.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/14/01 12:57:15 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes:

> Wouldn't it be possible that some languages or dialects may have
> started out as creoles and then have become standardized through increased
> contact with the parent language.

-- yes, this is a common phenomenon.

> and it seems plausible that (some) early regional forms of Romance may have
> initially been more like Latinate creoles than daughter languages.

-- no, because the special conditions which are required for the creation of
a creole language weren't present.

Creoles are pidgins which have become 'naturalized' and spoken as a first
language.

To have a creole, you first need a pidgin -- and pidgins are the result of
incomplete language acquisition in situations where multiple languages are
spoken and a trade jargon is needed, but acquisition of the standard form is
not possible.

None of the Romance languages was a pidgin to begin with; they all started
off as fairly standard versions of Late Latin -- regional dialects of Late
Latin, to be precise.

There may well have been forms of pidgin Latin spoken in the course of Roman
expansion, and among the masses of slaves from varoius areas in Italy and
adjacent parts of the Roman domains.  In fact, there probably would have
been.

But they never became creolized, as far as I know.


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 14 15:12:17 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 11:12:17 EDT
Subject: On "Joke Usage"
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.111217.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/14/2001 1:11:38 AM, dlwhite at texas.net writes:
<< This is a sub-case of the "it was different in those days" view of
language change, by which all sorts of bizarre things happened in the past,
in situations we are not able to observe, in this case mixed languages
lurking under every rock, a la Steve Long.>>

A mild correction.  My position is that "all sorts of bizarre things" are
also happening in the present.

<<...Other than silly things like the joke usage of "moi" in English.>>

Good example.  I imagine the last of the Anglo-Saxon wordists hearing that
medieval Muppeteer Chaucer reciting his Tales and then calling all those
French and Latin words "silly things" that should properly be categorized as
"joke usage."  Would make a good theoretical category, explaining how such
usage can fundamentally take over the substance of a language with a hearty
sense of humor, like English.  On a similar note, I heard an ESPN commentator
explain how one player had plans to "out-jumpize" the height advantage of the
Lakers.  Damn that Chaucer, Miss Piggy and the companies that customize
mini-vans.

<<...in this case mixed languages lurking under every rock...>>

Or staring you in the face.

Dr White's situation is not unlike that of the English natural philosopher
who traveled to Australia prepared to debunk the existence of the platypus,
the kangaroo, etc.  A boxing match was arranged between the philosopher and a
representative of one of these fauna.  After being soundly thrashed and
knocked out in the first round, Dr White - I mean, the philosopher denied he
had lost the match on the grounds that his opponent was theoretically
impossible.

Living la vita loca,
Steve Long


From edsel at glo.be  Thu Jun 14 12:53:35 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 14:53:35 +0200
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.145335.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Xavier Delamarre" <xavier.delamarre at free.fr>
Sent: Friday, June 08, 2001 10:07 PM

> le 5/06/01 10:09, Eduard Selleslagh ? edsel at glo.be a ?crit :

>>> 1/ Hier j'ai achete une maison tres grande a Vaucresson

>>> 2/ Hier j'ai achete une tres grande maison a Vaucresson

>>> Absolutely no difference in meaning, style or emphasis. I am sorry.

>> Yes, but consider:
>> 1) De Gaulle ?tait un tr?s grand homme.
>> 2) De Gaulle ?tait un homme tr?s grand.

>> The meaning is completely different.

>     Of course, classical example of handbooks. You have (semantic) freedom
> with the substantive maison but not with homme.
>     What is in question here is that when there is the possibility of free
> word order, it does not induce _systematically_ a difference in meaning,
> style, emphasis etc.
>     But there again it is not PIE, where these possibilities were much more
> extended than in Modern french.
>     And to reduce PIE syntax to word-order (Lehmann, Friedrich) is simply
> nonsense.

>     XD

[Ed]

Just a last note, not meant to be facetious: It seems to me that even in your
example there is a slight difference that (slightly) echoes the one in mine.
That difference is IMHO that the regular order (noun-determiner/adjective in
Romance languages) is more neutral, matter-of-fact-like, while the inverse
order implies something, usually a more symbolic or figurative sense, whence
sometimes poetic. This is quite general: unusual word order often implies
something beyond the literal meaning.

To me, 'une tr?s grande maison' implies a (very light) shade of grandeur,
while 'une maison tr?s grande' is simply a big house.

Ed.


From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu  Thu Jun 14 16:07:30 2001
From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 11:07:30 -0500
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
In-Reply-To: <B746FCB8.EAF%xavier.delamarre@free.fr>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.110730.0500.>

>le 5/06/01 10:09, Eduard Selleslagh ? edsel at glo.be a ?crit :

>>> 1/ Hier j'ai achete une maison tres grande a Vaucresson

>>> 2/ Hier j'ai achete une tres grande maison a Vaucresson

>>> Absolutely no difference in meaning, style or emphasis. I am sorry.

>> Yes, but consider:
>> 1) De Gaulle ?tait un tr?s grand homme.
>> 2) De Gaulle ?tait un homme tr?s grand.

>> The meaning is completely different.

>    Of course, classical example of handbooks. You have (semantic) freedom
>with the substantive maison but not with homme.
>    What is in question here is that when there is the possibility of free
>word order, it does not induce _systematically_ a difference in meaning,
>style, emphasis etc.
>    But there again it is not PIE, where these possibilities were much more
>extended than in Modern french.
>    And to reduce PIE syntax to word-order (Lehmann, Friedrich) is simply
>nonsense.

>    XD

The word order position attributed here to Lehmann, Friedrich and others is
over simplified for the period in which it was being done (the early '70's)
and there is much now that goes beyond it without, however, entirely
scrapping some of the basic principles.

Even then (Lehmann's article in LG 1973 on "A Principle ...") it was not a
question of word order per se but of correlates among categories such as
governed objects and their governors, including the basic order of the
adjective in comparisons of inequality (e.g., 'bigger than John', 'from
John bigger').

Certainly pragamatic factors affect the statistics of occurring word order
patterns, as noted by various people on this list. For the classicist,
Henri Weil's (reprinted) little book on word order that distinguished
between rhetorical order and basic order among the older Latin and Greek as
opposed to the more recent French and German (maybe English too) gives
examples using those languages.

More recently attention to issues of alignment or contentive type in
language add to the issue of word order another entire range of syntactic
argument. Essentially, was PIE ergative? Was it an active language as
Gamkrelidze & Ivanov (their IE & the IEeans), Lehmann (1993), K. H. Schmidt
(various publications) suggested? Some recent approaches to the
interrelations of language categories and type or IE and such contentive
types have just appeared in the new issue of General Linguistics 37 2000 (1997)
(GL website: http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/lrc/gl/gl.html  contents of
GL 37 to be posted this week) for anyone who is interested.

Carol Justus


From sarima at friesen.net  Fri Jun 15 01:32:45 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 18:32:45 -0700
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
In-Reply-To: <B746FCB8.EAF%xavier.delamarre@free.fr>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.183245.0700.>

At 10:07 PM 6/8/01 +0200, Xavier Delamarre wrote:
>le 5/06/01 10:09, Eduard Selleslagh ? edsel at glo.be a ?crit :

>>> 1/ Hier j'ai achete une maison tres grande a Vaucresson

>>> 2/ Hier j'ai achete une tres grande maison a Vaucresson

>>> Absolutely no difference in meaning, style or emphasis. I am sorry.

>> Yes, but consider:
>> 1) De Gaulle ?tait un tr?s grand homme.
>> 2) De Gaulle ?tait un homme tr?s grand.

>> The meaning is completely different.

>     Of course, classical example of handbooks. You have (semantic) freedom
>with the substantive maison but not with homme.

My French is rather weak, so I would appreciate an explanation of the 
distinction in the case of 'homme', please?

>     What is in question here is that when there is the possibility of free
>word order, it does not induce _systematically_ a difference in meaning,
>style, emphasis etc.

This is tricky to analyze.  Sometimes a regular distinction is neutralized
in some conditions.  Also, self reporting is not always the best criterion
for such subtle distinctions.  It would be interesting to see an analysis
of the distribution of the two patterns in an extended prose set for "free"
words such as 'maison'.

In Latin there is good evidence that adjectives (and similar modifiers)
placed before the noun provide some form of prominence or salience to the
adjective.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From sarima at friesen.net  Fri Jun 15 01:35:34 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 18:35:34 -0700
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
In-Reply-To: <000501c0f190$a78b9020$f96801d5@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.183534.0700.>

At 09:19 AM 6/10/01 +0100, petegray wrote:

>There is an expected, but not necessary word order.

Expression rules can certainly be optional.

>So word order is not an essential part of the grammar, in one sense, but it
>is an essential element of the whole linguistic communication.

I guess this is in part a matter of definition, as I consider such things
to be part of the grammar, unless they have no impact at all on the
communicative effect.
--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From sarima at friesen.net  Thu Jun 14 13:35:12 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 06:35:12 -0700
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <F196KvxtJ08v7jWLhZS000180e3@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.063512.0700.>

At 12:36 PM 6/8/01 +0000, Gabor Sandi wrote:

>I think that it is odd as well, yet I can't help noticing that personal
>markings of verbs in IE (and Uralic and Altaic as well, for all you
>Nostraticists) consistently come after the verb stem and not before it.
>What's more, some of these endings contain consonants identical or similar
>to what is found in the corresponding personal pronoun. -m- in the first
>person is the most obvious (in PIE and Uralic, plus some other proto
>languages), as is the -t- in the 2nd person plural (also, 2nd person sing.
>in Uralic), -t- in the third person less so, the -s- in the 2nd person sing.
>not at all. There are three competing hypotheses:

>1. coincidence
>2. agglutination of the pronoun
>3. there is a relationship, but the ending is not the result of an
>agglutination of the verbal root with a pronoun

>If the answer is no.2 above, I would like to come up with a succession of
>linguistic changes that look reasonable and result in the pattern we see.

Well, it is certainly possible that some pre-PIE language was VSO without
effecting the possibility that PIE itself was SOV.  Such transitions are
attested.  Perhaps this means that Proto-Nostratic was VSO, perhaps
not.  Either way, once the clitics have transitioned into inflections there
is no bar against a change in the unmarked position of the subject.

[Note, reconstruction of word order is difficult, there is good evidence
for "early" VSO in both Germanic and Celtic - but that is still later than
the classical IE languages].

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From petegray at btinternet.com  Thu Jun 14 19:20:58 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 20:20:58 +0100
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.202058.0100.>

> I can't help noticing that personal markings of verbs in IE (and Uralic and
> Altaic as well, for all you Nostraticists) consistently come after the verb
> stem and not before it.

A similar, newly developed, pattern might be observable in Sanksrit - though
detailed analysis is really needed, and I am going only on impression.  It
is relatively common to find the word "aham" (= "I") attached to the end of
a verb or participle, but not common to find it before -
     e.g.:   vistabhya aham   = supporting I   = I am supporting
             katham vidyam aham  = how might know I = how might I know
             vahami aham   = bring I   = I bring
etc

Peter


From rao.3 at osu.edu  Thu Jun 21 02:34:04 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 22:34:04 -0400
Subject: Word Order and verb endings (was Re: No Proto-Celtic?)
Message-ID: <WED.20.JUN.2001.223404.0400.>

Just because verb endings come from pronouns does not mean it must go
back to VS order. Tamil provides a good example where we can attribute
it to a different mechanism.

Modern Tamil has a large number of formations based on 'auxillaries'.
[These are called compound verbs. When grammaticalized, they function
much like auxillaries.] Their origin is clear in formal speech [even if
obscured in colloquial speech], except for a former progressive. Also,
double plural endings became established some time in the medieval
period (with old plural becoming the respectful form). After removing
these, we are left with basically two forms, traditionaly called past
and non-past when referring to Classical Tamil. These can be segmented
into a stem and an ending which is clearly the pronoun in the third
person and very similar to the pronoun in the first person. For example,
the forms for the verb "va:", 'come', the forms are

varuve:n    varuvo:m    vante:n    vanto:m
varuva:y    varuvi:r      vanta:y    vanti:r
varuva:n    varuva:r     vanta:n    vanta:r
  (-a:L, -atu)

But the stems varu- and vant- also occur in non-finite functions. In
particular, stem+current form of the pronoun function as participles,
and with the neut III can also function as a verbal noun. Most
importantly, similar forms can be used to turn a clause into an
adjective: "The man who came yesterday" can be rendered as
    neRRu    vanta    manitan
   yesterday [come] man

This suggests a very different explanation: Finite verbs came from
verbal nouns and the order stem+pronoun then will be due to the usual
order of adjective+noun.

I don't presume to claim that the origin of the person/number endings in
PIE is similar: To do that we need an explanation of why these endings
do not show common gender vs neuter gender. I just wish to point out
that alternate explanations must be ruled out before asserting that
Verb-Pronoun order lead to the endings.

Regards
Nath


From sarima at friesen.net  Thu Jun 14 13:44:55 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 06:44:55 -0700
Subject: *G^EN-
In-Reply-To: <004801c0f024$6a6581a0$fbf1fea9@swbell.net>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.064455.0700.>

At 09:07 AM 6/8/01 -0500, proto-language wrote:

>Methodologically, if it (and some others) can be derived from *both* *g^en-
>and *g^enH-, I see no reason to assume the non-existence of *g^en- just
>because all forms can be derived from *g^enH-

Actually, there is a methodological reason to at least not reconstruct a
*g^en- (even if one cannot positively say it did not exist).  It is called
Occam's Razor - do not multiply entities beyond necessity. In a case like
this there is no *need* to introduce three elements: a root, and extension,
and an extended root, so it should not be done.  Only if there is some
specific evidence requiring the existence of the "non-extended" root should
it be reconstructed as such.

Now, if Skt 'janati' does in fact point to *g^en instead of *g^enH, this
could be such evidence.  I am not really qualified to judge, but I am
somewhat skeptical.  For one thing, it is generally held that a form needs
to be found in two or three branches of IE before it can reconstructed for
PIE, so if Skt is the only source seeming to require bare *g^en, there is a
very real possibility of innovation in Indic.

>. My preference would be to assume that a root, *g^en- (which I would consider
>to be *basic*) and a root with extension, *g^enH- have been conflated into a
>single paradigm.

I would apply Occam, and only introduce this entity if I could reconstruct
it as such.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri Jun 15 18:38:55 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 19:38:55 +0100
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.193855.0100.>

I'm sorry if I was too suspicious of your motives, Pat!

You said:

>Like Pokorny, I believe that an Old Indian form like _janati_ points to
>*g^en- rather than *g^enH-.

Not necessarily.   It could have come from a zero grade *g'nH-eti (syllabic
n > an in this context.)   The same pattern is found in the zero grade Vedic
perfect plural jajanus for the expected (and later) jajnus.

I admit the accent is a problem, but this pattern of zero grade present
+ -e/o suffix is not uncommon.  Rix takes several verbs back to this
pattern, eg Latin maneo, venio, Greek baino,  Lithuanian lupu, Gothic
ga-lu:kan, Latin/Greek luo et al.

You also said:

> everything I have investigated leads me to believe that the basis
>of the CVC definition of a root is pretty universal.

Yes, but the vowel is not always -e-.  It can also be -r-, -i-/-y- -u-/-w-
etc, - I'm  sure you know the theory in PIE, whatever you think of it.   So
a root g'enH can be seen (and should be seen!) as CeVC / CVC: *g'enH/g'nH.
The unusual roots are those that are CC.

As for a root *g'en without laryngeal, there are some Sanskrit forms that
show no laryngeal, but they stand alongside forms that need it, and they can
be explained from the *g'enH root, whereas the forms with H cannot be
explained from a root *g'en.

So we're left with no evidence for laryngeal-less *g'en.  That does not mean
it did not exist!   Only that we have neither evidence for it, nor need of
it.

Peter


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Sun Jun 17 16:29:19 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 11:29:19 -0500
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <SUN.17.JUN.2001.112919.0500.>

Dear Peter and IEists:

---- Original Message -----
From: "petegray" <petegray at btinternet.com>
Sent: Friday, June 08, 2001 1:35 PM

[PCRp]

>> *g^enH1- would constitute an exception to the general proposition that IE
>> roots have the form CVC-.  Every good "rule" needs an exception or two.

[PG]

> here are many exceptions of this kind, Pat.  Are you being, perhaps, a
> little disingenuous?   Just for the pattern Ce(/R)TH (T= stop), one can
> suggest:
>   *keubH2   lie down, lay down
>   *sekH        cut
>   *wedhH1   hit
>   *wetH2      say
>   *krepH      creep
> The pattern of g'enH,  CeRH, is even commoner.

[PCR]

It is well-established in Afrasian studies, that roots are CVC. If we assume
that IE and Afrasian are derived from a common ancestor, Nostratic, it is
natural to suppose that all non-borrowed IE roots are originally derived from
Nostratic CVC roots even though the CVC component may not have survived in IE
as an independent root in a given instance.

To take one of the examples you have provided, *keubH2-, 'lie down, lay down',
I see no reason not to derive it from Pokorny's 2. *kew-, 'bend'.

Why do you not explain to us why you believe that it cannot be so derived, and
must constitute an independent, unrelated root?

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  Sun Jun 17 16:43:38 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 11:43:38 -0500
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <SUN.17.JUN.2001.114338.0500.>

Dear Rich and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rich Alderson" <alderson+mail at panix.com>
Sent: Friday, June 08, 2001 12:14 PM

> On 5 June 2001, Patrick Ryan wrote:

>> Thus, *g^enH1- would constitute an exception to the general proposition that
>> IE roots have the form CVC-. Every good "rule" needs an exception or two.

[RA]

> The general proposition that IE roots are CeC is directly related to the
> notion that IE roots involve extensions, or determinatives.  The root is
> abstracted from the stem, that portion of the word which is left after all
> inflectional and derivational morphemes are abstracted away; since the stem
> can be very messy, its analysis into a root plus a (poosibly zero) suffix
> plus one or more extensions simplifies things.

> Lehmann has a discussion of this in his 1952 monograph on phonology, derived
> from Benveniste's long exposition in _Origines de la formation des noms en
> indoeurop'een_.

> So the exception is only apparent.

[PCR]

Obviously, I have commented in general in two other postings on this question.

But, I really do not understand what you mean by "so the exception is only
apparent".

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- (which I
do not believe to be the case), 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-.

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  Mon Jun 18 14:01:59 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 09:01:59 -0500
Subject: Fw: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <MON.18.JUN.2001.090159.0500.>

Dear Stanley and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stanley Friesen" <sarima at friesen.net>
Sent: Saturday, June 09, 2001 7:32 PM

> At 11:15 AM 6/5/01 -0500, proto-language wrote:

[PCRp]

>> I have no problem with that opinion. Thus, *g^enH1- would constitute an
>> exception to the general proposition that IE roots have the form CVC-. Every

[SF]

> I actually doubt any such rule exists.  For one thing, I suspect the idea
> is due at least in part to what Rich called "over-analysis".  That is, many
> of the supposed CVC- roots that only occur with root determinatives are
> better treated as CVCVC- roots (or even CVCC or CCVC roots).  There are
> also a fair number of roots that apparently originally ended in laryngeals,
> which now masquerade as CVC- roots.

[PCR]

This is, of course, a natural "suspicion". However, having suspected the same,
no doubt, initially, IEists like Pokorny et al. were able to show a commonality
of meaning which linked various CVC(V)C roots together.

If one takes the idea of "overanalysis" to its ultimate implication, should we
assume that any CVC(V)C "root" is necessarily unrelated to a semantically
similar CVC root? Or do you believe that some CVC(V)C roots are legitimately
derived from CVC roots?

And how does one identify the legitimate derivations?

[SF]

> I find it better to just take PIE roots as they come, without trying to
> force them into some preconceived mold.

[PCR]

You assume what you attempt to argue.

It is the form of a PIE root which is the question  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 gordonbr at microsoft.com  Thu Jun 14 16:39:48 2001
From: gordonbr at microsoft.com (Gordon Brown)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 09:39:48 -0700
Subject: PU trees (WAS: About the Yew1)
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.093948.0700.>

Ante, can you give us some modern reflexes of these tree names, say in
Finnish, Estonia, Saami, perhaps others?

> ----------
> From: 	Ante Aikio[SMTP:anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi]
> Sent: 	Saturday, June 09, 2001 10:11 PM

> An example of Uralic tree names is perhaps interesting in this
> connection. At least five tree names can be reconstructed in
> Proto-Uralic, and all of them show identical meanings in all the
> cognate languages. Hence, no change in meaning in some 7000-8000
> years. (The reconstructed tree names include at least 'birch',
> 'spruce', 'Siberian pine', 'bird cherry', and 'rowan'.) The corpus of
> PU etymologies is very small, so it seems that at least in the case of
> Uralic, the tree names have belonged to the most stable part of the
> lexicon.

>  -Ante AIkio


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sun Jun 17 06:50:01 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 02:50:01 EDT
Subject: About the Yew1
Message-ID: <SUN.17.JUN.2001.025001.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/5/2001 2:55:01 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<< If you believe, like Renfrew, that these farmers (who entered Europe from
Anatolia) spoke PIE, then you must explain why "IE" *ebur- should have been
superseded by *eiw- in the north and by other words in the south and east.
This can be done if you posit movement of IE-speakers out of Anatolia and
east of yew-country, then back into Europe. But then we're begging the
question of what IE and non-IE are. It is pointless IMHO to extend
"Indo-European" back to the first European farmers, and equally pointless to
regard PIE as arbitrarily old. >>

Not so.  A good piece of Anatolia does not have yew trees either.  In fact,
the central plateaus have been steppes for most of the more modern climatic
periods.

So there's no difference between Anatolians IEists and the
Somewhere-East-of-Wherever IEists you are positing.  Move 'em up or down a
little and you've located the IE homeland, just avoid some patches of yew
trees here and there.

BTW, what I suspect - rather than believe - is that the evidence can support
a language like *PIE being spoken on the Danube in neolithic times.  Since
*PIE probably didn't fall from the sky, I suspect the predecessor(s) of that
language may have spread there from Anatolia.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Mon Jun 18 16:40:54 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 12:40:54 EDT
Subject: Yew Two
Message-ID: <MON.18.JUN.2001.124054.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/5/2001 2:55:01 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<< Celtic has preserved pre-IE *ebur- 'yew' rather extensively in toponyms,
ethnonyms, and personal names, and also Irish <ibhar> 'yew; bow' beside <eo>
'yew'. The stem *ebur- also appears in toponyms in Iberia, Liguria,
Campania, and probably Greece (Ephura:, old name of Corinth and other
places). In my opinion *ebur- belongs with the Old European substrate
associated with the expansion of Neolithic farmers across Europe (ca.
5500-4000 BCE). If you believe, like Renfrew, that these farmers (who
entered Europe from Anatolia) spoke PIE, then you must explain why "IE"
*ebur- should have been superseded by *eiw- in the north...>>

Because I suspect that words like Irish <iubhar>, Gaelic <iubhar>, Old Irish
<ibar> were words that could have developed as trade words, I don't think
there's any need need to explain an "IE" *ebur- at all.

The Romans, of course, knew ivory as <ebur, eboris>.  But they also called
ivory a "horn" <cornu> and words for ivory itself have been applied to the
boar and other tusks and horns of various kinds, as well as whale bone.  (See
Germanic <ebar>, <eber>, <ibor>, <epur>, <i:for> boar; Lat <aper> boar.) It
was common for horn and antler to be interchangeable with wood in a large
number of ancient European carved and turned objects.  We know that horn,
antler and ivory were often used in the making of bows (Homer only describes
bows made of horn or antler.) It's hard to trace but "ivory wood" is an old
term, and "white", "pink", "red" and "black ivory wood" (a kind of ebony)
have been available for some time to the woodworking trade.  "Eber-" is a
common name applied to, among others, the "service tree" (sorbus) and to the
rowan or mountain ash - a red-berry bearing tree that makes excellent bow
wood.  The Romans used "iberis" and similar terms to refer to various plants,
including perhaps the pepperwort.  (E.g, Pliny calls <ibe:ris>, "a kind of
cress." Cf., vibo, vibo:nis, m., the flower of the herb called "Britannica,"-
Pliny.) Hesychlus mentions both plants and animals with <iber-> names , and
attributes the name "Iberes" to an unidentified animal, <iber>.  Cf., "gravis
imber et uber", Latin, <uber> referring to copious-growing plants and
presumably trees and trade wood.

So, it seems reasonable to think that "ebor"-words may not be quite so
specific to the yew and may not be quite so "Old European" (if such a thing
existed) but relates in some way to better quality trade wood and horn
working materials and the places where they were traded from or to.  E.g.,
"ibhar" referring to ivory producing elephants in Sanskrit, far from "Old
European" haunts.

Another possibility which I like is that Irish <iubhar>, Gaelic <iubhar>
simply are reflections of the early or later Greek influences among
Celtic-speakers.  The Greek influence on Celtic has often been overlooked,
despite the major archaeological evidence of Greek trade routes deep into
France and Spain for centuries before 400BC.  And the obvious influence of
learned Greek in both pagan and Christian times.  (E.g., Caesar's observation
that the druids wrote in Greek "literi.")

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.)

(<ios> also can refer to a variety of plants and unpredictable colors, but
that's another yew tale.)

The joint meaning is seen in words like <iobolos>, "shooting arrows" or
"shedding venom, venomous."  Or <iodokos> "holding arrows" (in Homer) or
"containing venom, fangs."  And the attested <iotokos, iotokon>, interpreted
as "poison-bearing" is interesting in that it suggests perhaps an early
connection for the "toxon" word for bow - "poison/arrow-bearing."  See also
<iocheaira> "arrow-pourer, shooter of arrows" epithet of Artemis.

Also interesting is the use of <-phoros>, carrying, bearing, in connection
with <ios>.  Well-attested is <xiphe:phoros> "sword-carrying, sword in hand,
swordsman."  And while <iophoros> is interpreted as "poison bearing" where
attested, it obviously can follow the split meaning given above and also mean
"arrow bearing" or sending or bringing.  I.e., a bow or a wood from which
arrows are made.

Of course, Gr <iophoros> as a borrowed word into Celtic may possibly have
ended up as Irish <iubhar> and Gaelic <iubhar>.  (See, e.g., Gaelic
<leabhar>,a book; Welsh <llyfr>; from Latin <liber>; <io> and <iu> being
somewhat interchangeable, compare Gaelic <iollagach> with <iullagach>, both
meaning frolicsome.)  See also Gaelic <uthaidh,
i:thaidh>, arrow; <coiliobhar>, a kind of gun; <ionntraich>, miss.  Cf.,
Gaelic <giuthas>, Early Irish <gius>, fir or similar wood.) All thios might
suggest a connection that conforms better perhaps to what we know about the
use of trade names for materials in ancient times.

It should be noted that references to Celtic archers are rare and most found
truly ancient bows are not yew.  The yew comes in Britain into prominence
with the Welsh longbow and most of the wood for those bows in the middle ages
were imported as a matter of royal policy from Spain and the Levant (for one
thing the wood was considered better), ballast on ships carrying Greek and
Italian wine.  We have some clues that a vigorous trade in horn, bow wood and
even ivory-type materials was carried on long before those times.

<...Ephura:, old name of Corinth and other places...>

I would suspect those place names may be connected to their character as
market places and ports.  See Gr <phoros>, levy, tax, tribute; <ephormizo:>,
anchor, harbor; <ekphora>, exportable; <ephoros>, overseer, collector,
guardian and, in Sparta, the officers of a corporation.

Regards,
Steve Long


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Thu Jun 14 18:57:59 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 14:57:59 EDT
Subject: Ockham's Razor
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.145759.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/14/01 9:51:36 AM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com
writes:

> And it's not a matter of what I want to believe.  It's where the facts
> lead me.

-- so far, you have not presented any facts supporting the hypothesis that
the word for "red deer" somehow meant "fallow deer" or "deer in general" in
remote antiquity.

> I also know of no sure differentiation made in Greek (in Ionia or
> otherwise)

-- "Elaphos", red deer, specifically; "ellos" and "enelos", young of the red
deer, fawn.

> Distinguishing between fallow and red deer is definitely multiplying entities
> not only beyond the necessity, but clearly beyond the evidence.

-- this is simply a false-to-fact statement.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Thu Jun 14 19:10:34 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 15:10:34 EDT
Subject: The Iceman's Berries
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.151034.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/14/01 10:57:30 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> Actually what becomes fairly apparent is that if "PIE-speakers" did know
> about the yew, there would be no way of telling.

-- 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.

*taksos has cognates in Latin, Celtic, Greek, and Indo-Iranian.

> The simplistic connections that are used to trace many of these words -
> like "yew" and "red deer" - very quickly disappear.

-- not if you actually use the standard methods of linguistics.

> This statement gives me pause.  Is any one on this list who is uncomfortable
> with the idea that its plausible that yew comes from PIE *eiw- 'berry'?

--- "related to" rather than "comes from".

There are two PIE words for "berry"

*og, with cognates in Baltic, Slavic, Tocharian, Celtic, Germanic, and
possibly Armenian.

*oi-wo, with cognates in Latin, Greek, and Armenian.  *oi-wo may well be
_related_ to the word for yew.

[clip of irrelevant stuff about mummies and bears]


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sun Jun 17 06:36:03 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 02:36:03 EDT
Subject: Uniformitarianism and the Arrowwood
Message-ID: <SUN.17.JUN.2001.023603.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/5/2001 2:55:01 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<< If you believe, like Renfrew, that these farmers (who entered Europe from
Anatolia) spoke PIE, then you must explain why "IE" *ebur- should have been
superseded by *eiw- in the north and by other words in the south and east.>>

Actually, I'd rather put the onus on you to justify the identification of
*ebur- or *eiw- with any particular modern tree classification.  I do not
doubt the phonology in the reconstructions.  I think that anyone who looks
closely will find that the meanings are anywhere as stable as you contend.

And of course this whole idea doesn't depend on the phonology.  It depends on
the meanings of these words.  What YOU must prove is that there's no chance
that the "yew" word would have changed if *PIE had had a yew word.  A lot of
evidence says that the word would have changed - possibly many times in 2000+
years.  But in the end you have no way of proving what such words meant in
the 2000+ years before ACTUAL attestation.  Because you have no direct
evidence at all.

<<If you and I belong to the same tribe, and we don't agree on what to call
trees in the next valley, then our use of language is dysfunctional. Do you
really believe that prehistoric humans were linguistically incompetent?>>

There's been some talk about a linguistic Uniformitarian Principle.  So let
me invoke it right now.

What actually happened when people gave names to trees, before modern
scientific classifications attempts to make them uniform?

Let's take the eastern US only, and pick a tree with a good practical name.
Near the top of the list of "common names" (non-scientific names) is
"ARROWWOOD" - kind of yew/bow tree in concept.  Maybe it means wood you'd
make arrows from or wood that looks like arrows.  Doesn't matter.

As a matter of the "Uniformitarian Principle" and an example of old fashion
American "non-dysfunctionality" (ha) we should see the ARROWWOOD stand for
one tree and one tree only.  Or we should stop expecting that the *PIE word
for YEW would have stood for one tree for 2000+ before that word would
actually be attested.

The answer is... STOP expecting one prehistoric name will equal one
prehistoric tree.  JUST take a look at how dysfunctional something as simple
as the "arrowwood" word can get:

"Arrowwood" #1 (Oxydendrum arboreum Ericaceae) - Other Names: sourwood, elk
tree, lily-of-the-valley tree, sorrel gum, sorrel tree, sour gum, titi, titi
tree.

"Arrowwood" #2 (Euonymus atropurpureus) - Other Names: wahoo, burningbush,
spindle tree, indian arrowwood, bursting-heart, strawberry-tree, strawberry
bush, American spindle tree, bitter ash, pegwood.

"Arrowwood" #3 (Viburnum dentatum, acerifolium, recognitum, pubescens) -
Other Names: southern arrowwood, northern arrowwood, smooth arrowwood,
withe-wood, downy arrowwood, viburnum, black haw, highbush cranberry,
maple-leaved viburnum, nannyberry, sheepberry, wild raisin.

"Arrrowwood" #4 (Rhamnaceae Rhamnus fragula) - Other Names: alder buckthorn,
black dogwood, glossy buckthorn, european buckthorn, black alder dogwood,
black alder tree, persian berries, european black alder, alder buckthorn.

"Arrowwood" #5 (Cornus florida L.) - Other Names: flowering dogwood, cornel,
boxwood, white cornel, cornelian tree, bunchberry, dogwood, false boxwood,
florida dogwood.

Check out all those tree names!!!  MAJOR dysfunction!

Based on this and an even generous application of the  "Uniformitarian
Principle", one would have to say the identification of prehistoric trees
with prehistoric names is not a very good bet.

Not something you'd want to use to identify the IE homeland, for sure.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 14 17:16:49 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 13:16:49 EDT
Subject: Red Deer in Anatolia
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.131649.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/4/2001 10:08:22 PM, alderson+mail at panix.com writes:
<< the word which means "red deer" in all daughter languages,...>>

I suspect there is no such word.  In the IE languages most relevant - those
where the fallow may have been present natively - the red deer and fallow
deer were one thing -  a deer.  Ockham's Razor.  Do not multiply entities
needlessly.

In a message dated 6/14/2001 9:58:21 AM, alderson+mail at panix.com writes:

<< I haven't had the time to review all the recent postings regarding the
habitat of the red deer vs. that of the fallow deer, but if Dr. White is
correct, then my point is _a fortiori_ made. >>

But in Anatolian languages there is no distinction made between fallow and
red.  Ergo, the presence or absence of the fallow (or red) tells us nothing.
Wherever the *PIE homeland was - whether it had fallow or red deer or both -
a deer was probably just a deer.  Much as it is today.  (Except of course
today in America, where the red deer is not a deer.)

Regards,
Steve Long


From stevegus at aye.net  Thu Jun 14 19:06:41 2001
From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 15:06:41 -0400
Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc.
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.150641.0400.>

Lionel Bonnetier wrote:

> Is there any obvious reason
> why -cum is the only instance of the archaic system? May
> *kom (cum) and *ko (cis) and *kwe (-que) be related
> etymologically around the idea of "here-nearby-with"?

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.  Which ones are treated as suffixes and
which as particles following a noun is more of a matter of current
orthography; the Romans themselves originally wrote without word
breaks.  These prepositions are more obviously case forms of other roots
than 'cum' is, though.

--
Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law
Fox & Cotner:  PHONE (812) 945 9600   FAX (812) 945 9615
http://www.foxcotner.com

I sure ain't the master of my fate, nor the captain of my soul.


From edsel at glo.be  Fri Jun 15 15:45:56 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 17:45:56 +0200
Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc.
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.174556.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lionel Bonnetier" <leo at easynet.fr>
Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2001 2:07 AM

> It's funny that Latin suffixed -cum in mecum, tecum, etc.
> has created some special -go case marker in Spanish with
> conmigo, contigo, consigo. I suppose -cum is a remnant of
> an older time when prepositions were either postpositions
> or relatively mobile adverbs. Is there any obvious reason
> why -cum is the only instance of the archaic system? May
> *kom (cum) and *ko (cis) and *kwe (-que) be related
> etymologically around the idea of "here-nearby-with"?

[Ed]

Why do you call Sp. -go a case marker? Isn't 'contigo' simply a popular
formation based upon 'tecum' (>tigo), with 'con' added when people became
unaware of the meaning of -go?

In Brabant Dutch dialects you have a similar phenomenon with the duplication of
the 2sg. pronoun when it was forgotten that -de was originally 'du' (a lost
word in later Dutch, like 'thou' in English. 'Gij' corresponds to 'you',
originally a plural):

Du. 'hebt gij...?' (Have you ...?) , dial. 'hedde-gij?' < hebst du gij?  'Gij'
is clearly superfluous like 'con-' in 'contigo', as long as you still
understand the original formation (quod non, for all, except a few linguists).

I'm really looking forward to the answers to your question about cum/cis/-que.
We already had an informative discussion about *kom (Lat. cum/con-, but also
Germanic ge-).

Ed. Selleslagh


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri Jun 15 18:51:18 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 19:51:18 +0100
Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc.
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.195118.0100.>

> I suppose -cum is a remnant of an older time when prepositions were either
> postpositions or relatively mobile adverbs.

Yes, so it is suggested.

> Is there any obvious reason why -cum is the only instance of the archaic
> system?

It only occurs with personal pronouns, and nowhere else.   The most
interesting suggestion I have heard is that it began with an avoidance of
the sequence cunn-.   cum nobis could sound like forms of cunnus, from which
comes the good English word cunnilingus.  Hence nobiscum, thence to other
personal pronouns.

> May *kom (cum) and *ko (cis) and *kwe (-que) be related etymologically around
> the idea of "here-nearby-with"?

No.  Latin cum has a good PIE history in *kom or *km, and -que has a
different one in *-kwe.  (different consonant, different vowel)

Peter


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri Jun 15 19:06:21 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 20:06:21 +0100
Subject: Munda in Early NW India
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.200621.0100.>

Sanskrit fricatives
> ...Visarga /h./ as a "hard spirant"

There are two h sounds, the voiceless visarga, and the sound transcribed
<h>, which is a voiced sound - so it can't be the usual /h/ sound of
English.   Does that make it a fricative?

The three sibilants are not all allophones of /s/.   One is the direct
reflex of PIE k' (as in as'va horse).   Another prbably began life as an
allophone (mostly becasue of the RUKI rule) but in attested Skt it must be
treated as a phoneme - there are enough minimal pairs.

>> How do we explain .., Iranian where *dh etc became d etc (at least
>> intervocalic)?

I understand (but may be wrong) that the written Iranian d is a fricative.
The voiced aspirates also appear as fricatives in Germanic and Latin, which
develop to stops later.

> My main point was that traditional PIE is short on fricatives and long on
> "laryngeals ... Their characterization
> as "laryngeal" ...

"Laryngeal" is just a label, and not a phonetic description.   The only
evidence we have is the evidence we've got, which allows us to interpret the
"laryngeals" as velars or post-velars.  There is nothing to stop them being
palatals, if you can make it fit the evidence.

Peter


From alderson+mail at panix.com  Mon Jun 18 23:27:18 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 19:27:18 -0400
Subject: Munda in Early NW India
In-Reply-To: <F99pP1znXgffHr1qmd6000073ac@hotmail.com> (acnasvers@hotmail.com)
Message-ID: <MON.18.JUN.2001.192718.0400.>

On 13 Jun 2001, Douglas G Kilday wrote:

> I think the H-series in PIE represents undetermined unvoiced fricatives,
> probably varying greatly among dialects and more rapidly in time than most
> other PIE sounds. Their characterization as "laryngeal" properly belongs to
> their final stage as fricatives

The characterization of Saussure's _co'efficients sonantiques_ as "layrngeals"
is based on their effect on surrounding vowels, an effect known to M/oller from
the Semitic language family to which he wished to relate Indo-European.  It is
now conventional, but should not be taken as more than that; on the other hand,
it would be interesting to hear of vocalic effects of non-laryngeal/non-pharyn-
geal fricatives in the languages of the world.

								Rich Alderson


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Thu Jun 14 21:24:51 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 16:24:51 -0500
Subject: bishop
In-Reply-To: <000601c0f190$a8537400$f96801d5@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.162451.0500.>

	A very fertile word in Spanish!

apotecario "pharmacist"
bodega "storage room, wine cellar, shop, convenience store"
botica "pharmacy"
boticario "herbal doctor"
botiqui/n "medicine cabinet"
and from French butik, boutique
etc.

[snip]
>It occurred to me that there is another example in the Italian bottega,
>Spanish (whence English) bodega, meaning shop or inn, from the Greek
>apotheke.

>Peter

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From edsel at glo.be  Fri Jun 15 15:41:30 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 17:41:30 +0200
Subject: bishop
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.174130.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "petegray" <petegray at btinternet.com>
Sent: Sunday, June 10, 2001 10:23 AM

> There was discussion a while ago of the word "bishop", coming from Greek
> episkopos.    I think it was Piotr who said the loss of the initial vowel
> was not an issue, but the voicing of the "p" was uncommon.  (Pardon me if
> I've mis-remembered who it was!)

> It occurred to me that there is another example in the Italian bottega,
> Spanish (whence English) bodega, meaning shop or inn, from the Greek
> apotheke.

> Peter

[Ed]
A few comments:

1. These particular cases of voicing (of p) are not so frequent, but they
typically occur a) in languages like Spanish and Portuguese (and to a much
lesser degree: Italian, but still: soddisfare < satisfacere) that show a marked
tendency to voicing, and b) in Greek words that virtually nobody understood (I
mean their literal meaning in the original Greek), but that were very
intensively used by the whole population, thus making them very common words in
the receiving language. Those are potent factors to make the words conform to
phonetic practices (i.e. make them sound indigenous).

2. In some languages (Italian, French) there was an additional shift b > v in
the bishop-words (Vescovo, Ev?que), while in Italian even the p of skopos was
voiced (and then became a fricative v). It seems to me that the voicing of the
p's only occurred if they were intervocalic (like the t-d voicing in American
English) since I don't know any cases of voicing of initial p in formerly Greek
words.

3. Bodega and bottega appear as boutique in French. Spanish also has botica,
closer to the original meaning of apotheke. I got the impression that a lot of
mutual copying has gone on, at different points in time.

3. In the same religious context, we have 'iglesia' , from Greek 'ekkles?a',
also with voicing, but with a shift of accent. In Portuguese even 'igreja',
with additional voicing of the s(i) to zh.

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.

Ed. selleslagh


From dlwhite at texas.net  Thu Jun 14 23:16:20 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 18:16:20 -0500
Subject: kinkajou
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.181620.0500.>

>> <kinkajou>

>> I'm pleased, but not surprised, that it's in American dictionaries, since
>> it's an American animal.  Is it still in the concise English ones, I wonder?
>> because that's what my point was.

        It is not "an American animal" in the sense of being an animal that
occurs in the territory of American English.  (It does not occur north of
southern Mexico.)  It is "an American animal" only in the sense of occurring
in the New World.  I would hope that Brits, even lexicographers, would not
be so zoologically parochial as to exclude the only English name for this
animal on such grounds.  American lexicographers do not exclude Old World
animals like lorises and lemurs, after all, on the grounds they are Old
World (thus "un-American"?) animals.  If "kinkajou" has been excluded from
some recent dictionaries, it is, I hope, on account of rarity (as a word),
not geography.

Dr. David L. White


From dlwhite at texas.net  Fri Jun 15 16:25:52 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 11:25:52 -0500
Subject: "ou" in "kinkajou"
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.112552.0500.>

> Greek found the same solution as French.  In both languages the vowel
> written <u> is fronted, so the back /u/ is written ou.  It is this back /u/
> which is used to represent the /w/ sound, as in Oualerios (Valerius) or
> "oui" or Touareg /twareg/.

        And in kinkajou, judging by the pronunciation.  First named in
French Guyana?   Passed into English in British Guyana?   (There were once
such entitities, no?   My knowledge of colonial history is failing me.)

Dr. David L. White


From dlwhite at texas.net  Fri Jun 15 16:22:17 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 11:22:17 -0500
Subject: 'dhole'
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.112217.0500.>

>> I agree that that is what the usual supects say, on the linguistics side,
>> but on the biology side, all my sources agree that wolves do not occur in
>> south India, and therefore in the Kannada area.  (Why is not entirely clear
>> to me.  They did not spread from China into SE Asia either.  Dislike of
>> tropcal heat?)  Therefore there is something not quite right here.

>> Dr. David L. White

> Could the Dravidian word refer to a different carnivore?

        Well, the obvious possibility is that is refers to dholes, and that
somewhere along the line somebody screwed up in saying that it means 'wolf'.

> Your question is very interesting: why have wolves not penetrated south
> India or SW Asia? It can't be just the heat - north India (where there ARE
> wolves) can be as hot as any place on this earth in the summer, as I know
> from experience (48 degrees in May/June are not unusual in New Delhi, for
> example). Maybe it's the humidity they don't like, or there are carnivores
> who thrive better than wolves in the year-round humid heat.

        Yes, dholes do.  Why is unclear.  They are not tropical animals,
being known to occur as far north as the so-called Siberia of Siberian
tigers.  (Which would be better called "Ussuriland".   It is really part of
the Chinese zone, biologically.)   But they are an older lineage than wolves
(with smaller brains, for example), and have perhaps had longer to adapt,
however they have, to year-round humid heat.  They used to occur in Europe,
but were in the long run unable to compete with wolves there. So it is odd:
wolves out-compete dholes in Europe, but dholes out-compete wolves in
south/east Asia.  In China and northern India, both occur.  (Or in the case
of China, used to.  The Chinese have done a great job of replacing animal
biomass with human biomass.)

Dr. David L. White


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Fri Jun 15 16:31:41 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 12:31:41 EDT
Subject: note on 'dhole'
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.123141.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/8/2001 7:06:18 PM, dlwhite at texas.net writes:

<< I agree that that is what the usual supects say, on the linguistics
side, but on the biology side, all my sources agree that wolves do not occur
in south India, and therefore in the Kannada area.  (Why is not entirely
clear to me.  They did not spread from China into SE Asia either.  Dislike
of tropcal heat?)  Therefore there is something not quite right here.

Dr. David L. White >>

I suppose it's worth repeating.  What's not quite right is equating the wolf
word to the animal in the wild.

A word for wolf does not have to refer to an actual animal.  Imported wolf
hides or wolf heads, wolf teeth, wolf images, wolf stories, wolf totems,
powdered wolf whatevers, people with wolf nicknames, animals or animal
by-products that might be like a wolf in some form or function or captive
wolves traveling with an ancient equivalent of a circus or at the zoo might
all answer to the name "wolf."

The actual distribution of the wolf in the wild therefore may have only minor
relevance to its presence in a particular vocabulary.

Steve Long


From philjennings at juno.com  Thu Jun 14 02:07:10 2001
From: philjennings at juno.com (philjennings at juno.com)
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 21:07:10 -0500
Subject: Five Antiquities of Hay (was Thy Thigh, etc.)
Message-ID: <WED.13.JUN.2001.210710.0500.>

As an appendix to my prior post, it occurs to me that the invention/naming of
hay might be associated with the domestication of the horse.

Human use of the horse has historically been abusive, with hard riders keeping
strings of horses and wearing them out one by one.  Basically we ride horses
and keep them otherwise occupied, precisely at those times of day when they
need to be grazing.  To compensate, horse-people take steps to provide food,
even concentrated food, at other times of day, ie. when horses are stabled or
corralled.

If horse people were also cow people, they might have gradually adopted the
same policy in the care of one animal as for the other, but horses needed to
take precedence.  Horses forced the issue.  Cows didn't.

This would explain the lateness of our proto-Germanic and Balto-Slavic "hay"
words.  Certainly their LBK predecessors had cow stockades, but perhaps were
lazy about providing fodder to their cattle during shut-in times, because after
all the animals had plenty of time to graze during the day.

Of course, here I'm ignoring the phenomenon of "working" cattle, as we do
easily nowadays in the age of tractors.  If the LBK people used draught oxen,
et cetera, they may have conceived the need to compensate them for their labor.
The use or non-use of hay by the LBK people seems to be the central issue.  If
the LBK language represents IE at an early and fairly unified stage, and they
used hay, there would be a common term across many language sub-families.  If
the Corded Ware people used hay (probable), then if there is no common term
across several sub-languages, one possible conclusion is that the Corded Ware
people were linguistically a mere superstrate, absorbed by diverging IE groups,
or absorbed in the west and only dominant in part of the east.


From bronto at pobox.com  Fri Jun 15 06:58:24 2001
From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood)
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 23:58:24 -0700
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <THU.14.JUN.2001.235824.0700.>

> I once came across a woman who had learned the word 'misled'
> through reading, and who pronounced it like 'mild', . . .

Does anyone really rhyme it with `drizzled'?

--
Anton Sherwood  --  br0nt0 at p0b0x.com  --  http://ogre.nu/


From brent at bermls.oau.org  Fri Jun 15 10:21:36 2001
From: brent at bermls.oau.org (Brent J. Ermlick)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 06:21:36 -0400
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <a05010403b7479a6a6e2b@[193.159.57.14]>; from
 Georg-Bonn@t-online.de on Sat, Jun 09, 2001 at 11:22:39AM +0200
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.062136.0400.>

On Sat, Jun 09, 2001 at 11:22:39AM +0200, Stefan Georg wrote:
> Maybe. But that's an increased tendency to be aware of foreign
> phonemes, an increased openness for the outside world, and certainly
> an increase which increases with education. Whatever this means for a
> phoneme system.

I've noticed a slight tendency in this direction in American
English. In the fifties I don't recall any American radio or TV
announcer using the phoneme /x/ in any word. The Scottish word
"loch" was pronounced with a definite /k/.

While /k/ is still the majority pronunciation, sometime afterwards
(starting in the 70's?) I started to hear an occasional announcer
use /x/ in this word as well as others.

I think that this is also "an increased openness for the outside
world" rather than a change in the phoneme system.

--
Brent J. Ermlick		Veritas liberabit uos
brent at bermls.oau.org


From John_Freeman1 at btinternet.com  Fri Jun 15 21:44:06 2001
From: John_Freeman1 at btinternet.com (John Freeman)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 22:44:06 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.224406.0100.>

Larry Trask wrote:

>> Larry Trask mentions the revival of the properly buried "albeit". He may
>> be amused that I have heard this resurrected word pronounced as if it
>> were German, riming with "Arbeit".

> Not so much amused as flabbergasted.  However, I guess I shouldn't be
> surprised.  This word must have been resurrected via reading, and I guess
> it's not unusual for a reader who is eager to collect fancy-looking words
> to see this as [indigestible glob], and to assign a pronunciation
> accordingly.

As it happens, my partner, who was brought up in Munich but has lived in
London for over thirty years and so speaks almost faultless English, was
reading out a passage from the (London) Times to me in the car last
weekend. At one point she enunciated what appeared to me to be the
phrase "all-bite" in an adverbial context. When I twigged and explained
what it was, I was left in no doubt as to (a) my own pedantry (rather
unreasonably, I thought) and (b) the pretentiousness of Times journalists
(more justifiably, perhaps).

Incidentally, I once heard [maizld] for 'misled'.

John Freeman
London


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri Jun 15 19:10:56 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 20:10:56 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.201056.0100.>

> the word 'misled' through reading, and who pronounced it like 'mild',

..and the famous pronunciation as "mizzled".

Peter


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri Jun 15 19:09:40 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 20:09:40 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.200940.0100.>

> I'm not sure the editors have seen fit to
> include it in more recent UK dictionaries.

Hurray!   That was the starting point of this discussion - I was suggesting
a few words which might have been dropped from modern dictionaries.

Peter


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Jun 15 13:19:42 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 14:19:42 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.0.20010609104127.01d58540@127.0.0.1>
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.141942.0100.>

--On Saturday, June 9, 2001 10:59 am -0400 "Douglas G. Wilson"
<douglas at nb.net> wrote:

[LT]

>> In my vernacular, even in proper names, I absolutely can't have /h/
>> before schwa or before unstressed /I/.

> Does Larry Trask really mean that he (in his American persona) doesn't say
> "habitual" with /h@/ (@ = schwa)? I think most Americans say it so, and my
> talking (Yankee) dictionary does.

OK; ya got me.  I was being careless.  I can certainly have /h/
word-initially, even before schwa, and I do have /h/ in 'habituate'.  A
stupid blunder, and I can only blame the annual ordeal of exam-marking for
wiping out some of my favorite brain cells.

> Similarly: "habiliment", "rehabilitate",
> etc., etc., and one frequent pronunciation of "harass".

I definitely do not have /h/ in 'rehabilitate'.  As for 'harass', I put the
stress on the first syllable.  The word rhymes with 'embarrass', and also
with 'Paris'.

> Finding the /h/ between TWO schwas is a little more difficult ... some
> pronounce "Abraham" /eibr at h@m/,

Not me.

> and I wouldn't have trouble reading the
> imaginary but conceivable "ultra-habituating" as /Vltr at h@bItSueitIN/

Yes; if I encountered this, I would use /h/.

> or so
> ... I think "intrahabenular" = "inside the habenula" is an acceptable word
> (medical/anatomical) which would be pronounced /Intr at h@bEnjul at r/ usually

Probably, but not a word known to me.

OK.  I'll try again.  I cannot have /h/ before unstressed schwa except
word-initially ('Havana') or (sometimes) after an obvious prefix.  I hope
I've got it right this time.

Thanks, Doug.

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 zsau at yahoo.com.au  Fri Jun 15 14:11:48 2001
From: zsau at yahoo.com.au (Tristan Alexander McLeay)
Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2001 00:11:48 +1000
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <000401c0f190$a6c9c6c0$f96801d5@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <SAT.16.JUN.2001.001148.1000.>

>> In Britain, it is the tradition to identify the 'cut' vowel as a wholly
>> distinct phoneme from schwa.

> I've been following this debate with interest.
> I just want to remind linguists, in case anyone's interested - in
> NZ, there
> is no schwa.  The vowel in "bit" is used instead.  So there is no problem
> whatever with h before schwa - it just doesn't occur.

You've got it back-to-front. The vowel in 'bit' is a schwa over there. I'm
an Aussie, but have heard enough NZeders to know it.
Fush and Chups, 5+1=sex... (and, on the other hand, sex=/sIks/ (or something
close to it)
(both different renditions of the same sound, a stressed /'@/)

And so they have hs before @s, in words like hit and hill.

Tristan


From stevegus at aye.net  Fri Jun 15 15:33:48 2001
From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 11:33:48 -0400
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.113348.0400.>

petegray wrote:

>>> Greeks ...transcription of Latin: AKOAI
>>> ...for Latin AQUAE.

>> Comes from not having a [w] sound.

> Greek found the same solution as French.  In both languages the vowel
> written <u> is fronted, so the back /u/ is written ou.  It is this back /u/
> which is used to represent the /w/ sound, as in Oualerios (Valerius) or
> "oui" or Touareg /twareg/.

Also, the Greek letter upsilon had the sound of /y/ rather than /u/ in
Attic and Koine Greek.  Greek /u:/ was written 'ou,' and I don't think
that Greek had a short /u/.  So AKUAI would not have suggested the
correct pronunciation, and AKOUAI would have suggested a three syllable
word.

--
Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law
Fox & Cotner:  PHONE (812) 945 9600   FAX (812) 945 9615
http://www.foxcotner.com

I sure ain't the master of my fate, nor the captain of my soul.


From edsel at glo.be  Fri Jun 15 14:00:24 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 16:00:24 +0200
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <FRI.15.JUN.2001.160024.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas G Kilday" <acnasvers at hotmail.com>
Sent: Friday, June 08, 2001 11:28 AM

> Larry Trask (31 May 2001) wrote:

>> I might also point out that, in the US, the word 'vehicle' is a traditional
>> shibboleth for spotting country bumpkins: if you pronounce an /h/ in
>> 'vehicle', you're a bumpkin.  Even the folk singer Arlo Guthrie, hardly the
>> personification of cosmopolitan sophistication, used this word to great
>> effect on one of his records to identify a southern policeman as a bumpkin.

> It's noteworthy here that Varro reports <veha> as a rustic pronunciation of
> <via>: "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).

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.

Ed. Selleslagh


From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi  Mon Jun 18 18:28:26 2001
From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting)
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 21:28:26 +0300
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
In-Reply-To: <000701c0f190$a90c15a0$f96801d5@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <MON.18.JUN.2001.212826.0300.>

On Sun, 10 Jun 2001, petegray wrote:

>> Originally Latin had a vocalic [u] and a semi-vowel [w], both written with
>> the <u/v> graph (the two shapes were simply variants of the same
>> grapheme).  ...., they remained more or
>> less interchangeable until the late middle ages.

> The u shape was unknown to the Romans.

This is just not true.  If one considers only inscriptional capitals you
could make a case, but you are ignoring all the handwritten scripts like
Old Roman Cursive (1st-2nd century BC) and New Roman Cursive (4th century
AD) and the various book hands.  Not all Roman writing was engraved in
stone.

> They had only capital V.

In the inscriptional capitals this is true.  In other scripts it is not.
But it is true that individual scripts tended to have either one or the
other of U and V, not both.  Inscriptional capitals and later square
capitals tended to have the pointed shape and cursive hands tended to have
the rounded shape.  But a Roman would have no difficulty in recognizing
inscriptional V and book hand u as the same letter.

> When small letters were developed, about 600 AD or so, the small form
> of V was u, in all contexts.  This is how the Oxford Classical texts
> are still printed:
>    Vbi at the beginning of a sentence, ubi elsewhere.
>    Venit at the beginning of a sentence, uenit elsewhere.

> But this pattern is totally unroman.

You are leaving uncials (popular from the 4th to the 8th century AD,
principally for books) completely out of consideration.  Do you consider
them to be unroman?  The uncial u/v is the origin of the modern lowercase
<u>, but this shape already has its beginnings in the Old Roman Cursive of
the republic.  Most lowercase letters developed out of the uncial and half
uncial hands, but uncials are not lowercase letters but simply more
cursive capitals.  Their forms, however, in many cases led directly to the
modern lowercase forms.

Now I agree that the mixture of u and V in the same script is totally
unroman; roman writing did not mix scripts.  To get V and u in the same
inscription they would have to mix inscriptional capitals or square
capitals with uncials and they just didn't do it.

So the grain of truth in this is that inscriptional capitals had only
V and uncials had only u.  But they were nonetheless variants of the
same letter, even if never used in the same inscription.

Claiming that Latin had only capital V until the 6th century when a
lowercase u sprang out of nowhere is a gross oversimplification of very
complex developments.  Have a look at S. Knight, "The Roman Alphabet" in:
Daniels and Bright, _The World's Writing systems_ (Oxford, 1996), 312-32.

<snip>

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi


From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi  Sat Jun 16 08:45:57 2001
From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting)
Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2001 11:45:57 +0300
Subject: Dubya (was Re: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme
 not a morpheme?))
In-Reply-To: <001101c0f0cc$d46d4760$8502703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <SAT.16.JUN.2001.114557.0300.>

On Sat, 9 Jun 2001, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Robert Whiting" <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
> Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2001 8:24 PM

<snip>

>> As usual, Dutch is stuck in the middle between German and English.
>> German has no [w] sound so they use the <w> graph for [v] (since
>> they use the <v> graph for [f]).  To them the name of the <w> graph
>> is 'vay' (just like the name of the Hebrew letter waw is vav in
>> German).

> [Ed]
> Modern Israelis say 'vav' too.

And for much the same reason.

> I think your statement about Germans pronouncing w as v and v as f
> goes a bit too far.

I would have thought so too, but for the fact that I had a German-speaking
colleage who pronounced English <v> as [w] (as in "willage").  When I
pointed out to her that she could easily pronounce the [v] sound in
<village> she said, "Oh, no, German doesn't have that sound -- we use
<v> for [f] like in <Vater>.  Well, what can you say?  Now if 'village'
were written *<willage>, she would have had no trouble pronouncing it.

> These are relatively modern pronunciations (which tend to propagate to
> Holland), with lots of exceptions, almost exclusively for w. In
> certain contexts (like C+w), as Pat mentioned, and in a lot of
> regional speech, w is pronounced w. Similar things can be said about
> e.g. r (more, or less, velarized).

Yes,  there are always more ways of pronouncing things than you will find
in the manuals, and ways of pronouncing (some?/most?) things are always
changing.

> It seems to me that German pronunciation is still evolving in a
> perceptible (and uneven) way. And so is the the pronunciation of Dutch
> in the Netherlands, but emphatically not in Flanders, Belgium, which
> is phonetically and lexically more conservative, even though it's the
> original homeland of Dutch as we know it (but since the
> (religious-political) secession in the 16-17. c. and the ensuing mass
> emigration to Holland, it has become more peripheral).

I rather think that the pronunciation of any living language you care to
name is still evolving in a perceptible and uneven way.  It is the nature
of the beast.

<snip>

>>> And Double-U (pr. Dub'ya) is still another thing, nothing to do with its
>>> shape either :-)

> [Ed]
> I meant George W.

Yes.  I'm sorry, but despite the capital letter and the smiley, I just
didn't make the connection.  It wasn't until this week when Dubya was
playing in my back yard that the penny dropped, and I realized that my
response was neither apropos nor appropriate.  This of course provides new
linguistic raw material.  If things continue on their present course, then
I see the development of a new idiom, 'you pulled a Dubya' or 'that's a
Dubya', meaning "you just did or said something really stupid or
boneheaded," more or less synonymous with 'say goodnight, Gracie'.  Call
it linguistic preconstruction. :)

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi


From jmott at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Fri Jun 22 04:14:19 2001
From: jmott at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Justin M. Mott)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 00:14:19 -0400
Subject: 'pitA' and 'pad'
In-Reply-To: <c9.11497cbe.285994bd@aol.com>
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.001419.0400.>

Before these correspondence sets go any further, Hindi 'pitA' and 'pad'
are not native Hindi words.  Both are Sanskrit borrowings, i.e. tatsamas.

-Justin Mott

On Thu, 14 Jun 2001 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> I wrote:

>>   We've been through this.  What you call often call "change" is actually
>> continuity to me, because you still call what remains "cognate", which means
>> there must be something that stayed the same.

> JoatSimeon at aol.com replies:

[ moderator snip ]

> <<Eg., "pita" (Hindi) and "father" (English) are cognates, as are "pad" and
> "foot", despite having no surface similarity at all.>>

> If you said "pita" and "brassiere" have no surface similarity, well that
> would be different.

[ moderator snip ]


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Fri Jun 22 07:21:16 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 03:21:16 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.032116.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/21/01 10:00:37 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> But that doesn't contradict what I wrote.  "Systematic patterns of change"
> allow one to show that cognates are "derived from the same source."  So there
> must be some continuity between the source and what is derived from the
> source.

> -- continuity is not similarity.

> <<Eg., "pita" (Hindi) and "father" (English) are cognates, as are "pad" and
> "foot", despite having no surface similarity at all.>>

> But "pita" and "father" clearly do have som prima facie structural
> similarities.

-- they have one vowel in common -- and it isn't even the same vowel in each.
The Hindi word has "i" where the English has "a". "Pad" and "foot" don't have
even that much.  If you know the sound-shifts, you can tell the p/f
correspondences, etc.

> truly have no recognizable resemblances are rare.

-- well, you're wrong there.

Consider the following words, all cognates and all meaning "horse" and all
derived from *ekuos

jor
eoh
'sp
yuk

Or there's the word for "or", *aw

no
-ve
wat

Or there's *uper, for "over":

for
super
ylfir

Or there's *eudol, "pain":

adduwal
yolo
erkn

And I could go on for pages and pages.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Fri Jun 22 07:22:33 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 03:22:33 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.032233.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/21/01 10:29:33 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> The part that you avoided is what I'm after.  It has to do with the oneness

-- it's quite simple:  if the comparative method works as advertised, then
*PIE was one language.  And if it wasn't, then the method just doesn't work.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Fri Jun 22 07:23:43 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 03:23:43 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.032343.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/21/01 11:19:12 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> It's one thing to say that a systematic pattern shows the absence of
> coincidence -- which is all that you have said in the statement above. It's
> another to say that that pattern proves a single ancestor, which was Prof
> Trask's point.

-- no, in point of fact it's exactly the same thing.


From edsel at glo.be  Fri Jun 22 08:29:12 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 10:29:12 +0200
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.102912.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stanley Friesen" <sarima at friesen.net>
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2001 6:42 AM

> At 12:18 AM 6/8/01 -0400, Brian M. Scott wrote:

>> The basic point is probably sound enough, but you'd have a hard time
>> finding a medieval historian who would agree that 'during the Middle
>> Ages society hardly changed over 100 or more years'.  Pick any 100-
>> year period you like during the MA, and you'll find significant social
>> changes.

> Quite so, even based on my amateur studies of post-Norman England I cannot
> name any 100 year period without any social change.  Sometimes change was
> even fast by modern standards.  The changes after the end of Stephen's
> reign were extremely rapid, as Henry didn't tolerate much guff.

[Ed Selleslagh]

I made a clear exception for "periods of upheaval, relatively sudden migrations
etc.". I guess the Norman invasion in England was a major upheaval with long
lasting after-effects.

During the early Middle Ages on the continent, there were lots of limited wars
and countries changed hands many times, but the cultural evolution was
generally pretty slow up to the 13-14th century, when the cities became more
independant and created a new type of civil society.

Anyway, my focus was more on Antiquity, and my remark about the M.A. may not
have been so relevant or convincing.

But it is a fact that some societies evolve very slowly at times, sometimes
over a 1000 year period, cf. Ancient Egypt, China, arctic peoples, etc.

Quick change is almost always related to migration/separation,
invasion/conquest, major changes in the environment, import of new technology,
etc. These are discrete, non-continuous phenomena in most cases, at least in
pre-industrial times. Languages are part of culture, and the single most
important tool for communication within a society, so they tend to follow the
socio-cultural changes. The conditions for quick change mentioned above are
also favorable to linguistic change (physical separation, exposure to other
languages, cultures, technology, etc); conversely, their absence causes a
fall-back to a kind of slow base-rate of linguistic change (e.g. phonetics)
implicit in the transmission from one generation to the next one, a bit like
genetic evolution.

This my own view of course. Anyone is free to disagree.

Ed.


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Jun 22 12:52:20 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 13:52:20 +0100
Subject: Rate of Change
In-Reply-To: <dd.15f83240.28599a53@aol.com>
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.135220.0100.>

--On Thursday, June 14, 2001 12:40 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> It's not the comparative method that I'm criticizing.  It's the conclusion
> you come to that you claim OBVIOUSLY follow from the comparative method.

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 can accept the comparative method and still find fault with those
> conclusions, which you gave in your first post in this thread.

Well, I'm listening.

> It's not the comparative method but what you read into it.  After all,
> even the devil can quote Scripture to his purpose.

I don't think I read anything into the method.  I'm just reporting it.

Steve, have you ever *done* any comparative linguistics?  Have you ever
grappled with linguistic data in an effort to demonstrate common ancestry,
or to challenge someone else's efforts in this direction?

> The part that you avoided is what I'm after.  It has to do with the
> oneness of PIE.

You mean you don't agree that PIE was a single language?  If so, please
tell us why.

> I'll repeat what I wrote here so that when you get around to it, you can get
> past your misinformed impressions, and we can get to the meat of the matter:

> <<The problem I perceive and have been getting at does not arise after a
> judgment is made about "genetic" relationships.  It happens before.
> Romani and Anglo-Romani obviously resemble one another in some way.

So they do, but this insistence on "resemblances" is yours, not mine.  I
have pointed out repeatedly that the comparative method has nothing to do
with resemblances.

Esperanto "resembles" quite a few European languages, but I don't therefore
conclude that it is genetically related to any of them.

> Upon analysis, one discovers a "systematic correspondence" between Romani
> and the lexicon in Anglo-Romani.

No, one doesn't.  One simply discovers a modern English lexicon in
Anglo-Romani -- not the same thing at all.

> But does that yield a genetic relationship?
> No, because one only gets one genetic relationship per customer?  Why?
> Because a language can only represent one "system"?  But Anglo-Romani
> represents two systematic correspondences, and therefore presumably two
> different systems.  In Anglo-Romani, the problem is clear, because the
> language is historic.  In IE languages, the problem is hidden in
> prehistory.>>

OK; let's see if I follow this.

Steve is suggesting that there is something (unidentified) in IE which is
comparable to Anglo-Romani.  I don't agree.

Steve, *what exactly* is there in any IE language or languages that is
similar to Anglo-Romani?  My answer is "nothing".  I can see no IE language
that even vaguely resembles Anglo-Romani -- not even Albanian.  So what are
you talking about?

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 Jun 22 13:46:35 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 14:46:35 +0100
Subject: Rate of Change
In-Reply-To: <c9.11497cbe.285994bd@aol.com>
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.144635.0100.>

--On Thursday, June 14, 2001 12:17 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

[Joat Simeon]

> <<Eg., "pita" (Hindi) and "father" (English) are cognates, as are "pad"
> and "foot", despite having no surface similarity at all.>>

> If you said "pita" and "brassiere" have no surface similarity, well that
> would be different.  If you said "pad" and "philadelphia" have no surface
> similarity, that might work.  But "pita" and "father" clearly do have some
> prima facie structural similarities.  All these similarities and
> differences are clearly a matter of degree.  I would suspect that "found"
> cognates that truly have no recognizable resemblances are rare.

Well, maybe not that rare.  Romance is a rather shallow family, but look at
these cognates:

	French	Italian

	/u/	/agosto/	'August'
	/o/	/akkwa/	'water'
	/wazo/	/uttSello/	'bird'
	/Sa~/	/kampo/	'field'
	/SEf/	/kapo/ 	'head'
	/SE~/	/kane/	'dog'

And so on.  French /o/ 'water' arguably resembles the unrelated Basque <ur>
'water' much more closely than it does its Italian cognate, and Italian
/agosto/ 'August' arguably resembles the unrelated Basque <agorril>
'August' more closely than it does its French cognate.

I suspect that dissimilar-looking cognates are not particularly rare at
all.  After all, English 'head' is cognate with both the Romance words for
'head' given above, but it really does not resemble either.

But note that the last three words, while exhibiting little in the way of
resemblance, exhibit a systematic correspondence rather well.

> And I would suspect that any attempt to find a systematic pattern of change
> that included "pita" and "brassiere" as cognates would not get very far.

Oh, I beg to differ -- semantics aside.  First, the long form 'brassiere'
is now pretty much obsolete, and unknown to younger speakers.  So let's try
<pita> and <bra>.  An initial bilabial plosive, followed by a non-nasal
coronal, followed by /a/ -- by some standards, this is a very high degree
of similarity.  I know one or two not very respectable linguists who would
not hesitate to reconstruct *<pta>, with vowel epenthesis in one language,
and the changes *<pta> --> *<pra> --> <bra> in the other.  Of course, that
element <-ssiere> is just an accretion, and not to be taken seriously, like
the final elements of Spanish <cabeza> 'head' and <corazon> 'heart'.  ;-)

Now, the semantics of 'father' and 'bra' is a challenge, but perhaps the
most important Roman bra-factory was located in or near the Temple of Jove
the Father. ;-)

Sorry, folks -- I'm always like this at the end of the exam-marking period.
I hope to be back to my normal gruff self within a week.

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 sarima at friesen.net  Fri Jun 22 14:02:59 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 07:02:59 -0700
Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look
In-Reply-To: <MABBIJNNPBOFHEBNBMEHCEPFCLAA.mclasutt@brigham.net>
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.070259.0700.>

At 01:59 AM 6/18/01 -0600, Dr. John E. McLaughlin wrote:

>English and Scots.)  The next documentation in 1828 shows a language in
>transition with most of the 5 phonological changes in full process of taking
>charge.  The next major documentation in 1861 shows that all five of the
>phonological changes have finished the job of restructuring the language.
>...
>During this entire period, Comanche society was preliterate and still
>nomadic, having been forced onto the reservation only in 1872.  So, during
>this 75-year span, 5 fairly important sound changes occurred.  ...
>I can't really tell you how this stacks up against figures for literate
>societies because I'm not an Indo-European expert, but I do seem to recall
>from my general reading in historical linguistics that this seems to be the
>general pattern found in all language change, whether the language is
>written or not.

It certainly is about on par with the Great Vowel Shift in English, which
took on order of 50 to 100 years to complete.

And that was in a somewhat literate society (there was certainly enough
literacy to support a literature).

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Jun 23 05:27:08 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 01:27:08 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look
Message-ID: <SAT.23.JUN.2001.012708.EDT.>

I wrote:
>If we are talking about sound changes that separate two daughter languages,
>we should be able to show that those specific sound changes took a certain
>number of years, days, hours and with historical evidence.  If we are
>claiming that that rate is somehow universal - justifying the application of
>a uniformity assumption - we should be prepared to show that the same rate
>per sound change can be observed in a large enough number of other languages.
>  Or explain why they vary.

In a message dated 6/22/2001 1:56:04 AM, sarima at friesen.net replied:
<<This assumes a constant rate of change,..>>

No it doesn't.  Average rates of change are based on multiple occurrences.
You get an average by finding the same changes in different languages and
averaging the time they took.  Variable rates of change (the opposite of
constant) simply mean that rates will vary in correlation to the change in
some independent variable.

<<What is suggested is a *statistical* median or mean rate, and a
variance in rate.  Given those one can determine a range of reasonable
values for when a *set* of changes took place.  One can certainly determine
a maximum amount of time that could reasonably correlate with a given
amount of change - that is how statistics works.>>

So, you have a historical *set* of changes and some numbers to supply here?
Now you're talking.  I'm ready to go.  My buddy and statistical wiz Seth
Margos has even volunteered to do the crunching.  He's done standard curve
analysis on projects where there were over a half million incidences and over
25 variables.  This should be a piece of cake.

First, what *set* of changes do you want to use?  Remember that we'll need
more than one occurrence of that set.  One occurrence has no statistical
validity, of course.  So pick a *set* of changes that has occurred in at
least five, preferably ten languages, and the time it took for each of them
to occur historically.  This will give us your basic mean, mode, medium rates
of change, a rate of variance, standard deviations and some level of
statistical validity.

Now just find the same *set* in a prehistoric language and we'll get a pretty
respectable probable rate of change for that prehistoric language.

And THAT is how statistics works.

Of course, someone may come up with different *sets* of changes and get
different average rates of change, but Seth can handle that, too, if you can
quantify the differences between the *sets.*  (The rate of change might
"vary" predictably according to the *sets*.) But that's jumping ahead.

There's nothing mysterious here.  If Time consistently produces a MEASURABLE
amount of AVERAGE change in some specific feature of a number of historical
languages, that can be validated statistically.  And once it's validated, you
can statistically expect to find the same (plus or minus) "rate of change" in
prehistorical languages that have those same specific features.

Awaiting the data,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Jun 23 06:00:14 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 02:00:14 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look
Message-ID: <SAT.23.JUN.2001.020014.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/22/2001 2:19:29 AM, mclasutt at brigham.net writes:
<<Today, there are five main phonological changes that separate Shoshoni from
Comanche and make the two mutually incomprehensible without extensive
practice.>>

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?

<< 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....I can't really tell you how this stacks up against figures for
literate societies because I'm not an Indo-European expert, but I do seem to
recall from my general reading in historical linguistics that this seems to
be the general pattern found in all language change, whether the language is
written or not.  The true Indo-Europeanists can undoubtedly provide detailed
information to verify or correct this impression.>>

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.

Regards,
Steve Long


From edsel at glo.be  Fri Jun 22 14:27:42 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 16:27:42 +0200
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.162742.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: <X99Lynx at aol.com>
Sent: Friday, June 15, 2001 7:13 AM

[snip]

>     Then he went on to point out that European Portuguese has the rolled r,
>     but (Northern) Brazilian Portuguese has an /h/ reflex of /r/, to which I
>     added that the Puerto Rican Spanish rolled ("double") rr is often
>     pronounced as a velar like in French etc.  The implication is that
>     Brazilian may have passed through this stage in the evolution of r > h.

[snip]
> Steve Long

[Ed Selleslagh]

Isn't there a little confusion here? Isn't the Brazilian Portuguese r that's
pronounced as uvular r, as [rx] in final position, or as [x] or even [h], the
original rr (cf. Spanish), the rolling r (>3 taps)? Not the single r
(originally one tap, now often more). [Note that double r is not always written
as such, as orthography is different according to position in a word, e.g.
initially or finally]. Did you mean that Puertoricans use the Brazilian
pronunciation of double r? I wasn't aware of that. Maybe Portuguese influence
stretched farther north than I thought: in Cura?ao Papiamento there is a
considerable Portuguese base, but that's still far more to the south than P.R.

In the mid-southern Andes (parts of Per?, Bolivia, N. Argentina), the double
r is pronounced [Z] (French j), strongly reminescent of Polish rz or Czech
r-hacek, which - as far as I know - have the same origin (rolling r). All seem
to be results of retroflexion.

As to unusual sound correspondences, isn't there a Sumerian rustic dialect that
uses m and S instead of g and n? I seem to remember something like that from
Meillet. Can anyone tell me more about that?

Ed.


From mcv at wxs.nl  Fri Jun 22 18:06:05 2001
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 20:06:05 +0200
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
In-Reply-To: <a05010400b74e9af87403@[132.229.243.85]>
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.200605.0200.>

On Thu, 14 Jun 2001 09:59:33 -0700, "R.S.Georg"
<R.S.Georg at let.leidenuniv.nl> wrote:

>>And, if anyone can make any sense of the phonetic side of the change *s > *k
>>mentioned above, I'd be glad to hear it...

>Armenian has a somewhat similar development (although the details are
>by far not as simple; I don't know them from the top of my head, so
>please look it up).

In Armenian, sw > k` (like tw and kw).

>In early European writings on things Indian, I encountered the term
>/upaniSad/ rendered as <Oup'nekhad>  (I think it was in Schopenhauer,
>but he certainly got it from someone else); the ultimate source of
>this impressionistic notation may have been Bengali Brahmin
>pronunciation of Sanskrit, but I'm not so sure about that.

Wasn't it simply French?

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon Jun 25 06:45:08 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 02:45:08 EDT
Subject: Uniformitarianism and the Arrowwood
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.024508.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/25/01 12:02:47 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> Actually, I'd rather put the onus on you to justify the identification of
> *ebur- or *eiw- with any particular modern tree classification.  I do not
> doubt the phonology in the reconstructions.  I think that anyone who looks
> closely will find that the meanings are anywhere as stable as you contend.

-- *eiuos produces a word meaning "yew" in Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, and
probably Hittite.  In Slavic, it's shifted to "willow".

The rules generally used for historical linguistics would accord a high
probability of this being the PIE meaning.

Again, if you want to argue in the field of historical linguistics, you have
to accept the rules in general use.

> What YOU must prove is that there's no chance that the "yew" word would
> have changed if *PIE had had a yew word.

-- that is not so.  As mentioned above, the general rule is that three
separate language families with the same meaning render a PIE meaning highly
probable.  Particularly if one or more is widely separated from the others.

> evidence says that the word would have changed - possibly many times in
> 2000+years.

-- odd that you haven't produced one scrap of it, then.

Semantic shifts in _other_ words have no relevance to the original meaning of
_this_ word.

Incidentally, yew wood was used for bows throughout northern Eurasia from
Mesolithic times on.  The Alpine "iceman" had a yew bow.

The evidence indicates that PIE had _two_ words for "yew", one (the older)
with the general sense of "evergreen tree with reddish heartwood and
berries", and the other (possibly a late dialectical word of the PIE center
and east) meaning roughly "bow-wood".


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Tue Jun 26 07:20:02 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 07:20:02 -0000
Subject: Uniformitarianism and the Arrowwood
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.072002.0000.>

Steve Long (17 Jun 2001) wrote (responding to my posting of 5 Jun 2001):

>Actually, I'd rather put the onus on you [DGK] to justify the identification
>of *ebur- or *eiw- with any particular modern tree classification.  I do not
>doubt the phonology in the reconstructions.  I think that anyone who looks
>closely will find that the meanings are anywhere as stable as you contend.

>And of course this whole idea doesn't depend on the phonology.  It depends on
>the meanings of these words.  What YOU must prove is that there's no chance
>that the "yew" word would have changed if *PIE had had a yew word.  A lot of
>evidence says that the word would have changed - possibly many times in 2000+
>years.  But in the end you have no way of proving what such words meant in the
>2000+ years before ACTUAL attestation.  Because you have no direct evidence at
>all.

According to your rhetoric, all words are susceptible to frequent, random,
unknowable change. Therefore, words cannot be used to argue anything
whatsoever about linguistic or ethnographic prehistory. You have objected to
other list-members "queering the game", and your response is to throw the
whole game-board into the trash.

And when did it become incumbent upon _me_ to prove "no chance" of something
happening contrary to a scenario I have suggested? Do you hold your own
scenarios to the same absolute standard of proof?

>There's been some talk about a linguistic Uniformitarian Principle.  So let
>me invoke it right now.

>What actually happened when people gave names to trees, before modern
>scientific classifications attempts to make them uniform?

You mean things are different now? Linnaeus unwittingly changed the habits
of all subsequent speakers, even those who have never heard of Linnaeus or
binomial nomenclature? When a pre-Linnaean (such as Dioscorides) discussed a
particular taxon, it could have referred to anything, in your view? It seems
rather arbitrary and capricious to invoke the UP only to exclude its
_present_ application in the next sentence.

>Let's take the eastern US only, and pick a tree with a good practical name.
>Near the top of the list of "common names" (non-scientific names) is
>"ARROWWOOD" - kind of yew/bow tree in concept.  Maybe it means wood you'd
>make arrows from or wood that looks like arrows.  Doesn't matter.

>As a matter of the "Uniformitarian Principle" and an example of old fashion
>American "non-dysfunctionality" (ha) we should see the ARROWWOOD stand for
>one tree and one tree only.  Or we should stop expecting that the *PIE word
>for YEW would have stood for one tree for 2000+ before that word would
>actually be attested.

>The answer is... STOP expecting one prehistoric name will equal one
>prehistoric tree.  JUST take a look at how dysfunctional something as
>simple as the "arrowwood" word can get:

>[...]

>"Arrowwood" #3 (Viburnum dentatum, acerifolium, recognitum, pubescens) -
>Other Names: southern arrowwood, northern arrowwood, smooth arrowwood,
>withe-wood, downy arrowwood, viburnum, black haw, highbush cranberry,
>maple-leaved viburnum, nannyberry, sheepberry, wild raisin.

Thanks for the memories! I haven't heard about highbush cranberries since
the days when Euell Gibbons was shilling for Post Grape-nuts.

>[...]

>Check out all those tree names!!!  MAJOR dysfunction!

Not at all. What you have forgotten while gathering the woodpile is that my
example involved members of the same tribe. In modern North America, such a
community corresponds roughly to a village like "Mayberry" with its
surrounding farmland, not to the entire eastern USA. If a single village
actually exhibited such a wide variety of terms for the same tree, it would
be a major dysfunction indeed, suitable for a plot-device.

Andy: "I told you to stake out the house behind the boxwoods!"
Barney: "Those _are_ boxwoods, Andy!"
Andy: "Those are _false_ boxwoods, Barn ..."

DGK


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Jun 23 03:15:22 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 23:15:22 EDT
Subject: "Uniformitarian Principle"
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.231522.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/22/2001 2:41:08 AM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:
<< ["Uniformitarian Principle"] = languages and speakers in the remote past
did not behave differently from the way languages and speakers have behaved
in the historical period.>>

Now, don't forget that you brought this "Uniformitarian Principle" up
specifically and especially as the support for your "rate of change"
statements about IE.

And whether it works or not for other aspects of historical linguistics (and
I think it does), it just doesn't work for your pronouncements about rate of
change.

You have no objective "rate of change" to offer for speakers in historical
periods.  So you really have nothing to extend to prehistorical periods.

<<To reject this position is to make historical linguistics impossible.>>

This is untrue. We can validly assume all kinds of uniformity and linguistic
continuity between the historic and the prehistoric - without buying your
subjective judgments about "rate of change" of IE languages.

There is plenty of room for "Uniformitarianism" in historical linguistics,
without claiming that it supplies you some kind of objective measure of
language "change" per measure of time.

<<Without the UP, historical linguistics would be no more orderly or
principled than a Michael Moorcock fantasy novel.  We need it.>>

But, unfortunately, as far as a scientific rate of change goes, you just
don't meet the qualifications.

Regards,
Steve Long


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sat Jun 23 01:25:21 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 21:25:21 EDT
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.212521.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/22/01 7:23:23 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes:

> but who is to deny the Steve Longs and other No-Protos of the world when
> they come back and say "Yes it is."?

-- well, they'll do that anyway.  Every field has this sort of
cannot-be-convinced person hanging around its fringes.


From mcalamia at hotmail.com  Wed Jun 27 10:50:19 2001
From: mcalamia at hotmail.com (Maria Anna Calamia)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 06:50:19 -0400
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.065019.0400.>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
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From petegray at btinternet.com  Sun Jun 24 18:47:14 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 19:47:14 +0100
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <SUN.24.JUN.2001.194714.0100.>

> what I am asserting is that the morphemes used in conjugation are very
> resistant to borrowing.  ...

The highly productive English morpheme -ess appears to derive (through Late
Latin) from the Greek -issa which appears, from its phonetic shape and other
factors, to be a loan into Greek from some substrate.

So there's one interesting example, at any rate.

Peter


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Jun 23 06:53:27 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 02:53:27 EDT
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
Message-ID: <SAT.23.JUN.2001.025327.EDT.>

[ moderator edited ]

In a message dated 6/22/2001 10:09:04 PM, parkvall at ling.su.se writes:
<< To the best of my knowledge, no variety of Haitian Creole has ever been
attested in which African words make up more than a couple of per cent (at
the very best) of the vocabulary. The lexicon of Haitian is normally
considered to be more than 80% (citing from memory, but I could probably
come up with references if neccessary) of French origin, regardless of
whether you consider the core lexicon or the whole vocab. Given that most
French affixes -- though they do exist -- have got lost on their way, it
would make more sense (which doesn't mean it would be correct) to describe
Haitian as French lexicon and no affixes rather than Afro lexicon and
french affixes. >>

You're quite right about the lexicon.  It is mainly French and I misread my
very old notes.

You should be aware however that you may find strong disagreement about your
"no affixes" statement in some quarters.  Michel DeGraff at MIT seemed to
find French affixes and even found their development and consistent with
genetic developments in French:

"[To identify Haitian Creole as non-genetic] these features must diverge when
 comparing the grammars of (colloquial) 17th-18th century French dialects to
 that of Haitian Creole, and such divergences must be *qualitatively*
 different than their counterparts in the ("genetic") course of French
 diachrony.

 So far, I have not be able to isolate such features. Whatever divergences
 exist between colloquial 17th-18th century French dialects and Haitian
 Creole (e.g., `loss' of verbal inflection, verb-placement differences, etc.)
 seem to have counterparts in the diachronic course of `genetic' languages.
 And what I find most intriguing is that such divergences in `genetic'
 diachrony also seem to coincide with the history of contact within these
 `genetic' diachronies."

There's a paper on HC by Michel DeGraff that should still be on the web at:
http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/degraff/hc-sketch.pdf

A completely different approach, and one that points to "genetic" continuity
with West African morphology was taken by Brousseau,  Filipovich & Lefebvre
at the University of Quebec :

"[Comparing] the productive morphology of Haitian with that of French (the
 lexifier language), and Fon, a contributive West African language, ... 1)
 productive affixes of Haitian creole pattern in a significant way with the
 model of contributing West African languages more so than with French; and 2)
 the presumed morphological simplicity of [HC] reduces to the selection of the
 unmarked option with respect to the position of morphological heads." (JPCL
 4:1 1989)

If any of the above is possibly accurate, then the multiple "genetic strains"
in Haitian Creole may still apply, despite my misstatement regarding the
lexical part.

What I was AMAZED by in your post was the following paragraph:

<<A deliberate oversimplification which would need to be taken by more than a
grain of salt, but which have some truth to it is that while a non-contact
language has one parent, an intertwiner has two, and a pidgin or creole
none.>>

The idea that any language can have TWO PARENTS - grain or salt or not - is a
significant enough step for me in this dialogue.  Following Russell and
Whitehead and the dictum that "qualitative differences are just large
quantitative differences," I would ask if there isn't a bit of "interwiner"
in most languages?

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Jun 23 08:09:09 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 04:09:09 EDT
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
Message-ID: <SAT.23.JUN.2001.040909.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/22/2001 10:44:59 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:

> 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.

<<This is not the way we use 'genetic' in linguistics.  We do 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.

Is there a more "pithy" answer to why there can only be one genetic ancestor
than this one?

Regards,
Steve Long


From parkvall at ling.su.se  Sat Jun 23 14:47:13 2001
From: parkvall at ling.su.se (Mikael Parkvall)
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 16:47:13 +0200
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
In-Reply-To: <271946182.3201868260@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SAT.23.JUN.2001.164713.0200.>

Regarding the history of Haitian Creole, both Joat Simeon and Larry Trask
recently referred to the classical pidgin-to-creole cycle as the current
majority view of creole development. Indeed, this is how most people have
become used to looking at creoles for at least the past four decades.

However, if only for the record, I thought that I as a creolist should tell
you that this view is now rapidly losing ground in mainstream anglophone
creolistics (Americans are thereby reinventing the view that francophone
creolistics -- whose works they never bothered to read since they're not in
English -- has had for a long time). What many, and perhaps even most,
creolists believe these days is that Haitian et al never passed through any
"pidgin bottleneck" -- the relation of Haitian to French, they have it, is
simply similar to that of French to Latin. End of story.

The debate on this subject is very heated. I personally strongly disagree
with the view sketched above, clinging to the view in which creoles indeed
have a pidgin past, and that this can be demonstrated even in modern
creoles. Things happened to eg French on its way to Haitian that normally
don't happen in "normal" language development.

If you ask me, the reasons for taking this new position are more of a
political nature than anything else ("Pidgins are primitive languages, and
my ancestors surely weren't primitive -- are you trying to say that we
blacks can't learn to master inflexions?").

Anyway, even though I dislike the direction creolistics is taking, I
thought that you as historical linguists should be aware of it, so this is
just for your information.

Mikael Parkvall


From miskec4096 at hotmail.com  Sun Jun 24 21:21:41 2001
From: miskec4096 at hotmail.com (Kreso Megyeral)
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 23:21:41 +0200
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
Message-ID: <SUN.24.JUN.2001.232141.0200.>

Larry Trask wrote:

> And Albanian is not Greek, Romance, Slavic, HUNGARIAN or Turkic, even though
> elements of these origins greatly outnumber the inherited elements.

Excuse me, but I will kindly ask for the explanation of the possible
Hungarian elements in Albanian. I'm a student of Hungarian and have also
studied Albanian, but have found no trace of evidence for such connection
(except the interesting similarity between Hungarian "|l" and Albanian "ul"
- to sit). Or was it that you just took Hungarian as an example of
"any-possible-language-it-could-be-connected-to"?


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Jun 23 08:00:04 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 04:00:04 EDT
Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns"
Message-ID: <SAT.23.JUN.2001.040004.EDT.>

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. >>

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."

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.

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.)

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:

<<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....

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.

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.

Regards,
Steve Long


From edsel at glo.be  Sat Jun 23 11:22:22 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 13:22:22 +0200
Subject: European Genetics/IE
Message-ID: <SAT.23.JUN.2001.132222.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: <JoatSimeon at aol.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2001 11:05 AM

[snip]
> None of the Romance languages was a pidgin to begin with; they all started
> off as fairly standard versions of Late Latin -- regional dialects of Late
> Latin, to be precise.

> There may well have been forms of pidgin Latin spoken in the course of Roman
> expansion, and among the masses of slaves from varoius areas in Italy and
> adjacent parts of the Roman domains.  In fact, there probably would have
> been.

> But they never became creolized, as far as I know.

[Ed Selleslagh]
I would like to add something to this:

It could possibly be argued that early Castilian had some kind of a pidgin
phase during the Reconquista, when it became the communication device for the
different regional groups (who all spoke different Romance languages, some even
non-IE Basque) taking part in it and settling in its wake, in the place of
fleeing Arabs. If it actually was a pidgin at one time, it quickly became a
creole, but with a relatively low social status (as most creoles): high level
poetry (troubadours) continued in Catalan for some time, but folksy comedy was
in Castilian.

In fact, Castilian has some, but not much, grammatical simplification compared
to other Romance languages like French or Italian (e.g. wholly or partly
'regularized' verbs) and inconsistency in phonetic evolution stages of
different words, indicating different Romance origins; and there are a number
of peculiarities that have been attributed to 'substrate', often Basque (e.g.
Lapesa)- although this is far from a consensus opinion. (Note that Castilian
was 'born' in the southern fringe of the Basque speaking region of the time; so
those wouldn't qualify as pidgin efects or creolization).

If Castilian is not so clearly a creole, this would be explainable by the fact
that its speakers originally spoke pretty closely resembling languages (except
the Basques: see above), but in different stages of phonetic evolution (e.g.
initial f>h, but not in all older words).

Another case of someone's two cents, I guess.

Ed.


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Sat Jun 23 20:15:07 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 15:15:07 -0500
Subject: European Genetics/IE
In-Reply-To: <fd.7bc3eb4.2859d859@aol.com>
Message-ID: <SAT.23.JUN.2001.151507.0500.>

	From what I've seen, written forms definitely seem close to the
standard.
	But I'm wondering if the masses initially spoke some pidginzed form
of Latin in the marketplace, which developed into a creole or somelike
close to one.
	I seem to remember reading about some degree of language-mixing (as
opposed to dual texts) in Hispano-Celtic inscriptions

[ Moderator's note:
  The following material is quoted from a posting by JoatSimeon at aol.com dated
  14 Jun 2001 05:05:29 EDT.
  -- rma ]

>> and it seems plausible that (some) early regional forms of Romance may have
>> initially been more like Latinate creoles than daughter languages.

>-- no, because the special conditions which are required for the creation of
>a creole language weren't present.

>Creoles are pidgins which have become 'naturalized' and spoken as a first
>language.

>To have a creole, you first need a pidgin -- and pidgins are the result of
>incomplete language acquisition in situations where multiple languages are
>spoken and a trade jargon is needed, but acquisition of the standard form is
>not possible.

>None of the Romance languages was a pidgin to begin with; they all started
>off as fairly standard versions of Late Latin -- regional dialects of Late
>Latin, to be precise.

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Fri Jun 22 11:53:42 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 11:53:42 -0000
Subject: Pelasgian/was Etruscans
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.115342.0000.>

Eduard Selleslagh (1 Jun 2001) wrote:

>If [Hebrew] <ko:pher> can mean 'pitch', and <go:pher> 'sticky stuff', couldn't
>there be some semantic link, leading either to convergence of two originally
>different words, or to two variants of the same original word?

This could well be a case of convergence. The 'covering'-word <ko:pher> is
clearly native Hebrew, from the common root <k-p-r> 'to cover'. The
'sticky-stuff'-word <go:pher>, if it is (as I think likely) derived from
(unrelated) Pelasgian *kupar-, seems to have been assimilated in form to the
more common Hebrew word. Aramaic has a verb <g-p-r> 'to cover with pitch'
apparently back-formed from <go:pher>.

For a third-party borrowing with k- in Greek and g- in West Semitic, we also
have the 'tin'-word: Gk. <kassiteros>, Aram. <gas't'iyra:>. Watkins derives
this from Elamite <kassi-ti-ra> 'coming from the land of the Kassi'.

DGK


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Fri Jun 22 12:43:50 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 12:43:50 -0000
Subject: Chronology and history of Germanic Consonant Shift
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.124350.0000.>

petegray (9 Jun 2001) wrote:

>As for the first sound shift, I'm not up to date with the most recent stuff,
>but I quote the following from the dtv-Atlas:

>    "For the date of the 1st sound shift, we can use the word Hanf, which
>comes from the Greek word kannabis.  This word is a loan word out of Scythian,
>which did not enter Greek till the 5th century BC.  In Germanic we meet the
>word in its shifted form *hanap-.  Since Germanic could not have borrowed this
>word very early, we can assert that at this time the rules *k > h and *b > p
>were still in force.  But it does not tell us how long this rule had existed.
>That it no longer was in force in the 3rd and 2nd centuries before Christ can
>be concluded from loan words from Latin, none of which have shifted forms.
>(The first contact of Germans with Romans as in this period.)"

A Scythian source for the 'hemp'-word is reasonable enough, given Old
Persian <kanab> and alleged cognates in Finno-Ugric. But why on earth would
Greek intermediation be necessary to get a Scythian word into Germania?
Darius I bridged the Danube in his costly campaign against the Scythians,
and that puts a large part of them much closer to the Germans than the
Greeks were.

>Walker-Chambers supports this.  He says:  "It is estimated that the First
>Sound Shift was completed by c 500BC; but we only know that it was finished
>before the Germanic peoples established contact with the Romans in the1st
>century BC, since none of the words borrowed from Latin were affected by it."

There's something wrong with this analysis, since the ethnonym
Catti/Chatti/Hesse and the hydronym Vacalis/Vachalis/Vahalis/Waal show that
the consonant-shift was _not_ completed everywhere by the 1st cent. BCE.
Both authors have assumed that "first contact" is relevant to the form of a
borrowed word. In the case of borrowings from Latin into Germanic, this is
probably false. The first borrowing of <coquus> 'cook' might well have
undergone shifting of initial [k] to [x] in some dialects, but the resulting
forms would have been superseded by fresh borrowings with [k], as
Romano-German contacts continued for several centuries. In situations like
this, "last contact" may be more important than "first contact".

DGK


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri Jun 22 16:38:59 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 17:38:59 +0100
Subject: -ca in Sanskrit and Bartholomae's law
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.173859.0100.>

> could someone explain why Bartholomae's law never affects -ca ?

It concerns the specific formation root + tos.  It raises a number of severe
questions, and the "new phonoogy" of PIE mght even remove teh law entirely.

In more traditional terms, -tos is seen as a bound morpheme suffixed to a
non-independent form of the root, whereas -ca is seen as a separate
morpheme, following an indpenedent word.  In our modern script, it happens
to be written on the word in Latin, not on the word in Greek, and on the
word in Sanskrit, but in Sanskrit everything is written without a space if
possible, so that means nothing.   The morpheme boundary between a preceding
element and -ca is much stronger than the boundary between a root (which
does not exist on its own) and the bound morpheme -tos.

Peter


From dlwhite at texas.net  Sun Jun 24 00:04:24 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 19:04:24 -0500
Subject: On "Joke Usage"
Message-ID: <SAT.23.JUN.2001.190424.0500.>

> A mild correction.  My position is that "all sorts of bizarre things" are
> also happening in the present.

        Like what?

> <<...Other than silly things like the joke usage of "moi" in English.>>

> Good example.  I imagine the last of the Anglo-Saxon wordists hearing that
> medieval Muppeteer Chaucer reciting his Tales and then calling all those
> French and Latin words "silly things" that should properly be categorized as
> "joke usage."

        Well, when "moi" displaces "me" in isolative usage, then you will
have something.  Not before.

> <<...in this case mixed languages lurking under every rock...>>

> Or staring you in the face.

        Again, like what?

> Dr White's situation is not unlike that of the English natural philosopher
> who traveled to Australia prepared to debunk the existence of the platypus,
> the kangaroo, etc.  A boxing match was arranged between the philosopher
> and a representative of one of these fauna.  After being soundly thrashed and
> knocked out in the first round, Dr White - I mean, the philosopher denied
> he had lost the match on the grounds that his opponent was theoretically
> impossible.

        Excuse me, but last I heard you were not even able to coherently
distinguish between influence and descent.  I think you are mistaken about
who got knocked out inf the first round.

        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".

Dr. David L. White


From edsel at glo.be  Sun Jun 24 09:15:05 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 11:15:05 +0200
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
Message-ID: <SUN.24.JUN.2001.111505.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stanley Friesen" <sarima at friesen.net>
Sent: Friday, June 15, 2001 3:32 AM

[ moderator snip ]

>>> Yes, but consider:
>>> 1) De Gaulle ?tait un tr?s grand homme.
>>> 2) De Gaulle ?tait un homme tr?s grand.

>>> The meaning is completely different.

> My French is rather weak, so I would appreciate an explanation of the
> distinction in the case of 'homme', please?

[Ed Selleslagh]

1) D.G. was a very great man
2) D.G. was a very tall man

Ed.


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sun Jun 24 18:53:50 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 19:53:50 +0100
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
Message-ID: <SUN.24.JUN.2001.195350.0100.>

>In Latin there is good evidence that adjectives (and similar modifiers)
>placed before the noun provide some form of prominence or salience to the
>adjective.

In Latin the adjective is regularly put before a complex nominal group, and
after a simple noun.  The reason is to indicate the limits of the noun
phrase;  an adjective not immediately followed by a noun in agreement is
left "hanging", and closure of the syntactic relationship implies closure of
the phrase.   For example the patterns:  adj - genitive - noun and
adjective-preposition-noun are very much commoner than other orders for
those combinations of words - though exceptions can of course be found.

Peter


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Mon Jun 25 22:28:28 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 18:28:28 -0400
Subject: PIE syntax and word-order
In-Reply-To: <B746FCB8.EAF%xavier.delamarre@free.fr>
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.182828.0400.>

>     Of course, classical example of handbooks. You have (semantic) freedom
> with the substantive maison but not with homme.
>     What is in question here is that when there is the possibility of free
> word order, it does not induce _systematically_ a difference in meaning,
> style, emphasis etc.

sorry for the delay on replying to this.  i disagree that what is in
question here is solely the systematic correlation between differences in
word order and differences in meaning.  yes, i am saying that i would
expect differences in meaning, broadly construed, accompanying differences
in word order, but i've also been trying to say that whether this holds up
in every instance or not is actually independent of whether word order is
a part of the grammar of all languages.  in order for word order to be a
component of the grammar it is not necessary for it to be tied directly to
nuances of meaning.  it is only necessary for the various word order
possibilities in a given language to be determined by the grammar of that
language.  maybe there are two word order variants in French or some other
language that have absolutely identical meanings and usage restrictions,
but the point is that the fact that they are available at all (while other
imaginable orders are not) is a fact about French grammar.

>     But there again it is not PIE, where these possibilities were much more
> extended than in Modern french.

yes, of course, but that does not imply that the possibilities are not
regulated by the grammar.  it just makes it harder to show that they are.

>     And to reduce PIE syntax to word-order (Lehmann, Friedrich) is simply
> nonsense.

>     XD

i agree wholeheartedly.  i don't think anyone was trying to do that (at least i
hope).  to reduce English syntax to word order is nonsense as
well.  syntax involves the full scope of putting elements together to form
a grammatical sentence in a given language.  but its also nonsense to
reduce PIE syntax (or the syntax of any language) to something excluding
word order.  word order has to be part of it, just like case, agreement,
etc.  like i've said before, these other parts of syntax are much easier
to reconstruct than word order, so it may well be that confidently
reconstructing PIE word orders and their nuances will remain impossible,
but that's a very different thing than saying they didn't exist in the
grammar.


From g_sandi at hotmail.com  Sun Jun 24 11:22:19 2001
From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi)
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 11:22:19 -0000
Subject: Word Order and verb endings (was Re: No Proto-Celtic?)
Message-ID: <SUN.24.JUN.2001.112219.0000.>

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From proto-language at email.msn.com  Sun Jun 24 17:58:32 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 12:58:32 -0500
Subject: Word Order and verb endings (was Re: No Proto-Celtic?)
Message-ID: <SUN.24.JUN.2001.125832.0500.>

Dear Nath and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Vidhyanath Rao" <rao.3 at osu.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2001 9:34 PM

<snip>

> Most importantly, similar forms can be used to turn a clause into an
> adjective: "The man who came yesterday" can be rendered as
>     neRRu    vanta    manitan
>    yesterday [come] man

> This suggests a very different explanation: Finite verbs came from
> verbal nouns and the order stem+pronoun then will be due to the usual
> order of adjective+noun.

[PCR]

First, I think we should explicit note that Adj+N is the order associated with
SOV.

Probably, the following comments are arguably more appropriate to the
Nostratic-List, and Rich may transfer this posting there if he chooses to do
so.

My studies of many language groups have led me to the conclusion that if one
can go back far enough into the syntactic structure of any language, one finds
equational sentences, composed of a Topic and Comment.

The application of this to IE is that I propose that IE or the language that
produced IE had a stage in which a statement like

*mon(u) *sek

could be interpreted to mean either

'the man is cutting (something)', or

'the man is cut',

with the context distinguishing between the two possible interpretations.

With the aid of an element, *te, designating a fellow tribe-member, hence
animate,

*mon(u) seket(e)

man cut(ting)+tribe-member

in effect, this Adj+N phrase, specified the active aspect of *mon(u), so that

THE MAN IS CUTTING (SOMETHING)

was the mandatory interpretation.

On the other hand, with the aid of an element, *?e (or *H{1}e), designating
'(something) over there', hence inanimate,

*mon(u) sek(e)H{1}(e)

man cut+(something) over there

in effect, this Adj+N phrase, specified the inactive aspect of *mon(u), so that

THE MAN IS CUT

was the mandatory interpretation.

I realize that this explanation involves many assumptions that many
list-members will be positively loath to make; and, for them, I offer this
(very much oversimplified) explanation only as a curiosity.

[VR]

> I don't presume to claim that the origin of the person/number endings in
> PIE is similar: To do that we need an explanation of why these endings
> do not show common gender vs neuter gender.

[PCR]

I presume you are referring here to the Tamil (and Dravidian) paradigm here
rather than the IE one.

In the case of IE, inanimate neuters (another oversimplification, I know) would
naturally favor stative endings; and animates, when not expressing their
animacy, would be functionally neuter.

Now I know all this needs beaucoup of qualifications but, in the interest of
hopefully not trying the patiences of list-members who will find this
speculation worthless, I have tried not to expand it overduly.

[VR]

> I just wish to point out that alternate explanations must be ruled out before
> asserting that Verb-Pronoun order lead to the endings.

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  Sun Jun 24 10:15:00 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 12:15:00 +0200
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <SUN.24.JUN.2001.121500.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stanley Friesen" <sarima at friesen.net>
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2001 3:35 PM

> At 12:36 PM 6/8/01 +0000, Gabor Sandi wrote:

>> I think that it is odd as well, yet I can't help noticing that personal
>> markings of verbs in IE (and Uralic and Altaic as well, for all you
>> Nostraticists) consistently come after the verb stem and not before it.
>> What's more, some of these endings contain consonants identical or similar
>> to what is found in the corresponding personal pronoun. -m- in the first
>> person is the most obvious (in PIE and Uralic, plus some other proto
>> languages), as is the -t- in the 2nd person plural (also, 2nd person sing.
>> in Uralic), -t- in the third person less so, the -s- in the 2nd person sing.
>> not at all. There are three competing hypotheses:

>> 1. coincidence
>> 2. agglutination of the pronoun
>> 3. there is a relationship, but the ending is not the result of an
>> agglutination of the verbal root with a pronoun

>> If the answer is no.2 above, I would like to come up with a succession of
>> linguistic changes that look reasonable and result in the pattern we see.

> Well, it is certainly possible that some pre-PIE language was VSO without
> effecting the possibility that PIE itself was SOV.  Such transitions are
> attested.  Perhaps this means that Proto-Nostratic was VSO, perhaps
> not.  Either way, once the clitics have transitioned into inflections there
> is no bar against a change in the unmarked position of the subject.

> [Note, reconstruction of word order is difficult, there is good evidence
> for "early" VSO in both Germanic and Celtic - but that is still later than
> the classical IE languages].

[Ed Selleslagh]

Even as a non-specialist, I can only note that in agglutinating languages (e.g.
in some Uralic and Altaic, but also in Quechua, the Inca language) the person
marker for verbs and the possessive marker for nouns is virtually the same
suffix, or obviously derived from the same form. IMHO this pleads in favor of
'2. agglutination of the pronoun'. Maybe it also suggests a previous
agglutinative phase for PIE; if so, that would make the position of the old
suffixed pronoun irrelevant for the VSO/SOV... discussion.

It might also suggest that in the early stages of agglutinating languages the
distinction between verbs and nouns wasn't as clear-cut as we might want to
believe. That would suggest an even earlier stage when lexical words
represented essentially 'concepts', and were themselves invariable like in
isolating languages.

So, my first suggestion that the enclitic pronoun might be due to PIE having
been VSO was probably not so fortunate, but it yielded an interesting dicussion
nonetheless.

Ed.


From alderson+mail at panix.com  Mon Jun 25 18:04:18 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 14:04:18 -0400
Subject: *G^EN-
In-Reply-To: <005701c0f74a$a966c8a0$7a464241@swbell.net>
 (proto-language@email.msn.com)
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.140418.0400.>

On 17 Jun 2001, Pat Ryan wrote:

> It is well-established in Afrasian studies, that roots are CVC. If we assume
> that IE and Afrasian are derived from a common ancestor, Nostratic, it is
> natural to suppose that all non-borrowed IE roots are originally derived from
> Nostratic CVC roots even though the CVC component may not have survived in IE
> as an independent root in a given instance.

So the question you are really asking is, "Is **g'en- a possible Nostratic
root?", then?  Wrong newsgroup for that discussion...

> To take one of the examples you have provided, *keubH2-, 'lie down, lay
> down', I see no reason not to derive it from Pokorny's 2. *kew-, 'bend'.

> Why do you not explain to us why you believe that it cannot be so derived,
> and must constitute an independent, unrelated root?

No, that's not how it works.  As the one proposing the etymology, it is up to
you to demonstrate why it should be accepted.  And if you are proposing it as
an *Indo-European* etymology, you are restricted to using only IE materials in
your demonstration.  (Internal reconstructions are of course fair game.)

								Rich Alderson


From alderson+mail at panix.com  Mon Jun 25 18:59:27 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 14:59:27 -0400
Subject: *G^EN-
In-Reply-To: <006501c0f74c$a953f200$7a464241@swbell.net>
 (proto-language@email.msn.com)
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.145927.0400.>

On 17 Jun 2001, Pat Ryan wrote:

> 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-
> (which I do not believe to be the case), 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-.

That is of course one possibility, but let's examine one other that is at least
as likely:

Let us suppose the existence of a stem extension **-n-, added to roots to form
a verbal stem, and a rule of "laryngeal metathesis" which requires that the
sequence **-HN- => **-NH- (where <N> here represents any nasal).  In that case,
the expected pre-form of reconstructed *g'enH1- must ultimately be **gVH1-n-,
with a root **gVH1.

So without further evidence for the reduced shape of the root, I propose that
we stick with the reconstructible form.

								Rich Alderson


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon Jun 25 04:31:29 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 00:31:29 EDT
Subject: About the Yew1
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.003129.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/24/01 10:29:43 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> BTW, what I suspect - rather than believe - is that the evidence can support
> a language like *PIE being spoken on the Danube in neolithic times.  Since
> *PIE probably didn't fall from the sky, I suspect the predecessor(s) of that
> language may have spread there from Anatolia.

-- there's plenty of evidence it didn't, and absolutely none that it did.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon Jun 25 04:34:43 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 00:34:43 EDT
Subject: About the Yew1
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.003443.EDT.>

>Steve Long

>A good piece of Anatolia does not have yew trees either.  In fact,
>the central plateaus have been steppes for most of the more modern climatic
>periods.

-- moving the PIE speakers around Anatolia again, are we?

One minute these people of 7000 BCE are in far eastern Anatolia, among the
red deer.  Next they're in the steppes where there are no yew trees.

And they must have been _very careful_ not to see the lions, leopards and roe
deer; not to mention the olives and vines native to central and western
Anatolia.

Meanwhile, by time-travel and telepathy, they knew all about horses and
wheeled vehicles, thousands of years before the development of those
technologies.

Astoundingly capable people -- perhaps Alien Space Bats were involved?

What a waste of time and effort.


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Tue Jun 26 08:30:38 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 08:30:38 -0000
Subject: About the Yew1
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.083038.0000.>

Steve Long (6 Jun 2001) wrote:

>Quick note.  Allow me to address this in more detail once I get back to my
>papers.

>But I did want to just point out that "Greek has (s)mi:lax" from the earlier
>post [DGK, 5 Jun 2001] is a good place to start to examine the simplification
>being attempted above.

>The statement that "It is very unlikely that a name for this particular tree,
>once established among a body of speakers, would be applied by those speakers
>to any other tree" just won't work with Greek.

Actually, I believe it will work, but my earlier posting contained a glaring
oversight. The regular Greek word for 'yew' is <taxos>, which is clearly
from the same source as Latin <taxus>. The word I cited, <smi:lax>, is an
epithet of several diverse plants. As you suggest, the most plausible
connection is with <smi:le:> 'type of knife', and the epithet probably means
'having knife-like leaves', since vines and weeds are hardly suitable for
carving. Anyhow, there is no reason to suppose that <smi:lax> was ever
established in the _exclusive_ sense of 'yew' and then applied to other
plants.

>In fact, the Greeks used "smilax" to apply at least four other forms of flora.
>And the original associations they were making appear to be to carving or
>perhaps sharpness of the leaves.  As far as, "red berries" goes, one of the
>trees-smilax was the "Hollyoak" or "Holmoak", which of course has red berries,
>provides an excellent carving wood and has sharp leaves.  The odd thing, of
>course, is that there is little or no reference to the smilax being poisonous
>in Classical Greek.  When we do have a connection between poisonous and
>arrows, it is in words like "ion", which is often associated with the violet,
>although there are texts where it is pretty clear this association is
>arbitrary and that the word has multiple meanings in reference to flora also.

There are three distinct Greek words here: the oxytone <i:os> 'arrow'
referred by L&S to the root of <ienai> 'to go'; the oxytone <ios> 'poison,
esp. of serpents' cognate with Latin <vi:rus> 'slime; poison' (PIE *weis-
Pok. 1134); and the paroxytone <ion> 'violet' cognate with Lat. <viola> id.
of non-IE origin.

>The closer we look, in fact, the more we understand that the ancients were
>more concerned with wood and pitch and bark and juice than they were with the
>modern-style scientific taxonomy of trees (except for the occasional natural
>historian) and that the names they actually used reflected this.  More
>importantly, if we don't look closely, we may inadvertantly use Occam's Razor
>to remove a good chunk of the truth.

If poor old Occam had a nickel for every time someone misused his razor, he
would be the world's richest dead man. It seems to me that your own method
of analysis is likely to cut out much of the truth as well. Lumping together
similar-sounding words in order to support crude generalizations is as
hazardous to the facts as going berserk with a straight razor.

DGK


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon Jun 25 06:24:04 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 02:24:04 EDT
Subject: Yew Two
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.022404.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/24/01 10:59:43 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> Another possibility which I like is that Irish <iubhar>, Gaelic <iubhar>
> simply are reflections of the early or later Greek influences among

-- no, this is phonologically impossible.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon Jun 25 06:23:20 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 02:23:20 EDT
Subject: Yew Two
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.022320.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/24/01 10:59:43 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> Because I suspect that words like Irish <iubhar>, Gaelic <iubhar>, Old Irish
> <ibar> were words that could have developed as trade words,

-- No.  This is out of the question; obviously false.

PIE *eiuos, "yew", is attested by cognates in Celtic, Germanic, Baltic,
Slavic, and (probably) Hittite.

This is more than enough, by the usual rules, to guarantee PIE status for
*eiuos.


From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com  Mon Jun 25 13:39:08 2001
From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 09:39:08 -0400
Subject: Yew Two
In-Reply-To: <111.125ec83.285f8916@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.093908.0400.>

Mr. Long is playing with Irish orthography here.  The Old Irish word
is <ibar>, with a short <i>, as cited earlier in the message.  The
spellings with <iu> reflect Early Modern Irish developments (growth
of a glide vowel, shift of the diphthongal crest) and resemblance to
Greek <iophoros> is chimerical.  Fluctuations between <io/iu>
spellings in Modern Irish/Scottish Gaelic words reflect mid/high
vowel exchanges in dialects that have nothing to do with the Old
Irish forms of the words.

Jim Rader

> Of course, Gr <iophoros> as a borrowed word into Celtic may possibly have
> ended up as Irish <iubhar> and Gaelic <iubhar>.  (See, e.g., Gaelic
> <leabhar>,a book; Welsh <llyfr>; from Latin <liber>; <io> and <iu> being
> somewhat interchangeable, compare Gaelic <iollagach> with <iullagach>, both
> meaning frolicsome.)  See also Gaelic <uthaidh, i:thaidh>, arrow;
> <coiliobhar>, a kind of gun; <ionntraich>, miss.  Cf., Gaelic <giuthas>,
> Early Irish <gius>, fir or similar wood.) All thios might suggest a
> connection that conforms better perhaps to what we know about the use of
> trade names for materials in ancient times.
...........
>
> Regards,
> Steve Long


From alderson+mail at panix.com  Mon Jun 25 19:14:07 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 15:14:07 -0400
Subject: Yew Two
In-Reply-To: <111.125ec83.285f8916@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com)
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.151407.0400.>

On 18 Jun 2001, Steve Long wrote _inter alia_:

> 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.)

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 parti-
ciple /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, to draw conclusions
supporting your view of the linguistic world which are not actually borne out
by the evidence.  When the Basque+everything enthusiasts do it, we criticize
them; we shouldn't let you get away with the same thing in these discussions.

								Rich Alderson


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Mon Jun 25 20:19:06 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 15:19:06 -0500
Subject: Yew Two
In-Reply-To: <111.125ec83.285f8916@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.151906.0500.>

[snip]

	Buck & Partridge have Latin ebur as ultimately from Egyptian
	Gamkrelidze & Ivanov don't seem to be so sure
	In any case, I'm sure more work has been done since they wrote this

see Sanskrit ?bha-h "ivory" [Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1995: 444]
< Indo-European *yebh-, *Hebh- [Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1995: 444]
< Indo-European *lebh-onth [Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1995: 444]
< ? *lebho- [Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1995: 444]
< ? Near Eastern language [Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1995: 444]
< ? Egyptian ?b, ?bu [Ernout & Meillet 1939: 249]
see Coptic ebou, ebu [Ernout & Meillet 1939: 249]
see Egyptian 3bw, Coptic ebou, ebu "ivory" [Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1995: 444]
< *jebu [Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1995: 444]
see Hebrew s^en-habbim "tusk" (s^en "tooth") [Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1995: 444]

>The Romans, of course, knew ivory as <ebur, eboris>.  But they also called
>ivory a "horn" <cornu> and words for ivory itself have been applied to the
>boar and other tusks and horns of various kinds, as well as whale bone.  (See
>Germanic <ebar>, <eber>, <ibor>, <epur>, <i:for> boar; Lat <aper> boar.)
>[snip]

	Spanish berro "cress" is usually seen as from Celtic. Here's what I
have. MacBain, of course, is dated but his link between watercress and water
is interesting, although I don't know if the calque is valid in Celtic.

berro "watercress"; berra "strong type of watercress"; berraza, berrera
"water parsnip"
	< Iberian Celtic [jng]
	< Celtic [wje 190-91; rks 12-13; Corominas 1972: II 211]
	see Gaelic biolaire, Irish biolar, early Irish biror, Welsh berwr,
Cornish, Breton beler "watercress" [MacBain]
	see Welsh berwr [wje 40; Corominas 1972: II 226]
	< Celtic *beruro- [MacBain; Corominas 1972: II 226
	see French berle, Latin berula [MacBain; wje 40]
	< Gaulish beruro "watercress" [wje 190-91]
	see Celtic berw? "seethe"; Old Irish tipra, Gaelic tobar "well"
[MacBain]
	see English burn "spring, stream"; German brunnen kresse
"watercress; i.e. well-cress" [MacBain]
	see early Gaelic bir "water", bior "well" [MacBain]
	see Indo-European *bhreu- "to boil, bubble, effervesce, burn"
[Watkins 1985: 9]
	see Old English burn, burna "spring, stream"
	< Germanic *brunn?n < *bhrunn-, *bhrunen- [Watkins 1985: 9]
	see Greek phrear "spring"
	< *bhr?w-r- [Watkins 1985: 9]
	see Latin ferv?re "to boil, ferment"
	< *bherw- [Watkins 1985: 9]

>(E.g, Pliny calls <ibe:ris>, "a kind of cress." Cf., vibo, vibo:nis, m., the
>flower of the herb called "Britannica,"- Pliny.) Hesychlus mentions both
>plants and animals with <iber-> names , and attributes the name "Iberes" to
>an unidentified animal, <iber>.  Cf., "gravis imber et uber", Latin, <uber>
>referring to copious-growing plants and presumably trees and trade wood.

[snip]

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Mon Jun 25 06:39:15 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 02:39:15 EDT
Subject: Ockham's Razor
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.023915.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/25/2001 12:21:29 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com writes:
<< -- so far, you have not presented any facts supporting the hypothesis that
the word for "red deer" somehow meant "fallow deer" or "deer in general" in
remote antiquity. >>

So far, you have presented no facts that show any distinction between the two
types of deer in early IE languages.

Supporting a possible Anatolian origin for IE languages, you have provided no
distinction between the two deer types in Anatolian languages.

The earliest distinction I am aware of in IE languages is possibly Roman and
apparently refers to the semi-domestication of the fallow.  You've shown
nothing that indicates that we have any way of knowing how *PIE speakers
distinguished between the two types of deer.

The most apparent solution is that there was no distinction between the two
deer types in *PIE.

<<Elaphos", red deer, specifically; "ellos" and "enelos", young of the red
deer, fawn.>>

Show me specifically in any Classical Greek texts where the distinction is
made between red deer and fallow deer.

If you cannot, then I think it is reasonable to conclude that this whole
fallow deer thing has nothing to do with history or IE origins.  Upon close
examination, this seems to be the way most of these paleolinguistic arguments
for an IE homeland go.

Regards,
Steve Long


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon Jun 25 06:51:58 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 02:51:58 EDT
Subject: Red Deer in Anatolia
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.025158.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/25/01 12:22:10 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> In the IE languages most relevant - those where the fallow may have been
> present natively - the red deer and fallow deer were one thing - a deer.
> Ockham's Razor.  Do not multiply entities needlessly.

-- no.  This is a false statement.  These are distinct terms in enough IE
languages that the attribution of PIE *elhen is secure.


From leo at easynet.fr  Mon Jun 25 16:27:32 2001
From: leo at easynet.fr (Lionel Bonnetier)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 18:27:32 +0200
Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc.
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.182732.0200.>

Steve Gustafson wrote:

>> Is there any obvious reason why -cum is the only instance of the archaic
>> system?

> 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...


From leo at easynet.fr  Mon Jun 25 16:43:29 2001
From: leo at easynet.fr (Lionel Bonnetier)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 18:43:29 +0200
Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc.
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.184329.0200.>

Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

>> It's funny that Latin suffixed -cum in mecum, tecum, etc.
>> has created some special -go case marker in Spanish with
>> conmigo, contigo, consigo.

[Ed]
> Why do you call Sp. -go a case marker? Isn't 'contigo' simply a popular
> formation based upon 'tecum' (>tigo), with 'con' added when people became
> unaware of the meaning of -go?

Sure, but intuitively, by comparison with other
prepositions, there's a feeling of a -go mark:

para mi     con mi go
para ti     con ti go
para si     con si go

One may say it's felt like a con-go circumfix
because they write them as single words.

> In Brabant Dutch dialects you have a similar phenomenon with the duplication
> of the 2sg. pronoun when it was forgotten that -de was originally 'du' (a
> lost word in later Dutch, like 'thou' in English. 'Gij' corresponds to
> 'you', originally a plural):

> Du. 'hebt gij...?' (Have you ...?) , dial. 'hedde-gij?' < hebst du gij?
> 'Gij' is clearly superfluous like 'con-' in 'contigo', as long as you still
> understand the original formation (quod non, for all, except a few
> linguists).

Maybe the m-s-t... personal endings in IE verbs
crunched previous marks the same way?

> I'm really looking forward to the answers to your question about
> cum/cis/-que.  We already had an informative discussion about *kom (Lat.
> cum/con-, but also Germanic ge-).

I'll dig for it. I hope it explains why *ke/o went
ge- instead of he-... (Heschwister, tohether...)


From leo at easynet.fr  Mon Jun 25 16:52:53 2001
From: leo at easynet.fr (Lionel Bonnetier)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 18:52:53 +0200
Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc.
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.185253.0200.>

petegray wrote:

>> Is there any obvious reason why -cum is the only instance of the archaic
>> system?

> It only occurs with personal pronouns, and nowhere else.   The most
> interesting suggestion I have heard is that it began with an avoidance of
> the sequence cunn-.   cum nobis could sound like forms of cunnus, from which
> comes the good English word cunnilingus.  Hence nobiscum, thence to other
> personal pronouns.

Ha, not only *wlkos was not allowed on the hunt,
but cunn- was taboo too in rhetorics... But what
about "cum nostribus (...)" or "cum novis (...)"
or similar? Maybe less frequent.

>> May *kom (cum) and *ko (cis) and *kwe (-que) be related etymologically
>> around the idea of "here-nearby-with"?

> No.  Latin cum has a good PIE history in *kom or *km, and -que has a
> different one in *-kwe.  (different consonant, different vowel)

No *ko-we > *kwe pattern envisionable? (*-we being
just a dummy placeholder here).


From dlwhite at texas.net  Mon Jun 25 21:16:52 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 16:16:52 -0500
Subject: Note on 'dhole'
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.161652.0500.>

> A word for wolf does not have to refer to an actual animal.  Imported wolf
> hides or wolf heads, wolf teeth, wolf images, wolf stories, wolf totems,
> powdered wolf whatevers, people with wolf nicknames, animals or animal
> by-products that might be like a wolf in some form or function or captive
> wolves traveling with an ancient equivalent of a circus or at the zoo might
> all answer to the name "wolf."

        Well yes, but then the word would probably be a borrowing (unless
there is some evidence it is a coined compound, which does not seem likely),
in which case Kannada "tola" is not its real origin, so my point still
stands.  There is also the problem that Kannada /t/ does not really explain
a spelling with "dh".  It would appear more likely that the original etymon
has been lost somehow, and that the Kannada word is a side-show.

Dr. David L. White


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Tue Jun 26 06:35:37 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 02:35:37 EDT
Subject: the 'Dhole'
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.023537.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/25/2001 3:01:34 PM, dlwhite at texas.net replied to the
following post:

<<Your question is very interesting: why have wolves not penetrated south
India or SW Asia? It can't be just the heat - north India (where there ARE
wolves) can be as hot as any place on this earth in the summer,... Maybe it's
the humidity they don't like, or there are carnivores who thrive better than
wolves in the year-round humid heat.>>

<<Yes, dholes do.  Why is unclear.  They are not tropical animals,
being known to occur as far north as the so-called Siberia of Siberian
tigers.>>

Dholes (aka "red dog of India" (Kipling)) are found in dense forests.  Wolves
as a general rule and apparently especially in southern Asia are found in
open habitats.  There has been some small marginal crossover noted.

<<But they are an older lineage than wolves (with smaller brains, for
example), and have perhaps had longer to adapt, however they have, to
year-round humid heat. >>

It may well be the other way around.  Wolves and dholes evolved from a common
ancestor and it looks like it's the dholes that carry more innovations.
"Smaller brains" are no indication of evolutionary age or time - the all-time
champion brain size-to-weight ratio goes to a South American fish that
developed a much longer time ago.  I don't know the numbers, but brain size
probably has nothing to do with either intelligence or primitiveness in this
case.

<<They used to occur in Europe, but were in the long run unable to compete
with wolves there. So it is odd: wolves out-compete dholes in Europe, but
dholes out-compete wolves in south/east Asia. >>

Much more likely, the dhole lost its habitat in the deforestation that turned
most of Europe into a savannah in the early Holocene.  There appears to be
very little competition between wolves and dholes where they share common
ground.  Dholes are generally considered to compete with the big cats and
other big predators - but mainly with man - where they occur.  (See, e.g.,
Venkataraman, A. "Do dholes (Cuon alpinus) live in packs in response to
competition with or predation by large cats." Current
Science,1995,11:934-36.)  Large packs of dholes are reputed in folk reports
capable of taking on tigers, though this is definitely (and wisely) not how
they make their living.  Dholes also seem to be vulnerable to disease because
of their social behavior.

Dholes exhibit a relatively high degree of social behavior - more so than the
wolf - and their need to cohabit in much larger colonies may also have made
them more vulnerable to "persecution" by man.  These large social units also
place a heavy burden on food resources, as the dhole appears to be an
ultracarnivore rather than an omnivore like the dog or bear.  Tropical
forests would offer them a better bet at finding a high enough ratio of prey
concentration to subsist on.

<< Well, the obvious possibility is that is refers to dholes, and that
somewhere along the line somebody screwed up in saying that it means 'wolf'.>>

Or that it applied to wolves and was later applied to "dholes".  Common names
given to the dhole have been reported as (these are referenced as from Burton
1940). :

English: dhole, red dog, asiatic wild dog, Indian wild dog, Indian hunting dog
Hindi: adivi-kuta, son-kuta, sona-kuta, rasa-kuta.
Assamese: kuang-kukur, rang-kukur.
Bengali: ban Kutta, ban-kukur.
Bhutanese: phara.
Burmese: tan-kwe.
Canarese: ken-nai, chen-nai.
Chenchu: reis-kukul.
Chinese: nyar
Gujiarati: earam-naiko.
Gurkhali: ban-kukur.
Hindustani: jungli-kuta, rwn-kuta, ban-kuta.
Kachin: kyi-kwa-lam.
Kashmiri: jungli-kuta, ram-hun, ban-kuta, bhansa.
Korku: bun-secta.
Lepcha: sa-tun.
Malay: sirgala Aijing-kutar.
Malayalam: hahmasai-kuta, kotsun, kolsa, kolarsi.
Nepali: bwaso.
Tibetan: phara.
Tamil: chen-nai.
Telegu: vanna-kooka.
Thai: maa paa.

A Javanese/Sumatran source gives:
[DOG:] anjing; wasua (Kanikeh, Seram).
[DHOLE:] ajag; anjing hutan.

Another more recent source gives
Hindi: dhole
Tamil: chen nai, kattu nai
Telugu: reza kutta
Kannada: kadunai

Possibly British or Hindi speakers applied the original or generic wolf name
to the "Cuon alpinus" (dhole), relatively recently.

The taxonomic name has now changed back again I believe to "Canis alpinus."
The dhole is hardly ever called a wolf in European literature, except in
Romance languages ("lobo alpino").  The original classification of the dhole
(by Pallas 1811) was as a dog - Canis.

The obvious reason is that the dhole looks like a dog, much more so than a
wolf does.  There are photos on the web and in some the dhole looks just like
"Old Yeller".

Although dholes are relatively close relatives of wolves and dogs, in the
times before close comparative anatomy and DNA, they were totally associated
with dogs.  It is much more likely it would seem that a dhole would have been
called a dog than a wolf before the 20th century.  Two 19th century entries
on the dhole illustrate:

This is from an American Natural History series of the late 1800's:
"Buansuah.
 This is the native name of the wild dog of Nepal and northern India, an
 animal whose special interest to us lies in the fact that it is supposed by
 naturalists to be the original type of the dog tribe, although the honor of
 such a supposition is shared with the Dhole of British India. The Nepal
 claimant is certainly a dog in the rough, without the refining influences of
 association with the human race.

 It is of a reddish color, pale underneath, with a bushy, pendulous tail, and
 in size is between that of the wolf and the jackal, but with very stout
 limbs. It hunts in packs of eight or twelve, and follows game mostly by the
 nose instead of the eye, as it possesses exquisite powers of scent. It is
 shy, and never willingly permits itself to be seen, but is capable of being
 tamed to a certain degree, and when captured young, can be trained to hunt.
 It is of the most assistance in chasing the wild boar, as its wolf-like
 attack of sudden snap is more destructive to its prey than the bite of an
 ordinary hound, but for other game it is not at all trustworthy, and will
 often give up the chase at the critical moment, and turn its attention to a
 tame sheep or goat which happens to be grazing in its pathway. The difference
 between the habits of this animal and those of the faithful and trusted
 'friend of man,' is a remarkable illustration of development."

This is translated from a Danish book on dogs printed in 1880:

"The DHOL - a wild dog in India, resembling a sighthound
 The Indian Wild Dog or the Dhol lives wild in India. Form and size mostly
 resembles a small sighthound. Slimmer and with a more pointed nose than the
 Dingo, whom it resembles in color and in the form of the pointed upright
 ears, the Dhol is lighter in construction and possess more power and
 endurance.  It also have a bushier tail...
 Most of the Dhols live in the highlands of Dekan at the Koromandel coast, but
 they are not numerous anywhere. It is also very shy and prefer the big
 jungles.  When hunting, the Dhol are often seen in packs of 50 - 60
 individuals and they persue all kind of prey.  They are said to be an
 important factor to stop the spread of the tiger. Dhol packs don't hesitate to
 attack tigers or bears. Even if 10 or more are killed, the others keep
 attacking the prey very fervently until it is exhausted.  The Dhol is known
 to be very independant."

The principle commercial value of the dhole (as with the wolf) has long been
its fur.  As it has some seasonal coat variation, its confusion with the wolf
could have easily occurred not in the jungle - where it was rarely seen by
most folks - but at the marketplace, where its fur would have been traded
along with the wolf's.

Regards,
Steve Long


From Georg-Bonn at t-online.de  Mon Jun 25 21:51:11 2001
From: Georg-Bonn at t-online.de (Stefan Georg)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 23:51:11 +0200
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <3B29B210.53539CD1@pobox.com>
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.235111.0200.>

>> I once came across a woman who had learned the word 'misled'
>> through reading, and who pronounced it like 'mild', . . .

>Does anyone really rhyme it with `drizzled'?

With "his lead", I think ... (But what do I know). StG
--
Dr. Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn


From bmscott at stratos.net  Mon Jun 25 21:53:36 2001
From: bmscott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott)
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 17:53:36 -0400
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <3B29B210.53539CD1@pobox.com>
Message-ID: <MON.25.JUN.2001.175336.0400.>

On 14 Jun 2001, at 23:58, Anton Sherwood wrote:

>> I once came across a woman who had learned the word 'misled'
>> through reading, and who pronounced it like 'mild', . . .

> Does anyone really rhyme it with `drizzled'?

I once knew someone who had acquired it through reading as
/'maIzld/ and who only later connected it with the /,mIs'lEd/ that she'd
heard others use.

Brian M. Scott


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Tue Jun 26 20:32:48 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 15:32:48 -0500
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <3B29B210.53539CD1@pobox.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.153248.0500.>

	No, but on US TV I've heard kooks talk about being /maizld/ by
politicians and about things being /aw-ri/ rather than /@rai/

>> I once came across a woman who had learned the word 'misled'
>> through reading, and who pronounced it like 'mild', . . .

>Does anyone really rhyme it with `drizzled'?

>--
>Anton Sherwood  --  br0nt0 at p0b0x.com  --  http://ogre.nu/

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From DFOKeefe at aol.com  Fri Jun 22 21:48:54 2001
From: DFOKeefe at aol.com (DFOKeefe at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 17:48:54 EDT
Subject: Proto-Celtic - An Exploration: Celtic ICM & Q/P Words = Function
 IE Roots
Message-ID: <FRI.22.JUN.2001.174854.EDT.>

Hello Indo-European List:

          Recently there was some discussion of Proto-Celtic on the list.  As
you probably know, my wife and I are amateur linguists.  In spite of our
amateur status, please permit us to offer for your consideration a paper
entitled PROTO-CELTIC - AN EXPLORATION: Celtic Initial Consonantal Mutation
and Q/P Equivalent Words as a Function of I.E. Roots.  We believe that our
analysis of I.E. roots in terms of ICM helps obtain a much clearer picture of
the prehistoric development of ICM and perhaps the phonological dynamics
which brought it about.  We are sure that this analysis of ICM in terms of
I.E. roots can benefit from some constructive suggestions.  Thank you for
your consideration.

          You may access this paper at one of our two Web sites:
http://hometown.aol.com/IrishWord/page1.html  (section 1)
http://hometown.aol.com/Dfokeefe/page1.html  (section xiii)
We humbly apologize for the all-too-basic America On Line graphics of our Web
page.

Sincerely,
David O'Keefe
Houston, Texas


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Wed Jun 27 03:15:27 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 23:15:27 EDT
Subject: 'pitA' and 'pad'
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.231527.EDT.>

> Before these correspondence sets go any further, Hindi 'pitA' and 'pad'
> are not native Hindi words.? Both are Sanskrit borrowings, i.e. tatsamas.

-- well, that's rather like French borrowing a word from Latin, since
Sanskrit is ancestral to Hindi.


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Wed Jun 27 06:25:43 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 02:25:43 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.022543.EDT.>

I wrote:
<<If you said "pad" and "philadelphia" have no surface similarity, that might
work.  But "pita" and "father" clearly do have some prima facie structural
similarities.>>

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.
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.

And that's the problem with subjective evaluations.  They lack objective
measure.

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.

Regards,
Steve Long


From sarima at friesen.net  Wed Jun 27 06:50:26 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 23:50:26 -0700
Subject: Rate of Change
In-Reply-To: <006401c0faf6$331e5aa0$fa01703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.235026.0700.>

At 10:29 AM 6/22/01 +0200, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:
>> Quite so, even based on my amateur studies of post-Norman England I cannot
>> name any 100 year period without any social change.  Sometimes change was
>> even fast by modern standards.  The changes after the end of Stephen's
>> reign were extremely rapid, as Henry didn't tolerate much guff.

>[Ed Selleslagh]

>I made a clear exception for "periods of upheaval, relatively sudden
>migrations etc.". I guess the Norman invasion in England was a major upheaval
>with long lasting after-effects.

Remarkably long lasting :-)  Stephen's reign ended about 90 years after the
Conquest!  And about 60 years later the Magna Carta was being signed - 150
years after the Conquest.  And very shortly after that were the three
Edwards with their own brand of changes (new laws, new conquests, new
nobles, ...).

The fact is one can date an English castle to within 50 or so years just by
its architecture - from shortly before the Conquest all the way until the
mid 1300s at least (and probably later).  So at least one aspect of English
culture was constantly changing for over 300 years.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi  Wed Jun 27 07:47:32 2001
From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 10:47:32 +0300
Subject: Rate of Change
In-Reply-To: <a9.17442147.28644bec@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.104732.0300.>

[Steve Long:]
>I would suspect that "found" cognates that truly have no recognizable
>resemblances are rare.

[Joat Simeon:]
> -- well, you're wrong there.

(snip of list of examples from IE)

It is true that found cognates with little or no phonological similarity
are very common. Just a while ago, Larry brought up sound changes in some
Pama-Nyungan languages, which, as far as I understand, have quite
effectively eradicated all surface similarity from most of the cognate
words. But this thread is a perfect excuse to list my ten favorite
examples from Uralic. ;-) So here goes:

PU *j?Nsi 'bow'
Sami /juoksa/
Hungarian /?j/
Nenets /ngin?/

PU *wixti 'five or ten'
Finnish /viisi/ '5'
H. /?t/ '5'
N. /yuq/ '10'

PU *SiNiri 'mouse'
F. /hiiri/
H. /eg?r/

PU *widimi 'marrow'
F. /ydin/
H. /vel??/

PU *sexji 'pus'
S. /siet?t?a/
H. /?v/
N. /ty?m-/

PU *kulki- 'go, flow'
F. /kulke-/
N. /x?-/

PU *weti 'water'
F. /vesi/
N. /yiq/

PU *ulki 'pole'
S. /holka/
N. /ng?/

PU *wajNi 'breath, spirit'
S. /vuojNa/
N. /y?nt?q/

PU *k?xli 'tongue'
S. /kiella/
N. (Forest) /sye/

etc.

These examples are not at all untypical. I once compiled a list of all the
cognate words between North Sami and Tundra Nenets (there are not very
many of them, less than 100). At least about half of the Sami words hardly
resembled their Nenets cognates at all.

 - Ante Aikio


From g_sandi at hotmail.com  Wed Jun 27 08:10:30 2001
From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 08:10:30 -0000
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.081030.0000.>

>[Ed Selleslagh]

>I made a clear exception for "periods of upheaval, relatively sudden
>migrations etc.". I guess the Norman invasion in England was a major upheaval
>with long lasting after-effects.

>During the early Middle Ages on the continent, there were lots of limited wars
>and countries changed hands many times, but the cultural evolution was
>generally pretty slow up to the 13-14th century, when the cities became more
>independant and created a new type of civil society.

>Anyway, my focus was more on Antiquity, and my remark about the M.A. may not
>have been so relevant or convincing.

>But it is a fact that some societies evolve very slowly at times, sometimes
>over a 1000 year period, cf. Ancient Egypt, China, arctic peoples, etc.

>Quick change is almost always related to migration/separation,
>invasion/conquest, major changes in the environment, import of new technology,
>etc. These are discrete, non-continuous phenomena in most cases, at least in
>pre-industrial times. Languages are part of culture, and the single most
>important tool for communication within a society, so they tend to follow the
>socio-cultural changes. The conditions for quick change mentioned above are
>also favorable to linguistic change (physical separation, exposure to other
>languages, cultures, technology, etc); conversely, their absence causes a
>fall-back to a kind of slow base-rate of linguistic change (e.g. phonetics)
>implicit in the transmission from one generation to the next one, a bit like
>genetic evolution.

>This my own view of course. Anyone is free to disagree.

>Ed.

Reply:

I have a lot of sympathy for your point of view, Ed, since I also like to
draw a parallel between accelerated language change and changes in the
external environment of the speakers, whether characterized as historical or
social changes.

Yet I can't help wondering about the circularity of the argument: when we
see fast linguistic change, we look at society at the time of the change,
and fix on some aspect of it that is undergoing change - after all,
something is bound to be changing at any one period, given the fact that
human beings get bored easily.

Take periods of known "great change": the English vowel shift for example,
or French (Latin in Gaul?) between the end of the Western Roman empire (end
of 5th century AD) and the Strasbourg Oaths (mid 9th century). Did these
periods correspond to greater social change than earlier or later periods in
the same geographic area, or when compared with the same historical period
in other (but comparable) areas? I think that France in the high Middle Ages
is a good example: the area of the langue d'oeil underwent noticeably more
changes in both phonetics and morphology than did the arae of the langue
d'oc. Is this because of more social changes in the north than in the south?

Standard Italian has undergone practically no changes in its phonological or
morphological structure since Dante's time, yet standard English, French and
Spanish have all changed considerably since then. Has Italy been a
historical or social backwater in all this time? I hardly think so, what
with constant invasions, the Risorgimento, Mussolini and the rest.

And I haven't even broached the subject of contemporary life, probably the
fastest changing social (and technical) environment ever known to mankind.
Yet the phonological and morphological structures of contemporary languages
are not changing that fast, or are they?

Just some thoughts for discussion...

Best wishes,
Gabor


From petegray at btinternet.com  Wed Jun 27 20:32:26 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 21:32:26 +0100
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.213226.0100.>

> -- it's quite simple:  if the comparative method works as advertised, then
> *PIE was one language.  And if it wasn't, then the method just doesn't
work.

The comparative method also allows us to identify differences spatially and
over time within the reconstructed language.   These are very significant
for PIE.

Peter


From rao.3 at osu.edu  Thu Jun 28 23:13:40 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 19:13:40 -0400
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.191340.0400.>

<JoatSimeon at aol.com> wrote:

> -- actually, in their earliest attested forms, the languages are
> transparently quite closely related, both lexically and in terms of
> syntax; [...] Or sentences having to do with elementary activities;
>"Ten horses of my father are pregnant" [...] etc.

I am not sure that without hindsight, equus and hippos sound
"transparently quite closely related". And if we take not generic
sentences, but those relating to past tense, I doubt that they will
sound very close to each other. How about translating the following:
    I had a white horse. I used to ride every day. Yesterday, it
    tripped, fell down and broke its leg. So, I have to go to the
    market to buy a new horse. I hope that it will be as good as
    the old horse.

Try translating these into various IE languages and see how similar they
look in terms of morphosyntax. For real fun, try translating them into
languages at the same point in time, say 2nd BCE Latin, Koine Greek and
Pali/Prakrit [Sanskrit was a learned language by this time].

---

I had started drafting the above, but did not get around to finishing
it. But recent remarks concerning use of morphemes vs "morphology" led
me to resurrect this. I am not sure what "morphology" was meant to be in
this context. For example, the PIE perfect is in Latin the perfective
(and narrates), in Greek, perfect was a resultative (though in Koine,
started to merge with the aorist) and it is the aorist that narrates,
and totally lost in Pali (in late Brahmana /upanishad prose, perfect
narrates legends/myths and is unusable in the above passage for
translation) and narration was with the preterit which was the result of
the merger of the "imperfect" with the aorist. It is the relatedness of
the morphemes and our knowledge of how syntactic categories evolve and
tend to evolve, that allows us to see the connection between the forms.

In other words, when it came to verbs, it is the morphemes played a big
role in relating IE languages, not morphosyntax.


From mcv at wxs.nl  Wed Jun 27 09:08:02 2001
From: mcv at wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 11:08:02 +0200
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
In-Reply-To: <00b801c0fb2b$308ebc00$2b01703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.110802.0200.>

On Fri, 22 Jun 2001 16:27:42 +0200, "Eduard Selleslagh" <edsel at glo.be>
wrote:

>As to unusual sound correspondences, isn't there a Sumerian rustic dialect that
>uses m and S instead of g and n? I seem to remember something like that from
>Meillet. Can anyone tell me more about that?

The reference is probably to Emesal, a literary dialect of Sumerian
which is sometimes considered a "woman's language" (because in the
texts it's mainly used to render women's speech), although it may well
be a regional or evolved dialect of standard Sumerian [Emegir] (cf.
the use of Prakrits by female characters in Sanskrit drama).

Emesal, besides other phonetical and lexical (but few grammatical)
characteristics,  uses <m> for Sumerian <g>, but only when this stands
for *g~, a sound usually reconstructed as /Nw/ (labialized velar
nasal).    It is possible that the spelling <m>, in Akkadian fashion,
represents /w/.  The correspondence Emegir <n> ~ Emesal <s^> occurs
only in a few words (normally <n> = <n>), and may be connected with
the alternation <n> ~ <l> that is otherwise found in Sunerian.  The
spelling <s^>, as in Akkadian, might then represent some kind of
lateral (fricative or maybe palatalized).

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl


From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi  Wed Jun 27 18:58:07 2001
From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 21:58:07 +0300
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
In-Reply-To: <a05010400b74e9af87403@[132.229.243.85]>
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.215807.0300.>

On Thu, 14 Jun 2001, R.S.Georg wrote:

> In some New Indian languages, under the so-called ruki-rule, *s went
> as far as (at least) /x/. The ruki-rule decrees that /s/, after /r/,
> /u/, /k/, /i/ goes to /sh/ (in Iranian, and Indic /s-retrofl./.
> Ah, yes, (I'm not fully awake yet), it holds in Slavic, too, where
> the outcome, at least after /u/, is /x/, too  (ru. snoxa, lat. nurus,
> skt. snuSa:, Gk. nuos).
> The phonetic ratio, if any, has to do with retroflexion. If you
> retroflect your tongue *a lot* when pronouncing, say, Sanskrit /S/
> (s-subscript dot), the acoustic impression is already very close to
> (velar, not uvular) /x/. IOW, /S/ and /x/ have quite adjacent places
> of articulation. The whole process from /s/ to /x/ is, thus,
> describable as a gradual movement of place of articulation. OK, in
> the end /x/ has to lose its friction to turn into the stop /k/, but
> then you have it.

I don't think the Mator *s > *k shift has to do with retroflexion; the
context (/_e,i) rather suggests palatalization. So one would rather think
of something like *s > *sj > *cj > *kj > *k, but this feels quite
awkward.

Regards,
Ante Aikio


From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi  Wed Jun 27 19:00:59 2001
From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 22:00:59 +0300
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
In-Reply-To: <6g0hit0kobrv50294hsleabtomkui4sojh@4ax.com>
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.220059.0300.>

On Thu, 14 Jun 2001, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:

> Well, *s > *t in Samoyedic (whether *s was really /s/ or perhaps
> something like /T/ is a matter we discussed some time ago).  Then, /t/
> before a front vowel palatalizes to /t^/, a sound intermediate between
> /t/ and /k/.  Then it further shifts to /k/ (cf. Egyptian Arabic */d^/
> > /g/).

It was not PU *s (> Samoyedic *t) which became /k/ in Mator, but
Proto-Samoyedic *s (< PU *s?), which was unambiguously a sibilant. But the
development could still have been similar, perhaps via *c? and *k? as I
suggested in a parallel mail.

 Regards,
 Ante Aikio


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Wed Jun 27 22:27:36 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 17:27:36 -0500
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
In-Reply-To: <00b801c0fb2b$308ebc00$2b01703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.172736.0500.>

>----- Original Message -----
>From: <X99Lynx at aol.com>
>Sent: Friday, June 15, 2001 7:13 AM

>>     Then he went on to point out that European Portuguese has the rolled r,
>>     but (Northern) Brazilian Portuguese has an /h/ reflex of /r/, to which I
>>     added that the Puerto Rican Spanish rolled ("double") rr is often
>>     pronounced as a velar like in French etc.  The implication is that
>>     Brazilian may have passed through this stage in the evolution of r > h.

>[Ed Selleslagh]

>Isn't there a little confusion here? Isn't the Brazilian Portuguese r that's
>pronounced as uvular r, as [rx] in final position, or as [x] or even [h], the
>original rr (cf. Spanish), the rolling r (>3 taps)? Not the single r
>(originally one tap, now often more). [Note that double r is not always
>written as such, as orthography is different according to position in a word,
>e.g. initially or finally].

	I think that's what he meant. Some varieties of Brazilian
Portuguese use /h/ for trilled /rr/. I've heard it from people from the
South as well, from Rio Grande do Sul and Rio de Janeiro. The northerners
I've met used a type of uvular /R/. I've been told that /rr/ is also
trilled in parts of Brazil


>Did you mean that Puertoricans use the Brazilian pronunciation of double r?
>I wasn't aware of that.

	Not all Puerto Ricans, but some. It was a rural pronunciation but
is now found among urban working class people of rural origin in Puerto
Rico and New York --or so I've been told by Puerto Ricans. It's also found
among some Dominicanos and --I've been told-- among some Orientales (Far
Eastern Cuba). You hear a lot among Hispanics from all over who have
settled in New York and lived among Puerto Ricans --including one of my
Costa Rican brothers-in-law

>Maybe Portuguese influence stretched farther north than I thought: in
>Cura?ao Papiamento there is a considerable Portuguese base, but that's still
>far more to the south than P.R.

>In the mid-southern Andes (parts of Per?, Bolivia, N. Argentina), the double
>r is pronounced [Z] (French j), strongly reminescent of Polish rz or Czech
>r-hacek, which - as far as I know - have the same origin (rolling r). All seem
>to be results of retroflexion.

	This is common all over most of Spanish-speaking Latin America
outside of the Caribbean and northern Mexico: Costa Rica, Guatemala,
western Panama, southern Mexico, parts of Highland Columbia & Venezuela,
parts of Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, etc.

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From alderson+mail at panix.com  Wed Jun 27 19:14:31 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 15:14:31 -0400
Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look
In-Reply-To: <a5.1774f2a6.286582ac@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com)
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.151431.0400.>

On 23 Jun 2001, Steve Long wrote:

> Average rates of change are based on multiple occurrences.  You get an
> average by finding the same changes in different languages and averaging the
> time they took.

Definitionally difficult:  Two languages cannot undergo "the same changes", so
substitute "similar" for "same".  Then be prepared to argue the validity of the
similarity you propose to measure and average.

> So pick a *set* of changes that has occurred in at least five, preferably ten
> languages, and the time it took for each of them to occur historically.

Who gets to decide how long the changes took?  Or are you restricting the
sample only to historically attested changes?  In that case, are you prepared
to accept the results if they contradict your view of the prehistoric spread of
the Indo-European languages?  Or will you aver that unattested (that is to say,
unwitnessed) changes must have happened at a different rate?

> If Time consistently produces a MEASURABLE amount of AVERAGE change in some
> specific feature of a number of historical languages, that can be validated
> statistically.

Suppose that no specific feature ever shows a correlatable average rate of
change?  Suppose that it is instead entire systems that change at a comparable
rate, with no particular change required?  What then?

								Rich Alderson


From alderson+mail at panix.com  Wed Jun 27 19:35:32 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 15:35:32 -0400
Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look
In-Reply-To: <12e.714796.28658a6e@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com)
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.153532.0400.>

On 23 Jun 2001, Steve Long wrote:

> In a message dated 6/22/2001 2:19:29 AM, mclasutt at brigham.net writes:

>> The true Indo-Europeanists can undoubtedly provide detailed information to
>> verify or correct this impression.

> 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.

You forget that Indo-Europeanists do not study only unrecorded languages, but
the records of a very large family over a period of roughly 4,000 years, which
show that drastic change is often episodic, punctuated, and rapid, while
constant, gradual change is often drastic in its results, making it impossible
in the end to tell which has occurred without the aid of records.

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.

								Rich Alderson


From connolly at memphis.edu  Wed Jun 27 15:03:46 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 10:03:46 -0500
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.100346.0500.>

Maria Anna Calamia wrote:
>
> I am not sure that all of your examples are relavent. In the first
> example the more accurate translation would be "the books are pleasing
> to me". The corresponding verb in Italian "piacere" follows the same
> pattern: Mi piacciono i libri. There is nothing preventing one from
> saying: Los libros me gustan or I libri mi piacciono, therefore
> creating an SOV order. The only reason for this type of word order as
> you point out is that the verb is passive. Maria Anna Calamia > Me
> gustan los libros. > "To me please (3p) the books." > "I like books."
> [ moderator snip ] >Rick Mc Callister >W-1634 >Mississippi University
> for Women >Columbus MS 39701

How is 'the books are pleasing to me' "more accurate"?  The most
accurate translation is that which, in its own language, most closely
corresponds to the original in meaning *and* in the psychological
impression made on the hearer/reader.  The original is natural; your
translation is weird.  Superficial grammatical structure has nothing to
do with it.  Nothing!

BTW, apart from the grammatical subject, the structure of your "more
accurate" translation is not parallel to that of the original.
"Pleasing" must be construed as a predicate adjective, not as part of a
progressive verb form; and "to me" is dependent on this adjective rather
than being an argument of the verb, as in Spanish or Italian.

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?

The best explanation I know is the Case Grammar analysis based on
Fillmore: English _like_, Sp. _gustar_, Italian _piacere_, and German
_gefallen_, have two arguments: an "Experiencer" and a "Patient" or
"Theme".  The "normal" subject in this configuration is the Experiencer,
which is now (but not formerly) the choice for the grammatical subject
of _like_.  But _gustar_, _piacere_, and _gefallen_, like many verbs of
similar meaning in other languages, make the Patient (Theme) the
grammatical subject.  This, however, causes complications.  In both
Spanish and Italian, the Experiencer precedes the verb; _los libros me
gustan_ is just barely possible and cannot in any sense be called good
Spanish, whereas _A Carlos no le gustan los libros_ is perfect.  But
this makes sense if we reflect a bit.  Even though Spanish _gustar_ has
the "wrong" grammatical subject, it nevertheless places the Experiencer
PP _A Carlos_ ahead of the verb, where the subject "ought" to go.  Ditto
Italian. -- Most modern linguists have taken note of such facts and
declared that forms such as _A Carlos_ in such sentences actually *are*
subjects.  While I strongly disagree on that point, it is more
defensible than a claim that _gustar_ is somehow "passive".

Leo Connolly


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Wed Jun 27 22:32:59 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 17:32:59 -0500
Subject: Genetic Descent
In-Reply-To: <F41okLQ8aZRhQdOgl4r00001f0a@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.173259.0500.>

	The normal order for verbs like Spanish gustar, Italian piacere, etc.
		is Indirect object pronoun-Verb-Subject, OVS
	You certainly can change the order to SOV for the purpose of
emphasis but my point was that there is a whole category of "reverse action
verbs" in Romance languages.
	I'm curious how the curious syntax arose

>I am not sure that all of your examples are relavent. In the first example
>the more accurate translation would be "the books are pleasing to me".
>The corresponding verb in Italian "piacere" follows the same pattern:  Mi
>piacciono i libri.There is nothing preventing one from saying: Los libros
>me gustan or I libri mi piacciono, therefore creating an SOV order.The
>only reason for this type of word order as you point out is that the verb
>is passive.Maria Anna Calamia> Me gustan los libros. > "To me please (3p)
>the books." > "I like books."[ moderator snip ]>Rick Mc Callister >W-1634
>>Mississippi University for Women >Columbus MS 39701

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From bronto at pobox.com  Wed Jun 27 16:18:43 2001
From: bronto at pobox.com (Anton Sherwood)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 09:18:43 -0700
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.091843.0700.>

>> what I am asserting is that the morphemes used in conjugation are
>> very resistant to borrowing.  ...

petegray wrote:

> The highly productive English morpheme -ess appears to derive (through
> Late Latin) from the Greek -issa which appears, from its phonetic
> shape and other factors, to be a loan into Greek from some substrate.

> So there's one interesting example, at any rate.

is <-ess> used in conjugation?

--
Anton Sherwood  --  br0nt0 at p0b0x.com  --  http://ogre.nu/


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Wed Jun 27 17:50:00 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 13:50:00 EDT
Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns"
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.135000.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/27/01 11:10:56 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> As you were kind enough to concede, you have to see patterns BEFORE you even
> apply the comparative method.

-- no, that's not what he said.

>Heck, borrowing creates patterns.

-- not this type of pattern.

Look, you're obviously not interested in listening.  Why do you keep wasting
everyone's time?


From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi  Wed Jun 27 18:52:01 2001
From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 21:52:01 +0300
Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns"
In-Reply-To: <6e.c0bd599.2865a684@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.215201.0300.>

On Sat, 23 Jun 2001 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> 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.

Extensive borrowing can indeed create patterns, e.g. recurring sound
correspondences resulting from phonetic (and system-based) sound
substitutions (such can be observed in e.g. the Proto-germanic loan words
in Proto-Finnic). However, these kinds of patterns do not suffice, if a
genetic relationship is to be established. Usually the following is
required:

- systematic correspondences can be established in morphology/morphosyntax
(preferrably between entire paradigms)

- the sound correspondences should not be explicable as phonetically or
otherwise predictable substitutions (excludes extensive/massive
borrowing), and must not reflect different stages in the development of
the assumed cognate languages

- the cognate percentage is higher in basic vocabulary than in typical
cases of extensive borrowing (borrowed items often include much "cultural"
vocabulary pertaining to technological/social innovations, local
phenomena, etc.)

Regards,
Ante Aikio


From alderson+mail at panix.com  Wed Jun 27 22:53:36 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 18:53:36 -0400
Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns"
In-Reply-To: <6e.c0bd599.2865a684@aol.com> (X99Lynx@aol.com)
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.185336.0400.>

On 23 Jun 2001, Steve Long 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.

> 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."

You aren't reading what Herb Stahlke wrote.

The hypothesis is not that "this language is related to ancestral group X", but
rather "these two/three/four/dozen languages are related to each other".  That
makes a very big difference.

Hypotheses of relationship are made among existing languages (or reconstructed
protolanguages once those are available), not between a single language and a
possible ancestor.  Once the comparative method has been employed on data drawn
from a group of languages--and the canonical number is *NOT* 2--and a proto-
language reconstructed (even in part), the latter can be used as a *shortcut*
in examining data from other languages that it is thought may be related, but
it *IS* a *SHORTCUT* for comparing the new data from these languages to all the
data from all the previous languages used to build the protolanguage.

And once again, the hypothesis is not that "this language is related to the
reconstructed ancestral group X", but rather "these two/three/four/dozen
languages are related to each other, and to the two/three/four/dozen already
examined in the same way previously".

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 compara-
tive method, the languages in question are *JUST* *NOT* *RELATED*.

> 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.

Borrowing produces patterns that are qualitatively different from those that
arise from genetic relationship.  The concept of patterning alone is necessary
but not sufficient to define genetic relationship; the *kinds* of pattern are
the determining factor.

								Rich Alderson


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Jun 29 14:27:19 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 15:27:19 +0100
Subject: Trivial Truths and Genetic "Patterns"
In-Reply-To: <6e.c0bd599.2865a684@aol.com>
Message-ID: <FRI.29.JUN.2001.152719.0100.>

--On Saturday, June 23, 2001 4:00 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

[replying to someone else]

> 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.

Steve, please!!!  I have never said any such thing.  I have *never*
asserted that a language cannot have multiple ancestors.  I have only
asserted that no Celtic or IE language is an example of a language with
multiple ancestors.

At various times, on various lists -- probably including this one, though I
can't remember -- I have pointed out that there certainly exist languages
which do not descend from a single ancestor in the ordinary way, and I have
repeatedly cited Michif as an outstanding example.  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.  But the
point is that the ancestry of Michif is fundamentally different in nature
from the ancestry of English, or of any other known IE language.

Since I'm the person who has pointed this out repeatedly, and since I'm the
person who has emphasized the difference between Michif and English -- in
great contrast to Steve, who apparently wants to see no difference -- I
must take exception to Steve's wording when he imputes to me the position
that "languages can't have more than one genetic ancestor".  Naughty,
naughty, Steve.

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 Jun 29 14:01:47 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 15:01:47 +0100
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
In-Reply-To: <26.1736db1d.2865a8a5@aol.com>
Message-ID: <FRI.29.JUN.2001.150147.0100.>

--On Saturday, June 23, 2001 4:09 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

[quoting himself]

>> 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.

[LT]

> <<This is not the way we use 'genetic' in linguistics.  We do 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.

> Is there a more "pithy" answer to why there can only be one genetic
> ancestor than this one?

Steve is taking issue with my fussiness over terminology.  Well, sorry, but
my fussiness is not mere tedious pedantry: I think Steve is trying to blur
a fundamental distinction by introducing misleading terminology of his own
devising.

In linguistics, we use the term 'genetic' in connection with languages and
with the ancestry of languages.  We simply do not apply it to elements
within languages, and doing so is not helpful.

Elements in languages may be labeled 'inherited' or 'borrowed'.  This
distinction is conventionally seen as fundamental, and I want to insist on
the correctness of such a position.  Steve, I gather, wants to blur it, and
perhaps even to abandon it.

The English word 'brother' has been a part of English as long as English
has existed as an identifiable language, and even for longer than that.  It
is inherited.

The English word 'kangaroo' was introduced into English around 1770, after
being taken over from the Australian language Guugu-Yimidhirr.  It is
borrowed.

I take it that Steve wants to draw no distinction between the two cases.
For him, it appears, 'brother' is just one piece of Germanic baggage in
English, while 'kangaroo' is just one piece of Australian baggage, and
there is no difference of principle.  It is merely that the Germanic
baggage -- at present, anyway -- outweighs the Australian baggage.  Is this
right?

But I think there's a huge difference between the stuff that's been in
English from the beginning and the stuff that's entered the language along
the way.  The Norman French influx after the Conquest was so vast that the
French baggage in English probably now outweighs the native Germanic
baggage -- but English is still descended from a Germanic ancestor, not
from a Romance ancestor.  English, like any language, cannot change its
ancestry.

Why do I insist on such doctrinaire pigeonholing?  Why can't I just accept
Steve's enlightened position that all languages have multiple ancestries,
and that making distinctions like mine is a waste of time?

Because I believe firmly that the distinctions are real and important.  The
way that modern English has come into existence is really and fundamentally
different from the way that Michif has come into existence, or Tok Pisin,
or Haitian Creole, or Media Lengua.

In order to understand how these other languages have come into existence,
we must first recognize that there is something fundamentally different
about their origins, compared with "ordinary" languages like English and
Chinese.

If we follow Steve in maintaining that all languages have multiple
ancestors, then we in effect abandon any hope of seeing Michif or Tok Pisin
as anything special, and we thus abandon any hope of understanding the
conditions that led to their creation.  And such an outcome would be a
disaster: we would be closing off a whole avenue of historical
investigation, and moreover an avenue that I would describe as
outstandingly fascinating and important.

Steve wants us to believe that every element present in a language is part
of its genetics, part of its inheritance.  But this view is simply not
helpful: it obscures fundamental distinctions.

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 Jun 29 14:11:54 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 15:11:54 +0100
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
In-Reply-To: <LAW2-F81YP0QzBxhJTA0001432c@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <FRI.29.JUN.2001.151154.0100.>

--On Sunday, June 24, 2001 11:21 pm +0200 Kreso Megyeral
<miskec4096 at hotmail.com> wrote:

[LT]

>> And Albanian is not Greek, Romance, Slavic, HUNGARIAN or Turkic, even
>> though elements of these origins greatly outnumber the inherited
>> elements.

> Excuse me, but I will kindly ask for the explanation of the possible
> Hungarian elements in Albanian. I'm a student of Hungarian and have also
> studied Albanian, but have found no trace of evidence for such connection
> (except the interesting similarity between Hungarian "|l" and Albanian
> "ul" - to sit). Or was it that you just took Hungarian as an example of
> "any-possible-language-it-could-be-connected-to"?

Ah, I knew I'd get pulled up on this one.

What happened here was this.  In my student days, back in the Bronze Age, I
was taught that the Hungarians were among those who had been prominent in
Albania at various times in the past, and that there were Hungarian loan
words in Albanian to prove it.

Before sending out that posting, I checked a standard reference source on
Albanian in my office, and I found that all the other languages I mentioned
were cited as important sources of loans in Albanian, while Hungarian was
not mentioned.

Having already typed the word 'Hungarian', but now doubting it, I almost
deleted it, but then I decided to leave it in.  I figured "Well, if there
are no Hungarian loans in Albanian, somebody will tell me about it."

This is true.  Honest.

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.

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 anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi  Wed Jun 27 18:38:07 2001
From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 21:38:07 +0300
Subject: Genetic Descent/continuity & convergence
In-Reply-To: <26.1736db1d.2865a8a5@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.213807.0300.>

On Sat, 23 Jun 2001 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> Is there a more "pithy" answer to why there can only be one genetic ancestor
> than this one?

Genetic relationship is defined in terms of continuity. E.g., there is
continuity between the linguistic systems of present-day English and
Proto-Germanic. There is no continuity between English and French, despite
the fact that English has borrowed massively from French: i.e., if we
could go backwards in time, we could observe English gradually becoming
Proto-Germanic; but at no point would it become French.

Could there, then, be a case where a language becomes not a different
language, but rather *two* different languages, when the film is run
backwards?

There is one especially interesting type of case, which could
(erroneously?) be seen as a counterexample. I know only a couple of
examples, an especially interesting one being Sea Sami.

Sea Sami is one of the three main dialect groups of North Sami (it is a
dialect group, not a separate language; the North Sami dialects are 95+%
mutually intelligeble). North Sami belongs taxonomically to western Samic,
which shows several innovations distinguishing it from Eastern Samic, the
most important ones here being two sound shifts: Western Samic underwent
the changes *NN > *TN between vowels (i.e., *nn > *tn, *mm > *pm etc.) and
*S (= sh) > *jh before *k, *t or *n (unusual sound shifts, once again),
whereas Eastern Samic preserved the original forms. The sole exception to
these Western Sami innovations is Sea Sami, which has preserved the
original nasal geminates, and only very recently (in the 19th century)
underwent the shift *S > *jh, which is prehistorical in the other
languages / dialects and presumably must be dated to Proto-Western-Samic.
This, and other evidence as well, suggests that Sea Sami was originally no
dialect of North Sami, but rather a separate language belonging to the
Eastern group. But as its speakers spread west along the Scandinavian
coast, it became subject to so strong North Sami influence that it
ultimately coalesced with it, while still preserving a couple of archaic
features indicating its genetic origin.

Sea Sami has sometimes been presented as an example of a language /
dialect having two genetic ancestors (i.e. North Sami and
Proto-Eastern-Samic, both of which, of course, ultimately derive from
Proto-Samic). However, at least in my view, this interpretation can
be criticized: there is no continuity between (Proto-)North Sami
and Sea Sami, so it is genetically Eastern Samic. Synchronically, however,
it is now a dialect of North Sami, but this seems to be merely a result of
convergence (borrowing included under the term "convergence" here).

There are also similar cases in Finnic, but the details are far more
complicated. E.g., Finnish does not represent a single branch in the
Proto-Finnic family tree, but is the result of convergence and ultimate
coalescence of many dialects belonging to at least two taxonomically
distinct branches. Even today, there is not a single isogloss that defines
Finnish as a whole as opposed to the rest of Finnic. The case of South vs.
North Estonian is somewhat similar: South Estonian has preserved several
archaic forms in several cases where *all* the other Finnic
languages/dialects have an innovative form; this concludes that the
primary genealogical dichotomy in Finnic is South Estonian vs. all the
rest (including North Estonian). However, due to convergence, South and
North Estonian are today mutually intelligible to a fair degree, but the
mutual intelligibility of Estonian and Finnish is practically nonexistent,
disregarding some very simple expressions.

I'd be most interested in hearing how typical these kinds of convergence
scenarios between closely related languages are (I suppose there must be
plenty of examples elsewhere), and opinions on how they should be
taxonomically interpreted.

Regards,
Ante Aikio


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Thu Jun 28 13:26:16 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 08:26:16 -0500
Subject: European Genetics/IE
In-Reply-To: <00b501c0fbd6$caaa37a0$3906703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.082616.0500.>

	Dialect creolism? It's an interesting concept.
	Spanish literary language was interesting: Galaico-Portuguese was
used for lyric verse during most of the Reconquista, local varieties of
Castillian were used for humorous verse and prose at that time, and during
the short Renaissance period Salmantine was used for drama.
	In terms of western Romance pidgin or creole language --if such a
thing ever existed, I was thinking of a Celtic-Latin contact language used
in the market place between Celtic-speaking peasants and Latin-speaing city
people. Something that may never have been committed to writing and that
would have been relatively rapidly assimilated into Vulgar Latin.
	I'm curious whether there are studies of the pecentage of
Latin-Celtic cognates in French, Spanish and/or Portuguese vocabulary; i.e.
whether Celtic speakers tended to use words similar to their native
language as opposed to non-cognate synonyms. I see this phenomenon all the
time among Americans learning Spanish and Latin Americans learning English.


>[Ed Selleslagh]
>I would like to add something to this:

>It could possibly be argued that early Castilian had some kind of a pidgin
>phase during the Reconquista, when it became the communication device for the
>different regional groups (who all spoke different Romance languages, some
>even non-IE Basque) taking part in it and settling in its wake, in the place
>of fleeing Arabs. If it actually was a pidgin at one time, it quickly became a
>creole, but with a relatively low social status (as most creoles): high level
>poetry (troubadours) continued in Catalan for some time, but folksy comedy was
>in Castilian.

>In fact, Castilian has some, but not much, grammatical simplification compared
>to other Romance languages like French or Italian (e.g. wholly or partly
>'regularized' verbs) and inconsistency in phonetic evolution stages of
>different words, indicating different Romance origins; and there are a number
>of peculiarities that have been attributed to 'substrate', often Basque (e.g.
>Lapesa)- although this is far from a consensus opinion. (Note that Castilian
>was 'born' in the southern fringe of the Basque speaking region of the time;
>so those wouldn't qualify as pidgin efects or creolization).

>If Castilian is not so clearly a creole, this would be explainable by the fact
>that its speakers originally spoke pretty closely resembling languages (except
>the Basques: see above), but in different stages of phonetic evolution (e.g.
>initial f>h, but not in all older words).

>Another case of someone's two cents, I guess.

>Ed.

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 28 06:20:00 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 02:20:00 EDT
Subject: Uniformitarianism and the Arrowwood
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.022000.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/27/2001 4:35:07 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<< According to your rhetoric, all words are susceptible to frequent, random,
unknowable change. Therefore, words cannot be used to argue anything
whatsoever about linguistic or ethnographic prehistory. You have objected to
other list-members "queering the game", and your response is to throw the
whole game-board into the trash. >>

That's not true.  You can "argue anything" you like about linguistic history
that is strictly linguistic .  But the problem that's obvious is the
non-linguistic elements.  There's a lot more to historic and prehistoric
people, things and processes than an anachronistic dictionary-style
definition of a tree.

And this is not an all or nothing proposition.  The "whole game-board" does
not have to be thrown "into the trash."

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.  And the focal point, in that case, becomes not simple
word-matching, but rather the historical processes themselves.  And the
actual textual context.

After your initial post, in which you mentioned the ""Greek has (s)mi:lax"
for yew, I looked at L-S and about ten different Greek texts that contained
the word.  I found that it referred to at least four totally different trees
or bushes and quite possibly to just wood that was carved or carveable.  I
just don't find that the words that came down to us in writing reflect modern
style tree taxonomies at all.  I think that, even with the Greeks, different
linguistic communities had different names for what we would consider the
same object.  This is totally consistent with everything we know about naming
flora and fauna in preliterate cultures.  And I think these names were based
much less on species definition than on practical usage, which varied among
speakers of the same language.  So the same word was used for different trees
or wood products.  This is true in Greek and I assume therefore all early IE
languages.

Just starting there, I'd be negligent in not having doubts about your claims
about unrecorded proto-Celtic and German.  And there's a lot more that
follows that first step.  It seems particularly dubious to assume that all
these languages did not influence each other in use of names of things that
were demonstrably an important part of on-going commerce and trade - where
names that crossed language barriers would have to be economically more
important than traditional local names.

It seems I'm always being reminded on this list that linguistics is not
simple.  But I have to say that historical processes and relationships and
historical meaning itself can't be any simpler.  In fact, everything we know
says they are far more irregular.  Just the opposite of assuming that a
reconstructed word stood for a modern taxonomic species of tree for 2000+
years of preliteracy.

I may have overstated what you "need to prove," but I was reacting to what
you were telling me I needed to prove.  In fact, all I was proving was that
there is a high degree of uncertainty in all this.  And I think that is
somewhat obvious.

If you are saying that your interpretation is possible, I'd have to agree.
If you are saying its probable, there's just too many other equally plausible
possibilities for that to be true.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 28 14:09:10 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 10:09:10 EDT
Subject: Uniformitarianism and the Arrowwood
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.100910.EDT.>

I wrote:
<<What actually happened when people gave names to trees, before modern
scientific classifications attempts to make them uniform?>>

In a message dated 6/27/2001 4:35:07 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<<You mean things are different now? Linnaeus unwittingly changed the habits
of all subsequent speakers, even those who have never heard of Linnaeus or
binomial nomenclature?>>

No, Linneaus did not erase the use of "idiosyncratic and irregular local
common names" for trees and wood.

Yes, it was his intention to do so.  There was nothing "unwitting" about it.
He says so himself.  He was appalled by the fact that local "common names"
were so "idiosyncratic and irregular."  In this, he had the total support of
commercial interests that were upset about, e.g., shipments of "yew" wood
that in fact turned out to be upon inspection - by those with the expertise -
juniper, rowan, elm or walnut.

In fact, the use of Latin (often in binomial nomenclature) names for such
objects was the common way to overcome idiosyncratic and irregular local
"common names" in trade long before Linnaeus.  He just came up with the first
taxonomic system that actually anticipated evolutionary family trees, which
is where his influence mainly comes from.

The early English references to the yew are generally all made in combination
with Latin names.  (And of course taxus can show up there as being equated to
the "haw-tre" - the hawthorn.)  And that may in fact be how the "yew" name
settled down and standardized to mean a particular tree - one that equated to
the Latin taxus.

<<When a pre-Linnaean (such as Dioscorides) discussed a particular taxon, it
could have referred to anything, in your view?>>

No. But they clearly do not match up with modern scientific classifications
of trees. Nor could they reflect all "idiosyncratic and irregular local
common names."  They were simply earlier attempts to catalogue plant and
trees, and just as often, their by-products, probably according to trade
usage.

But let me ask, do you actually think that no progress has been make in
botanical sciences since Dioscorides?  Do you actually think that early IE
speakers were more scientific than the more modern people who have the
benefit of modern botanical science?

An important factor in standardizing "idiosyncratic and irregular local
common names" for trees and wood probably came not from the efforts of
"natural philosophers" but from the wood-working (including bow makers) and
pharmaceutical trades.  They would obviously need words that crossed language
barriers in order to standardize the supply and distribution of timber, wood
stock, resins and other derivatives as well as finished products.

But these trades had there own names for the woods and by-products.  Which is
why Pliny, Theophrastus and Dioscorides (the latter two were actually
herbalists), etc., are so difficult for modern botanists to figure out and
include so many species and by-products that are "unknown" or questionable.
(Pliny actually mentions an unknown "taxa" tree that is not definitely not a
yew and an "Indian ivy" called the "euon.")

<<It seems rather arbitrary and capricious to invoke the UP only to exclude
its _present_ application in the next sentence. >>

Come on.  The arrowwood example IS a present application.  I gave you the
modern scientific names.  Then I gave you the "idiosyncratic and irregular
local common names."  Are you saying that the *PIEists had standardized
scientific names and only since that golden age have we been reduced to
"idiosyncratic and irregular local common names?"

<<If a single village actually exhibited such a wide variety of terms for the
same tree, it would be a major dysfunction indeed, suitable for a plot-device.
Andy: "I told you to stake out the house behind the boxwoods!"
Barney: "Those _are_ boxwoods, Andy!"
Andy: "Those are _false_ boxwoods, Barn ...">>

But the script goes on:
Barney: "There you go again, Andy!  Two years at the agricultural college and
ain't you the Werner Van Braun of tree-ology...
Andy: "Now, Barn, you know how important it is here in Mayberry for all of us
to have a Uniform Nomenclature System for trees.  'Else how will we be able
to function in our everyday lives.  Can you just imagine if we called trees
by different names?  Imagine if we could not distinguish between the over 85
different trees growing regionally in our everyday conversations with, say,
Floyd the Barber or Aunt Bea? Why, just think of the impact on the social
fabric... "
Barney: "Andy, lemme stop ya'll right there.  When you say 'you', Andy, are
you spelling that 'y-o-u' or 'y-e-w'?

S. Long


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Jun 29 13:03:10 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 14:03:10 +0100
Subject: "Uniformitarian Principle"
In-Reply-To: <12e.6d1df8.286563ca@aol.com>
Message-ID: <FRI.29.JUN.2001.140310.0100.>

--On Friday, June 22, 2001 11:15 pm +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

[LT]

> << ["Uniformitarian Principle"] = languages and speakers in the remote
> past did not behave differently from the way languages and speakers have
> behaved in the historical period.>>

> Now, don't forget that you brought this "Uniformitarian Principle" up
> specifically and especially as the support for your "rate of change"
> statements about IE.

Not really.

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 don't recall ever going any further than that, and I have no idea what
"statements about IE" are being alluded to here.

> And whether it works or not for other aspects of historical linguistics
> (and I think it does), it just doesn't work for your pronouncements about
> rate of change.

Steve, I haven't made any pronouncements about rate of change.  What are
you talking about?

> You have no objective "rate of change" to offer for speakers in historical
> periods.  So you really have nothing to extend to prehistorical periods.

Steve, I have already pointed out that no accepted metric of rate of change
exists, and that I doubt whether such a metric can be constructed to
general satisfaction.  I have made no claims beyond this.  What on *earth*
are you talking about?

As for prehistoric periods, the only claim I have made is that prehistoric
languages and speakers cannot reasonably be assumed to be fundamentally
different from historical ones in any respect at all, unless there is good
evidence to the contrary.  Do you disagree with me here?  If not, what are
you so exercised about?  I haven't said anything else.

[LT]

> <<To reject this position is to make historical linguistics impossible.>>

> This is untrue. We can validly assume all kinds of uniformity and
> linguistic continuity between the historic and the prehistoric - without
> buying your subjective judgments about "rate of change" of IE languages.

Steve, this posting is becoming surreal.  I have made no "subjective
judgements" about rate of change, least of all in IE.  In fact, I haven't
made any statements about rate of change at all beyond what I've just
outlined.

Your lunch disagreeing with you? ;-)

> There is plenty of room for "Uniformitarianism" in historical linguistics,
> without claiming that it supplies you some kind of objective measure of
> language "change" per measure of time.

Steve, for heaven's sake.  I have made no such claim.  This is the sort of
thing glottochronologists do, and I am not a fan of glottochronology.

Have you confused me with someone else?  My name is 'Trask' -- nice, short,
distinctive, Norwegian, easy to remember.

[LT]

> <<Without the UP, historical linguistics would be no more orderly or
> principled than a Michael Moorcock fantasy novel.  We need it.>>

> But, unfortunately, as far as a scientific rate of change goes, you just
> don't meet the qualifications.

And what is this supposed to mean?

First, I am not a rate of change, and your statement is incomprehensible.
You might as well tell me that I don't meet the qualifications for being a
complex number.

Second, I have not proposed any rate of change.

Third, I have never even mentioned any rate of change, except to point out
that we cannot reasonably assume that the rate of linguistic change
increased greatly across the planet -- or decreased greatly, for that
matter -- some thousands of years ago.

I have said no more than this.  Why does it bother you so much?  And why do
you keep accusing me darkly of making sinister claims?

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 sarima at friesen.net  Wed Jun 27 06:33:43 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 23:33:43 -0700
Subject: The Iceman's Berries
In-Reply-To: <8f.be2bd65.285a662a@aol.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.233343.0700.>

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.

>*taksos has cognates in Latin, Celtic, Greek, and Indo-Iranian.

This looks older, as it covers all the widely separated branches except
Hittite.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 28 13:28:29 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 09:28:29 EDT
Subject: Red Deer in Anatolia
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.092829.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/28/2001 6:30:05 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com writes:
<<-- no.  This is a false statement.  These are distinct terms in enough IE
languages that the attribution of PIE *elhen is secure. >>

-- no. This is a false statement.  There are no clearly attested terms in any
early enough IE languages that distinguished between the fallow and red deer.

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.

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.  If you can produce them - in context, if possible - then I might
have to concede the distinction might validly be reconstructed in *PIE.
Otherwise, I can say with confidence I see no logical basis for your
conclusions.

Regards,
S. Long


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Thu Jun 28 18:25:52 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 14:25:52 EDT
Subject: Ockham's Razor
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.142552.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/28/01 4:52:51 AM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com
writes:

> So far, you have presented no facts that show any distinction between the two
> types of deer in early IE languages.

-- since the word means "red deer" specifically in a number of IE languages,
we may therefore assign that meaning to the PIE form.

That's the general rule.  Are you rewriting linguistic methodology again
today?

> Show me specifically in any Classical Greek texts where the distinction is
> made between red deer and fallow deer.

-- Hesychius.


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 28 20:24:49 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 16:24:49 EDT
Subject: About the Yew1
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.162449.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/27/2001 9:20:37 PM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:

<< Actually, I believe it will work, but my earlier posting contained a glaring
oversight. The regular Greek word for 'yew' is <taxos>, which is clearly from
the same source as Latin <taxus>. >>

I don't think so.  Your first post was probably right.  I seriously doubt
that you'll find a single reference to yews or any other tree as <taxos> in
all of Classical Greek.  Even your own Dioscorides cited <taxos> = 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.

<<The word I cited, <smi:lax>, is an epithet of several diverse plants. As
you suggest, the most plausible connection is with <smi:le:> '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.  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.

<<Anyhow, there is no reason to suppose that <smi:lax> was ever established
in the _exclusive_ sense of 'yew' and then applied to other plants.>>

I suspect no word had the exclusive sense of "yew" in pre-Roman Greek.  I've
not seen any in the texts anyway.

<<the oxytone <i:os> 'arrow' referred by L&S to the root of <ienai> 'to go';
the oxytone <ios> 'poison, esp. of serpents' cognate with Latin <vi:rus>
'slime; poison' (PIE *weis-
Pok. 1134);...>>

Whatever the two sources of the words, they are distinguishable in Greek
texts almost only by context and often not even by that.  The source of
course is irrelevant because my notion was that they were borrowed, without
regard to the source, in a later form into Celtic.

<<Lumping together similar-sounding words in order to support crude
generalizations is as hazardous to the facts as going berserk with a straight
razor.>>

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.

Regards,
Steve Long


From edsel at glo.be  Thu Jun 28 17:16:07 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 19:16:07 +0200
Subject: About the Yew1
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.191607.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas G Kilday" <acnasvers at hotmail.com>
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2001 11:31 AM

> Steve Long (21 May 2001) wrote:

[snip]

>> My real problem with all this is that the "yew" is not really that
>> recognizable as a tree or as a wood.  And there is evidence that the name
>> was not altogether that stable, even among cultures that had writing and
>> could communicate long-distances about something as local and variable as
>> the appearance of a tree.  Even if PIEists knew the tree, chances are they
>> would have soon confused it with other trees.

> I'm well aware that cognate dendronyms can refer to different trees in
> different languages, and examples from IE and Semitic occur in my own
> postings. But in fact Taxus baccata _is_ quite distinctive as trees go.
> First, it has prominent red berries. Second, its wood is prized for making
> bows and arrows. Third, its leaves are highly toxic (unusual, if not unique,
> for a tree native to Europe). The Belgic king Catuvolcus took his own life
> with yew-poison (Caes. B.G. VI.31). A persistent superstition (Diosc. IV.79)
> holds that anyone sleeping under a yew will die: hence the epithet "albero
> della morte". It is very unlikely that a name for this particular tree, once
> established among a body of speakers, would be applied by those speakers to
> any other tree. They could, of course, migrate out of its habitat and forget
> the name.

>> The main problem I think with using the yew word to locate PIE is, of
>> course, that the "yew" was not always a "yew."  And this only makes sense,
>> since trees don't move and that means what you call a yew or don't call a
>> yew and what I call a yew in the next valley could be two different trees --
>> up until such time as we obtain Polaroid cameras. Or up until we get around
>> to cutting them down and selling the wood, scrapping their bark for extract
>> or perhaps in the case of the yew, eating their berries.  It would be the
>> by-products, not the tree, that we could discuss in common.

> I don't see that Polaroid cameras are necessary. If you and I belong to the
> same tribe, and we don't agree on what to call trees in the next valley, then
> our use of language is dysfunctional. Do you really believe that prehistoric
> humans were linguistically incompetent?

> I don't think any serious objections have been presented to the thesis that
> PIE-speakers didn't know the yew. As I mentioned before, "yew" itself has
> ancient congeners only in Celtic and Germanic, plausibly derived from PIE
> *eiw- 'berry'. Latv. <ive> and Old Pr. <iuwis> are from MLG <i:we>, not
> Proto-Baltic. Evidently northern IE-speakers _did_ name the tree after its
> distinctive "by-products" when they encountered it by moving west. Other
> groups of IE-speakers entered yew-country by other routes and either adopted
> pre-IE names or fixated on other features.

> Celtic has preserved pre-IE *ebur- 'yew' rather extensively in toponyms,
> ethnonyms, and personal names, and also Irish <ibhar> 'yew; bow' beside <eo>
> 'yew'. The stem *ebur- also appears in toponyms in Iberia, Liguria,
> Campania, and probably Greece (Ephura:, old name of Corinth and other
> places). In my opinion *ebur- belongs with the Old European substrate
> associated with the expansion of Neolithic farmers across Europe (ca.
> 5500-4000 BCE). If you believe, like Renfrew, that these farmers (who
> entered Europe from Anatolia) spoke PIE, then you must explain why "IE"
> *ebur- should have been superseded by *eiw- in the north and by other words
> in the south and east. This can be done if you posit movement of IE-speakers
> out of Anatolia and east of yew-country, then back into Europe. But then
> we're begging the question of what IE and non-IE are. It is pointless IMHO
> to extend "Indo-European" back to the first European farmers, and equally
> pointless to regard PIE as arbitrarily old.

> It should be noted that Hans Krahe, whose research did much to substantiate
> the Old European substrate, regarded this substrate as IE. I think Krahe
> succeeded in showing that Old European shares a few suffixes with PIE and is
> probably related, but again I disagree with the characterization of
> something this old as "Indo-European".

> DGK

[Ed Selleslagh]

1. The very well known case of Lat. 'fagus' (Eng. beech and similar in other
Germanic, e.g. beuk in Du.) and Gr. 'phe:g?s' (Dor. phag?s) (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?

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.

[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]

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).

Ed.


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 28 21:48:12 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 17:48:12 EDT
Subject: Yew Two
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.174812.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/28/2001 3:53:52 AM, jrader at Merriam-Webster.com writes:
<< Mr. Long is playing with Irish orthography here.  The Old Irish word
is <ibar>, with a short i, as cited earlier in the message.  The
spellings with <iu> reflect Early Modern Irish developments (growth
of a glide vowel, shift of the diphthongal crest) and resemblance to
Greek <iophoros> is chimerical.  Fluctuations between <io/iu>
spellings in Modern Irish/Scottish Gaelic words reflect mid/high
vowel exchanges in dialects that have nothing to do with the Old
Irish forms of the words.>>

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.  What I was trying to do
was suggest just one more alternative explanation for <ibar> et al.  And the
reason I like it is because I don't think that any one can say for sure how
<iophoros> would have been borrowed into Celtic or some part of Celtic.

If you have a notion of what it would looked like, I'd be happy to hear it.

<iophoros> > <ibar> > <iubhar> would work just as well.  In Gaelic, of
course, I only had <iubhar>, so that's what I used.  And it looked good.

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, consistent with the historical and technical
evidence regarding these objects and the clear use of the same or similar
words to refer to those objects.  I think that *ebor was a trade word that
circulated where these objects or materials or substitutes went.  And was
borrowed in one form or another.

But I LIKE the <iophoros> connection because it's a chance to remind somebody
somewhere that the Greeks had some connection with Celtic (and maybe even
Vasconian) speakers, on and off, since way before Celtic historical times.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 28 05:19:37 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 01:19:37 EDT
Subject: "mono-descent is implicit in the comparative method ..."
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.011937.EDT.>

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:

<<Actually, I would be quite happy to call such a language an isolate. It is
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 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:

<<Excuse me, but last I heard you were not even able to coherently
distinguish between influence and descent.>>

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."

<<I think you are mistaken about who got knocked out inf the first round.>>

Of course!  After all, theoretically - it just couldn't happen.  How many
fingers do you see?

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 28 16:35:32 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 12:35:32 EDT
Subject: Handfuls of Unrelated Forms
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.123532.EDT.>

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:
<< 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 28 17:30:46 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 13:30:46 EDT
Subject: The Single Parent Question
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.133046.EDT.>

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.

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.

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, have you ever *done* any comparative linguistics?  Have 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.  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.  That demands that the
process should be rational and reproducible.  If you're saying I'm missing
something, spell it out.  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.

Regards,
Steve Long


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu Jun 28 21:10:46 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 17:10:46 EDT
Subject: The Single *PIE Village Theory
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.171046.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/27/2001 4:35:07 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<< Not at all. What you have forgotten while gathering the woodpile is that my
example involved members of the same tribe. In modern North America, such a
community corresponds roughly to a village like "Mayberry" with its
surrounding farmland, not to the entire eastern USA. If a single village
actually exhibited such a wide variety of terms for the same tree, it would
be a major dysfunction indeed,...>>

Earlier DGK wrote:
<< I don't see that Polaroid cameras are necessary. If you and I belong to the
same tribe, and we don't agree on what to call trees in the next valley,
then our use of language is dysfunctional. Do you really believe that
prehistoric humans were linguistically incompetent? >>

What's interesting in this and the quote above 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.

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?

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).

<<If you and I belong to the same tribe, and we don't agree on what to call
trees in the next valley, then our use of language is dysfunctional. Do you
really believe that
prehistoric humans were linguistically incompetent? >>

I posted (6/14/2001 12:04:03 PM) under the title "The Yew and The Native
Guide" the research that says that this is probably wrong.  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.

Regards,
Steve Long


From rao.3 at osu.edu  Wed Jun 27 11:45:28 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 07:45:28 -0400
Subject: -ca in Sanskrit and Bartholomae's law
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.074528.0400.>

"Oliver Neukum" <Oliver.Neukum at lrz.uni-muenchen.de> wrote:

> could someone explain why Bartholomae's law never affects -ca ?

Isn't Bartholomae's Law limited to 'word"-internal sandhi, and not
applicable even to compounds? [even secondary affixes seem to be immune
to internal sandhi] I can't find any primary suffixes that begin with c
or j [and primary suffixes that begin with k, g, p seem to rare and not
productive].


From rao.3 at osu.edu  Wed Jun 27 11:59:00 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 07:59:00 -0400
Subject: Munda in Early NW India
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.075900.0400.>

From: "Douglas G Kilday" <acnasvers at hotmail.com> wrote, on June 13, 2001,
> [...]  Hence it appears that Sanskrit has 5  phonemically distinct
> fricatives.

Four: visarga is an allophone of /s/.

>>>[...] OTOH if the traditional (Brugmannian) voiced aspirates were
>>> "really" voiced fricatives, the transition to voiced aspirates in Indic
>>> could be viewed as systematic substrate-induced fortition, if the
>>> Munda-substrate hypothesis is in the ballpark.

> It's not hard to find examples of voiced fricatives becoming voiced stops.
> [...] The phonetic systems in Iranian and MIA are thus viewed as more
> conservative than the Sanskrit system, and there is no need to explain "the
> aspirated series going to a voiced fricative". The trouble lies in explaining
> the reverse, namely the voiced aspirated series in Indic, and this is where
> substrate may be in the ballpark.

First of all, *d and *dh etc produced distinct phonemes in Germanic
which still needs to be explained: Doesn't the [d] in "da Bulls" merge
with [d] in "dun"?

I don't follow MIA being "more conservative in this regard": PIE *dh,
*gh, *bh all merge into /h/ in MIA (intervocally), but remained distinct
in Sanskrit, except for *dh going to h in verbal endings and
some words. We can see the process happening: The verbal adjective from
*dheH is dhita in RV fairly often, but hita becomes more and more common
as time goes on. How is MIA more conservative? Even in MIA we from -ddh-
(from Sanskrit -gdh-/-bdh-, if I remember right). How?

If the substrate was Munda (as suggested by somebody), why did it
conveniently disappear to leave MIA to change these fricatives to voiced
h, but leave survivors? Or is another case where a unknown substratum
operated only to disappear when it would have become troublesome for
observed outcomes? In both cases, why should we assume that the MIA
changes g, d, b -> zero and gh, dh, bh -> h were unrelated?

> My main point was that traditional PIE is short on fricatives and long on
> "laryngeals".

I have no opinions on the phonology of laryngeals. I am perfectly
willing to assume that PIE had a fricative with every series, with
laryngeals being what we can deduce of their existence, if  a complete
theory can be put forth. I object, on principle, to fix-ups that invoke
substratum explanations whenever somebody points out problems.

To put it more positively: Anyone who proposes a new systemic
reconstruction must provide a complete trajectory into attested daughter
languages that can reasonably be continued into historically known
subsequent changes. This is a tall order of IE, I know; but to ignore it
opens the door to unchecked speculation.


From miskec4096 at hotmail.com  Thu Jun 28 16:44:06 2001
From: miskec4096 at hotmail.com (Kreso Megyeral)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 18:44:06 +0200
Subject: Word Order and verb endings (was Re: No Proto-Celtic?)
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.184406.0200.>

According to Gabor Sandi's observations on Hungarian verbal and nominal
system, I would like to ask what 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?


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Thu Jun 28 19:22:36 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 15:22:36 -0400
Subject: Word Order and verb endings (was Re: No Proto-Celtic?)
In-Reply-To: <001c01c0fce0$e3f2fc00$28474241@swbell.net>
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.152236.0400.>

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.

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Vidhyanath Rao" <rao.3 at osu.edu>
> Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2001 9:34 PM

> <snip>

>> Most importantly, similar forms can be used to turn a clause into an
>> adjective: "The man who came yesterday" can be rendered as
>>     neRRu    vanta    manitan
>>    yesterday [come] man

>> This suggests a very different explanation: Finite verbs came from
>> verbal nouns and the order stem+pronoun then will be due to the usual
>> order of adjective+noun.

> [PCR]

> First, I think we should explicit note that Adj+N is the order associated
> with SOV.

> The application of this to IE is that I propose that IE or the language that
> produced IE had a stage in which a statement like

> *mon(u) *sek

> could be interpreted to mean either

> 'the man is cutting (something)', or

> 'the man is cut',


From sarima at friesen.net  Wed Jun 27 06:26:30 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 23:26:30 -0700
Subject: Fw: *G^EN-
In-Reply-To: <00af01c0f7ff$40f086c0$7a464241@swbell.net>
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.232630.0700.>

At 09:01 AM 6/18/01 -0500, proto-language wrote:
>[PCR]

>This is, of course, a natural "suspicion". However, having suspected the same,
>no doubt, initially, IEists like Pokorny et al. were able to show a
>commonality of meaning which linked various CVC(V)C roots together.

>If one takes the idea of "overanalysis" to its ultimate implication, should we
>assume that any CVC(V)C "root" is necessarily unrelated to a semantically
>similar CVC root? Or do you believe that some CVC(V)C roots are legitimately
>derived from CVC roots?

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.

>And how does one identify the legitimate derivations?

If there are attested forms derived from the CVC basis in several branches
of IE, or there are several *distinct* forms of very similar or closely
related meaning with different extensions.

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.

>[SF]

>> I find it better to just take PIE roots as they come, without trying to
>> force them into some preconceived mold.

>[PCR]

>You assume what you attempt to argue.

>It is the form of a PIE root which is the question  here.

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).

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From petegray at btinternet.com  Tue Jun 26 19:49:50 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 20:49:50 +0100
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.204950.0100.>

Pat said:
>*keubH2-, 'lie down, lay down',
>I see no reason not to derive it from Pokorny's 2. *kew-, 'bend'

Help yourself.  It doesn't alter my (or any normal) understanding of PIE.

PIE


From petegray at btinternet.com  Tue Jun 26 19:48:18 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 20:48:18 +0100
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.204818.0100.>

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

Peter


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Wed Jun 27 08:58:31 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 08:58:31 -0000
Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc.
Message-ID: <WED.27.JUN.2001.085831.0000.>

petegray (15 Jun 2001) wrote:

>> I suppose -cum is a remnant of an older time when prepositions were either
>> postpositions or relatively mobile adverbs.

>Yes, so it is suggested.

>> Is there any obvious reason why -cum is the only instance of the archaic
>> system?

>It only occurs with personal pronouns, and nowhere else.  The most interesting
>suggestion I have heard is that it began with an avoidance of the sequence
>cunn-.  cum nobis could sound like forms of cunnus, from which comes the good
>English word cunnilingus.  Hence nobiscum, thence to other personal pronouns.

That's certainly ingenious, but it says more about the suggestor than it
does about the linguistics. A kid stashing his dirty pictures between the
pages of his Latin textbook, perhaps ...

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). This usage is preserved better in p-Italic: e.g.
Umbrian <ukriper fisiu tutaper ikuvina> 'pro arce Fisia pro civitate
Iguvina', Oscan <vibieisen beriieis> 'in Vibiis Beriis'. Similarly, in Epic
Greek many prepositions may follow their objects, but in Attic prose only
<peri> may do so.

Noteworthy is the fact that <cunnus> is a 2nd-decl. feminine. This type
occurs commonly with names of trees, which suggests to me that <cunnus> was
originally a phytonym, referring to a species with hirsute foliage, which
acquired the secondary meaning 'pudendum muliebre'. OTOH Watkins refers
<cunnus> to *kutno- 'sheath' from *(s)keu- 'to cover', which is plausible
enough etymologically (cf. <vagina>) but fails to explain the gender. Lest
anyone think that "feminine parts acquire feminine gender" (we've been
through this), <saltus> lit. 'forest' is a 4th-decl. masculine, and it's
used colloquially as 'pudendum muliebre'.

DGK


From Georg-Bonn at t-online.de  Thu Jun 28 14:34:00 2001
From: Georg-Bonn at t-online.de (Stefan Georg)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 16:34:00 +0200
Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc.
In-Reply-To: <003901c0fd97$a039b780$5821b4d4@leo>
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.163400.0200.>

>petegray wrote:

>>> Is there any obvious reason why -cum is the only instance of the archaic
>>> system?

>> It only occurs with personal pronouns, and nowhere else.   The most
>> interesting suggestion I have heard is that it began with an avoidance of
>> the sequence cunn-.   cum nobis could sound like forms of cunnus, from which
>> comes the good English word cunnilingus.  Hence nobiscum, thence to other
>> personal pronouns.

No Latin speaker would have ever cared to avoid the use of cunnus or
whatever it may be which is carefully omitted from our textbooks
today. They wouldn't even have understood what someone who might
object was talking about. (they would have been
flabber-fucking-gasted and would have said so !) They were no
Victorian Latin teachers (isti cinaedi).

StG
--
Dr. Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Thu Jun 28 19:28:22 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 15:28:22 -0400
Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc.
In-Reply-To: <003801c0fd97$9f9b0680$5821b4d4@leo>
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.152822.0400.>

> I'll dig for it. I hope it explains why *ke/o went
> ge- instead of he-... (Heschwister, tohether...)

the ge- in together is a different ge.  its part of the stem, as in gather.


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Thu Jun 28 21:37:22 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 16:37:22 -0500
Subject: Latin mecum, tecum, etc.
In-Reply-To: <003901c0fd97$a039b780$5821b4d4@leo>
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.163722.0500.>

[snip]

	Old Spanish had conosco & convosco

>Ha, not only *wlkos was not allowed on the hunt,
>but cunn- was taboo too in rhetorics... But what
>about "cum nostribus (...)" or "cum novis (...)"
>or similar? Maybe less frequent.

>>> May *kom (cum) and *ko (cis) and *kwe (-que) be related etymologically
>>> around the idea of "here-nearby-with"?

>> No.  Latin cum has a good PIE history in *kom or *km, and -que has a
>> different one in *-kwe.  (different consonant, different vowel)

>No *ko-we > *kwe pattern envisionable? (*-we being
>just a dummy placeholder here).

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701


From dlwhite at texas.net  Thu Jun 28 15:45:45 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 10:45:45 -0500
Subject: the 'Dhole'
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.104545.0500.>

> Dholes (aka "red dog of India" (Kipling)) are found in dense forests.  Wolves
> as a general rule and apparently especially in southern Asia are found in
> open habitats.

        Just briefly, again...
        No.  Wolves used to live in eastern N. America, not to mention
Japan, which is not exactly noted for its open steppes, and dholes occurred
in the tundra environments of Ice Age Europe.  The reason we associate
wolves with grasslands these days is that we exterminated them in former
forest lands, which are good for agriculture, first.   It is no sort of
inherent property.  The two species have essentially the same "life-style",
living to a large extent off of deer or deer-sized animals, and there is no
reason to think that one or the other would engage in a sort of tabu
avoidance of areas that were too wooded or not wooded enough, as long as the
overall life-style was viable.
        On the other hand, staying out of each other's way to some extent is
probable.   One may compare how ferrets and badgers in N. America are
grassland animals, though in Eurasia they are not.  Probably the previosuly
established existence of racoons and possums occupying much the same niche
in the forests of N America made spread into these areas more difficult.
And probably wolves, coming into India from the NW and there bumping into
dholes, tended to stay in environments more similar to those they came from,
as did ferrets and badgers in N. America.   But avoidance of dholes cannot
be the whole story.  Note that wolves have not spread from temperate N.
America into tropical Central America either, despite there being no
competition there from dholes or anything else of the sort.

Dr. David L. White


From rao.3 at osu.edu  Fri Jun 29 12:53:01 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 08:53:01 -0400
Subject: the 'Dhole'
Message-ID: <FRI.29.JUN.2001.085301.0400.>

<X99Lynx at aol.com> wrote:
> Large packs of dholes are reputed in folk reports
> capable of taking on tigers,

This was repeated in a PBS show (Nature?), and it was asserted that the
tiger they were following moved away when it got the scent of the wild
dogs.

----

Regarding "year-round humidity" as explanation for wolves being absent
in South India: Do they make maps of humidity levels? My personal
experience was that the (lower) Gangetic plain is much more humid than
the eastern part of Tamil Nadu, Andhra in the summer (which at these
latitudes is April-June): These parts get much of their rain from the
North-East monsoon which occurs in Oct-Nov, and are leewards for the
South-West monsoon.

The avoidance of dense forest by wolfs may be a better explanation: The
pathway from the northwest to the Decan is blocked by two ranges
(Vindhya and Satpura), two major rivers that run east to west and what
must have been heavily forested areas in ancient times.

Regards
Nath


From connolly at memphis.edu  Wed Jun 27 04:01:12 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 23:01:12 -0500
Subject: German <w> (was:Dubya and before that, minimal pairs)
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.230112.0500.>

Robert Whiting wrote:

> ... I had a German-speaking
> colleage who pronounced English <v> as [w] (as in "willage").  When I
> pointed out to her that she could easily pronounce the [v] sound in
> <village> she said, "Oh, no, German doesn't have that sound -- we use
> <v> for [f] like in <Vater>.  Well, what can you say?  Now if 'village'
> were written *<willage>, she would have had no trouble pronouncing it.

Sure she would have.  The fact is, some Germans pronounce <w> 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 petegray at btinternet.com  Tue Jun 26 19:32:28 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 20:32:28 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.203228.0100.>

>"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.

Peter


From petegray at btinternet.com  Tue Jun 26 19:44:01 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 20:44:01 +0100
Subject: bishop
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.204401.0100.>

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'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 petegray at btinternet.com  Tue Jun 26 19:39:53 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 20:39:53 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.203953.0100.>

> Claiming that Latin had only capital V until the 6th century when a
> lowercase u sprang out of nowhere is a gross oversimplification of very
> complex developments.

Yes, I admit I simplified.  But my point was what you said earlier

> Now I agree that the mixture of u and V in the same script is totally
> unroman; roman writing did not mix scripts.  To get V and u in the same
> inscription they would have to mix inscriptional capitals or square
> capitals with uncials and they just didn't do it.

Peter


From petegray at btinternet.com  Tue Jun 26 19:36:28 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 20:36:28 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <TUE.26.JUN.2001.203628.0100.>

>> - in NZ, there is no schwa.  The vowel in "bit" is used instead.  So there
>> is no problem whatever with h before schwa - it just doesn't occur.

> You've got it back-to-front. The vowel in 'bit' is a schwa over there. I'm
> an Aussie, ...

It only sounds like that to an Aussie!   I don't have the dialect books at
hand, but I think I stand in lustrous company on this one.   (On the other
hand, even I have been known to err...)

Peter


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Jun 29 10:27:19 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 11:27:19 +0100
Subject: kinkajou
In-Reply-To: <000f01c0f528$16038400$6a6263d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <FRI.29.JUN.2001.112719.0100.>

--On Thursday, June 14, 2001 6:16 pm -0500 "David L. White"
<dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

[on 'kinkajou']

>         It is not "an American animal" in the sense of being an animal
>         that occurs in the territory of American English.  (It does not
> occur north of southern Mexico.)  It is "an American animal" only in the
> sense of occurring in the New World.  I would hope that Brits, even
> lexicographers, would not be so zoologically parochial as to exclude the
> only English name for this animal on such grounds.  American
> lexicographers do not exclude Old World animals like lorises and lemurs,
> after all, on the grounds they are Old World (thus "un-American"?)
> animals.  If "kinkajou" has been excluded from some recent dictionaries,
> it is, I hope, on account of rarity (as a word), not geography.

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)


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri Jun 29 10:37:13 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 11:37:13 +0100
Subject: "ou" in "kinkajou"
In-Reply-To: <002b01c0f5b7$eaddd240$e16063d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <FRI.29.JUN.2001.113713.0100.>

--On Friday, June 15, 2001 11:25 am -0500 "David L. White"
<dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

[on the spelling of /u/ as <ou>]

>         And in kinkajou, judging by the pronunciation.  First named in
> French Guyana?   Passed into English in British Guyana?   (There were once
> such entitities, no?   My knowledge of colonial history is failing me.)

The OED has an interesting tale to tell about this word.  It derives from
an Algonquian name for the wolverine, and it passed into French both as
<carcajou> and as <quincajou> 'wolverine'.  But the French naturalist
Buffon, in writing up his natural history of the Americas, screwed up
big-time and mistakenly transferred the second version to a wholly
different animal.  In English, we then took over both French words,
applying the first to the wolverine but the second to the other animal
mistakenly singled out by Buffon.

It occurs to me that we do not have an accepted label for semantic shift
resulting from an outright blunder.  Are there any classicists out there
who can provide a suitably dignified Greek term meaning 'change by cock-up'
or something of the sort?

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 anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi  Thu Jun 28 17:51:37 2001
From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio)
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 20:51:37 +0300
Subject: Proto-Celtic - An Exploration: Celtic ICM & Q/P Words =
 Function IE Roots
In-Reply-To: <c4.16208626.28651746@aol.com>
Message-ID: <THU.28.JUN.2001.205137.0300.>

Dear Mr. Keefe and discussants:

On Fri, 22 Jun 2001 DFOKeefe at aol.com wrote:

>           Recently there was some discussion of Proto-Celtic on the list.  As
> you probably know, my wife and I are amateur linguists.  In spite of our
> amateur status, please permit us to offer for your consideration a paper
> entitled PROTO-CELTIC - AN EXPLORATION: Celtic Initial Consonantal Mutation
> and Q/P Equivalent Words as a Function of I.E. Roots.  We believe that our
> analysis of I.E. roots in terms of ICM helps obtain a much clearer picture of
> the prehistoric development of ICM and perhaps the phonological dynamics
> which brought it about.  We are sure that this analysis of ICM in terms of
> I.E. roots can benefit from some constructive suggestions.  Thank you for
> your consideration.

>           You may access this paper at one of our two Web sites:
> http://hometown.aol.com/IrishWord/page1.html  (section 1)
> http://hometown.aol.com/Dfokeefe/page1.html  (section xiii)
> We humbly apologize for the all-too-basic America On Line graphics of our Web
> page.

As a Uralist, my knowledge of Celtic is very superfluous, so I only wish
comment on the following passages in the paper:

>Consonantal gradation is comparable to initial consonant mutation. There
>is initial consonantal gradation in the Fenno-Ugric languages.

This is incorrect. There is no "gradation" of initial consonats in any
Uralic language; this is not at all what is meant by the term 'consonant
gradation', and morphophonological phenomena affecting initial consonats
are non-existent in Uralic.

>There is consonantal gradation in Uralic languages of all consonants in words,
>which makes Urtalic comparable to Celtic in some respects.

Once again, this is incorrect. The most complex systems of consonant
gradation are found in Samic and Nganasan, but they do not affect all
consonants in words, being prosodically and phonotactically restricted to
certain positions.

>No one has suggested that the consonantal gradation in these languages is a
>recent phonological development.

Depends on what is meant by "recent", but strictly speaking, this is not
true. Practically no one believes in Proto-Uralic gradation anymore, and
the Samoyedic and Sami-Finnic gradation systems are almost uniformly seen
as resulting from convergence. There is even evidence for the view that
also the Samic and Fennic gradational patterns have arisen separately. So,
from the point of view of Proto-Uralic, these phenomena can certainly be
considered 'recent'.

>Therefore, the same should not be assumed of Celtic languages.

Even if the gradation was a Proto-Uralic feature, this is non sequitur,
because the Uralic gradation and the Celtic mutations have certainly
nothing to do with each other.

---------------

In this connection, I also only very briefly comment on two other papers
on the same web site, titled "2,650+ Similar Irish and Finnish Words with
an Irish Tie-in to Uralic" and "Similar Uralic, Fenno-Ugric, and
Indo-European Roots" (it is not possible to thoroughly criticize these
papers here, as they contain so many blunders, factual mistakes and
dubious claims that addressing them all would probably take days or weeks
of my working time - and I doubt that the list members would find this of
any special interest). Regrettably, even a cursory examination of the
supplied "etymologies" reveals the authors' nearly total lack of knowledge
in Uralistics, as well as general methods and principles of comparative
linguistics. Consequently, the observed similarities between Irish and
Finnish, or Uralic and Indo-European, are reduced to a mere fata morgana.

Regards,
Ante Aikio
(Assistant / Sami language, University of Oulu)

Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 22:39:37 +0300
From: Ante Aikio <anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi>
X-Sender: anaikio at paju.oulu.fi
To: Indo-European at xkl.com
Message-ID: <Pine.SGI.4.21.0106282145250.35458771-100000 at paju.oulu.fi>

Just a correction to a silly L2 mistake:

>>As a Uralist, my knowledge of Celtic is very superfluous,

'superficial' was of course what I meant...

- Ante


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Jun 30 07:01:44 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 03:01:44 EDT
Subject: Sound changes versus sound changes
Message-ID: <SAT.30.JUN.2001.030144.EDT.>

[Steve Long:]

>I would suspect that "found" cognates that truly have no recognizable
>resemblances are rare.

In a message dated 6/29/2001 11:53:48 PM, anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi writes:

<< It is true that found cognates with little or no phonological similarity
are very common. >>

The difference between "recognizable resemblances" and "phonological
similarities" may make a difference here.  But in any case your examples are
compelling:

<<PU *j?Nsi 'bow'
Sami /juoksa/
Hungarian /?j/
Nenets /ngin?/

PU *wixti 'five or ten'
Finnish /viisi/ '5'
H. /?t/ '5'
N. /yuq/ '10'...etc.>>

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.)

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.

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.

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.

So in talking about changes in related languages, maybe we're talking about
two types of change.

One is simply the number of times a language changes.  The other is how fara
language goes with those changes.

<<PU *j?Nsi ... Hungarian /?j/.... PU *wixti .... H. /?t/...>>

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.

The Hungarian example also brings to mind the question of how much certain
changes seem just plain immeasurable.

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.  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.

If morphology, grammar and syntax are the least likely things to be 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.  And perhaps the phonological gap is a truer measure, if there is
any reliable measure at all.

You wrote:
<<Larry brought up sound changes in some Pama-Nyungan languages, which, as
far as I understand, have quite effectively eradicated all surface similarity
from most of the cognate words.>>

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.

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.

Regards,
Steve Long


From sarima at friesen.net  Sat Jun 30 13:28:50 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 06:28:50 -0700
Subject: Rate of Change
In-Reply-To: <F337nlT2NqFJ3sl3xbY00016065@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <SAT.30.JUN.2001.062850.0700.>

At 08:10 AM 6/27/01 +0000, Gabor Sandi wrote:

>Yet I can't help wondering about the circularity of the argument: when we
>see fast linguistic change, we look at society at the time of the change,
>and fix on some aspect of it that is undergoing change - after all,
>something is bound to be changing at any one period, given the fact that
>human beings get bored easily.

>Take periods of known "great change": the English vowel shift for example,

While I really agree with you, one can make an argument that this one at
least was associated with profound social upheaval, as it started during
the Wars of the Roses, which seriously disrupted the fabric of the nation
for many years.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at friesen.net


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sat Jun 30 16:41:22 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 12:41:22 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <SAT.30.JUN.2001.124122.EDT.>

In a message dated 6/29/01 9:04:30 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com
writes:

> 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.

-- excuse me, but how exactly are '_sp_ and _yuk_ close?


From edsel at glo.be  Sat Jun 30 17:06:27 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 19:06:27 +0200
Subject: Rate of Change
Message-ID: <SAT.30.JUN.2001.190627.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gabor Sandi" <g_sandi at hotmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2001 10:10 AM

[ moderator snip ]

> Reply:

> I have a lot of sympathy for your point of view, Ed, since I also like to
> draw a parallel between accelerated language change and changes in the
> external environment of the speakers, whether characterized as historical or
> social changes.

> Yet I can't help wondering about the circularity of the argument: when we
> see fast linguistic change, we look at society at the time of the change,
> and fix on some aspect of it that is undergoing change - after all,
> something is bound to be changing at any one period, given the fact that
> human beings get bored easily.

[Ed Selleslagh]

Maybe I should have touched upon other factors; I didn't mainly because the
initial discussion was about the correlation between socio-cultural and
linguistic change.

In pre-modern times, the factors I mentioned often, but not always, lead to
accelerated linguistic change. That depends also on other factors like whether
a given language is on the giving or the receiving end, its associated
culture's degree of self-centeredness or openness (involving among many other
things, the existence or absence of plurilinguism, of a common transcultural
geographical space like NW Europe, etc. or else: cultural-linguistic
pride/chauvinism), its place in the pecking order of cultures, and the like.

As I mentioned, breaking up of previous cultural or linguistic norms, usually
because of the breakdown of communications, is a potent factor in linguistic
change (actually: divergence), at least in the beginning. E.g. the breakup of
the Roman Empire.

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.

When suddenly left to themselves after some upheaval (Normans in England,
breakdown of the Roman Empire...), languages initially tend to evolve rapidly
to a what might be called a more stable situation, and then evolve according to
their own internal idiosyncrasies. And this internally driven rate of change
seems to behave in an irregular way. It seems that there are periods of
relative stability between periods of rapid - mostly phonological - change, as
if certain points in linguistic evolution were unstable or were like
crossroads: a new path is 'chosen'.  It looks a lot like chaos theory.
Obviously, socio-cultural change can be a trigger in this context, but it is
not a necessary condition.

I believe it is important to distinguish internally and externally caused
linguistic change, even when the two may be (more or less) overlapping at
times, e.g. the Great Vowel Shift (internal) and the Norman-French influence in
English.

> Take periods of known "great change": the English vowel shift for example,
> or French (Latin in Gaul?) between the end of the Western Roman empire (end
> of 5th century AD) and the Strasbourg Oaths (mid 9th century). Did these
> periods correspond to greater social change than earlier or later periods in
> the same geographic area, or when compared with the same historical period
> in other (but comparable) areas? I think that France in the high Middle Ages
> is a good example: the area of the langue d'oeil underwent noticeably more
> changes in both phonetics and morphology than did the arae of the langue
> d'oc. Is this because of more social changes in the north than in the south?

[Ed]

Early French was a typical case of the breakdown of linguistic unity, after the
fall of the Roman Empire.

In the high Middle Ages, the Langue d'O?l was at the core of what was
becoming the great nation-state of France, while the Langue d'Oc (Occitan, and
Catalan in the Roussillon) was the language of a region ('Aquitaine', in its
later stages and extent) that was on its way to becoming a backwater and a
virtual colony of the actual France (i.e. the north). Some people in the Midi
think that is still the case today, according to the slogans you see sometimes.

> Standard Italian has undergone practically no changes in its phonological or
> morphological structure since Dante's time, yet standard English, French and
> Spanish have all changed considerably since then. Has Italy been a
> historical or social backwater in all this time? I hardly think so, what
> with constant invasions, the Risorgimento, Mussolini and the rest.

[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.

French has change more, but that is nothing compared to the way English and
Dutch have changed. For the last 500 years or so, only the pronunciation has
changed moderately, disregarding the modest regeneration of the vocabulary and
the gradual loss (mainly in coloquial speech) of more complex conjugation forms
('l'e?sses-tu cru?') that are still normal in Castilian. Even Rabelais can
still be read without too much preparation. Villon is a bit more difficult.

The biggest change in English, which makes Old English incomprehensible, has of
course been Norman French.

But without such a dramatic intervention, Old Dutch is just as incomprehensible
to modern speakers. Middle Dutch and even 16-17th c. Dutch are noticeably
harder to understand than Shakespeare. But Flemish/Dutch culture has always
been very open and exposed to many influences, just like modern English, with
the British colonial past and all that.

> And I haven't even broached the subject of contemporary life, probably the
> fastest changing social (and technical) environment ever known to mankind.
> Yet the phonological and morphological structures of contemporary languages
> are not changing that fast, or are they?

[Ed]

I think I explained that above: the key is normalization by mass media and
generalized literacy. That is: a totally 'abnormal' situation as compared to
the (remote) past.

> Just some thoughts for discussion...

> Best wishes,
> Gabor

[Ed]
I hope I have contributed to that (again).

Ed Selleslagh


From g_sandi at hotmail.com  Sat Jun 30 13:43:44 2001
From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi)
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 13:43:44 -0000
Subject: Possible phonological changes (was: Rate of change)
Message-ID: <SAT.30.JUN.2001.134344.0000.>

>From: Rick Mc Callister <RMCCALLI at SUNMUW1.MUW.EDU>
>Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 17:27:36 -0500

>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: <X99LYNX at AOL.COM>
>> Sent: Friday, June 15, 2001 7:13 AM

>>> Then he went on to point out that European Portuguese has the rolled r,
>>> but (Northern) Brazilian Portuguese has an /h/ reflex of /r/, to which I
>>> added that the Puerto Rican Spanish rolled ("double") rr is often
>>> pronounced as a velar like in French etc. The implication is that
>>> Brazilian may have passed through this stage in the evolution of r > h.

>> [Ed Selleslagh]

>> Isn't there a little confusion here? Isn't the Brazilian Portuguese r that's
>> pronounced as uvular r, as [rx] in final position, or as [x] or even [h],
>> the original rr (cf. Spanish), the rolling r (>3 taps)? Not the single r
>> (originally one tap, now often more). [Note that double r is not always
>> written as such, as orthography is different according to position in a
>> word, e.g. initially or finally].

> I think that's what he meant. Some varieties of Brazilian
>Portuguese use /h/ for trilled /rr/. I've heard it from people from the
>South as well, from Rio Grande do Sul and Rio de Janeiro. The northerners
>I've met used a type of uvular /R/. I've been told that /rr/ is also
>trilled in parts of Brazil

>> Did you mean that Puertoricans use the Brazilian pronunciation of double r?
>> I wasn't aware of that.

> Not all Puerto Ricans, but some. It was a rural pronunciation but
>is now found among urban working class people of rural origin in Puerto
>Rico and New York --or so I've been told by Puerto Ricans. It's also found
>among some Dominicanos and --I've been told-- among some Orientales (Far
>Eastern Cuba). You hear a lot among Hispanics from all over who have
>settled in New York and lived among Puerto Ricans --including one of my
>Costa Rican brothers-in-law

>> Maybe Portuguese influence stretched farther north than I thought: in
>> Curagao Papiamento there is a considerable Portuguese base, but that's still
>> far more to the south than P.R.

>> In the mid-southern Andes (parts of Perz, Bolivia, N. Argentina), the double
>> r is pronounced [Z] (French j), strongly reminescent of Polish rz or Czech
>> r-hacek, which - as far as I know - have the same origin (rolling r). All
>> seem to be results of retroflexion.

> This is common all over most of Spanish-speaking Latin America
>outside of the Caribbean and northern Mexico: Costa Rica, Guatemala,
>western Panama, southern Mexico, parts of Highland Columbia & Venezuela,
>parts of Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, etc.

Since in many varieties of Argentinian Spanish (as well as in Chile and
Uruguay), the phonetic realizations of orthographic <y> and <ll> 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


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat Jun 30 19:21:03 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 15:21:03 EDT
Subject: Rate of Change: A Closer Look
Message-ID: <SAT.30.JUN.2001.152103.EDT.>

I wrote:
<< So pick a *set* of changes that has occurred in at least five, preferably
ten languages, and the time it took for each of them to occur historically.

In a message dated 6/30/2001 2:54:10 AM, alderson+mail at panix.com writes:
<<Who gets to decide how long the changes took?  Or are you restricting the
sample only to historically attested changes?>>

Oh, yes.  It would have to be that way.  These have to be observable changes
in observable periods of time.  That makes the data "universal" and
reproducible - anyone can measure it.  Of course, you have some statistical
leeway in setting a range for the period the change took.   E.g.,  this set
of changes took 200 years, plus or minus 100 years, and this simply puts a
similar averaged margin of error on your results.  But yes the changes and
the average time they took would have to be measurable by disinterested
observers - just like in calculating half-lives, for example.

You also probably should test a few different sets, just to be sure you had
an adequate control - to show that this one particular set is not an anomaly.

<<In that case, are you prepared to accept the results if they contradict
your view of the prehistoric spread of the Indo-European languages?  Or will
you aver that unattested (that is to say, unwitnessed) changes must have
happened at a different rate? >>

Let me put it this way, this kind of statistical evidence would be very
powerful and would create a prima facie presumption that this statistically
derived "rate" is universal.  The more languages it shows in the more
"certain" it becomes in terms of probability theory.  It would be bad science
indeed to argue against that.

As far as discontinuity behind attested and unattested rates, that cannot be
assumed - as Prof Trask stated - without a clear demonstration that an
outside variable creates a statistical difference between "attested" and
"unattested" languages - e.g., absent something like a distinct iridium
layer, a Yucatan crater and dinosaur extinction at precisely 64 million years
BP.  Obviously, the strong assumption would have to be that this is a
universal (average) rate of change in both attested and unattested languages.
 And because of my training and experience, I'd have every reason to agree.

I should say that I'm not vested in any way in a particular "rate of change."
 I don't have family in Anatolia ready to open up an IE homeland theme park.
I am vested however in the use of proper scientific methodology.  However, on
this list you have some strong personalities with some very strong opinions.

So I find myself taking firm positions about Anatolian origins not because
I'm particularly sure of that idea, but because "strength of conviction"
counts for something in these discussions.  When you are in such a minority,
you simply have to take a devil's advocate position sometimes just to force a
balanced consideration of the evidence on the other side.

On the other hand, the kind of statistical analysis described above is pretty
independent of opinion - my opinion or anyone else's. It speaks for itself
and should go a good way towards settling the matter for everyone.  Or
practically everyone.

<<Suppose that no specific feature ever shows a correlatable average rate of
change?  Suppose that it is instead entire systems that change at a
comparable rate, with no particular change required?  What then?>>

Then the question becomes whether the difference between entire (attested)
systems is measurable.  This would seem to be analogous to the analysis of
differences in complex structural "states."  Again you find some set of
variables - perhaps a much larger set - that predictably matches the
difference you see in the entire system.  If that set (e.g., as an
off-the-cuff example: the twenty most common sounds used in a language) can
predictably identify items from the correct language from a random sample of
items from different languages (let's say 75% of the time) then you have a
pretty good indicator for the entire language system.

Once you have demonstrably shown that kind of correlation, it becomes a good
hypothetical tape measure for any attested language (unless the correlation
can be shown not to apply in other languages.)  More importantly, using that
"representative" set, one should be able to calculate a pretty precise degree
of (attested) change between the same language at two different points in
time.

Of course, one might say that such a representative set or sets cannot be
identified.  But I don't think anyone should be happy with that, since it
would apparently mean that the rate of change in languages is so random and
unpredictable that no scientific statement about it can be valid.

Regards,
Steve Long


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Sat Jun 30 07:49:27 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 07:49:27 -0000
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <SAT.30.JUN.2001.074927.0000.>

petegray (24 Jun 2001) wrote:

>The highly productive English morpheme -ess appears to derive (through Late
>Latin) from the Greek -issa which appears, from its phonetic shape and other
>factors, to be a loan into Greek from some substrate.

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
<Phoi'nissa> and <Ki'lissa> in which the final [-k-] of the ethnic stem was
palatalized by the feminine suffix [-ya]. This didn't happen to the
corresponding choronyms because their final Alpha was long and the preceding
Iota took the accent: <Phoiniki'a:>, <Kiliki'a:>, etc.

Similarly, stem-final [-t-] has been palatalized in <me'lissa> 'honeybee'
from *melit-ya, which nobody would dare to refer to substrate. Such words
resemble the toponyms and phytonyms in -issos which _are_ best explained as
coming from non-IE substrate, but the groups should be kept separate in
one's etymological thinking.

DGK


From connolly at memphis.edu  Sat Jun 30 23:29:29 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 18:29:29 -0500
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <SAT.30.JUN.2001.182929.0500.>

Rick Mc Callister wrote:

>         The normal order for verbs like Spanish gustar, Italian piacere, etc.
>                 is Indirect object pronoun-Verb-Subject, OVS
>         You certainly can change the order to SOV for the purpose of
> emphasis but my point was that there is a whole category of "reverse action
> verbs" in Romance languages.
>         I'm curious how the curious syntax arose

As an addendum to what I wrote a few days ago:  The construction is not
confined to Romance (it flourishes in Hindi and Russian, to name but a
few other IE languages) or even to Indo-European (cf. Japanese).  It's
obviously a phenomenon of "universal grammar" (whatever that really
means) and hence cannot be answered within the context of a single
language family.  Hence my appeal to a Case Grammar solution.

Leo Connolly


From g_sandi at hotmail.com  Sat Jun 30 22:21:28 2001
From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi)
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 22:21:28 -0000
Subject: Genetic Descent/Haitian Creole
Message-ID: <SAT.30.JUN.2001.222128.0000.>

> What happened here was this. In my student days, back in the Bronze Age, I
> was taught that the Hungarians were among those who had been prominent in
> Albania at various times in the past, and that there were Hungarian loan
> words in Albanian to prove it.

> Before sending out that posting, I checked a standard reference source on
> Albanian in my office, and I found that all the other languages I mentioned
> were cited as important sources of loans in Albanian, while Hungarian was not
> mentioned.

> Having already typed the word 'Hungarian', but now doubting it, I almost
> deleted it, but then I decided to leave it in. I figured "Well, if there are
> no Hungarian loans in Albanian, somebody will tell me about it."

> This is true. Honest.

> 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.

What's more, absolutely *everybody* in the neighbourhood bit off a bit (quite a
bit in many cases) of Hungary after World War I, except for the Albanians.
Sounds like a good basis for a beautiful friendship between the two peoples...
(Actually, King Zog of Albania had a beautiful Hungarian wife, adding to this
historical relationship).

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.

All the best,
Gabor


From dlwhite at texas.net  Sat Jun 30 12:58:42 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 07:58:42 -0500
Subject: Michif
Message-ID: <SAT.30.JUN.2001.075842.0500.>

> 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.
        By the way, it seems from Mr. Long's use of "theoretically possible"
in indirectly ridiculing my views that he thinks I think that language
mixture is theoretically impossible.  No.  Recall please, Mr. Long and
anyone else who may need to, that my first comment on the subject was
something along the lines of "there may be one out there, I just haven't
seen it yet."  My theoretical musings long ago led me to the conclusion that
mixed languages are possible.   Also, my conclusion that there are no
(non-lexically) mixed finite verbal morphologies was based on observation of
the evidence (such as it is!) in TK, not ratiocination (regardless of
whether Dr. Trask likes the particular ratiocinations that might have led to
that conclusion, if that had been what I was doing).  So Mr. Long has been
fighting phantoms here.  And not paying much attention to what people
actually say.
        In the intervals of dutiful slogging, I am preparing a combination
1) response to Dr. Trask and 2) coherent (hopefully) presentation of my
views.  Responding to individual isolated points tends, I think, to lead to
confusion (not to mention tangents, and tangents of tangents ...) when the
matter in question is of any complexity, which language contact certainly
is.

Dr. David L. White


From rao.3 at osu.edu  Fri Jun 29 13:30:10 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 09:30:10 -0400
Subject: -ca in Sanskrit and Bartholomae's law
Message-ID: <FRI.29.JUN.2001.093010.0400.>

"petegray" <petegray at btinternet.com> wrote:

>> could someone explain why Bartholomae's law never affects -ca ?

> It concerns the specific formation root + tos.  It raises a number of
> severe questions, and the "new phonoogy" of PIE mght even
> remove teh law entirely.

In Sanskrit, it affects the "infinitives" in -tum, -tave, -tos (not to
be comfused with PIE -*to), agent nouns in -tar and action noun in -ti.
It presumeably would have affected primary suffixes in -p and -c if they
had existed. [-ka seems to occur as primary suffix, but only with a
handful roots ending in vowels, and may very well go back root noun +
secondary suffix ka. This cannot be asserted synchronically because root
nouns ending in short vowels add -t.]

Are there any recent (in the last 2-3 years) about the "new phonologies"?

Regards
Nath