From crismoc at smart.ro  Tue May  1 09:55:35 2001
From: crismoc at smart.ro (Cristian Mocanu)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 12:55:35 +0300
Subject: Crimean Gothic
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.125535.0300.>

I am extremely sorry. I hadn't realized that the original posing on this
thread was about de Busbecq's recordings of CG. I thought Diamond's article
meant another CG set of etyma. I have never read the original de Busbecq
letter in its entirety until now.(thanks, Steve Gustafson). So, a thousand
pardons!!!
     However, my original question about the "men" still stands.
        It is clear now that De Busbecq  made the etyma sound more
German/Low German than they probably did.
         Here is some of the "hard stuff" Diamond left out, with the
original Latin equivalents and my somewhat amateurish comments (Feciunt
meliora potentes!)
       I'll start with the two for which one may invoke Hungarian, just as
Diamond did for "menus"
            Iel= vita sive sanitas cf. Hung. "el"=he/she/it lives;
"elo"=living
           Atochta=malum "-ta" appears to be an adjectival suffix.thus, for
"atoch-" cf. Hung "atok"=curse

            Then::
             Kilemschkop=ebibe calicem, can actually be de-composed into
"kilemsch kop" "kil"=cf. Engl. kill" could have meant smth. like "finish",
"terminate"
               Baar=puer, cf. Scand. "barn", Engl.dial."barn" =child (ren)
[not so hard, that one, really]
               Lista=parum;, i.e. lis-ta; lis-cf. Grmanic "lik"
               There are 2 etyma, also left out by Diamond, which display
the kind of incredible similarity that usually provide a temptation for
far-too-amateurish explanations (the likelihood of which is questionable
pending some consistent linguistic or historic "endorsement")
            Fers=vir; cf. Irish, fir, far
            ich malthata=ego dico; malthata,cf.Norw. maal=language
              One quick thing about  "gadeltha". Could it be that the "g"
here is De Busbecq's way of  transcribing some sort of initial glottal stop?
Then it would be fair to paralell it with German "Adel,
edel"=noble.(with-tha as an adjectival suffix).
               Once again, sorry for my previous message!
                                      Best regards,
                                           cristian


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Tue May  1 06:58:58 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 06:58:58 -0000
Subject: Olives/was: Lactose Intolerance/Renfrew
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.065858.0000.>

Rick Mc Callister (25 Apr 2001) wrote:

>	I read a recent article in either Natural History or National
>Geographic (or some similar magazine) that olives were first cultivated in
>present Syria.
>	If so, one would expect a Semitic root for the word
>	Yet, if I remember correctly, the origin of Latin oliua either from
>or cognate to Greek elaia, elaion is unknown
>	As far as I know, Semitic is the only recorded non-intrusive
>language group in that specific area.
>	Arabic has zayt "oil (of any kind)", zaytun "olive", whence Spanish
>aceite, aceituna. I think the Hebrew forms are cognate.

Hebrew has <zayith> 'olive, olive-tree', but the generic term for 'oil'
(also 'fat', 'fatness') is <s^emen>: hence <s^emen zayith> 'olive-oil' and
<ze:yth s^emen> 'oil-olive' (i.e. oil-producing olive-tree). Since
'olive-tree' is expressed in full as <!e:c, hazzayith> 'tree of the zayith'
while 'wild olive-tree, oleaster' is <!e:c, s^emen> lit. 'oil-tree' it seems
likely that <zayith>, like its Arabic cognate, originally meant 'oil'. This
was evidently supplanted by <s^emen>, derived from <s^-m-n> 'to be or become
fat'.

>	If olives are indeed from that area, any idea where the word may
>have come from?

At the risk of being accused again of peddling unfalsifiable hypotheses, I
would refer *elaiw- to Pelasgian.

Latin <oli:va> evidently comes from Etruscan *eleiva by regular changes:
Etr. short /el/ generally becomes Lat. short /ol/, and Old Lat. /ei/ becomes
Class. Lat. /i:/. The Etruscan lexeme is attested in adjectival form (TLE
762, bucchero aryballos) <aska mi eleivana> 'a vessel (am) I pertaining to
oil' = 'I am an oil-vessel'. This in turn looks like a borrowing from
Western Greek <elaiwa:> (cf. Etr. Eivas from WGk Aiwa:s 'Ajax'). I'm not
sure how to explain the shorter Lat. forms <olea>, <oleum> vs. <oli:va>,
<oli:vum>.

This borrowing-path suggests that olives were introduced to Italy by Greeks
trading with Etruscans. The earlier Pelasgians of central Italy presumably
didn't know olives and couldn't contribute the word to the Italic languages.
BTW this hypothesis could be "falsified" by the discovery of olive-pits or
strigils at the Villanovan level or below.

Returning to the Greek forms, we have a chicken-and-egg problem: was oil
(elaion) named after the olive (elaia:) or vice versa? In the Arabic words,
it's clear that 'oil' is the primary notion, and 'olive' is derived. This is
retained in Spanish; one of the first words I learned was "aceite" in the
sense of "motor-oil", not the Filippo Berio stuff. Hence it's plausible that
the original meaning of *elaiw- was 'oil', applied later to an oily edible
fruit and the tree which produces it.

I don't see a problem with Pelasgians antedating Semites in the NE
Mediterranean. Hebrew <ke:ph> 'cliff, crag' and <s'a:s'> 'garment-moth'
(along with Aramaic cognates) are possible derivatives from Psg. substrate
(cf. Gk. Ke:phi:sos 'name of several rivers', <se:s> 'moth').

DGK


From edsel at glo.be  Tue May  1 16:39:30 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 18:39:30 +0200
Subject: Etruscan / Pelasgian
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.183930.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: <philjennings at juno.com>
Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2001 4:10 AM

[snip]

> Isn't Tarhuntassa securely located as a neighbor to Kizzuwatna?
> (I envision this about as far east as the borders of southwest Asia
> Minor can be stretched.  I have heard that Tarhuntassa = later Tarsus.)

> How old a god is Tarhun(d/t)?  Could he possibly be pre-Anatolian (ie.
> Pelasgian on the theory that Pelasgian <> Anatolian)?

[snip]

> Rather than this, Is there not sufficient evidence here and elsewhere,
> that the -assa suffix is Anatolian as well as Pelasgian?

[snip]

> Dr. White also explains the wide dispersion of -assos names (like Tartessos)
> as possibly due to later Greek mediation.  It is in fact extreme to think of
> early Pelasgians in Spain.  But the name Tarhuntassa came and went before the
> Greeks came snooping very far into Asia Minor.  Some kind of pre-Greek
> dispersion really did happen.

[Ed Selleslagh]

I have several questions, some of which are based upon extremely speculative
ideas (somebody has to stick out his neck):

1. Is Tarhun(t) the root for the name Tarquinius?

2. Is it unthinkable that the (Greek) names 'Pelasgoi' and 'Leleges' are based
upon the name of the NE Caucasian Lesghians? The first one with some indigenous
prefix (maybe indicating they're from the lowlands, not from the (Caucasian)
mountains), the second one with Greek reduplication, because of the shortness
of the name. If this could be substantiated, it might mean that the substrate
is non-PIE, non-Anatolian, not even sister-of-Anatolian, or else, of course,
that the Pelasgoi and the Leleges were misnamed or changed their language.
Anyone versed in Lesghian language and ancient history?

3. About -assos/-assa: In Basque there is a "complex" of suffixes composed of
parts of -(a)tz(a/e).  The meanings can be pretty diverse, but an important one
is something like 'place of (many/a lot of) ....' and the like (also: a plant,
tree producing fruit xxx). It looks like if the core meaning was a 'genitive',
'of', 'belonging to' (non existant in modern Basque case endings).  I am not
pretending that this is the origin of -assos/-assa, but rather wondering if the
Basque form might have a common Mediterranean origin, with or without Greek or
Iberian (or whatever) mediation. It could be an indication that this suffix was
wandering around the Mediterranean at an early date.

Don't kill me for this: I'm just wondering....

Ed.


From edsel at glo.be  Tue May  1 17:33:56 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 19:33:56 +0200
Subject: Etruscans
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.193356.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas G Kilday" <acnasvers at hotmail.com>
Sent: Friday, April 27, 2001 8:16 AM

> Having dismissed (correctly I hope) the Eastern sea-route, one can still ask
> when and by which route the Etruscan-speaking community came to Etruria. I
> can't answer this, but I think the best approach is a thorough analysis of
> substratal material. The Tuscan hydronyms Albinia, Alma, Armenta, Arnus, and
> Auser (with Albula = Tiberis) have been interpreted as "Old European" and
> pre-Etruscan. This is difficult to assess: do these names actually contain
> "Old European" elements, or are they Latinized Etruscan, or from some other
> source?

[Ed Selleslagh]

The Tuscan hydronyms cited remind me of the (P-Celtic) Welsh 'aber' (river
(mouth), estuary) and its probable derivatives in Holland and Belgium (from the
Celtic Belgae, I suppose): Amel in Belgium (the French-Belgian river name is
Amblève), Amer in Holland and Belgium (the latter name having been
transferred to the river banks of the lower Eikse Vliet). Indeed, they all
contain A-L/R-B/M(/N), sometimes with metathesis.

Of course, even though the word looks IE, this still leaves the possibility
that the Celts picked it up from another people, somewhere, e.g between the
mouth (in the Black Sea) and the springs (in S. Germany) of the Danube. Or
else: some IE-ans (e.g. P-Italic Umbrians, ...) were living in Etruria before
the arrival of the Etruscans; that would bring us back to the earlier idea that
was based upon the name of the river Ombrone, rightly or wrongly.

> Someone recently cast doubt on the whole program of using toponyms to deduce
> anything, citing the obliteration of native names in Texas and elsewhere by
> the Spanish bureaucracy. This sort of objection only applies when there is a
> literate bureaucratic class. To our knowledge, literacy didn't reach Etruria
> until ca. 700 BCE, so arguments from toponyms should have some validity. The
> problem is the large volume of unedited medieval archival material.

> DGK

[Ed Selleslagh]

This bureaucratic obliteration of native names seems to be a rather modern
phenomenon, linked to the emergence of nation-states obsessed with uniformity
of language, religion, etc...In earlier times, the names were usually only
adapted to the new speech pattern, not translated.

Ed.


From dlwhite at texas.net  Tue May  1 16:49:55 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 11:49:55 -0500
Subject: Cypresses
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.114955.0500.>

> If these "cypresses" are in fact the tree I know as the Red Cedar, they are
> indeed fast growing, as they are common "weeds" in old abandoned fields
> throughout the midwest.

> Linguistically, these names can be rather amusing: the Red Cedar > is
> actually a juniper!

        Yes, they are (as I have recently learned) fast-growing, no they are
not the same tree you know as "red cedar", nor are they junipers.  They are
members of the redwood family (not the cypress family), and are more
properly known as "bald cypress".  They are (with water tupelo) the standard
swamp tree of the American SE, growing easily in water.   (I once saw an
otter swimming merrily along through a cypress forest/lake (just barely) in
Texas.)   But I find it difficult to imagine that a circumference of 6
meters, diameter of about 2, does not require many years to reach.   Nor is
there anything inherently improbable in the idea that cypresses should have
spread up rivers into areas that would not otherwise support them.  I have
heard that the biggest tree in Texas is a cypress of more than 10 meters
circumference on the Frio west of San Antonio, which is not where one would
ordinarily expect to find such things.  But like just about everything else
associated with southern swamps (mocassins, alligators), they spread up the
rivers.  There were once alligators northwest of Waco, and to judge by
"Alligator Creek" between Austin and San Antonio, they once live there as
well.  They still show up as vagrants (so to speak) in Austin every once in
a while, and there are rumors of residents.  But I digress.

Dr. David L. White


From dlwhite at texas.net  Tue May  1 20:33:59 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 15:33:59 -0500
Subject: Indian Names/Red Clay
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.153359.0500.>

> [David White]  In any event, there is certainly a lot of non-red soil
> around, and I find it difficult to imagine that the proposition "The soil
> of Texas is (generally or universally) red" is true.

> In a message dated 4/19/2001 9:11:29 PM, mclasutt at brigham.net writes:
> << But that red clay.  You remember it.  Forever.  It doesn't take a lot of
> it. >>

> Yes, I think what you are saying sounds true.

        Yes, but Sulphur Springs is 250 miles from the Colorado, and in the
basin (indirectly) of the Red River (which might explain a few things, but
not "Colorado"), so attempting to connect "Colorado" with anything around
there is roughly equivalent to attempting to connect "London" with some
feature of the land around Snowdonia.   I saw the Colorado about half way to
the sea from Austin not long ago (no, I was not on a field-trip for the
edification of the list:  I was on my way to play Crocodilian Hunter, which
I did with fair success, in the wilds of suburban Houston), and it is not
red there either.  It is a sort of olive green.    Therefore I continue to
suspect that the original meaning intended was 'colorful' (which the
Colorado is, compared to the muddy brown competition), not 'red'.
        But perhaps what was meant was to connect red clay in NE Texas (more
or less) with "Tejas", but there is no reason to think that the original
perceived link is anything more than a classic example of folk etymology,
which surely would have occurred regardless of whether the story connecting
"Tejas" with a Caddo word meaning 'allies' was true or not.  There is, as
far as I know, no reason at all to doubt the original tale told by the
Spaniards about why they named "Texas" as they did, and as folk-etymology
would have occurred anyway, it means nothing.  It is not as if we are to
imagine that these people would have bothered to check historical records
before concocting a connection.  In any event, I was at Mission Tejas over
the winter, and though I did not check the color of the soil, having of
course no reason to think the issue would come up, I vaguely recall that it
was grayish brown.  One would think that if red soil inspired the name
"Tejas", the soil in question would be found, if anywhere, at Mission Tejas.

Dr. David L. White


From dlwhite at texas.net  Tue May  1 17:06:29 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 12:06:29 -0500
Subject: Voicless Fricative in PIE
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.120629.0500.>

> Unvoiced fricatives not surviving as sibilants in attested IE are
> reconstructed in their terminal state and given a numeral subscript.

        I think this is right.  More anon, once I get my act in (relative)
gear, but the supposed parallels with Semitic are (I think I will be able to
show) over-drawn.

Dr. David L. White


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Tue May  1 17:18:43 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 12:18:43 -0500
Subject: Three-Way Contrast of Secondary Articulations in PIE
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.121843.0500.>

Dear Stanley and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: "Stanley Friesen" <sarima at friesen.net>
Sent: Friday, April 27, 2001 8:36 AM

<snip>

>> [PCR]

>> I have a feeling that you might wish to retract this opinion upon further
>> reflection. IE, as it has been reconstructed, is rife with purported
>> homonyms.  What originally distinguished these homonyms were glides, and
>> before that, in Nostratic, different vowel-qualities.

[SF]

> Why need they always be distinguished?  Real languages today have much
> homonymy.

[PCR]

Yes, but most frequently we can trace the course of degenerative development
that led to these homonyms.

[SF]

> But even then, what I see in the PIE vocabulary is many homonymous *roots*,
> but relative fewer homonymous *words*.  The main distinguishing factors
> were differences in suffixes and stem formants - and occasionally infixes.

[PCR]

First, there are no infixes in IE.

Second, for these 'roots' to be able to have maintained semantic integrity,
they must have been distinguishable in some fashion. The suffixes, etc. (better
root-extensions) are an attempt to continue distinctions that were lost with
the glides.

[PCRp]

>> All roots with an unmodified vowel in IE are Ce/o/-C.

>> Roots with Ca:C, Ce:C, Co:C are all the result of an internal 'laryngeal',
>> or, in the very rare case, the effect of former aspiration. CaC roots are
>> Ca:C roots that have lost length.

[SF]

> Long vowels in PIE seem to also come from other sorts of compensatory
> lengthening, such as degemmination of a following double consonant.

[PCR]

Quite right; and that should have been included in my statement.

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 dlwhite at texas.net  Tue May  1 16:24:20 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 11:24:20 -0500
Subject: Stiff Voice/Slack Voice
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.112420.0500.>

> "Creaky" vs "breathy" (normal) vowel register is common

        I believe creaky vs. breathy (not normal) vowel register is common.
This the "stiff-voice"/"slack-voice" contrast discussed by Ladefoged and
Maddieson.  Slack voice is not what we would call normal, and what LM call
"modal phonation".  So yes, there are languages without modal phonation of
vowels.  (There is an example or two on the UCLA database, for those who may
want to hear what such things sound like.)
        There is, strangely enough, an IE relevance beyond the development
of Sanskrit, and that is that (as I have metioned before) if PIE had this
contrast of vowel "registers" (really phonation types), and it was later
reanalyzed as being "on" associated vowels, then a /CVC/ syllable with an
original "stiff" vowel would wind up with two stiff consonants, and a /CVC/
syllable with an original "slack" vowel
would wind up with two slack consonants.  As it happens, slack voice is a
kind of murmur or "voiced aspiration", so that would result in a lot of
/DHEDH/ roots.  Not quite so nicely, stiff voice is a kind of
glottalization, and this is inherently voiceless, so if stiff voice
consonants were reanalyzed as voiceless, this would result in a lot of /TET/
roots.  Either way, /DHET/ roots or /TEDH/ roots, which do not occur (at
least commonly), would be impossible, as neither an original stiff vowel nor
an original slack vowel could lead to such a result.  This would seem to
explain a root restriction that has not been explained so far.  The
preference for sameness could be seen as going back to the orginal nature of
the vowels.
        I also suggest (again) as part of this that what we know as the
voiced obstruents were pharyngealized, which would explain both the /b/-gap
and the restriction against roots of the /DED/ type, this last because
pharyngealization, being a rather crude gesture, would have to be maintained
across the vowel, and would distort its quality in the direction of /o/,
thereby destroying information.

Dr. David L. White


From alexeyf at zoran.co.il  Wed May  2 12:26:38 2001
From: alexeyf at zoran.co.il (Alexey Fuchs)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 14:26:38 +0200
Subject: Advice needed
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.142638.0200.>

Dear list members!

I am seeking advice on the following topic. I wish to study comparative and
indo-european linguistics (that, in the broadest sense, while specialization
depends on the offered course of studies, my conclusions and penchants).
Lack of resources forced me to delay these studies until I've gained a
practical profession. Sorry for the personal details; the non-practical
profession in question means much more for me (and, I suppose, to you, that
being the reason of my inquiry on this list) than the one I've acquired in
the meantime. The accumulating resources make me plan the beginning of
studies in winter semester of 2002, in a year and a half.

I have decided to apply for studies in Germany; there is no tuition fee,
which makes life much easier, and, probably, there are universities in that
country that offer adequate education in the field of liguistics, at least
giving the opportunity to seek further degrees in other countries (or to
continue at the same location).

The question I bring here is a question of choice. In which university in
Germany would your recommend to begin my education? I was considering
Freiburg University and Freie Universitaet in Berlin. However, I cannot come
to any conclusion without an advice from an educated person.

Please advice me on that matter; if the topic is considered inadequate on
the list, please contact me off-list, if you think you can be more helpful
if I provide more detail, I'd be delighted and grateful to be in
correspondence.

Thank you in advance,
Alexey Fuchs


From connolly at memphis.edu  Wed May  2 03:37:38 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 22:37:38 -0500
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.223738.0500.>

"David L. White" wrote:

>> I have proposed that PIE *p appears as a voiceless bilabial fricative in one
>> inscription in ancient northern Italy (from Prestino; see MSS 58, 1988).

>         Just a not terribly significant note:  development from /p/ to /f/
> (or perhaps a bilabial voiceless fricative) to /h/ is presupposed in the
> common (though perhaps wrong?) etymology of the "Hercynian" forest as being
> both Celtic and relatable to /perkun/.  In other words, it is not always
> assumed that PIE /p/ in Celtic went straight to zero, though I am unaware of
> it leaving any traces in Insular Celtic.

Didn't /pt/ yield /xt/?

Leo Connolly


From sarima at friesen.net  Wed May  2 03:49:52 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 20:49:52 -0700
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <50.14f5be64.281e311c@aol.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.204952.0700.>

At 11:08 PM 4/29/01 -0400, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:
>Even when people 'convert' to a new language, they have to learn it from
>_somebody_; ie., native speakers.  Furthermore, there are more and less
>likely was for this to happen; in a premodern context, small intrusive
>minorities generally get absorbed by their linguistic surroundings rather
>than vice versa, even if they're politically dominant. (Which is why this
>conversation is not being conducted in Norman French.)  Learning a new
>language is difficult for adults, and is seldom undertaken without very
>strong motivation.

True - though it does happen.  In fact the very French you mention is the
result of one such occurrence.  A small minority of Romans managed to
convert a much larger number of Gauls into speaking Latin.

I wonder if part of the difference wasn't time.  The Norman French
incursion into England was essentially a single pulse, after which there
was little additional immigration - indeed the French crown quickly forced
the Norman nobles in England to renounce their French lands, effectively
separating the two groups.  On the other hand the Roman policy of retiring
their veterans into planned communities throughout the Empire continued for
centuries, not to mention the "all roads lead to Rome" economic influence
that Rome had in the empire.

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


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Wed May  2 03:59:20 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 23:59:20 EDT
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.235920.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/1/01 9:56:01 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
dlwhite at texas.net writes:

> The only ones I am aware of that are even just-barely-possibly convincing
> involve cases of a language dying (e.g. Anatolian Greek), which is not
> exactly the most promising way for a new language family to get off the
> ground.
>

-- the same phenomenon has been noted in spoken Gaelic in Ireland along the
edges of the area where it's still spoken; a massive influx of English
vocabulary and syntax.

As you say, it's primarily a phenomenon of "language death".


From dlwhite at texas.net  Wed May  2 13:33:17 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 08:33:17 -0500
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.083317.0500.>

> I think I see a fallacy in their reasoning right here.  At least I have
> been lead to understand that pidgins and creoles are predominantly based on
> a single parent language, and thus cannot really be termed
> "mixtures".  Have I been mislead, or is this the case?

        It is usual for pidgin/creoles to have what is called a "lexifier
language", which forms the overwhelming basis of the lexicon.  There may be
a few quibbles about a few almost un-attested creoles like Chinook Jargon,
but I think that overall the principle is accepted as valid.

Dr. David L. White


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Wed May  2 15:57:53 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 10:57:53 -0500
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <004101c0d164$bff7d980$6d01703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.105753.0500.>

	And also in spoken French
	singular @m 	plural z at m

>[Ed Selleslagh]

>Grammatically determined initial-consonant mutations (I think it's important
>to be that explicit about it) occur in other, still existing, languages too:
>e.g.  (sub-saharan) Fulani ( or Peul). And some Bantu languages, like
>Tshiluba, use initial consonant palatalization for diminutives (so does
>Basque) and all use class-prefix modification (Actually, that may be the
>origin of the Peul phenemena: I wonder if the Celtic equivalent might not have
>a somewhat similar origin, e.g. the female form of the adjective).

>Verbal systems can change quite a bit in 1000 years, let alone in thousands of
>years; just look at what had already happened to Latin and Greek verb by the
>10th or 11th century A.D. - I mean Byzantine (and later) Greek and the various
>Latin languages.

>I really would like to know other people's views on these matters.

>Ed.

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


From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi  Thu May  3 06:24:38 2001
From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 09:24:38 +0300
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <000901c0d12c$b53cc9c0$632363d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.092438.0300.>

On Sun, 29 Apr 2001, David L. White wrote:

>         Two words or expressions are being thrown around here in a way that
> makes me a little uncomfortable.  The first is "lingua franca".  This has
> (if we are not case-sensitive) three meanings:  1) a real language, "Lingua
> Franca", which is (or was) a sort of Mediterranean Romance semi-creole, 2)
> an international business or trade language characteristic of a certain
> place/period, as for example Akkadian, and 3) something in the pidgin/creole
> range.   Meanings 2 and 3, though they can overlap, do not necessarily do
> so, and due to inherent ambiguity the expression "lingua franca" is probably
> best avoided, as considerable confusion is likely to be sown.

I fully agree. In my original mail, I only used the term "lingua franca"
because this is the term that the "Anti-Uralists" use. Indeed, it is
somewhat unclear what exactly is meant by their "Uralic lingua franca",
but at any rate it is some kind of pidgin / creole. On the other hand,
from the writings of Kalevi Wiik etc., one receives the impression that
Proto-Uralic is considered non-uniform, i.e. a group of languages (pidgins
/ creoles?) which resemble each other more or or less closely, because of
convergence. I believe that the term "lingua franca" was chosen because
according to Wiik, (Proto-)Uralic arose as communication medium of the
hunters of large game (e.g. mammoths) of the periglacial zone.

Regards,

Ante Aikio


From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi  Sat May  5 11:36:13 2001
From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio)
Date: Sat, 5 May 2001 14:36:13 +0300
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SGI.4.21.0104270802520.23423177-100000@paju.oulu.fi>
Message-ID: <SAT.5.MAY.2001.143613.0300.>

[I originally wrote:]

> These claims would of course deserve no attention from the scientific
> community, were it not that Kalevi Wiik has actively publicized them in
> the Finnish media, and also quite succesfully managed to market them as a
> "linguistic breakthrough" to some archeologists, geneticists and
> historians. Thus, in the recent years Uralists have been forced to mount
> an attack against the "Anti-Uralists", and this may deceptivily look like
> a serious scientific debate to non-linguists. I sure hope the situation
> with Celtic isn't as bad.

Interestingly, just after I happened to mention Kalevi Wiik in the
connection of the discussion on Proto-Celtic, it was pointed out to me in
private correspondence that Wiik is currently also an active supporter of
the "Celtic lingua franca" theory. The following passage is quoted from
Wiik's abstract of his paper "On the Origins and History of the Celts",
which will be read at the "International Colloquium on Early Contacts
between English and the Celtic Languages" (University of Joensuu Research
Station, Mekrijärvi, Finland, 24-26 August, 2001):

  "The first Celts, therefore, are the Basque-speaking hunters of western
Europe who adopted agriculture and the IE language from the LBK culture
and the Impressed Ware cultures. The area formed a chain of Celtic
dialects: in the north (Rhine area) the dialects were based on the LBK
(Central European) dialect of the IE language, while in the south (eastern
Iberia and southern France), they were based on the Impressed Ware
(Mediterranean) dialect of that language. In addition, the substrata of
the non-IE languages were different along the chain of the Celtic
dialects: the northern dialect had a Basque substratum, while the more
southern dialects had a Basque, Iberian, or Tartessian substratum. The
result was the following chain of Celtic dialects/languages: Lusitanian -
Celtiberian - Gaul - Lepontic.
  During the Bell Beaker period (c. 2800-1800 BC), the Celtic language was
used as a lingua franca by the populations of Western Europe. It was the
language of the élite of the Copper Age (Bronze Age). The centre of the
Celtic world was in the Únìtice culture in 1800-1500 BC, in the Urnfield
culture in 1200-800 BC, in the Hallstatt culture in 800-500 BC, and in the
La Tène culture in 500-50 BC. The Celtic lingua franca was based on
different Celtic dialects during the six different cultural periods
mentioned."

The complete version of Wiik's abstract can be read on the internet at
http://www.joensuu.fi/fld/ecc/Wiikabstract.htm.

 - Ante Aikio


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Wed May  2 06:25:06 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 02:25:06 EDT
Subject: IE versus *PIE
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.022506.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/2/01 12:19:49 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:

> Linguistic work in the last twenty years has demonstrated beyond dispute
> that linguistic descent can be, and sometimes is, far more complicated than
> our conventional family-tree model would suggest.

-- quite true.

Although one should point out that the family-tree model is overwhelmingly
more _common_; and should therefore be regarded as the "default mode" absent
evidence to the contrary.


From dlwhite at texas.net  Wed May  2 22:30:37 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 17:30:37 -0500
Subject: Greek from PIE
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.173037.0500.>

>>>> Does anyone know a good book describing in detail the development of Greek
>>>> from PIE?

>> Why is nobody mentioning Palmer's book on the subject?  Is it
>> considered discredited?  There is also Lejeune.

>> Dr. David L. White

> And why not Antoine Meillet's "Aperçu d'une histoire de langue grecque",
> Paris 1935 ? (many reprints, German transl., possibly English but I am not
> sure).

        There is also Wright's work on the subject, though being
pre-laryngeal it might be considered little more than a historical
curiosity.   Re-inventing Saussure's wheel from what was known or thought of
PIE at that time might prove an interesting "excercise for the reader."
        And yes, Palmer is a little "introductory", but my impression from
having used his work in combination with Rix, Lejeune, and Sihler is that he
is about 80% of the way toward these.

Dr. David L. White


From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu  Wed May  2 20:40:58 2001
From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 15:40:58 -0500
Subject: Crimean Gothic
In-Reply-To: <l0313036ab71331d4c239@[209.147.211.21]>
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.154058.0500.>

[ moderator edited ]

>	Diamond points out that "Classical" Gothic (my term, not his) is
>not ancestral to Crimean Gothic and that Busbecq somewhat arbitrarily
>called the language Gothic --although Diamond agrees that it was a form of
>Gothic. Diamond does go into some of the details in his article.

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

Are we to consider Diamond an authority here or to confirm the correctness
of his information based on other Gothic authorities? I seem to recall that
he is a biologist, not a linguist, so this foray into Gothic has got to
depend on the authority of Germanicists, hasn't it?

Carol Justus


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Wed May  2 21:46:06 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 17:46:06 -0400
Subject: Crimean Gothic
In-Reply-To: <000201c0d276$fba2d3a0$c80469c2@smart.ro>
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.174606.0400.>

>                There are 2 etyma, also left out by Diamond, which display
> the kind of incredible similarity that usually provide a temptation for
> far-too-amateurish explanations (the likelihood of which is questionable
> pending some consistent linguistic or historic "endorsement")
>             Fers=vir; cf. Irish, fir, far
>             ich malthata=ego dico; malthata,cf.Norw. maal=language

the first one at least is not 'far-too-amateurish'.  it corresponds to
Biblical Gothic wair /wer/ (with nom. sg. -s lost after short vowel + r) =
OE OFris OS OHG wer ON verr Latin vir OIr. fir etc.


From dlwhite at texas.net  Wed May  2 21:41:55 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 16:41:55 -0500
Subject: Umlaut in Crimean Gothic
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.164155.0500.>

        I suppose it should be noted, though it does not matter a great
deal, that finding /i/-umlaut in Gothic (I have not been paying rapt
attention, but I believe that was what was meant) is not terribly
surprising.  At the time that Gothic is attested, none of the Germanic
languages had /i/-umlaut (save possibly of /e/ to /i/?).  Its absence in
Gothic is thus to be taken largely as an archaism, a matter of time, not
space.  /i/-umlaut seems to have developed independently in the other
Germanic languages, not appearing in Old English till around 700, and is
generally taken to be a result of the strong stress accent typical of
Germanic.  If Gothic had this, and had not lost it, then it is surely
reasonable to suppose that it too would have developed /i/-umlaut,
independently, in time.

Dr. David L. White


From rao.3 at osu.edu  Wed May  2 09:42:50 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 05:42:50 -0400
Subject: semivowels
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.054250.0400.>

> Thinking about vocalic /r/, I got to wondering:
> do sequences like these occur in Sanskrit?
> rya, krya, #rya, rva, vya, vra

Peter already gave examples where these result from sandhi.
As far as word internal examples go, I doubt that krya or #rya occur.
But there is no reason why others can't, and do occur: arya-,
arva(n)t-, vyatha-, vraja- all occuring in RV.


From siva-nataraja at infonie.fr  Wed May  2 21:43:38 2001
From: siva-nataraja at infonie.fr (siva-nataraja)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 23:43:38 +0200
Subject: [Help] Phonetic transcription of an Old Irish text
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.234338.0200.>

Hello everyone,

[please note that English  is not my mother tongue]

    I'm working on Old Irish phonetics and transcription rules, and would
need some help : I'm trying to make a phonetic transcription of a text
(from _Scél Mucci Mic Dathó_), but I cannot manage to figure out where
some lenited consonants might be (since lenited "c", "t" and "p" are
neither spelled with a punctum delens nor a subsequent "-h" ; in the same
way, a certain number of eclipsed consonants might hide where I do not
expect them to be ("r", "l" and "n", or unvoiced consonants for
instance). Moreover, I read that a lenited "m" could nasalize the
following vowel. But, what if the following phoneme is a consonant ? I
also read that, for example, a "t" between two vowel was voiced, a "d"
lenited. What if this "t" or this "d" precede or follow a consonant?
Clusters of consonants are rather difficult, for me, to interpret. Last,
were broad consonants velarized, as in modern Irish?

    Here is, first line, the text then the transcription and so on
(assuming that "D" is a voiced apico-dental approximant, Eng. "THen", "B"
a voiced bilabial approximant, Esp. "saBer", "~"  indicates the
nasalization of the preceding vowel, "c" is an unvoiced dorso-palatal
stop, Skt. "Ca", "q" a voiced dorso-palatal stop [both slender
realisations of "k" and "g"], Skt. "Jîva-", "T" an unvoiced apico-dental
approximant, Eng. "THin", "G" is a voiced dorso-velar approximant, Esp.
"paGo", "P" an unvoiced bilabial approximant, Jap. "Fukeba", "S" an
unvoiced dorso-postalveolar fricative, Eng. "SHunt" [slender "s"], "ç" an
unvoiced dorso-palatal spirant, Ger. "iCH" [slender "ch"], that "R", "L"
and "N" are apico-alveolopalatal consonants with tongue retraction, and
are opposed to "r", "l" and "n", the late being apico-dental consonants
[nota bene: I'm not sure of these oppositions],  and, last but not least,
that ' indicates palatalization of the following consonant) :

Tucad dóib  iarum in   mucc ocus XL
tugaD do:B' iruB  i~n' muk  ogus (40)

dam dia tarsnu cenmotha in  biad ar chena
daB d'a tarsnu cenBo~Ta in' b'aD ar çena ||

Mac Dathó fessin icond fherdaigsecht.
mag daTo: Pesin' igonD   erDaixSext ||

"Mo chen duib," ar se,
 mo çen duB' |  ar Se |

"ni  dabar samail  riss sin.
 n'i daBar saBa~l' R'iS Sin' ||

Ataat aige ocus mucca la Laigniu.
adaad aqe  ogus muka  La LaGn'u ||


A testa  desin   mairfider  dúib  imbárach."
a t'esta d'eSin' marP'iD'er du:B' imBa:rax ||

"Is maith in  mucc," ar Conchobar.
 iS maT'  in' muk |  ar konxoBar ||

"Is maith imorro," ar Ailill.
 iS maT'  iBo~Ro | ar al'iL' ||

    I'm sure there are errors in my transcription, especially with
eclipsis and lenition the letters do not show.

    Thanks for your help.

       Regards,

               Vincent Ramos
               France
--
Atta unsar þu in himinam, weihnai namo þein.
Qimai þiudinassus þeins ; wairþai wilja þeins.


From dlwhite at texas.net  Thu May  3 16:38:27 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 11:38:27 -0500
Subject: Retroflexion
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.113827.0500.>

> here are the regular processes that led to them in Sanskrit:

> ruki-s -> .s
> n that follows r or .s, even with vowels, labials, y, v intervening -> .n
> t/th that immediately follows .s -> .t/.th
> s' (from PIE *k') +t(h) -> .s.t(h)
> h from PIE gh' + t/dh -> .dh (with h -> zero, preceding vowel lengthened.)
> ruki s + d/dh -> .d/.dh (with s -> zero, preceding vowel lengthened if not
> long by position)

        Many thanks for the memory-refreshing examples.

> Only the last two have retroflexing environments that go to zero in
> Sanskrit. However, they are rare in practive: the penultimate can occur
> only with ani.t roots ending in *gh' (only a handful in Sans); the `standard
> examples of the last are isolated words such as ni:.da (< *ni-sd-o, nest)
> and aorist 2nd pl mid, an infrequent category.

        Of course it is only the lost retroflexing environments that are
relevant to phonemicization.  That they are rare is suspicious, though
strictly speaking only one case would be required.

> In Prakrits, -rt- sometimes becomes -.t.t- (and vocalic r+t can become
> a/i/u+.t). But this is dialect dependent and it seems to vary within other
> families as well. Similar developments seem to have occurred in Norwegian,
> and this is why Hock (loc. cited by Oberoi) objects to attributing this to
> `substratum'.

        The idea that only developments that cannot be explained internally
should be explained externally (which seems to be lurking here) is nicely
dismissed in one of the earlier chapters of Thomason and Kaufman.

> Turning now to substratum explanations:

> See now T.A. Hall in Lingua 102 (1997) pp. 203-221: Contrast of
> two laminal shibilants, one alveopalatal and one palato-alveolar (his terms),
> is rare to non-existent and when sound changes lead to such a contrast,
> a shift to a more stable system will follow. One common repair
> mechanism is to make one sound apical. This is the explanation for IA
> retroflex s.

        What is the supposed origin of the contrast between palato-alveolar
and aleopalatal sibilants in the first place?  I note (with some
trepidation) that L&M assert that having "high-domed palates", which renders
retroflex articulations unsually easy to make and distinctive in sound, is
an Indian racial trait.  I find it difficult to believe that it is just a
coincidence that the one IE language that went into India developed such
sounds.

> It is interesting to see the evolution of the view on .s: Once upon a time,
> it was considered to be limited to South Asia. Masica, "Genesis of a
> linguistic area" lists only Chinese in addition. Hall makes gives a large
> number of examples of .s vs 's like contrast, and deems it a
`near-universal'.

        What is this thing " 's "?  A palatalized /s/ or just a typo?  One
of the more common ways of making a [s^] sound is effectively
semi-retroflex.  Perhaps this has something to do with why such sounds in
Russian are now "hard", though in the beginning they should have been (I
guess) "soft".  In any event, it is the retroflex series as a whole that
arouses my suspicions, not just /.s/.

> Also, all the three sibilants fall together as s in MIA. If .s is due to
> substratum influence, this is weird. The substratum induces a change, then
> conveniently disappers allowing Prakrits (which one would to show more
> substratum influence) to reverse the process.

        Not necessarily.  There is a huge span of time involved.  Even the
Vedas do not "remember" a time when Vedic speakers were not in India.
"Language X" could well have died out in the interval, and would hardly be
expected to reach out and exert any sort of influence from the grave.

> Note also that -rt- becomes some sort of (apical) shibilant in (Late?)
> Avestan: This suggests that -rt- was already retracted in PI-Ir and that the
> development of -rt- to -.t.t- in MIA need not invoke the deux ex machina
> of substratum influence.

        Coincidence is, in its own way, just as much a deus ex machina.  The
question is whether the developments seen are really normal from internal
causes alone.
        It is fairly normal for /r/s to be retroflected, and assimilation of
a following dental, as evidently in Norwegian, would not be surprising.
Indeed traditional Sanskrit grammar, if I have understood it correctly,
regards the difference between /r/ and /l/ as being that /r/ is retroflex
whereas /l/ is dental.  So at least phonetically, this sort of development
is normal.  Whether that would lead to a whole retroflex series is another
question.
        I note that what we seem to have here is a conspiracy, as in the
Slavic Conspiracy of Open Syllables, where it seems that some substantial
portion of the population was thinking, or feeling, "We need more
retroflexes here", and seizing upon any convenient phonetic pretext to
create them.  Again we, or at least I, must wonder,  if this sort of thing
is normal from internal causes alone, 1) why we do not see it more often,
and 2) why it happened only in India, where the pre-IE population was
probably both racially and linguistically pre-disposed to favor retroflexes.

> Regarding phonemic status of retroflexes: First of all, note that s/'s/.s
> contrast of Sanskrit is exactly parallel to h/s/s^ of Avestan. Nobody, to
> my knowledge, worries whether Avestan has three phonemes here or
> two. Why then should we worry about Sanskrit?

        It would seem better to answer both questions than neither.  One
good question would be why the development was to /s^/ in Avestan and /.s/
in Sanskrit rather than the other way around.

> Secondly, I don't know how phonemes are defined in inflected languages:
> Do we use inflected words or dictionary forms?

        We use inflected words, in my opinion.

> An additional problem is sandhi: If two words are homophones in some
> contexts due to sandhi, but not in all contexts, do they count for contrast?

        Yes, in my opinion.

> Due to the fact that the conditioning environments for retroflexion do not
> generally go to zero in Sanskrit, it is hard to find inherited contrasting
> words.  If we add the accent, it gets even harder:

        We should not consider the accent, in my opinion.  What flies under
the phonemic radar, so to speak, and therefore is merely phonetic, is what
is predictable from phonetic implementation.  Unless there is something
about the phonetic implementation of stress in Sanskrit that somehow implies
retroflexion (and I find it difficult to imagine what this could be), stress
does not count.  So the task of finding minimal, or near-minimal, pairs is
easier.

        But please note that I am not questioning that the various
retroflexes were phonemic in Sanskrit (after a time), only how they got that
way.  What I would guess is that in the few cases where a
retroflex-conditioning environment went to zero, this was in part because
very many speakers already possessed the ability to hear retroflexes as
phonemic, so that for them, no new contrast was created.  Likewise I would
guess that the main reason that the phonetic implementation of Sanskrit (but
not of Avestan) tended to produced so many cases of retroflexion was that
many speakers already had retroflexes on the brain, or in the mouth.


From mclasutt at brigham.net  Thu May  3 01:46:20 2001
From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 19:46:20 -0600
Subject: Fallow Deer
In-Reply-To: <000701c0d1bd$5d0e0d40$a32363d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.194620.0600.>

The Persian Fallow Deer (Dama mesopotamica or Dama dama mesopotamica) did,
indeed, exist (and was common) throughout Asia Minor before the modern era.
It's butchered bones have been found as far west as Cyprus and the Aegean
littoral.  It has shrunk to its current isolated pockets along the Iran/Iraq
border only after the arrival of the gun in Asia Minor.  As a piece of
trivia, the closest relative (ancient or modern) of the two species of
fallow deer was the Irish elk.

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

-----Original Message-----
From: Indo-European mailing list [mailto:Indo-European at xkl.com]On Behalf
Of David L. White
Sent: Monday, April 30, 2001 15:34

> Likewise, PIE lacks a word for the fallow deer, common throughout southern
> Europe, but has terms for 'elk' and 'red deer'.

        Another kind of fallow deer, not terribly distinct, occurs along the
border between Iraq and Iran, or did until the war there.

[ moderator snip ]


From centrostudilaruna at libero.it  Thu May  3 10:02:05 2001
From: centrostudilaruna at libero.it (Alberto Lombardo)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 12:02:05 +0200
Subject: Urheimat animals
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.120205.0200.>

> The logical conclusion would be that the IE languages were intrusive in
> areas which had chamois, leopards, lions, tigers, elephants, fallow deer,
> etc; and native to an area with bears, foxes, roe deer, lynx, and wolves.

I think we could add to the sentence whales, beavers, elks, many kinds of
birds and salmons too (Thieme 1953). It brings to north in the search of the
native homeland.


From sarima at friesen.net  Wed May  2 23:04:02 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 16:04:02 -0700
Subject: Olives/was: Lactose Intolerance/Renfrew
In-Reply-To: <F109mFkQKfzGVJtOU6G0001235b@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.160402.0700.>

At 06:58 AM 5/1/01 +0000, Douglas G Kilday wrote:
Returning to the Greek forms, we have a chicken-and-egg problem: was oil
>(elaion) named after the olive (elaia:) or vice versa? In the Arabic words,
>it's clear that 'oil' is the primary notion, and 'olive' is derived. This is
>retained in Spanish; one of the first words I learned was "aceite" in the
>sense of "motor-oil", not the Filippo Berio stuff. Hence it's plausible that
>the original meaning of *elaiw- was 'oil', applied later to an oily edible
>fruit and the tree which produces it.

This is especially likely as one of the most important classical uses of
the olive was to make olive oil.  Thus calling the tree the "oil tree",
that is "the tree from which we make oil", is a very good possibility.

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


From Insouciant at aol.com  Thu May  3 12:49:41 2001
From: Insouciant at aol.com (Insouciant at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 08:49:41 EDT
Subject: Olives/was: Lactose Intolerance/Renfrew
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.084941.EDT.>

> Latin <oli:va> evidently comes from Etruscan *eleiva by regular changes:
> Etr. short /el/ generally becomes Lat. short /ol/, and Old Lat. /ei/ becomes
> Class. Lat. /i:/. The Etruscan lexeme is attested in adjectival form (TLE
> 762, bucchero aryballos) <aska mi eleivana> 'a vessel (am) I pertaining to
> oil' = 'I am an oil-vessel'. This in turn looks like a borrowing from
> Western Greek <elaiwa:> (cf. Etr. Eivas from WGk Aiwa:s 'Ajax'). I'm not
> sure how to explain the shorter Lat. forms <olea>, <oleum> vs. <oli:va>,
> <oli:vum>.

Dear Indo-Europeanists:

I believe I have a way to explain the forms <olea>, <oleum> vs. <oli:va>.

First, let's derive <oli:va>:

*eleiwa: 'olive' > *oleiwa: (possibly due to the 'pinguis', i.e. velar,
nature of a final l) > *oli:wa: (cf. di:co : deiknumi) > ol:iva

And then <oleum>:

*eleiwom 'product of the olive tree' > *ole:wom (this e: is a long closed e,
comparable to the spurious diphthong found in the 7-vowel dialects of Greek) >
*ole:om (this is the critical step; at a certain point *wo- > -o- in Latin,
cf. deorsus (< *devorsus) and a similar development *coquo: (< *kwokwo: <
*pekwo:)) > *oleom (shortening of long vowels which immediately preceding
another vowel) > oleum.

<olea> must have been constructed by analogy, for its ancestor *eleiwa:
would've become *oli:va, the same form seen in 'olive'

Hope this helps,

Andrew Byrd


From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com  Thu May  3 13:29:04 2001
From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 09:29:04 -0400
Subject: Olives/was: Lactose Intolerance/Renfrew
In-Reply-To: <F109mFkQKfzGVJtOU6G0001235b@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.092904.0400.>

I seem to recall instances where /ei/ in Old Latin or perhaps more
accurately pre-Latin yielded /e:/ rather than /i:/ before the
semivowel <u>.  Hence *ole:uom > *ole:um by loss of the
semivowel before o/u and then > attested <oleum> by the rule that
"vocalis ante vocalem corripitur."  <Olea> would be a new formation
on the model of <oli:va>.  A similar case is <di:vus> as opposed to
<deus>, both from *deiuos.

Jim Rader

>[Douglas Kilday]
> Latin <oli:va> evidently comes from Etruscan *eleiva by regular changes:
> Etr. short /el/ generally becomes Lat. short /ol/, and Old Lat. /ei/ becomes
> Class. Lat. /i:/. The Etruscan lexeme is attested in adjectival form (TLE
> 762, bucchero aryballos) <aska mi eleivana> 'a vessel (am) I pertaining to
> oil' = 'I am an oil-vessel'. This in turn looks like a borrowing from
> Western Greek <elaiwa:> (cf. Etr. Eivas from WGk Aiwa:s 'Ajax'). I'm not
> sure how to explain the shorter Lat. forms <olea>, <oleum> vs. <oli:va>,
> <oli:vum>.


From sarima at friesen.net  Thu May  3 02:53:19 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 19:53:19 -0700
Subject: Cypresses
In-Reply-To: <002401c0d25e$d1d91ec0$726163d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.195319.0700.>

At 11:49 AM 5/1/01 -0500, David L. White wrote:
>         Yes, they are (as I have recently learned) fast-growing, no they are
>not the same tree you know as "red cedar", nor are they junipers.  They are
>members of the redwood family (not the cypress family), and are more
>properly known as "bald cypress".

Ah, I am not used to seeing them referred to by just the bare
"cypress".   I had forgotten that their range extended into Texas.  They
would indeed be characteristic of watercourses in southern Texas - and you
are right, they are not recent intrusions into the area.

I do not think they grow as fast as Red Cedar, though.

>   They are (with water tupelo) the standard
>swamp tree of the American SE, growing easily in water.

Strictly speaking they require temporarily emergent ground to *sprout*, but
once sprouted they can withstand almost permanent flooding - something very
few trees can do.

>(I once saw an
>otter swimming merrily along through a cypress forest/lake (just barely) in
>Texas.)   But I find it difficult to imagine that a circumference of 6
>meters, diameter of about 2, does not require many years to reach.

Oh, assuredly.  I was just confused by the short version of the name.  The
last time I saw a Bald Cypress swamp was the last time I was in
Florida.  They are quite impressive.

>   Nor is
>there anything inherently improbable in the idea that cypresses should have
>spread up rivers into areas that would not otherwise support them.  I have
>heard that the biggest tree in Texas is a cypress of more than 10 meters
>circumference on the Frio west of San Antonio, which is not where one would
>ordinarily expect to find such things.  But like just about everything else
>associated with southern swamps (mocassins, alligators), they spread up the
>rivers.

My range map shows the (bald) cypress extending well into the San Antonio
area, and it has no special notation on it concerning recent spread.  The
western edge of its range seems to about where the Frio is, or perhaps the
Nueces (hard to tell, as I am using two maps).  I suspect that the tree
would be normal anywhere in that area where there is slow moving
semi-permanent water that occasionally (during droughts) draws down enough
to allow sprouting.  I know that, at least further east, it is not only
found in swamps per se, but also along smaller slow moving streams.

How did this tree get to be called a cypress anyhow?  It is rather a unique
tree, not much like any other tree, not even the true cypresses.

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


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Thu May  3 15:55:44 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 10:55:44 -0500
Subject: Indian Names/Red Clay
In-Reply-To: <001701c0d27e$1d8f0b80$692863d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.105544.0500.>

	colorado is indeed "red" (including muddy red)
	colorido is "colorful, coloring, (brightly) colored" --which
wouldn't work because the Colorado has a dull color

	As far as I know, colorado has always meant "red" in modern Spanish
(i.e. since the discovery of America

[snip]
>        Yes, but Sulphur Springs is 250 miles from the Colorado, and in the
>basin (indirectly) of the Red River (which might explain a few things, but
>not "Colorado"), so attempting to connect "Colorado" with anything around
>there is roughly equivalent to attempting to connect "London" with some
>feature of the land around Snowdonia.   I saw the Colorado about half way to
>the sea from Austin not long ago (no, I was not on a field-trip for the
>edification of the list:  I was on my way to play Crocodilian Hunter, which
>I did with fair success, in the wilds of suburban Houston), and it is not
>red there either.  It is a sort of olive green.    Therefore I continue to
>suspect that the original meaning intended was 'colorful' (which the
>Colorado is, compared to the muddy brown competition), not 'red'.
[snip]

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


From sarima at friesen.net  Thu May  3 02:58:58 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 19:58:58 -0700
Subject: Three-Way Contrast of Secondary Articulations in PIE
In-Reply-To: <006401c0d262$c7081ec0$fbf1fea9@patrickr>
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.195858.0700.>

At 12:18 PM 5/1/01 -0500, proto-language wrote:
>Dear Stanley and IEists:
>[SF]

>> But even then, what I see in the PIE vocabulary is many homonymous *roots*,
>> but relative fewer homonymous *words*.  The main distinguishing factors
>> were differences in suffixes and stem formants - and occasionally infixes.

>[PCR]

>First, there are no infixes in IE.

I am not sure what else to call the nasal present formation.  It sure isn't
a suffix!

Let's see, from the root *bheug you get the present *bhunegti. Looks like
an infix to me.

>Second, for these 'roots' to be able to have maintained semantic integrity,
>they must have been distinguishable in some fashion. The suffixes, etc.
>(better root-extensions) are an attempt to continue distinctions that were
>lost with the glides.

While I agree many of the roots probably originally were distinct, I do not
think we yet have sufficient information to tell in what manner.  I
certainly doubt there was a single cause for all of the mergers.

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


From dlwhite at texas.net  Wed May  2 02:32:50 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 21:32:50 -0500
Subject: Pelasgian Place-names
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.213250.0500.>

> Isn't Tarhuntassa securely located as a neighbor to Kizzuwatna?
> (I envision this about as far east as the borders of southwest Asia
> Minor can be stretched.  I have heard that Tarhuntassa = later Tarsus.)

        That would be interesting, if true.  Both words look like possible
/turs^/ words to me.  (Perhaps we should rename these "/tors^/ words".
This lack of a distinction between /u/ and /o/ is annoying.)

> How old a god is Tarhun(d/t)?  Could he possibly be pre-Anatolian (ie.
> Pelasgian on the theory that Pelasgian <> Anatolian)?

        I do not know, but the form of the name is very close to Etruscan
version of "Tarchun", as in various names that come down in Latin as
"Tarquin-", which is a little suspicious.

> But I think the answer must be no.  Tarhun(d/t) is as Anatolian as St.
> Brigid is Irish.  In that case, did the founders of Tarhuntassa append
> a foreign -assa suffix to give their city name "class?"  (I'm from
> Minneapolis so I'm familiar with this practice.)

        My guess, as has been indictated, is that a good many of the rather
suspiciously far-flung Pelasgian names have that sort of origin.  But does
"Tarhun" really occur with a "d" or "t" attached?  That might (or might not)
make it the same thing as the famous /-nthos/, in which case we would have
double-suffixing.

> Rather than this, Is there not sufficient evidence here and elsewhere,
> that the -assa suffix is Anatolian as well as Pelasgian?

        I do not know, but it would not be surprising.  Depending on their
nature, it is not terribly unusual for suffixes to be borrowed.  (Sorry to
be repeating myself to some extent here.)

> Given the location of Tarhuntassa and its obvious Anatolian-ness, can't a
> strong case be made for a bond between Anatolian and the substrate
> everybody's talking about here?

        See Palmer's "The Greek Language" for an over-confident and not very
strong (in my opinion) version of that argument.  And note that in between
"The Latin Language" and "The Greek Language" he seems to have changed his
mind about the Pelasgians, for in the former they are a pre-IE susbtrate,
while in the latter they are Anatolians.  I think he had it right the first
time.   Though attempts have been made to connect "Pelasgian" /-nth/ (or
whatever it was) with a somewhat marginal IE suffix having a meaning of
'animate plural' (as I recall), which might (or might not) make sense for a
place-name suffix, this does not seem to work very well with /huakinth/
'hyacinth', /asaminth-/ 'bath-tub', /merinth-/ 'thread', /erebinth-/ 'pea',
and /olunth-/ 'unripe fig'.

> I suspect Dr. White has given my "right-fork" theory of Anatolian-Pelasgian
> connectedness a death-blow, but alas I am too elementary in my thinking
> processes to understand what he meant by:

>> As for the Pelasgians being a "right fork" of the IE-Anatolians who passed
>> into Greece, if their language had phonetically aspirated /t/s (and
>> presumably /p, k/), which is necessary to explain how Anatolian /t/ could
>> appear as Greek /th/, would we not find "Chorinthos", "Pharnassos", and even
>> (farther afield) "Tharthessos"? To invoke aspiration merely to explain the
>> Greek /th/ for Anatolian /t/ (or even /d/), conveniently ignoring unwanted
>> side effects, is not acceptable. What language in the world aspirates /t/
>> only after /n/?  None that I ever heard of.

> Apparently it is my burden to explain the Greek /th/ for Anatolian /t/ or
> /d/, but I don't know why.  (And certainly I don't know how!)

        Sorry to have been unclear (and over-confident).  What I meant was
that as Anatolian had only /t/ and /d/, no /th/, we would not expect /t/ to
be borrowed as /th/ unless all voiceless plosives were aspirated in
Anatolian, in which case we would expect to find no (or at least few)
examples of "Pelasgian" borrowings with Greek /p-t-k/.   It has since been
brought to my attention that some languages do indeed aspirate voiceless
plosives only after nasals, but the Anatolian words in question show /nt/
varying with later /nd/, which would indicate that Anatolian did not do this
(which is not surprising), but rather was more like English in tendning to
de-aspirate or even voice originally voiceless plosives after nasals.

> Dr. White also explains the wide dispersion of -assos names (like Tartessos)
> as possibly due to later Greek mediation.

        I am not sure I did that, or if I did, whether it was a good idea.
I think there were just enough city-names in /-ssos/ kicking around that
people began to think of /-ssos/ as an appropriate ending for city-names,
just as we have reached the point where we are well-pleased with
country-names that end in "-ia".  As far as I know, there is no evidence of
an "Old Tartessos", somewhere back in the eastern Mediterranean, that a "
New Tartessos" in Spain, with the "New" part conveniently forgotten) would
have been named after.

Dr. David L. White


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu May  3 08:18:48 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 09:18:48 +0100
Subject: Etruscan / Pelasgian
In-Reply-To: <002401c0d264$ed1df560$8d01703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.091848.0100.>

--On Tuesday, May 1, 2001 6:39 pm +0200 Eduard Selleslagh <edsel at glo.be>
wrote:

> 3. About -assos/-assa: In Basque there is a "complex" of suffixes
> composed of parts of -(a)tz(a/e).  The meanings can be pretty diverse,
> but an important one is something like 'place of (many/a lot of) ....'
> and the like (also: a plant, tree producing fruit xxx). It looks like if
> the core meaning was a 'genitive', 'of', 'belonging to' (non existant in
> modern Basque case endings).  I am not pretending that this is the origin
> of -assos/-assa, but rather wondering if the Basque form might have a
> common Mediterranean origin, with or without Greek or Iberian (or
> whatever) mediation. It could be an indication that this suffix was
> wandering around the Mediterranean at an early date.

The Basque suffix is <-tza> ~ <-tze>.  The central and earliest recoverable
function of this suffix appears to be collectivity, as in <area> 'sand',
<areatza> 'beach'.  But it has acquired other functions, most notably
'abstract action', as in <jaio> 'be born', <jaiotza> 'birth', and
'profession', as in <artzain> 'shepherd', <artzantza> 'sheepherding'.

The suffix is common in place names, where the collective sense is probably
present.  However, in the 10th-13th centuries, the suffix is regularly
written as <-zaha>, as in <Artazaha>, <Otazaha>, and others.  The origin of
modern <-tza> in an earlier *<-tzaa> is confirmed by the observation that,
in the Bizkaian dialect, the addition of the article <-a> to a noun ending
in <-tza> produces <-tzaia>, with the usual Bizkaian treatment of */aaa/.
The suffix <-tze> is *probably* a variant of <-tza>, since <-tze> too has
chiefly collective functions, but I won't swear to this.  In the modern
language, <-tze> retains its collective function in cases like <jende>
'people', <jendetze> 'crowd, multitude' (alongside <jendetza>), but its
chief function today is to serve as one of the two suffixes forming gerunds
of verbs, as in <etor-> 'come', <etortze> 'coming' (gerund).

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 philjennings at juno.com  Fri May  4 01:36:35 2001
From: philjennings at juno.com (philjennings at juno.com)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 20:36:35 -0500
Subject: Etruscan / Pelasgian
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.203635.0500.>

Readers on this topic might be interested in an essay by Ardian
Vehbiu.  I doubt I could exaggerate the wisdom here.  I blush to admit
I once spent money to buy one of the Mayani books!

The Internet address is:

http://members.aol.com/plaku/origins.htm

It turns out that the force of the ideas we use to politely probe each
other, can ingratiate con-artists to tyrants, and goad ethnic groups
to hooliganism.  The only innocents among us are those who speak
exclusively of velar fricatives and laryngeals.

I wish it were not so.   If only because I haven't the background to
say a thing about velar fricatives and laryngeals.

I have investigated what "Pelasgian" means to the greater world
beyond linguistics.  It appears that Greeks are quite willing to
accept the Pelasgians as their earliest genos, using the word in a
sense to mean, the earliest element in our compound substance.

The Pelasgian creation myth is fundamental.  If the Pelasgians of
the Mediterranean linguistic substratum cannot be linked to the
idea of a dancing goddess who whirls up a wind and turns him into
a phallic snake and by him bears an egg and so forth, ending up
in the creation of humans from the serpent's teeth, then the true
ownership of the term "Pelasgian" is clouded.

But it began for us by being clouded anyway.  We might as well
go forward as back.

Regarding the Lesghianism of the Pelasgians and the Leleges,
there does seem to be a "le" at the root of these Aegean
ethnonyms, and a "Le" at the root of Lemnos and Lesbos as well.
I can almost hear it happening in English, that if a culture
straddled two islands beginning with "la", we'd call them the
"la-la-people."  It would be a clever name.  I wonder if "Leleges" is
a clever name.

There are also the Laz, if we have to go as far as the Caucasus.
They speak a Kartvellian language, one step closer to the Aegean.
What's the advantage of one over the other?


From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu  Fri May  4 03:11:35 2001
From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 22:11:35 -0500
Subject: Etruscan / Pelasgian
In-Reply-To: <002901c0d173$4c0ae300$a26063d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.221135.0500.>

Does this assumption about the Hittite writing for -nd- take into
consideration the fact that the script was cuneiform, borrowed from an Old
Babylonian scribal school in Syria, that Hittite use of the OBabyl. signs
for 'd' all came with a vowel attached? To use the Hittite data, there
needs to be a lot more argumentation.

Carol Justus

>> What language in the world aspirates /t/ only after /n/? None
>> that I ever heard of.

>        Answering my own rhetorcal question,  I note that some African
>languages do this thing which I had thought was impossible.  Furthermore,
>reflection reveals that proto-Britonic almost certainly did this too,
>resulting in the nasal mutations of /p-t-k/.  Nonetheless, the Hittite forms
>show variants in /nd/, which suggests that their pronunciation was more like
>modern English "seventy" with a /d/ in it, so my original assertion was
>probably (in implication) correct.
>        As for place-name formative being both Pelasgian and Anatolian,
>there is nothing wrong with this.  Derivational suffixes are often borrowed
>with words, as is seen in modern English "ize" from Greek and, more vaguely,
>the idea that it is somehow (poetically?) appropriate for country names to
>end in "ia".  If there were enough city names in /-nthos/ and /-ssos/ (I am
>not sure about the /a/) around, people could well have gotten the idea that
>there was some sort of appropriate and "high-class" city name suffix
>involved, and applied it to their own cities, thus yielding things like
>Tartessos.  (I have no idea what the frst part is.)

>Dr. David L. White


From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu  Fri May  4 03:26:12 2001
From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 22:26:12 -0500
Subject: Etruscan / Pelasgian
In-Reply-To: <002401c0d264$ed1df560$8d01703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.222612.0500.>

Within the cuneiform tradition of ancient Hattusa, it is often thought that
Luwian Tarhunta and Hittite Tarhun (stormgods) have a prototype in Hattic
Taru. This is based on bilingual texts between Hattic and Hittite, for
example.

The transmission of religious traditions during the 400-odd years of
attested Hittite texts is itself not exactly straightforward, but fun to
play with, as I did some years ago in an article in JIES (indexed on the
website by author and volume /date at the new URL

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/lrc/iedocctr/jies.html ).

The Hittites preserved Hattic rituals from pre-Hittite Hattusa and added
Hurrian rituals and a pantheon at least by the time that Hattusili III had
married Puduhepa, the Hurrian priestess from Kizzuwatna, at the behest of
the goddess Ishtar (Babylonian deity). In the Hittite-Hurrian pantheon,
Tesup replaced Taru / Tarhun as head stormgod.

The coincidence of similiar-sounding 'Tarquinia' is tempting, but how would
you fill in the historical and phonological blanks? At Hattusa we are
fortunate to have bilingual texts and changing traditions that can be
correlated with repercusions of events perhaps.

Carol Justus

[ moderator snip ]

>[Ed Selleslagh]

>I have several questions, some of which are based upon extremely speculative
>ideas (somebody has to stick out his neck):

>1. Is Tarhun(t) the root for the name Tarquinius?

>2. Is it unthinkable that the (Greek) names 'Pelasgoi' and 'Leleges' are based
>upon the name of the NE Caucasian Lesghians? The first one with some
>indigenous
>prefix (maybe indicating they're from the lowlands, not from the (Caucasian)
>mountains), the second one with Greek reduplication, because of the shortness
>of the name. If this could be substantiated, it might mean that the substrate
>is non-PIE, non-Anatolian, not even sister-of-Anatolian, or else, of course,
>that the Pelasgoi and the Leleges were misnamed or changed their language.
>Anyone versed in Lesghian language and ancient history?

>3. About -assos/-assa: In Basque there is a "complex" of suffixes composed of
>parts of -(a)tz(a/e).  The meanings can be pretty diverse, but an important
>one is something like 'place of (many/a lot of) ....' and the like (also: a
>plant, tree producing fruit xxx). It looks like if the core meaning was a
>'genitive', 'of', 'belonging to' (non existant in modern Basque case endings).
>I am not pretending that this is the origin of -assos/-assa, but rather
>wondering if the Basque form might have a common Mediterranean origin, with or
>without Greek or Iberian (or whatever) mediation. It could be an indication
>that this suffix was wandering around the Mediterranean at an early date.

>Don't kill me for this: I'm just wondering....

>Ed.


From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com  Thu May  3 14:38:25 2001
From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 10:38:25 -0400
Subject: Etruscans
In-Reply-To: <002501c0d264$ed82aaa0$8d01703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.103825.0400.>

But Welsh <aber> doesn't only look Indo-European, it has a
generally accepted etymology, i.e., *ad-ber-, "place to which water
rushes/flows," paralleled in Goidelic by Old Irish <in(d)ber>, "river
mouth" (Inver- in Scottish place names), with different prefixation of
the same verbal root.  A base *ber- with other prefixes is well-
attested in Celtic.  Pokorny reconstructs *bher- "aufwallen (von
quellendem oder siedendem Wasser)," with a mass of somewhat
dubious comparanda, but on Celtic grounds an Indo-European
*bher- would be unimpeachable.

Jim Rader

[ moderator snip ]

> [Ed Selleslagh]

> The Tuscan hydronyms cited remind me of the (P-Celtic) Welsh 'aber' (river
> (mouth), estuary) and its probable derivatives in Holland and Belgium (from
> the Celtic Belgae, I suppose): Amel in Belgium (the French-Belgian river name
> is Amblhve), Amer in Holland and Belgium (the latter name having been
> transferred to the river banks of the lower Eikse Vliet). Indeed, they all
> contain A-L/R-B/M(/N), sometimes with metathesis.

> Of course, even though the word looks IE, this still leaves the possibility
> that the Celts picked it up from another people, somewhere, e.g between the
> mouth (in the Black Sea) and the springs (in S. Germany) of the Danube. Or
> else: some IE-ans (e.g. P-Italic Umbrians, ...) were living in Etruria before
> the arrival of the Etruscans; that would bring us back to the earlier idea
> that was based upon the name of the river Ombrone, rightly or wrongly.


From dlwhite at texas.net  Thu May  3 17:20:44 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 12:20:44 -0500
Subject: Etruscans
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.122044.0500.>

> David L. White (10 Apr 2001) wrote:

>> Yes.  I believe both descriptions might be applied to the civilization of
>> Troy, and I see nothing inherently contradictory or comical about this.
>> More to the point, any bearers of Eastern Mediterranean civilization,
>> however generic, would have been impressive to the people of Italy before
>> these began (with the Etruscans) to ascend to the same level.

> Fine. I don't claim that an areally modest civilization can't colonize and
> exert political control over a much larger region. But I'm afraid we may
> be losing track of the linguistic issues. What started this whole thread was
> my objection to the theory that the Etruscan _language_ came by sea from the
> East,

        Obviously colonizers, or exerters of control, will bring their
language along with them, having little choice in the matter.

> and the startlingly widespread willingness to misinterpret the Lemnian
> inscriptions as evidence for this theory.

        I agree that the Lemnian inscriptions are too late to have much to
do with anything, one way or another.  But we should be wary of falling into
the logical fallacy whereby the negation of a propostion is regarded as
proven if the original positive is unproven.  Unproven is not disproven, and
the burden of proof cannot be arbitrarily placed on one side or the other.

> If you think the Etruscan language came from Troy or its North Aegean allies,
> you should present more than hand-waving arguments about what High Culture
> can do.

        I fail to perceive any "hand-waving", beyond what is unavoidable
given that the material culture of Troy was not (somebody out there please
correct me if I am wrong) distinctive, and thus would leave no easily
discernable trace anywhere.  I can see how this might seem very convenient
(I would say "unfalsifiable", but that would be invoking a square wheel, now
wouldn't it?) to those having a prior committment to the nativist view, but
it is also, simply put, true.

>> There is evidence that the Trojans were a small bunch, in the fact that
>> their armies are described as being multi-lingual, whereas the Greeks were
>> pretty clearly multilingual.  (Now just where in the Iliad is that?)
>> Clearly they were not able to match the Greeks in putting fellow-speakers
>> (so to speak) in the field, and their forces were composed largely of the
>> tributary forces of other states, of other languages.  This does not suggest
>> that the native Trojans were ever a large group.  (Nor are they very
>> distinctive archeologically, as far as I know.)

> I'm not sure what you're getting at here. If the native Trojans constituted a
> small elite dominating a polyglot assortment of other peoples (which is
> perfectly plausible per se, given the opportunity for acquiring great wealth
> by controlling traffic on the Hellespont, and between Europe and Anatolia),
> and they or their descendants set up shop in Etruria, one would expect the
> linguistic result to be a Trojan superstrate in the native language, like the
> Norman element in English or the Doric in Latin (poena, machina, etc.).

        There is no firm expectation when an elite is of one language and
the mass of the population is not.   The case of the Turks in Anatolia seems
fairly well established by modern genetics:  they were a fairly small elite,
and the pre-Turkic population simply converted to Turkish over time.  (A lot
of time in this case, but Greek was a very "proud" language, as "Villanovan"
would not have been.)   I may note as well (again) the case of Latin
America, which has largely been Iberianized in language despite the
population being (with a few exceptions) largely Amerindian by genetic
descent.

> OTOH the claim that Etruscan originated as a creole between Trojan and the
> native speech, or as a Mischsprache based on tributary languages, can't be
> taken seriously.

        Which has something to do with why I have not made it.

> The bottom line is that whatever happened _politically_ in Etruria during
> 1200-700 BCE, the _linguistic_ community of Etruscan-speakers remained
> intact. Claims that the entire community immigrated en masse from the East
> run afoul of archaeology _and_ linguistics.

        En petite masse.  (My French is for reading knowledge only, so
please forgive me if I did not get that right.)   A large migration would
probably be logistically implausible, among other things.  I agree that the
native population was not expelled or exterminated, and that there is indeed
substantial archeoligical continuity.  But I thought we had agreed that such
a population, as it went over to Etruscan over a period of perhaps several
centuries (or perhaps less; stranger things have happened), would quite
probably leave no inscriptional trace.  Place names are another question,
but recent assertions that conquerors re-name places only when they have
bureaucrats along for the ride are clearly falsified by the case of
Anglo-Saxon England (among others, no doubt), where they conquerors surely
renamed a great many water-courses (whatever we think had happened to the
natives), despite not being notably well-supplied with bureaucrats.

>> I am not exactly the only person to say that Etruscan civilization did not
>> arise semi-miraculously in Tuscany as a result of Greek and Phonecian
>> contacts that can only be shown to have been significant in Campania.  Since
>> a date of 1200 is too early for real Etruscans in Italy, I would imagine
>> that most migrationists must posit an interlude somewhere in the northern
>> Aegean, or not far from it.

> By "real Etruscans" I presume you mean "bearers of Etruscan culture such
> as one finds in a coffee-table book". I don't deny the migration of
> substantial cultural elements from the NE Mediterranean to Etruria, without
> which the coffee-table books would be vastly different. But again we're
> losing sight of the linguistics.

        The linguistics does more harm than good to the nativist cause, as
/turs^/ (as in the "turshas", reputedly from Anatolias) is surely closer to
/turs-/ (as in "Tursenoi") than most of the Pelasgian phytonyms recently
noted are to each other.  And at least we can explain the small variation
seen, as Greek did not have /s^/.   No such luck (for the most part) with
Pelasgian phytonyms.
        While on the subject I may note that the existence of "coffee" vs.
"cafe", and "chocolate" vs. "cocoa" is not generally taken to "prove" the
existence of a vastly-spread sub-strate language wherever these words are
found.  Phytonyms can easily be wander-words, though I must admit I know
nothing about the uses (if any) of the various "Pelasgian" plants in
question.

> To a limited extent we can peel back the cultural superstrate by looking at
> the Etruscan pantheon, minus the obvious Hellenic figures (Aplu, Artumes,
> etc.) and Etruscanized Olympians (Tin, Turan, etc.). We are left with such
> deities as Aisu, Calu, Cautha, Cel, Leinth, Manth, Vanth, and Veltha.  Their
> names are evidently native Etruscan, and they were not (to any of our
> knowledge) imported from the Aegean, the Troad, or greater Anatolia.

        That is a good point, but not, I think, given the scanty nature of
the evidence, necesarily decisive.  What do we really know about Trojan, or
Turshan religion?   I would expect it to be a mix of native, Aegean, and
Anatolian elements.

> Having dismissed (correctly I hope) the Eastern sea-route,

        So now "one" is not only attorney but judge and jury too?  How nice,
to triumph so convincingly through simple fiat.  Maybe it works for you, but
when I, in my real job as house-husband, simply declare the dishes clean, my
wife tends to doubt that very much has truly been accomplished.

> one can still ask when and by which route the Etruscan-speaking community
> came to Etruria.

        Why bother?  Why can't they have arisen from the original
post-agricultural population of the area?  And what is gained by dismissing
one route as supportable only by "hand-waving", when all other possible
routes are even more mysterious?  Ignotium per ignotius indeed.  Such an
approach cries out for the creation of a term more vigorous than
"hand-waving". I do hereby officially suggest "hand-flapping."

Dr. David L. White


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Sat May  5 06:52:55 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Sat, 5 May 2001 06:52:55 -0000
Subject: Pelasgian/was Etruscans
Message-ID: <SAT.5.MAY.2001.065255.0000.>

Larry Trask (25 Apr 2001) wrote:

>The idea that Basque <berun> 'lead' is related to the Greek and Latin words
>has been around a long time.  But it is far from being the only proposal on
>the table.

>To begin with, looking for Latin etymologies on the Tiber, we need not
>appeal to a hypothetical Ligurian *<blum-> as a source.

>Now, there are two proposals for a native origin.  One idea is that the word
>is a derivative of <bera> 'soft', with an unidentifiable second element -- and
>lead is, of course, a soft metal.  The other sees the word as built on *<bel>
>'dark', again with an unidentifiable second element -- and lead is also dark.
>The item *<bel> is nowhere recorded as an independent word, but its former
>existence is assured by its presence in a number of derivatives, both as an
>initial and as a final element.

>Nevertheless, many scholars have wanted to relate <berun> to the Greek and
>Latin words in some way, though the proposals differ substantially in detail.

>These proposals are too numerous and too complicated to repeat here -- and
>they not infrequently involve even more far-flung words, such as German <Blei>
>'lead', Georgian <brp'eni> 'lead', Hebrew <bdi:l> 'lead', and a reported
>Berber <buldun> 'tin'.

Hebrew <b'dhiyl> means 'tin'; <!o:phereth> is 'lead'. These are contrasted
in the enumeration of metals (Num. 31:22). The former is probably derived
from <b-d-l> 'to separate'. For this connection to work in a relatively sane
way, one would have to assume that Punic used <b'dhiyl> vel sim. for 'lead'
instead of 'tin', and that the word diffused through Iberia to the Basque
Country undergoing peculiar phonetic changes. I certainly wouldn't endorse
this one.

Alessio argued from <brp'eni> that the ancestor of the Greek and Latin forms
was not improbably *brub-, but I don't buy that either. The Georgian term is
most likely unrelated to the others.

>Finally, to Douglas Kilday's proposal that <berun> derives from a possibly
>Ligurian word of the form *<blum->.  There are some serious phonological
>problems with this.

>First, as noted above, it seems likely that <beraun> is the more
>conservative form of the Basque word -- not helpful.

[more problems]

>So, the phonology is not right for a "Ligurian" *<blum-> yielding Basque
><ber(a)un>.  Of course, if the borrowing was very early, then Basque might
>have been employing different strategies at the time for resolving
>impermissible clusters, but there is no evidence for such a thing, and only
>special pleading is available.

Obviously I have some homework to do before attempting any more Basque
etymologies. I'm in no position to contest the formidable array of
phonologic facts presented.

>In sum, then, Douglas Kilday's proposal is not impossible, but it faces
>serious difficulties, and I cannot see that it should be preferred to any
>one of the several other proposals on the table.  At least all of those
>proposals but one must be wrong, and very likely they are all wrong.

Well, _my_ proposal was almost certainly wrong. Of the remainder, the
nativist derivation of <berun> 'lead' from <bera> 'soft' is most
straightforward and should probably be taken as the default etymology.

>  We cannot tell, because we lack adequate evidence.  This, I think, is what
>Joat Simeon was talking about.

Fine. But if this is a valid point, one should be able to make it without
rhetorical exaggeration. Joat Simeon's reference to "a couple of toponyms"
was irresponsible. The arbitrary dismissal of systematic evidence in favor
of substratal families, such as Pelasgian and Ligurian, is unscientific.
Slinging mud at legitimate investigation, using such sophomoric sophistry as
"unfalsifiability", is worse than unscientific. It amounts to "I'm right and
to hell with you" in erudite polysyllables.

DGK
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com


From petegray at btinternet.com  Thu May  3 19:01:09 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 20:01:09 +0100
Subject: Yeshua (WAS: Peter) [off-topic]
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.200109.0100.>

[ Moderator's note:
  This posting, and the following, are the last I will accept on this thread.
  Those who wish to continue the discussion should take it to private mail or
  to an appropriate mailing list.
  -- rma ]

> How exactly would a contemporary European pious
> Jewish family assist the tourists to part with their money?

I certainly meant no offence to anyone - I hadn't even thought of the
stereotype, and I should have done.  I would have avoided wording the
comment this way, if I had realised - so, I apologise to all of you.

I meant roughly what the moderator suggested, simply that tourism supplies a
part of the national income, and Belgians of any religious affiliation could
be involved in the tourist industry, and that this is often done through the
medium of English.

Despite my stupid wording, the polyglot character of life in the Low
Countries is still an interesting phenomenon, which may help us understand
potential parallels in other times and places.

Peter


From petegray at btinternet.com  Tue May  1 19:03:59 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 20:03:59 +0100
Subject: Yeshua (WAS: Peter)
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.200359.0100.>

[ Moderator's note:
  This posting, and the preceding, are the last I will accept on this thread.
  Those who wish to continue the discussion should take it to private mail or
  to an appropriate mailing list.
  -- rma ]

> the gospels ... are simply not historically tenable sources. Therefore to ...
> create a historical figure Yeshua is purely in the realm of hypothesis.

This is a debate which has been thrashed out thoroughly within historical
and theological circles through this century, and linguists are unwise to
enter it without a sound knowledge of what the historian/theologians have
achieved.

The consensus conclusion from them is that we cannot seriously doubt the
existence of a historical figure called Jesus;  we can, however, dispute
what that person did and said, and the field is wide open as to how to
interpret his alleged words and actions.

Might I , however, suggest that we return to linguistics?

Peter


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Tue May  8 20:14:45 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 8 May 2001 16:14:45 EDT
Subject: Fwd: Joseph Greenberg
Message-ID: <TUE.8.MAY.2001.161445.EDT.>

[ moderator edited ]

  From: Zylogy at aol.com
  Message-ID:
      <LYRIS-191-449-2001.05.08-15.25.36--x99Lynx#aol.com at list.vedavid.org>
  Date: Tue, 8 May 2001 15:25:16 EDT
  To: "MotherTongue List" <mothertongue at list.vedavid.org>

  I have just read (on Funknet) of the passing of Joseph Greenberg. Certainly a
  scholar of many talents, as well as a maverick in the field of linguistics
  during the repressive era which existed in the Cold War, Greenberg
  contributed to the birth of language typology as practiced currently and to
  the revitalization of interest in long range genetic relations. Roundly
  lauded for the first and often chided for the second of these efforts, his
  place is secure in the history of the field. He was open-minded enough to
  have done work on the above AND phonosemantics to boot! As such he provided a
  model for those who would not let intellectual blinders block their own
  wanderings. He will be missed.

  Jess Tauber
  zylogy at aol.com

  ---
  You are currently subscribed to mothertongue as: x99Lynx at aol.com
  To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-mothertongue-191K at list.vedavid.org


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun May  6 06:47:22 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 02:47:22 EDT
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.024722.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/5/01 9:06:24 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
sarima at friesen.net writes:


> True - though it does happen.  In fact the very French you mention is the
> result of one such occurrence.  A small minority of Romans managed to
> convert a much larger number of Gauls into speaking Latin.

-- it does happen, but Gaul may not be such a good example.  Recent
investigations indicate a much more dramatic settlement of Italian
Latin-speakers in the western provinces than previously thought.  Something
like 30% or more of the citizen population of Italy was resettled in the
provinces during the reign of Augustus alone -- and there had already been
hundreds of thousands before him.  This represented the migration of
something like 2-3 million Latin-speaking individuals.

Further, since they were settled as communities, they had the all-important
_local_ majority in areas of intensive colonization, even where the
represented minorities of the overall provincial populations.

Also, with the Roman state, there were institutions of Romanization (and
hence Latinization); the army, particularly, where people from many
linguistic backgrounds were taken away from home and submerged in a
Latin-speaking environment, and then released back into the civilian world
as veterans, with their families.  That would have been at least several
thousand familes in Gaul, every year -- and concentrated in the northern
districts where civilian colonization wasn't so heavy.

The Roman institution of mass slavery, with manumission, also tended to act
as a linguistic forcing-house.

Last but not least, some recent archaeological evidence indicates that Roman
conquest in the Imperial period in NW Europe was accompanied by wholesale
confiscation of farmland and the imposition of Roman settlers

> not to mention the "all roads lead to Rome" economic influence
> that Rome had in the empire.

-- this is a good point.  An imperial state-structure of Rome's enduring
kind, combined with a uniform literate elite culture make for a different
linguistic situation than the putative expansion of PIE in Neolithic times.
 A caste of bards does not act as the equivalent of a common schooling
system with a canon of written works, or the imposition of a administrative
command language which must be mastered by anyone seeking to rise socially.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun May  6 06:56:36 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 02:56:36 EDT
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.025636.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/5/01 10:00:41 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
eska at vtaix.cc.vt.edu writes:

> See Peter Schrijver, 'On the nature and origin of word-inital _h-_ in the
> Wuerzburg glosses', 'Eriu 48, 1997, 205-227, who makes an interesting case
> for the retention of PIE *p as h in some Early Irish forms.

-- it's interesting how rapid and brusque the restructuring of Insular Celtic
was, given the archaic state shown in the earliest sources (eg., the Ogham
inscriptions).


From dlwhite at texas.net  Sun May  6 14:09:41 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 09:09:41 -0500
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.090941.0500.>

> And also in spoken French
> singular @m plural z at m

>> [Ed Selleslagh]

>> Grammatically determined initial-consonant mutations (I think it's important
>> to be that explicit about it) occur in other, still existing, languages too:

        French liasion is abstractly similar to Celtic mutation, for both
might be described as the phonemicization of originally phonetic processes
occurring across boundaries.  I think there probably is a link, as other
suspiciously Celtic-seeming things occur in French, such as excessive (to my
mind) clefting.
        But be that as it may, mutations are actually fairly common,
according to my understanding,  in sub-standard dialects of Romance and
Greek.  An examples from Tuscan appears in the Encyclopedia Brittanica
(1973?) article on Celtic, and someone wrote a book on the subject a while
back.

Dr. David L. White


From dlwhite at texas.net  Sun May  6 14:21:11 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 09:21:11 -0500
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.092111.0500.>

----- Original Message -----
From: Ante Aikio <anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi>
Sent: Saturday, May 05, 2001 6:36 AM

> [I originally wrote:]

>> These claims would of course deserve no attention from the scientific
>> community, were it not that Kalevi Wiik has actively publicized them in
>> the Finnish media, and also quite succesfully managed to market them as
>> a "linguistic breakthrough" to some archeologists, geneticists and
>> historians. Thus, in the recent years Uralists have been forced to mount
>> an attack against the "Anti-Uralists", and this may deceptivily look like
>> a serious scientific debate to non-linguists. I sure hope the situation
>> with Celtic isn't as bad.

> Interestingly, just after I happened to mention Kalevi Wiik in the
> connection of the discussion on Proto-Celtic, it was pointed out to me in
> private correspondence that Wiik is currently also an active supporter of
> the "Celtic lingua franca" theory. The following passage is quoted from
> Wiik's abstract of his paper "On the Origins and History of the Celts",
> which will be read at the "International Colloquium on Early Contacts
> between English and the Celtic Languages" (University of Joensuu Research
> Station, Mekrijärvi, Finland, 24-26 August, 2001):
>
>   "The first Celts, therefore, are the Basque-speaking hunters of western
> Europe who adopted agriculture and the IE language from the LBK culture
> and the Impressed Ware cultures. The area formed a chain of Celtic
> dialects: in the north (Rhine area) the dialects were based on the LBK
> (Central European) dialect of the IE language, while in the south (eastern
> Iberia and southern France), they were based on the Impressed Ware
> (Mediterranean) dialect of that language. In addition, the substrata of
> the non-IE languages were different along the chain of the Celtic
> dialects: the northern dialect had a Basque substratum, while the more
> southern dialects had a Basque, Iberian, or Tartessian substratum. The
> result was the following chain of Celtic dialects/languages: Lusitanian -
> Celtiberian - Gaul - Lepontic.
>   During the Bell Beaker period (c. 2800-1800 BC), the Celtic language was
> used as a lingua franca by the populations of Western Europe. It was the
> language of the élite of the Copper Age (Bronze Age). The centre of the
> Celtic world was in the Únìtice culture in 1800-1500 BC, in the Urnfield
> culture in 1200-800 BC, in the Hallstatt culture in 800-500 BC, and in the
> La Tène culture in 500-50 BC. The Celtic lingua franca was based on
> different Celtic dialects during the six different cultural periods
> mentioned."

        There is good evidence of something like Semitic influence,
sub-stratal or not, in Insular Celtic, and I suspected when I first read Dr.
Trask's initial posting that something like this woud lie behind the views
of the "No-Proto-Celtic" crowd.  The typological lurch of Insular Celtic
toward Semitic, illusory (in terms of actual Semites) or not, does indeed
make it difficult to construct a unified proto-language.  Difficult, but not
impossible.  Such questions as how and when Insular Celtic wound up
verb-initial and so on just have to be answered at some point.  They do no
make proto-Celtic unviable, or suggest any such scenario as just given
above.

> The complete version of Wiik's abstract can be read on the internet at
> http://www.joensuu.fi/fld/ecc/Wiikabstract.htm.

        Substituting "White" for "Wiik", the complete version of my abstract
can be read there as well.  I am not entirely pleased that my work should
find itself in such company, though I suppose I should strive to keep an
open mind.

Dr. David L. White


From jer at cphling.dk  Sun May  6 17:55:08 2001
From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 19:55:08 +0200
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <17026879.3197632756@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.195508.0200.>

On Mon, 30 Apr 2001, Larry Trask wrote:

> [...] The null hypothesis is this:

> The IE languages are not descended by divergence from a single common
> ancestor.

> This null hypothesis is spectacularly falsified by the data, by the
> extensive and elaborate systematic patterns linking all of the IE
> languages.  A convergence scenario predicts nothing more than shared
> elements and resemblances.  This is not what we find, and so the
> convergence scenario is falsified.
[..]

Hear, hear! A bit annoying that truths like this one have to be repeated
over and over again whenever some uninformed know-it-all comes riding in
and tries to shoot up the results of two centuries of steady scholarly
progress. All the nicer to see it done so soberly.

Jens


From sonno3 at hotmail.com  Sun May  6 18:25:37 2001
From: sonno3 at hotmail.com (Christopher Gwinn)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 14:25:37 -0400
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.142537.0400.>

> True - though it does happen.  In fact the very French you mention is the
> result of one such occurrence.  A small minority of Romans managed to
> convert a much larger number of Gauls into speaking Latin.

There were a lot more Romans in Gaul than you might think (even if many of
them were ethnically Gaulish from Northern Italy, they were still thoroughly
Romanized).

We are also dealing with a literate culture versus a non-literate culture as
well as a culture with a more advanced governmental system versus a culture
whose own disunited a simpler governments were in flux. Once the Gauls were
conquered and forced into a new government which demanded knowledge of Latin
and also the ability to write in Latin for its governmental officials (many
of which were eventually gathered up from the local nobility), you see
bilingualism spreading quickly.

On top of this, the process of Romanization in Southern Gaul began long
before Caesar's conquest - the Roman lifestyle was quite attractive to the
Gauls and many of them had already developed a taste for it, which helped to
further Romanization in Gaul after the conquest. Many Southern Gauls prior
to the conquest likely already knew some Latin for purposes of trade with
the Romans.

The real death of Gaulish, however, was in Roman attitudes towards it - the
Romans considered the language to be inferior and ugly - something to be
embarrassed of. You couldn't be a proper Romano-Gaul and still speak
Gaulish. The nail in the coffin came with the spread of Christianity - the
failure to have a Bible commissioned in Gaulish meant that Latin was to
remain the language of religion (alongside of the government and trade).

I do not think that this situation is relevant, however, to the spread of
Celtic languages in a strictly non-literate Northern Europe in the Bronze or
Iron Ages.

- Chris Gwinn


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sun May  6 15:36:42 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 16:36:42 +0100
Subject: IE versus *PIE
In-Reply-To: <bb.e0a472a.28210242@aol.com>
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.163642.0100.>

--On Wednesday, May 2, 2001 2:25 am +0000 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

[LT]

>> Linguistic work in the last twenty years has demonstrated beyond dispute
>> that linguistic descent can be, and sometimes is, far more complicated
>> than our conventional family-tree model would suggest.

> -- quite true.

> Although one should point out that the family-tree model is overwhelmingly
> more _common_; and should therefore be regarded as the "default mode"
> absent evidence to the contrary.

Indeed.  I want to make it clear that I agree with this, since that's the
way the evidence points.

My old friend Bob Dixon has recently been trying to persuade us otherwise.
So far I am not persuaded, but I'm listening.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun May  6 08:45:17 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 04:45:17 EDT
Subject: Degrees of similarity and early IE.
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.044517.EDT.>

As the saying goes, once may be coincidence, twice may be happenstance, but
the third time, something is going on.

When considering broad questions of IE origins, it's helpful to step back and
take a look at the situation -- the relative similarity -- of the first
attested examples.

Eg., Mycenaean Greek, RV Sanskrit, early Avestan, Latin (particularly the
older pre-Classic) examples, what's attested of early Celtic, the early runic
Germanic, Tocharian, etc.

Then throw in the more secure of the first-generation reconstructed
protolanguages; Proto-Germanic, Proto-Slavic, and so forth.  Both the latter
seem to be products of the 1st millenium BCE; the basic characteristic PG
changes are fairly securely datable to the Iron Age and not earlier, and
Slavic somewhat later still.

No two single examples would be conclusive in estimating the time-depth;
after all, if you look at, say, modern Lithuanian in comparison to, say RV
Sanskrit, it makes you blink.  If Lithuanian didn't exist, and we discovered
it via a corpus of written texts buried in caves the way we did Tocharian,
you'd swear it was 2000 years old.  Nobody would dispute that there are
potentially very wide disparities in the speed with which individual
languages _can_ change, given special circumstances, or that the rate of
change can be "jerky" rather than smooth.

But overall, the earliest attested and the most securely reconstructable
early IE languages are of a really startling degree of similarity, and there
are so many of them across such a broad geographical expanse, three-quarters
of the whole width of Eurasia.

Anatolian slightly apart, they seem to be no more diversified than the
Romance languages today; and if you throw in French, Anatolian doesn't look
at that much more so.  In fact, Anatolian is less aberrant than English is
vs. a vs. the other Germanic languages, and we know that they were all
mutually comprehensible only a little over a millenium ago.

Given the extremely broad _geographical_ spread of the IE languages at their
earliest attestation -- from the Atlantic to Chinese Turkistan, which means
pretty well complete linguistic separation -- the high degree of uniformity
between so _many_ widely separated languages virtually forces, I should
think, the hypothesis of relatively recent origin and (by historical
standards) extremely rapid spread over an area previously occupied by many
different languages.

That's certainly the mechanism by which we see similar situations occurring
in historic times -- the spread of Latin and its diversification, the spread
of the (quite unified) Slavic in the early medieval period, the growth of the
Arabic-speaking area, the spread of Chinese, and the spread of English.  If,
every time we have records, Phenomenon A has Cause B, then we're on fairly
sure ground in attributing Cause B when we meet Phenomenon A.

This fits in very neatly with the other evidence -- eg., the technology
expressed in the PIE lexicon -- to bracket the late neolithic as the period
of PIE unity. (Or to be more precise, as the _end_ of the period of PIE
linguistic unity.)  Much earlier, and the degree of geographic spread should
logically and by comparison have resulted in much greater linguistic
diversity.  The hypothesis of recent (within two millenia) spread from a
relatively small area at the time when our first records emerge most
parsimoniously explains the data.

None of this, of course, delivers the degree of conclusivity provided by a
mathematical theorem -- or even the degree of certainty we can use to show
that Latin spread out from a small nuclear area in central Italy.  But it's
about as much certainty as we can expect, given the sparse evidence and huge
stretches of time involved.


From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi  Sun May  6 11:29:54 2001
From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 14:29:54 +0300
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs; credit where credit is due
In-Reply-To: <006401c0b57d$10301560$4b2363d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.142954.0300.>

[ moderator edited ]

[Just when you thought it was safe, the ugly spectre of minimal pairs
rears its head again.  I apologize for being so tardy in getting to this,
but since the end of last year I have not been able to keep up with the
list.  I still have not caught up with the past month's postings, but
about all I have found out from the rest of the year's postings is that
Larry Trask is really Larry the Etruscan. :)]

Over a year ago, on Thu, 30 Mar 2000 21:00:45 +0300 (EET DST) I posted a
message in which I cited the minimal pair 'thigh' / 'thy' and then said:

 Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] and [dh] in
 English on the basis of this minimal pair ...

I considered this a fairly unremarkable statement, since it is obvious,
even by the rules of classical phonology, that this is not a phonemic
contrast.  (I will post a couple of very long messages in the next few
days, replies to messages posted last November that will demonstrate
this.)

I was somewhat surprised, therefore, when this was met with a storm of
protest of the type "Of course [T] and [D] are phonemes in English" since
I had never said that they were not.

But then on Tue, 25 Apr 2000 John McLaughlin posted the following
concerning my original post:

 What got my goat in his first post was the comment that (not quoting
 directly), "No one doubts that Modern English [th] and [dh] represent
 allophones of the same phoneme."

Now I have known John for quite some time as a participant in various
lists, and he is not given to flights of fancy and does not often
misconstrue things (at least not that badly :>).  Since John's perception
of what I had said was nowhere close to what I had actually said, I began
to wonder how he could have gone so far astray.

So I searched through the archives for a possible explanation and found
the following message posted by Peter Gray (I quote the entire message
as found in the archives):


-----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Date:         Mon, 3 Apr 2000 20:42:55 +0100
  Reply-To:     Indo-European at xkl.com
  Sender:       The INDO-EUROPEAN mailing list <indo-european at xkl.com>
  From:         petegray <petegray at btinternet.com>
  Subject:      Re: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut)
  Comments: To: Indo-European at xkl.com
  Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

  >> Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] and [dh] in
  >> English

  Isn't there another minimal pair in   ether :  either  (at least in some
  dialects)?

  Peter
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Now Peter did not refer to my posting in his message (in fact that seems
to be sort of a trademark of his), but I don't believe that anyone was
in any doubt about where the statement came from.  I didn't pay any
attention to the message at the time because it had nothing to do with
what I was talking about, but since the crucial qualification of my
original statement was eliminated without even an ellipsis (another
trademark of Peter's), it made it appear that I was claiming something
that I was not.  For those of you who do grammar, the lack of a comma
after "English" shows that what follows is restrictive, i.e., it is
essential to the meaning of the main clause, not merely a modifier.

Now Peter may or may not have misunderstood the intent of my original
posting; it really doesn't matter, because his truncated statement
surely misrepresented it.  If Peter wanted to discuss whether [T] and
[D] are phonemes in English that was fine with me, but it had nothing
to do with the point I was trying to make.

But this explained John's misperception of my statements as well as the
wild rash of postings offering to prove the phonemicity of [T] and [D]
and suggesting that anyone who didn't believe in it was a few bricks
short of a load, and I'm afraid that I replied to the misstatements of
fact in these in much the same vein.  Most of these were, however, based
on a misunderstanding of what my claim was and so there is no point in
pursuing them on that basis (although I may respond to some of them for
other points when I have time).  The misunderstanding was caused by a
careless quotation out of context that I did not notice or correct at
the time.

This misquotation was regrettable in that it completely obscured the
point that I was trying to make, and forced the discussion into a
completely unproductive direction.  Particularly, the little contretemps
with John was regrettable because he actually had evidence of exactly
the point that I was trying to make, but this got lost in the discussion
of points that ware not at issue (or shouldn't have been).

To make it clear what my statement was about:  My entire point was that
[T] and [D] do not contrast in initial position in English.  My
statement was not about whether [T] and [D] are phonemes in English or
not.  The two are not necessarily related ([T] and [D] can still be
phonemes even if they don't contrast in some environments).

As I said, I don't consider this statement to be particularly
remarkable.  I had rather thought it was common knowledge (silly me;
perhaps there is no such thing as common knowledge in linguistics, or at
least not in phonology).  A good summary of the situation can be had
from Edward Finegan, "English" in Bernard Comrie (ed.), _The World's
Major Languages_ (London & Sydney: Croom Helm 1987), 77-109:

  Several notable differences between the consonant systems of Old
  English ... and Modern English can be mentioned.  The members of the
  three Modern English voiced and voiceless fricative pairs (/f/-/v/,
  /<theta>/-/<edh>/, /s/-/z/) were allophones of single phonemes in Old
  English, the voiced phones occuring between other voiced sounds, the
  voiceless phones occurring initially, finally and in clusters with
  voiceless obstruents.  Relics of the Old English allophonic
  distribution remain in the morphophonemic alternants _wife/wives_,
  _breath/breathe_ and _house/houses_, where the second word in each
  pair, disyllabic in Old English, voiced the intervocalic fricative.
  Significantly, initial /<edh>/ in Modern English is limited to the
  function words _the_, _this_, _that_, _these_, _those_, _they_ and
  _them_, _there_ and _then_, _thus_, _thence_, _though_ and _thither_,
  with initial voiceless /<theta>/ in Old English later becoming voiced
  by assimilation when unstressed, as these words often are.  Similarly,
  /<theta>/ does not occur medially in any native words, though it can
  be found in borrowings.  During the Middle English period, with the
  baring of the voiced phones word-finally when the syncreted
  inflections disappeared, the allophones achieved phonemic status,
  contrasting in most environments; there may have also been some
  Anglo-Norman influence, though not so much as is sometimes claimed.
  (pp. 90-91)

I find this to be an adequate summary of the situation, although it
skips over the difficult bits (but in a general work like this with
limited space and restrictions on the technical level of the discussion
one has to).  In general, it is descriptively adequate but not
necessarily explanatorily adequate.  Finegan has left himself an out,
however, when he says "contrasting in most environments."  A little
thought will show that lack of contrasts can only refer to [T D] since
[s z] and [f v] clearly contrast in all environments (initial, medial,
and final).  Thus room is left for a lack of contrast of [T D] in
initial position.  But, again, considering the type of publication, I
would have thought that this information was common knowledge, not some
outpost of hocus-pocus linguistics.

A. Sommerstein (_Modern Phonology_, Theoretical Linguistics 2 [London
1977]), in doing a classical phonological analysis of English (as an
example), puts the situation this way:

  There is no doubt that /<theta>/ and /<edh>/ contrast phonemically;
  but one might nevertheless feel that such a statement conceals an
  important fact.  For /<edh>/ occurs in initial position only in
  _grammatical_ morphemes:  the archaic second person pronoun _thou_
  (_thee_, _thy_, _thine_), the definite article, the root of a
  demonstrative (_that_, _there_, _then_, etc.):  /<theta>/, on the
  other hand, occurs initially only in _lexical_ morphemes.  This is
  complementary distribution, but not of a kind that a classical
  phonemic analysis can recognize; nor could the regularity be stated in
  the morphophonemic rules, since no alternation is involved.  If the
  regularity is to be stated at all, it must be as part of a set of
  principles governing the phonemic makeup of morphemes.

There are two points where this statement is at variance with my
observations.  First, no one (else) on this list seems to feel that
a statement about the phonemicity of [T] and [D] hides any facts at all,
important or not.  Finegan (cited above) points out the distributional
peculiarities of English [T] and [D], but these seem to be generally
unknown or, if known, considered unimportant, while Finegan considers
them "significant" (but without committing himself to why).

The second point is that, while it is true that the distribution of
initial [T D] in English is dependent on the morphemic structure of the
words involved, it is quite possible to capture this generalization
using the rules of classical phonology, so long as morphological
conditions to the extent of morpheme boundaries are permitted as
phonological conditions.  It is actually quite easy by using a
morphemic analysis similar to that already done by Z. Harris, _Methods
in Structural Linguistics_ (Chicago 1951), 192-93 or G. Trager,
_Language and Languages_, (1972), 76-79, and I am mildly surprised that
it does not seem to be obvious.  As I threatened earlier, I will have
a long, tedious, and doubtless boring posting on this (um der Moderator
es willen) very soon.

I know this kind of thing takes the fun out of the list which functions
best with lightning banter on which no great thought is expended <joke>,
but I haven't had a chance to do anything for 5 months, so please bear
with me.

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun May  6 08:52:41 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 04:52:41 EDT
Subject: Retroflexion
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.045241.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/6/01 2:31:55 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
dlwhite at texas.net writes:

> I note (with some trepidation) that L&M assert that having "high-domed
> palates", which renders retroflex articulations unsually easy to make and
> distinctive in sound, is an Indian racial trait.  I find it difficult to
> believe that it is just a
> coincidence that the one IE language that went into India developed such
> sounds

-- that's intriguing; is there any support for this in recent work on
physical anthropology?  And which Indian populations are L&M referring to?
If we're going back to the period of composition of the RV, then we're
probably talking about only the Indus Valley-Punjab-western Ganges areas,
which is not particularly similar in physical-anthropology terms to, say,
Orissa, and still less so to the Dravidian-speaking areas of the southern
penninsula.


From rao.3 at osu.edu  Tue May  8 16:24:47 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Tue, 8 May 2001 12:24:47 -0400
Subject: Retroflexion
Message-ID: <TUE.8.MAY.2001.122447.0400.>

"David L. White" <dlwhite at texas.net>

> The idea that only developments that cannot be explained internally should be
> explained externally (which seems to be lurking here) is nicely dismissed in
> one of the earlier chapters of Thomason and Kaufman.

What then is to stop us from proposing external influence in every
single case (or bacteria/viruses from comets for biological
explanation)? For example, what is to stop me attributing the emergence
of front rounded vowels to substratum influence of pre-IE European
langauges, or the Great Vowel Shift of English to whatever?

If memeory serves me right, Thomason and Kaufman use retroflexion in IA
as a prop for this dismissal. Since the adequacy of substratum
explanation for that is precisely what we are discussing, it seems
circular to invoke them as authorities here. What we need are
>independent< criteria for comparing internal and external explanations
and testing the latter in the case of retroflexion.

For me, the criterion is simply which explains more and requires least
amount of special
pleading to explain >all< relevant data. Substratum explanations for
retroflexion simply ignore all the troublesome details about Prakrits.]

> > Turning now to substratum explanations:
>         What is the supposed origin of the contrast between palato-alveolar
> and aleopalatal sibilants in the first place?

Huh? The claim is that the distinction is rare to non-existent. If you
mean why laminal vs apical distinction should come about, the question
is badly phrased: ruki-s ( -> apical) and affricate (?) outcome of PIE
k' were distinct to begin with. The origin is the assibilization of k'
which lead to ruki-s becoming retroflex to maintain the distinction.

> I note (with some trepidation) that L&M assert that having "high-domed
> palates", which renders retroflex articulations unsually easy to make and
> distinctive in sound, is an Indian racial trait.

I missed who L&M are. And is this a statistical trait, or absolute
trait? [retroflexes are absolute trait of Indian languages, not limited
to individuals with high-domed palates.] And what about other
languages/dialects that have/had retroflex sounds?

BTW, there is another change that proponents of substratum influence for
retroflexion don't mention. The dentals seem to have moved forward.
Rk-Praati"sakhya calls the dentals "dantamu:li:ya". [I have heard this
attributed to Kashmiri pronunciation as well.] But today, the dentals
are pronounced as inter-dentals (tongue between the teeth or at the
bottom of the top teeth). Why not attribute this to substratum too? [And
what racial trait would this reflect?] The alternate, neutral
explanation is that Dravidian had the threefold distinction of dental vs
alveolar vs retroflex and the pronunciation tended to make for maximal
differences between them.

>         What is this thing " 's "?  A palatalized /s/ or just a typo?

It was meant to be what in TeX will be \'s: s with an accute mark over
it, the usual transliteration of the palatal (laminal) shibilant. Normal
convention for those using ASCII us "s, which I forgot.

> One of the more common ways of making a [s^] sound is effectively
> semi-retroflex.

But then you are reducing the distinction between "s and .s!

> "Language X" could well have died out in the interval, and would hardly be
> expected to reach out and exert any sort of influence from the grave.

What "Language X"? Till now substratum explanations have tended to
attribute retroflexion to Dravidian influence, with occassional nod
towards Munda. In borrowed words and syntactic matters, their influence
grows till Pali at any rate. Bringing in a "Language X" with unknown
phonology hardly explains anything. [Language X, Para-Munda etc are
posits as sources of words in I-Ir and IA with unexplainable etymology.
It is not even clear how many languages are
involved, much less what their structure was.]

> [...]  Indeed traditional Sanskrit grammar, if I have understood it
> correctly, regards the difference between /r/ and /l/ as being that
> /r/ is retroflex whereas /l/ is dental.

Strangely enough, that is not true. Assigning r to retroflex series is a
comparatively late development. The earliest phonological notices
consider r to be produced at the gum line (dantamu:li:ya) or as alveolar
(barsvya). [Norwegian r was not retroflex, I am told.]

> Again we, or at least I, must wonder, if this sort of thing is normal from
> internal causes alone, 1) why we do not see it more often, and 2) why it
> happened only in India, where the pre-IE population was probably both
> racially and linguistically pre-disposed to favor retroflexes.

Wasn't the whole point Hock's objections that retroflexes are not unique
to India, but are found elsewhere?

>         It would seem better to answer both questions than neither.
> One good question would be why the development was to /s^/ in Avestan and
> /.s/ in Sanskrit rather than the other way around.

Because, in Avestan, PIE k' went to /s/. So there was just one shibilant
(if we ignore the one from *rt).

Actually, once I pressed M. C. Vidal on this point in the Indology list
as to why we should not posit a retroflex shibilant to Proto-Iranian as
well. One can just get around it by making the various relevant changes
occur in a precise sequence (see
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9808&L=indology&P=R2172
). But that is not accepted by all. Beekes (JIES, late 1990s) ,for
example, attributes a retroflex shibilant to PI-Ir reflex of ruki-s.

> [...]  But please note that I am not questioning that the various
> retroflexes were phonemic in Sanskrit (after a time),

If you accept that real words count as do sandhi variants but not
accent, then u:dhas (udder) vs u:.dhas (<*wgh'tos) is a minimal pair of
unimpeccably IE words. I thought that even one pair is
enough.

> What I would guess is that in the few cases where a retroflex-conditioning
> environment went to zero, this was in part because very many speakers already
> possessed the ability to hear retroflexes as phonemic, so that for them, no
> new contrast was created.

Does this theory apply to every phoneme split? Are they all are due to
external influence? If not, what is special about retroflexion?

Note that retroflex stops from /rt/, ruki-s+t etc become phonemic in
Prakrits due to simplification of consonant clusters. Due to diglossia
that must go back to even Middle to Late Vedic, IA speakers would have
made this distinction anyway.

BTW, Proto-Dravidian /rt/ survives in (Formal) Tamil. Hock gives a map
of the fate of /rt/. It depends on geography, not on language family.
How do you reconcile this with substratum explanations?

Regards
Nath


From dlwhite at texas.net  Sun May  6 13:40:04 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 08:40:04 -0500
Subject: DLW's Error on Retroflexion
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.084004.0500.>

        The reference to "high-domed" palates among Indians that I referred
to is actually,upon examination, a reference to "deep" palates among the
Toda, so I am guilty of mis-remembering and rather massively
over-generalizing, though, since the Toda are generally (I think) considered
of South Indian racial type, finding the same sort fo thing elsewhere,
perhaps to a lesser degree, would not be surprising.

Dr. David L. White


From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu  Sun May  6 15:01:46 2001
From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 10:01:46 -0500
Subject: [Help] Phonetic transcription of an Old Irish text
In-Reply-To: <01e101c0d351$3a8859c0$d150f2c3@gundapc>
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.100146.0500.>

The book, An Introduction to Old Irish, by R.P.M. Lehmann & W. P. Lehmann
(1975, Modern Language Assoc. of America Press), begins with a phonetic
transcription of Mac Datho's pig and explains the system, in case you want
a precedent for comparison with what you are doing.

Carol Justus

>Hello everyone,
>
>[please note that English  is not my mother tongue]
>
>    I'm working on Old Irish phonetics and transcription rules, and would
>need some help : I'm trying to make a phonetic transcription of a text
>(from _Scél Mucci Mic Dathó_), but I cannot manage to figure out where
>some lenited consonants might be

[ moderator snip ]

>Vincent Ramos
>France


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun May  6 09:20:58 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 05:20:58 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.052058.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/6/01 3:02:02 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
mclasutt at brigham.net writes:

> The Persian Fallow Deer (Dama mesopotamica or Dama dama mesopotamica) did,
> indeed, exist (and was common) throughout Asia Minor before the modern era.
> It's butchered bones have been found as far west as Cyprus and the Aegean
> littoral.

-- thank you; that _is_ interesting.

It also reinforces the point that the PIE vocabulary lacks terms for the
fauna specific to the southern and middle "tier" of Eurasia -- the
mediterranean zone, Asia Minor, Iran, the Levant.

It _does_ have a fairly complete vocabulary for the _northern_ part of
Eurasia; the zone that stretches from the middle Urals into eastern Europe.
Bears, wolves, aurochs, red deer, elk, etc., yes;  lions, leopards,
tigers, chamois, fallow deer, no.

When you combine this with the existance of specifically PIE loans in
proto-Finno-Ugrian, which by pretty well universal consent had an urheimat
in the central and northern Urals...


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun May  6 09:41:35 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 05:41:35 EDT
Subject: Urheimat animals
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.054135.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/6/01 3:27:06 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
centrostudilaruna at libero.it writes:

> I think we could add to the sentence whales, beavers, elks, many kinds of
> birds and salmons too

-- I would certainly agree on "beaver" (PIE *bhebhrus).  Note that Avestan
retains a derivative with exactly the same meaning -- bawra, 'beaver',
bawraini, 'of the/pertaining to beavers'.

Now, in Old Indian/Sanskrit, there has been a semantic shift; there's a
cognate term, babhru, but it means 'mongoose'.

So the more northerly Indo-Iranian languages retained the original meaning,
while in the southerly one, moving into an area where beavers weren't
known, shifted the term to a roughly similar animal.  Similar in color, at
least; Sanskrit babhru also means 'red-brown', and the derivation from a
color term is obvious in PIE *babhrus.

The neolithic range of the beaver stopped well short of the mediterranean
and most of Anatolia.  Again, this reinforces the PIE lexicon for animals
as being specifically north-central Eurasian.

As for salmon, there's a very similar fish present in rivers draining into
the Pontic-Caspian area, and so PIE *loks could have referred either to
this, to the Atlantic salmon, or to both.  In my opinion, probably to both,
or it just meant something like "a big river fish with reddish meat".

Note that in Tocharian (which was spoken in an area with nothing resembling
a salmon) a cognate word has undergone semantic shift to mean just "fish"
in general.


From alderson+mail at panix.com  Mon May  7 17:46:09 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 13:46:09 -0400
Subject: Urheimat animals
In-Reply-To: <000401c0d3d3$ef033960$d4641597@minitorre>
 (centrostudilaruna@libero.it)
Message-ID: <MON.7.MAY.2001.134609.0400.>

On 3 May 2001, Alberto Lombardo wrote:

> I think we could add to the sentence whales, beavers, elks, many kinds of
> birds and salmons too (Thieme 1953). It brings to north in the search of the
> native homeland.

There has of course been a great deal of work since Thieme, much informed by
more recent developments in paleobotany and paleoclimatology.  Besides the work
on IE tree names (Friedrich, _Proto-Indo-European Trees_), there was a paper I
read in pre-print on the salmonid fishes of Europe and Asia which concluded
that the salmon of Thieme's work is not the only candidate for the referent of
the PIE etymon *lok'so-.  (I apologize for being sketchy on the details, but it
was 25 years ago, and being passed from hand to hand among a group of graduate
students.  If anyone can identify it, that would be very helpful.)

								Rich Alderson


From dlwhite at texas.net  Sun May  6 13:56:11 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 08:56:11 -0500
Subject: Normanization of England
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.085611.0500.>

> At 11:08 PM 4/29/01 -0400, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>> Even when people 'convert' to a new language, they have to learn it from
>> _somebody_; ie., native speakers.  Furthermore, there are more and less
>> likely was for this to happen; in a premodern context, small intrusive
>> minorities generally get absorbed by their linguistic surroundings rather
>> than vice versa, even if they're politically dominant. (Which is why this
>> conversation is not being conducted in Norman French.)  Learning a new
>> language is difficult for adults, and is seldom undertaken without very
>> strong motivation.

> True - though it does happen.  In fact the very French you mention is the
> result of one such occurrence.  A small minority of Romans managed to
> convert a much larger number of Gauls into speaking Latin.

> I wonder if part of the difference wasn't time.  The Norman French
> incursion into England was essentially a single pulse, after which there
> was little additional immigration - indeed the French crown quickly forced
> the Norman nobles in England to renounce their French lands, effectively
> separating the two groups.

        The situation with Norman, and the failure of Normanization in
England, is indeed a little more complex than mere numbers.  The
extraordinary successes of Philip Augustus not only cut off the English
Normans from their French lands but created feelings of rivalry between the
two groups, such as were later evidenced in the Hundred Years War.  If it
had been King John that was an extraordinary success, and Philip Augustus
who was an incompetent idiot, matters might have developed differently.
        But probably not, for another factor here is that the Normans took
themselves very seriously as kings of England, as opposed to overlords of
some wet green land, and never contemplated extirpating English
institutions, of which language was one.  Thus when it came time for
England, in the eyes of Henry II, to have a better legal code, English law
was used as the basis, though importing Norman law would have been possible.
I think if we could go back and ask them, they would express surprise at
those who express surprise that Norman did not become the language of
England.   Such a development was never contemplated.
        Digressing a bit, in the case of Mednyj Aleut it seems that about 30
Russians among about 300 Aleuts were enough to wholly transform the the
native language.  Actually, I dispute this interpretation, but what did not
happen was that the Russians were linguisticaly absorbed into the Aleuts.
Part of the reason for what happened seems to have been that Aleut verbal
morphology, being unusually complex, was unusually diffiucult for the
Russians to learn, so even such a nebulous concept as language difficulty
can be a factor in such situations.

Dr. David L. White


From dlwhite at texas.net  Sun May  6 14:00:44 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 09:00:44 -0500
Subject: Semivowels In Sanskrit
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.090044.0500.>

        What is interesting, I think, is that /vy-/ (or /wy-/) occurred
though /yv-/ (or /yw-) did not.  This suggest a sound annoyingly
intermediate (to our theoretical notions) between /v/ and /w/.  The same
syndrome occurs in Germanic, were we find things like the ancestor of modern
English "write", with no cases of /yr/.

Dr. David L. White


From petegray at btinternet.com  Tue May  8 19:23:32 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Tue, 8 May 2001 20:23:32 +0100
Subject: semivowels
Message-ID: <TUE.8.MAY.2001.202332.0100.>

> I doubt that krya or #rya occur.

I can't offer you krya or #rya-, but how about these for word internal
examples of -rya-?

The root ghr forms a causative in gha:ryate (alongside the more normal
gha:rayati).

The root gr/ja:gr "wake" forms ja:garyat.

The root gr "sing" forms the suffix -gi:rya.

The root kr "scatter" has an aorist ki:ryat, and a derived suffix -ki:rya.

The root kr "do" has ka:rya as a 'gerundive'.

You might also like to consider optatives in the parasmaipada, where -ya:-
is added to weak forms of the stem.

Peter


From stevegus at aye.net  Mon May  7 03:18:57 2001
From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 23:18:57 -0400
Subject: Umlaut in Crimean Gothic
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.231857.0400.>

David L. White wrote:

>         I suppose it should be noted, though it does not matter a great
> deal, that finding /i/-umlaut in Gothic (I have not been paying rapt
> attention, but I believe that was what was meant) is not terribly
> surprising.  At the time that Gothic is attested, none of the Germanic
> languages had /i/-umlaut (save possibly of /e/ to /i/?).  Its absence in
> Gothic is thus to be taken largely as an archaism, a matter of time, not
> space.

As Ed Selleslagh and Oliver Neukum pointed out, the spellings that looked
like they showed evidence of i-umlaut may have in fact been artifacts of a
Dutch spelling system that adds an 'e' to indicate a long vowel, so that the
'oe' of Busbecq's writing may have in fact represented /o:/ rather than /0/
or /oe/.

Another of Busbecq's spellings that took me aback was "schuuester."  What
would have been the value of 'sch' here?  Palatisation of the /s/ in
'swistar' to /sh/ seems unlikely in this environment, as does its conversion
to /sk/.   Might this be a German contamination?

--
What the world needs is another great war to kill off a generation of
overachievers.

Ceterum censeo sedem Romanam esse delendam.


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sun May  6 08:09:51 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 09:09:51 +0100
Subject: Stiff Voice/Slack Voice
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.090951.0100.>

> /DHEDH/ roots.  ... stiff voice ....  Either way, /DHET/ roots or /TEDH/
> roots, which do not occur (at least commonly), would be impossible, as
> neither an original stiff vowel nor an original slack vowel could lead to
> such a result.

Interestingly modern Panjabi now uses the aspirate as a tone marker.
Although the aspirate (or the letter h) is still written, there is no
aspiration at all, and before the vowel the consonant is also devoiced.
Before a vowel it indicates low tone, after it, high tone.  So DHEDH
syllables are now impossible.

Peter


From edsel at glo.be  Mon May  7 11:22:04 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 13:22:04 +0200
Subject: Flemish/Dutch dialectology
Message-ID: <MON.7.MAY.2001.132204.0200.>

[ Subject: changed by moderator ]

----- Original Message -----
From: "petegray" <petegray at btinternet.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2001 9:01 PM

> Despite my stupid wording, the polyglot character of life in the Low
> Countries is still an interesting phenomenon, which may help us understand
> potential parallels in other times and places.

> Peter

[Ed Selleslagh]
It sure is interesting, maybe even more than you seem to think:

You were considering the use of other European languages, but there is more:
the sometimes very divergent Flemish/Dutch dialects (Ingwaeonic/Frisian/West-
Flemish, Brabants, Hollands, Saxon, Limburgs...) can be as different among
themselves as Castilian, Catalan and Portuguese, possibly more. Their genesis -
and later partial convergence and mixing - may shed some light on the
mechanisms underlying differentiation of PIE.

Some of these dialects are e.g. strongly palatalizing, velarizing, or
diphtongation-prone, others are not or in a different way. Verb forms may
differ subastantially, e.g. absence of 'ge-' in Saxon participles, preservation
of verbs as 'strong' etc...And all that in an area like three times
Massachusetts (Flanders - 6 million out of 21 million native Dutch speakers -
is a bit smaller than that state).

I got the impression - rightly or wrongly - that most of the litterature on the
subject is largely descriptive, or concerned with the problems of bilingualism
(official Dutch-local dialect) or the emergence of the modern standard
language.

Ed.


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Mon May  7 16:23:04 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 11:23:04 -0500
Subject: Olives/was: Lactose Intolerance/Renfrew
Message-ID: <MON.7.MAY.2001.112304.0500.>

Dear Andrew and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: <Insouciant at aol.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2001 7:49 AM

[ moderator snip ]

> First, let's derive <oli:va>:

> *eleiwa: 'olive' > *oleiwa: (possibly due to the 'pinguis', i.e. velar,
> nature of a final l) > *oli:wa: (cf. di:co : deiknumi) > ol:iva

[ moderator snip ]

[PCR]
For whatever it may contribute to the discussion, I think there is a fair
possibility that *eleiwa: can be analyzed as consisting of *el-, 'brown' +
*eiwa:, 'yew', itself a composite of *ei-, 'red' + **we/o-, 'berry'. Please
notice the double asterisks for **we/o-; I am aware that it would be difficult
to prove this root from inside IE.

Pat

PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th
St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE:
http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ec
at ec hecc, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim
meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138)


From hwhatting at hotmail.com  Mon May  7 11:50:52 2001
From: hwhatting at hotmail.com (Hans-Werner Hatting)
Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 13:50:52 +0200
Subject: Pelasgian/was Etruscans
Message-ID: <MON.7.MAY.2001.135052.0200.>

On Sat, 05 May 2001 06:52:55 Douglas G Kilday wrote:

>> These proposals are too numerous and too complicated to repeat here -- and
>> they not infrequently involve even more far-flung words, such as German
>> <Blei> 'lead', Georgian <brp'eni> 'lead', Hebrew <bdi:l> 'lead', and a
>> reported Berber <buldun> 'tin'.

> Hebrew <b'dhiyl> means 'tin'; <!o:phereth> is 'lead'. These are contrasted
> in the enumeration of metals (Num. 31:22). The former is probably derived
> from <b-d-l> 'to separate'. For this connection to work in a relatively
> sane way, one would have to assume that Punic used <b'dhiyl> vel sim. for
> 'lead' instead of 'tin', and that the word diffused through Iberia to the
> Basque Country undergoing peculiar phonetic changes. I certainly wouldn't
> endorse this one.

This would not be the only case of "tin" and "lead" being mixed up in
cognate languages, e.g., Russian <olovo> means "tin", while the Polish
equivalent <olowo> (with barred <l>) means "lead". But as long  as we do not
know the Punic word for lead, this is speculation, and DGK seems right to be
cautious.

Best regards,
Hans-Werner Hatting


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Mon May  7 17:33:52 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 12:33:52 -0500
Subject: Pelasgian Place-names
In-Reply-To: <000701c0d2b0$60ddce80$466163d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <MON.7.MAY.2001.123352.0500.>

>> How old a god is Tarhun(d/t)?  Could he possibly be pre-Anatolian (ie.
>> Pelasgian on the theory that Pelasgian <> Anatolian)?

>        I do not know, but the form of the name is very close to Etruscan
>version of "Tarchun", as in various names that come down in Latin as
>"Tarquin-", which is a little suspicious.

	Would the source of Latin tarquin- /tarkwin, tar_qu_in/ & Etruscan
tarchun /tarkhun?, tarxun?/ be something like /tarhwin, tarxwin/ ?

	Early Latin had an /h/, and borrowed Greek /kh/ was usually
transcribed as <ch>, so I'm guessing the <qu-> had to come from something
else
	Or is it possible that Etrucan <chu-> was a conventional spelling
for /khw-/?

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


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Mon May  7 22:02:35 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 17:02:35 -0500
Subject: Three-Way Contrast of Secondary Articulations in PIE
Message-ID: <MON.7.MAY.2001.170235.0500.>

Dear Stanley and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stanley Friesen" <sarima at friesen.net>
Sent: Wednesday, May 02, 2001 9:58 PM

<snip>

[PCRp]
>> First, there are no infixes in IE.

[SF]
> I am not sure what else to call the nasal present formation.  It sure isn't
> a suffix!

[PCR]
That is exactly what I would call it: a suffix --- that has methasized.

[SF]
> Let's see, from the root *bheug you get the present *bhunegti. Looks like
> an infix to me.

[PCR]
The normal formation is from *bhu-n-g-ti or *bhu-n-kti. Yes, *bhunegti can be
reconstructed on the basis Old Indian bhunákti but this is a fish swimming
against the stream.

[PCRp]
>> Second, for these 'roots' to be able to have maintained semantic integrity,
>> they must have been distinguishable in some fashion. The suffixes, etc.
>> (better root-extensions) are an attempt to continue distinctions that were
>> lost with the glides.

[SF]
> While I agree many of the roots probably originally were distinct, I do not
> think we yet have sufficient information to tell in what manner.  I
> certainly doubt there was a single cause for all of the mergers.

[PCR]
First, our agreement: there is rarely a single cause for anything.

But -- putting glides aside, how were they kept separate?

Glides is the most parsimonious explanation.

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 dlwhite at texas.net  Mon May  7 23:54:33 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 18:54:33 -0500
Subject: DLW's Renewed Absence
Message-ID: <MON.7.MAY.2001.185433.0500.>

        As my never-ending efforts to get a life, someday become a real boy,
etc., seem, however unaccountably, to be bearing some fruit, I am going to
have to vanish for two or three months, in order to prepare two conference
papers in that time (not to mention that the deadline on the other one,
which is still far from perfect, got extended, a mixed blessing indeed.)
Just a few notes before I check out.
        Apologies to DGK to mis-interpreting his "one" as a "we".  The same
process has been noted in colloquial French, so I suppose I am in good
company.  The answer to my question "Why bother?" is "Because of the Old
European place-names", which I admit I overlooked.  But I do not see that
substituting for 1) Herodotus, optatives and all, 2) the Aeneid and
associated legends, and 3) an archeologocailly unfalsifiable hypothesis
positing Proto-Etruscans in the northern Aegean, 1) nothing, 2) nothing, and
3) an archeologically unfalsifiable hypothesis positing proto-Etrucans
somewhere else, really helps very much.
        With regard to "mixed languages", I am of course aware of the
supposed examples in Thomason and Kaufmann.  I must however object to their
assertion that, in influence between languages, "anything goes".  There are
at least two things that do not go:  1) mixed finite verbal morphology, and
2) redundant suffixes from a primary language intruded, rather than added
to, verbal forms of a secondary language.  To illustrate the second, I note
that when Turkish sufiixes were added on to Greek verbs and suffixes in
(dying) Anatolian Greek, they were indeed added on, so that the order of
elements was Greek verb + Greek sufix + Turkish suffix.  Apparently things
like Greek verb + Turkish suffix + Greek suffix do not occur.  This is
perhaps not terribly surprising, but it is not what an assertion that
"anything goes" would suggest.   Mixed nominal morphology, by the way, does
occur, if I am right in remembering that the Rumanian feminine vocative os
from Bulgarian.
        Taking all these things together, plus the fact that finite verbs
are ordinarily "higher in the tree" than NPs, I suggest that the genetic
descent of a language can always (theoretically) be traced through finite
verbal morphology, where this exists.  This will never be mixed, and its
affixes will always be found closer to lexical verbs than are foreign
affixes, if the examples I am aware of are a reliable guide.  Using this
standard, Mednyj Aleut is Russian, Michif is Cree, and Ma'a is Bantu.  Each
is a rather bizarre and severely influenced version of its putative genetic
ancestor, but technically there is little reason to think that what Thomason
and Kaufmann call "normal transmission" of finite verbal morphology has in
fact been interrupted, for in each case it is there, unmixed and un-intruded
upon. To some extent it is a matter of what we call things rather than what
they are,  but in any event I thought it worthwhile to point out that the
somewhat wild claims of Thomason and Kaufmann are arguably exaggerated, as
there are restrictions 1) that they fail to note, and 2) that can at least
possibly be used to determine genetic descent, considerably reducing the
incidence of "linguo-genesis" and/or "mixed languages", perhaps to zero.  Be
all this as it may, I am sure Dr. Trask would not assert that any of the
extreme developments adduced by Thomason and Kaufmann have anything to do
with Proto-Celtic, so we are at least in agreement on that.  Not only is the
finite verbal morphology of Celtic clearly IE, so is the nominal morphology.
        My answer to Dr. Justus's question is that my source is Palmer's
("the Greek Language") transliteration into Roman characters, and I have no
idea what it is based on.

Dr. David L. White


From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu  Thu May 10 01:24:55 2001
From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus)
Date: Wed, 9 May 2001 20:24:55 -0500
Subject: University of Texas Indo-European website
Message-ID: <WED.9.MAY.2001.202455.0500.>

[ moderator edited ]

Our website has moved from

	www.dla.utexas.edu/depts/lrc

to

	www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/lrc

All the subparts, including the IE Documentation Center and the JIES index
have also moved. We are not longer on the 'dla' but on 'cola'. Everything
else should be the same.


From sarima at friesen.net  Thu May 10 05:51:14 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Wed, 9 May 2001 22:51:14 -0700
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <6d.1384ddc8.28264d7a@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.9.MAY.2001.225114.0700.>

At 02:47 AM 5/6/01 -0400, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>In a message dated 5/5/01 9:06:24 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
>sarima at friesen.net writes:

>> True - though it does happen.  In fact the very French you mention is the
>> result of one such occurrence.  A small minority of Romans managed to
>> convert a much larger number of Gauls into speaking Latin.

>-- it does happen, but Gaul may not be such a good example.  Recent
>investigations indicate a much more dramatic settlement of Italian
>Latin-speakers in the western provinces than previously thought.  Something
>like 30% or more of the citizen population of Italy was resettled in the
>provinces during the reign of Augustus alone -- and there had already been
>hundreds of thousands before him.  This represented the migration of
>something like 2-3 million Latin-speaking individuals.

1. They were spread over many provinces.
2. Gaul was quite populous on its own.

So, the result was still a minority of Italians in Gaul establishing the
Latin language.

>Further, since they were settled as communities, they had the all-important
>_local_ majority in areas of intensive colonization, even where they
>represented minorities of the overall provincial populations.

This may be a key factor in a minority converting a majority - local
"dense" colonies.

>Also, with the Roman state, there were institutions of Romanization (and
>hence Latinization); the army, particularly, where people from many
>linguistic backgrounds were taken away from home and submerged in a
>Latin-speaking environment, and then released back into the civilian world
>as veterans, with their families.  That would have been at least several
>thousand familes in Gaul, every year -- and concentrated in the northern
>districts where civilian colonization wasn't so heavy.

As I said - one factor was the continuing influx of Latin speakers over
several centuries.  It continually renewed the Latin base.

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


From lmfosse at online.no  Thu May 10 09:14:02 2001
From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 11:14:02 +0200
Subject: SV: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.111402.0200.>

David L. White [SMTP:dlwhite at texas.net] skrev 6. mai 2001 16:21:
>         There is good evidence of something like Semitic influence,
> sub-stratal or not, in Insular Celtic, and I suspected when I first read Dr.
> Trask's initial posting that something like this woud lie behind the views
> of the "No-Proto-Celtic" crowd.  The typological lurch of Insular Celtic
> toward Semitic, illusory (in terms of actual Semites) or not, does indeed
> make it difficult to construct a unified proto-language.  Difficult, but not
> impossible.  Such questions as how and when Insular Celtic wound up
> verb-initial and so on just have to be answered at some point.  They do no
> make proto-Celtic unviable, or suggest any such scenario as just given
> above.

As far as I know, Old Norse is also verb-initial. Should we assume Semitic
influence there too?

Would it be possible to get a list of features that point in the direction of
Semitic?

Best regards,

Lars Martin Fosse

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


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Thu May 10 19:31:44 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 14:31:44 -0500
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <004501c0d636$400632e0$b36063d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.143144.0500.>

	As a non-linguist, I'll have to take your word on that but could
someone explain the seeming complexity of mutations wrought by Irish
numbers on following consonants. As I remember some numbers don't cause
mutation, and there are two types of mutations caused by other numbers

>        French liasion is abstractly similar to Celtic mutation, for both
>might be described as the phonemicization of originally phonetic processes
>occurring across boundaries.  I think there probably is a link, as other
>suspiciously Celtic-seeming things occur in French, such as excessive (to my
>mind) clefting.
>        But be that as it may, mutations are actually fairly common,
>according to my understanding,  in sub-standard dialects of Romance and
>Greek.  An examples from Tuscan appears in the Encyclopedia Brittanica
>(1973?) article on Celtic, and someone wrote a book on the subject a while
>back.
>
>Dr. David L. White

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


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Thu May 10 19:34:13 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 14:34:13 -0500
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <004d01c0d637$cddc8320$b36063d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.143413.0500.>

	Besides Insular Celtic's VSO structure. Could you elaborate?

>        There is good evidence of something like Semitic influence,
>sub-stratal or not, in Insular Celtic, and I suspected when I first read Dr.
>Trask's initial posting that something like this woud lie behind the views
>of the "No-Proto-Celtic" crowd.  The typological lurch of Insular Celtic
>toward Semitic, illusory (in terms of actual Semites) or not, does indeed
>make it difficult to construct a unified proto-language.  Difficult, but not
>impossible.  Such questions as how and when Insular Celtic wound up
>verb-initial and so on just have to be answered at some point.  They do no
>make proto-Celtic unviable, or suggest any such scenario as just given
>above.

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


From colkitto at sprint.ca  Sat May 12 18:51:27 2001
From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr)
Date: Sat, 12 May 2001 14:51:27 -0400
Subject: IE versus *PIE
Message-ID: <SAT.12.MAY.2001.145127.0400.>

[ moderator edited ]

I think part of the problem is that family tree diagrams tend to be
oversimplified.  A close reading of the relevant passages of Dixon's book
shows that he seems to arguing for some sort of recognition  that family
tree diagrams should be far more complex than normally presented.

One analogy that we should consider is bushes which can sprout branches
which later can fuse again, or can fuse with branches from other bushes.  Of
course, it may be impossible to reduce such complexity to a page, and
linguists may have to discuss family trees in the same way that
cartographers discuss Mercator's Projection (even Peter's may not entirely
free of such problems.)

Robert Orr

>>> Linguistic work in the last twenty years has demonstrated beyond dispute
>>> That linguistic descent can be, and sometimes is, far more complicated
>>> Than our conventional family-tree model would suggest.

>> -- quite true.

>> Although one should point out that the family-tree model is overwhelmingly
>> more _common_ and should therefore be regarded as the "default mode" absent
>> evidence to the contrary.

>Indeed.  I want to make it clear that I agree with this, since that's the
>way the evidence points.

>My old friend Bob Dixon has recently been trying to persuade us otherwise.
>So far I am not persuaded, but I'm listening.

>Larry Trask


From dlwhite at texas.net  Thu May 10 14:41:24 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 09:41:24 -0500
Subject: Brief Note on OE
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.094124.0500.>

[ Moderator's note:
  The following qouted material is taken from a posting by JoatSimeon at aol.com
  dated 30 Apr 2001 00:01:04 EDT.
  -- rma ]

> English has a massive freight of lexical items from Latin and the Romance
> languages; in total (though not in frequency of use) almost as much as it
> derives from its Germanic parent.  And its syntax bears very little
> resemblance to Proto-Germanic or to Old English.

> This, however, affects the _genetic_ relationships involved not at all.
> English is a Germanic language, and if we had no record of Old English, we
> could reconstruct it (and the intervening stages) quite accurately from
> cognate languages and the modern speech.

        Not really.  There is no evidence of the so-called short diphthongs,
an essential part of OE as it is traditionally construed (but see Daunt
1939), in other Germanic or in later English, notwithstanding the somewhat
desparate and confused efforts of Kuhn and Quirk to show otherwise in their
response to Barritt and Stockwell.

Dr. David L. White


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu May 10 17:14:46 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 13:14:46 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.131446.EDT.>

In a message dated 4/30/2001 2:44:19 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com writes:
<< Likewise, PIE lacks a word for the fallow deer, common throughout southern
Europe, but has terms for 'elk' and 'red deer'.... The logical conclusion
would be that the IE languages were intrusive in areas which had... fallow
deer,... and native to an area with roe deer...>>

I believe all or most members of this list are motivated by a sincere
scholarly interest in the truth, no matter how it may turn out.  The
difficulty here is that the "anti-Anatolian" position is in such a majority
on this list that it's difficult to keep up with all assertions of the type
above.  So, this is why I am suggesting that, even if you agree with the
"anti-Anatolian" position, it might be worthwhile looking at statements like
the one above with a critical eye.  What I'm attempting to do is just point
out examples of problems that may not be obvious unless one takes a step back.

I think when one (even the most "anti-Anatolian") does take a step back and
looks at the statements above critically, if only for the moment, one becomes
more and more unhappy with their value as evidence.

Take the example of the fallow deer mentioned so often in the topic bars
recently.

Consider, for example, that when English speakers came to America, they
impliedly misppplied the very deer names mentioned above.  The American Elk
is in fact the same species as the European Red Deer.  The European Elk, on
the other hand, is the same species as the American Moose.  Anyone familiar
with these two types of deer, not just in appearance but also in terms of
what they output, will know how big a miscue this was.  What is striking here
is that IE speakers were giving animals they were supposedly already quite
familiar with completely opposite names.

Champlain and DeSoto also reported back the wide presence of "Dama" and
"Dain" (names for fallow deer) in America, when in fact there were no fallow
deer in America.  They probably saw small spotted whitetail fawns and that
would be a very easy mistake to make.  In fact, French Canadians continued to
use the fallow deer name for the American Whitetail Deer into the 20th
Century.   (And it should be pointed out that the fallow deer is most
definitely a deer.  It is probably in fact, in one of its many variations,
the famous white stag of legend.)

Someone, a relatively disinterested outsider, might take this alone to
undermine the idea that there was any necessary connection between the names
for elk, red deer and fallow deer and any particular types of deer.
Especially when IE speakers were faced with a much more difficult task than
the american colonists.  Retaining specific meanings as the language spread
from wherever over a very large geographic areas in the days before picture
books.  And over thousands of years.

And the problem here is not phonology or morphology or the comparative
method.  It simply is that the names just don't seem to stick to the objects
that reliably.
And it simply means that IE speakers could have used one name in one place
and another name in another place for the same deer or vice versa.

In fact, the very name used for the Red Deer, for example, suggests that it
wasn't a name for just the Red Deer initially.  Buck's universal "cervus" is
reconstructed in *PIE by many as *ker-wo-s, consisting of the root *ker,
meaning "horn," a nomimalizing suffix -wo-, and the nominative singular
inflection -s.  Wild goats, aurochs, roedeer all have horns.  Female red deer
never have horns and they make up the great majority of the actual red deer
population.  It's possible from this to suspect that *ker-wo-s did not mean
"red deer" in PIE.  There's no indication it ever meant red deer in Greek.
Like the word "deer" itself, perhaps it only came to mean a specific animal
after its original sense was lost, after IE speakers had traveled some
distance from home.

But there's something much weaker about this approach and I offer this not in
rancour but in the hopes that the logic problem can be looked at objectively
and unemotionally.

Pretend you are a disinterested obserser.  You are presented with evidence
that IE languages did not originate in Anatolia, but intruded there.  The
evidence is there is no common name for the fallow deer among IE languages.
The reasoning is that if IE languages originated in Anatolia there would have
been name for fallow deer in those languages.  Because the fallow deer was
present in Anatolia but not in most of Europe.  And since there is no common
name in IE, IE languages could not have originated in Anatolia.

Now, as a pretend outsider, you might ask the innocent question.  What if the
PIEers moved into non-fallow territory and simply forgot the name?  Since
there was no fallow deer in the north, why would they remember the name?
There'd be nothing to apply it to.

If some very early form of IE left Anatolia in say 6000BC, the people
speaking it who went to or were in Germany or Britain or Ireland might not
see a fallow deer for another 7000 years.  (The common date for the
introduction of the fallow deer into the British Isles is after the Norman
invasions.  Even if the Romans introduced it, the gap would be over 5000
years.)

So as an objective observer, you are being asked to accept the following:

If IE languages originated in Anatolia in 6000BC, Insular Celtic and Germanic
speakers would have had to have a name for the fallow deer, even though they
hadn't seen one for 6000+ years.

I think that stepping back and with a critical eye, even the most adamant
anti-Anatolian can see why an outsider might see this as a very poor
argument.  And I think the same applies to most of these animal arguments.
I'll try to get to those soon.  They simply do little or nothing for the
anti-Anatolian position, even if that position is true.

Let me repeat that and add something.  The "fallow deer" does little or
nothing for the anti-Anatolian position, no matter how correct that position
is.  In fact, I think, to someone who holds the anti-Anatolian, this whole
line of argument will create in the end nothing more than a credibility
problem.  That's just an impression.

Finally, there is the matter of the fallow deer itself.  It seems it may have
been introduced into southern Italy in Neolithic times.  There seems to have
been a native population in Bulgaria and Romania (darn close to the Ukraine)
from late neolithic times into the present (N. Spassov 2000) and in Greece.
The fallow deer and its names are actually an interesting example of how we
should not take the things behind the names for granted.  The dama (Gr. tame)
in "Dama Dama", it's formal scientific name, is appropriate.  The fallow deer
appears to have been a very early semi-domesticate, not just another furry
thing in the woods.  I hope to send a little more on this soon.

For those who've been kind enough to temporarily see the other side of this
issue, my appreciation.

Best Wishes,
Steve Long


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Thu May 10 19:22:37 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 14:22:37 -0500
Subject: Fallow Deer
In-Reply-To: <bd.e31fd96.2826717a@aol.com>
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.142237.0500.>

	There were tigers in the Caspian region until about 100 years ago.
How far to the north and west did they live in earlier times?

>It also reinforces the point that the PIE vocabulary lacks terms for the
>fauna specific to the southern and middle "tier" of Eurasia -- the
>mediterranean zone, Asia Minor, Iran, the Levant.

>It _does_ have a fairly complete vocabulary for the _northern_ part of
>Eurasia; the zone that stretches from the middle Urals into eastern Europe.
>Bears, wolves, aurochs, red deer, elk, etc., yes;  lions, leopards,
>tigers, chamois, fallow deer, no.

>When you combine this with the existance of specifically PIE loans in
>proto-Finno-Ugrian, which by pretty well universal consent had an urheimat
>in the central and northern Urals...

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


From sarima at friesen.net  Thu May 10 14:11:33 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 07:11:33 -0700
Subject: Three-Way Contrast of Secondary Articulations in PIE
In-Reply-To: <003d01c0d741$6d1df5e0$10464241@patrickr>
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.071133.0700.>

At 05:02 PM 5/7/01 -0500, proto-language wrote:
>Dear Stanley and IEists:
>[PCR]
>The normal formation is from *bhu-n-g-ti or *bhu-n-kti. Yes, *bhunegti can be
>reconstructed on the basis Old Indian bhunákti but this is a fish swimming
>against the stream.

I was following the traditional reconstruction.  I cannot at this time
evaluate the relative likelihood of the various alternatives.

>> While I agree many of the roots probably originally were distinct, I do not
>> think we yet have sufficient information to tell in what manner.  I
>> certainly doubt there was a single cause for all of the mergers.

>[PCR]
>First, our agreement: there is rarely a single cause for anything.

>But -- putting glides aside, how were they kept separate?

My point is that in PIE per se, they weren't, except by formatives such as
the noun stem formatives.  That is, by the time of the reconstructed
language, the old conditioning factors were gone.

>Glides is the most parsimonious explanation.

I would tend to say, we do not know what the differentiating factors were
in the pre-stage preceding the reconstructed stage.

Also, I suspect that multiple factors kept them separate at that stage.

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


From hwhatting at hotmail.com  Fri May 11 13:57:27 2001
From: hwhatting at hotmail.com (Hans-Werner Hatting)
Date: Fri, 11 May 2001 15:57:27 +0200
Subject: Russian phonology (Was: Three-Way Contrast of Secondary
 Articulations in PIE)
Message-ID: <FRI.11.MAY.2001.155727.0200.>

On Tue, 10 Apr 2001 16:05:38 0500, David L. White wrote:

>the degree of velarization in "yeri" (henceforth "I"), is more than would
>be predicted from velarization of a preceding consonant alone, so that we
>must (or depending on theory might) conclude that /I/ is an independent
>target, i.e. a phoneme, probably picked up from Uralic.

I cannot follow you here. Do you want to say that, in Russian, <I> is a
phoneme separate from /i/? Since when is the degree of presence of a
phonetical feature in itself an indicator of phonemicity? I don't want to
restart last years' discussion on what constitutes a phoneme, but I think we
can agree on that we have to look at whether we have occurrences of distinct
sounds in phonologically identical environments concurring with distinctions
of meaning.
If we look at the Russian material, we have a phoneme /i/ with the
allophones <i> in anlaut position and after palatalised conconants, and <I>
after non-palatalised consonants. I do not know of a single case in Russian
where this rule would be violated. So there simply is no basis for
establishing a separate phoneme /I/.
If you want to say that <I> ought to be seen as the "basic" realisation of
the phoneme /i/, so that this phoneme ought to be called /I/, you are of
course free to do so, although the fact that <I> cannot appear in anlaut
position would in my opinion speak against such an assertion.
One point where /i/ is unique among vowel phonemes in Russian is the fact
that it is the only of them where the allophone occurring after palatalised
vowels is the one occurring in anlaut position, while for the other ones it
is the allophone occurring after non-palatalised vowels. But, from a
naturality viewpoint, it is exactly the phoneme where we would expect such a
deviation most.
This, of course, does not mean that the particular realisation of the
allophone <I> cannot have been an influence from Uralic, but I have to leave
this question to the Uralicists.

Best regards,
H. W. Hatting


From rao.3 at osu.edu  Thu May 10 16:48:09 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 12:48:09 -0400
Subject: Semivowels In Sanskrit
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.124809.0400.>

"David L. White" <dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

>         What is interesting, I think, is that /vy-/ (or /wy-/) occurred
> though /yv-/ (or /yw-) did not.  This suggest a sound annoyingly
> intermediate (to our theoretical notions) between /v/ and /w/.

Although people often seem to assume that Sanskrit v was labio-dental,
the evidence for that is mixed and late. Early evidence is discussed in
M. M. Deshpande, "The phonetics of v in Panini", Annals of Bhandarkar
Oriental Research Institute, 56(1975) 45--65. Rkpra:ti"sa:khya, for
example describes the both p-series and v as o.s.tya, "labial". Nor is
it usually described in terms
that would suggest a spirant.

Modern pronunciation varies: Post-consonantly, it is usually a bilabial
approximant. But, AFAIK, never a spirant (so some people don't like
transcribing an English v by Devanagari v, but use vh). Intervocalicaly,
it varies more, but in some mouths (including mine) it comes as bilabial
there too.


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri May 11 19:25:18 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 11 May 2001 20:25:18 +0100
Subject: Semivowels In Sanskrit
Message-ID: <FRI.11.MAY.2001.202518.0100.>

>         What is interesting, I think, is that /vy-/ (or /wy-/) occurred
> though /yv-/ (or /yw-) did not.

Only marginally connected with the above -- I find it striking that we
have -va- < *-un.- in the 3 plural of a word like juhvati (and other such
words).   The rest of the active has weak stem juhu-, and there are a number
of -anti forms for the 3 plural.  So does the lack of a 3 pl. *juhunti tell
us something about Sanskrit analogical pressures, or something about
Sanskrit semivowels, and if so, what?

Peter


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Thu May 10 05:40:54 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 05:40:54 -0000
Subject: Pelasgian/was Etruscans
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.054054.0000.>

Rick Mc Callister (30 Apr 2001) wrote:

>	I've seen somewhere (in popular etymological books) that
>	cypressus and kuparissos are from Semitic
>	and are cognate to English gopher (wood) --which was used for
>Noah's Ark (if I remember correctly),
>	and also cognate to Cyprus "(is)land of conifers"
>	--and indirectly copper (metal from Cyprus).

>	It does sound a bit pat and the -ssos ending looks suspiciously
>pre-Greek substrate rather than Semitic but I plead ignorance

>	So, are cypressus and kuparissos from Semitic?
>	If gopher (wood) derived from Hebrew or just a variant form derived
>from cypressus or kuparissos?
>	Is there a link between Cyprus and cypress?

>	Or is this all someone's wishful thinking?

All three variants (Lat. cupressus, Gk. kuparissos, Heb. go:pher) are most
likely derived from pre-Greek substrate, which I have been calling
"Pelasgian", also known as "Aegean" or "Aegeo-Anatolian". The Latin spelling
with cypr- reflects a belief (probably mistaken) that the word was borrowed
from Greek.

The wood is resinous, and Davies-Mitchell consider <go:pher> akin to
<ko:pher> 'village, pitch, henna, ransom' which are all "coverings" derived
from <k-p-r> 'to cover', so in their view the dendronym is Semitic. This is
refuted IMHO by Gen. 6:14, which uses the two lexemes distinctly: <te:bhath
!'ac,ey-gho:pher> 'ark of gopher-wood' but <bakko:pher> 'with pitch' (lit.
'in the pitch') and <w'kha:pharta:> 'and thou shalt pitch'.

The simple word occurs only in Gen. 6:14, but the derivative <gophriyth>
'sulfur, brimstone' (presumably named after similarity to burning
tree-resin) is found 7 times in the OT. The usage of the simple word in the
compound suggests that <go:pher> actually means 'resin', perhaps a specific
(fragrant?) type. The Latin and Greek dendronyms carry the generic
denominative suffix of the substrate, so one can provisionally extract
"Pelasgian" *kupar- '(fragrant?) resin'.

I have no solid information on the origin of the name "Cyprus". It is not
recognizable in the OT with the possible exception of <?iy kaphtowr> 'isle
of Caphtor' (Jer. 47:4) which, as homeland of the Philistines, is more
likely a reference to Crete. Aramaic has the adjective <kwpryy> 'Cypriot',
but this is almost certainly borrowed from Greek.

DGK


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Fri May 11 04:11:47 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Fri, 11 May 2001 04:11:47 -0000
Subject: Etruscans
Message-ID: <FRI.11.MAY.2001.041147.0000.>

David L. White (3 May 2001) wrote:

>Obviously colonizers, or exerters of control, will bring their
>language along with them, having little choice in the matter.

Yes, but the outcome can vary greatly. The natives _may_ adopt the intrusive
language, or the colonists _may_ adopt the native language, or both
languages _may_ co-exist. Every case must be examined separately.

>I fail to perceive any "hand-waving", beyond what is unavoidable
>given that the material culture of Troy was not (somebody out there please
>correct me if I am wrong) distinctive, and thus would leave no easily
>discernable trace anywhere.  I can see how this might seem very convenient
>(I would say "unfalsifiable", but that would be invoking a square wheel, now
>wouldn't it?) to those having a prior committment to the nativist view, but
>it is also, simply put, true.

I don't have a "prior commitment" to the nativist view. Every case must be
examined separately, and there are plenty of situations in which the
migrationist view cannot be sanely disputed (such as IE-speakers in North
America). In the particular case of the Etruscan language, the theory of
intrusion from Anatolia or the Aegean raises more questions than it answers,
so the nativist view is just more plausible.

And I certainly wouldn't use the Un-F-word to describe your postings. That
would make my own responses worse than meaningless; they would be pointless.

>There is no firm expectation when an elite is of one language and the mass of
>the population is not.  The case of the Turks in Anatolia seems fairly well
>established by modern genetics:  they were a fairly small elite, and the
>pre-Turkic population simply converted to Turkish over time.  (A lot of time
>in this case, but Greek was a very "proud" language, as "Villanovan" would not
>have been.)  I may note as well (again) the case of Latin America, which has
>largely been Iberianized in language despite the population being (with a few
>exceptions) largely Amerindian by genetic descent.

How "simple" was the conversion to Turkish? Weren't there Greek communities
in Cappadocia and elsewhere in Anatolia until recently? I'm not sure this is
such a good example.

Likewise, most parts of Latin America retain indigenous languages, despite 4
or 5 centuries of political and economic dominance by IE-speakers.

What specific features of Villanovan exhibit lack of linguistic pride? Was
it an untidy language, with speakers failing to perform the house-husbandry
of sweeping out the Fremdwoerter every week? For that matter, if "proud"
languages generally clobber "humble" ones, why aren't we all speaking
Trojan?

>En petite masse.  (My French is for reading knowledge only, so
>please forgive me if I did not get that right.)   A large migration would
>probably be logistically implausible, among other things.  I agree that the
>native population was not expelled or exterminated, and that there is indeed
>substantial archeoligical continuity.  But I thought we had agreed that such
>a population, as it went over to Etruscan over a period of perhaps several
>centuries (or perhaps less; stranger things have happened), would quite
>probably leave no inscriptional trace.

It's hard to leave inscriptions without a writing system. But the
petite-masse explanation begs the question of what happened to the _rest_ of
the Trojans after the war. Presumably there was a diaspora, and presumably
other places (mostly nearer to Troy) were settled, and presumably the native
speakers, like the Villanovans, had "humble" languages or were bedazzled by
the High Culture. So, if your Trojo-Tyrrhenian theory is valid, where is the
evidence for Etruscoid speech in the non-Etrurian part of the Trojan
diaspora (since we agree that Lemnian is too late to matter)?

>Place names are another question,
>but recent assertions that conquerors re-name places only when they have
>bureaucrats along for the ride are clearly falsified by the case of
>Anglo-Saxon England (among others, no doubt), where they conquerors surely
>renamed a great many water-courses (whatever we think had happened to the
>natives), despite not being notably well-supplied with bureaucrats.

I didn't suggest that re-naming occurred _only_ when conquerors had
bureaucrats in tow. I was referring to the ability of new regimes to
obliterate the old names completely, which seems to be the case in much of
Texas. That requires either bureaucracy (and writing conventions and
materials) or genocide. Normally, dominant intruders re-name _some_ of the
landmarks, resulting in toponomastic stratification.

>The linguistics does more harm than good to the nativist cause, as
>/turs^/ (as in the "turshas", reputedly from Anatolias) is surely closer to
>/turs-/ (as in "Tursenoi") than most of the Pelasgian phytonyms recently
>noted are to each other.  And at least we can explain the small variation
>seen, as Greek did not have /s^/.   No such luck (for the most part) with
>Pelasgian phytonyms.

That's comparing apples with giraffes (actually just _one_ apple, since you
allege that only one lexeme is involved in your turs-words).

>While on the subject I may note that the existence of "coffee" vs.
>"cafe", and "chocolate" vs. "cocoa" is not generally taken to "prove" the
>existence of a vastly-spread sub-strate language wherever these words are
>found.  Phytonyms can easily be wander-words, though I must admit I know
>nothing about the uses (if any) of the various "Pelasgian" plants in
>question.

Yes, psychotropic substances can spread like wildfire, along with the words
which denote them: hence the difficulty in finding the linguistic source of
"wine" (not to mention "hemp"). But now we're talking potonyms (and
capnonyms), not phytonyms. I wouldn't know whether roses, violets, and
hyacinths contain abusable substances. (Where's Timothy Leary when you need
him?) Anyhow, if any of the phytonyms referred to substrate by Lejeune,
Palmer, Devoto, Alessio, etc. were comparable to coffee, chocolate, tobacco,
etc. (with consumption occurring far beyond the native areas of the plants,
and specialized producers, refiners, and merchants), then the words in
question would not be restricted in distribution to the "Pelasgian" area,
and would be either regarded as Wanderwoerter or indistinguishable from
ordinary IE wordstock.

>That is a good point, but not, I think, given the scanty nature of
>the evidence, necesarily decisive.  What do we really know about Trojan, or
>Turshan religion?   I would expect it to be a mix of native, Aegean, and
>Anatolian elements.

That begs the questions of how "native" Trojan/Turshan elements are to be
distinguished from regular Aegean or Anatolian ones, and where their
homeland was if not Aegeo-Anatolian. You have repeatedly emphasized the
non-distinct nature of Trojan material culture, if memory serves.

The lack of Anatolian features in Etruscan religion has been pointed out
before. If the Trojans had recently arrived from the West to take over the
Troad, they wouldn't have had much time to assimilate Anatolian cultural
features. This in itself is reasonable enough. But the most plausible
scenario is that the Trojans (or their ruling class) were Phrygians who came
from Thrace. The Trojo-Tyrrhenian theory has to face not only the silence of
classical authors, but the absence of Etruscan linguistic evidence in
Thrace. We could, of course, always postulate that the Trojans originated in
Etruria (supported by Dardanus allegedly coming from Cortona?) and then
returned after the war, but then they would hardly be introducing a _new_
language.

>So now "one" is not only attorney but judge and jury too?  How nice, to
>triumph so convincingly through simple fiat.  Maybe it works for you, but
>when I, in my real job as house-husband, simply declare the dishes clean,
>my wife tends to doubt that very much has truly been accomplished.

Obviously I should have used different wording. I wasn't trying to usurp the
roles of judge and jury. When I refer to "dismissing" Anatolian-Etruscan or
any theory, it should be clear that I speak only for myself. I don't expect
the whole world to jump aboard the bandwagon.

>Why bother?  Why can't they [Etruscans] have arisen from the original
>post-agricultural population of the area?  And what is gained by dismissing
>one route as supportable only by "hand-waving", when all other possible
>routes are even more mysterious?  Ignotium per ignotius indeed.  Such an
>approach cries out for the creation of a term more vigorous than
>"hand-waving". I do hereby officially suggest "hand-flapping."

Before long we'll have Khrushchevian shoe-banging, unless a pact against
metaphoric escalation is implemented. So let's _not_ categorically dismiss
_any_ sane theory (please note that I never called the Trojan theory
"insane"). One theory is indeed the ultra-nativist one that Etruscan
represents the speech of the first anatomically modern humans to inhabit
Etruria. At the other extreme, ultra-migrationists have the Etruscans fresh
off the boat from Lemnos in 700 BCE. In principle, one could also theorize
Proto-Etruscan coming in with the first farmers, the first metallurgists,
the Proto-Villanovans, or none of the above. The answer (if it has not been
irretrievably lost, as a prominent defeatist suggests for pre-Greek) is in
the toponyms, phytonyms, glosses, and such relics as we have in extant
Etruscan texts. But unless one is a dogmatic dualist, there is no _a priori_
reason for narrowing the field to two choices.

DGK


From mclasutt at brigham.net  Thu May 10 06:35:44 2001
From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 00:35:44 -0600
Subject: Normanization of England
In-Reply-To: <003701c0d634$5cbe6940$b36063d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.003544.0600.>

David White wrote:
        Digressing a bit, in the case of Mednyj Aleut it seems that about 30
Russians among about 300 Aleuts were enough to wholly transform the the
native language.  Actually, I dispute this interpretation, but what did not
happen was that the Russians were linguisticaly absorbed into the Aleuts.
Part of the reason for what happened seems to have been that Aleut verbal
morphology, being unusually complex, was unusually diffiucult for the
Russians to learn, so even such a nebulous concept as language difficulty
can be a factor in such situations.

Me:  The issue of language complexity has rarely been mentioned in my
experience, since, according to our axiomatic definition of "human
language", "all languages are equally complex" (in terms of considering the
language as a whole).  Yet we always talk about pidgins as "simplified"
languages which forego much morphology in favor of word order and lexicon.
There's something very powerful to be said for this.  On the Great Plains of
North America, the Pawnees held the central ground.  Much trade from the
South Plains to the North Plains passed through their hands, but Pawnee
never became a trade language or lingua franca.  The verbal morphology was
just too incredibly complex.  I've seen Pawnee verbs of 25 syllables.  The
incredibly simple nominal morphology (virtually zero) and pretty free word
order (most clauses are only one or two words long) doesn't outweigh the
highly complex verb structure.  Comanche, on the other hand, held an equally
important trade function on the South Plains and their language became a
lingua franca.  Comanche verb structure is not quite as simple as English
verb structure, but with little morphophonemic "mush", a fairly
uncomplicated sound system, and no tones, speakers of neighboring groups
with complex morphophonemics, verb morphology, tonal variation, etc. (Kiowa,
Wichita, Tonkawa, Plains Apache, etc.) frequently used Comanche in
intertribal communication.  It seems that, upon my very cursory examination
of similar situations, a simple morphological system and uncomplicated sound
system will always outweigh free word order and lexical flexibility in
language contact situations.

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 JoatSimeon at aol.com  Thu May 10 19:56:21 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 15:56:21 EDT
Subject: Normanization of England
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.155621.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/9/01 11:44:09 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
dlwhite at texas.net writes:

> But probably not, for another factor here is that the Normans took
> themselves very seriously as kings of England, as opposed to overlords of
> some wet green land, and never contemplated extirpating English
> institutions, of which language was one.

-- note that the Normans themselves were the descendants of a
Scandinavian-speaking intrusive group in Normandy -- which was assimilated
into a Romance-speaking population.  In fact, very few of the Viking-era
Scandinavian settlements abroad retained a Scandinavian language; only those
where there was no native population and the Scandinavians were in an
overwhelming majority. (Iceland, the Faeroes, etc.)

As for Norman respect for English, for two centuries or so after 1066, it was
a language for peasants.  The Court in London spoke French; for the first
couple of generations the _entire_ landowning aristocracy spoke French; and
most of their immediate retainers spoke French.  French was also the language
of administration, and the law courts -- and remained so down to Tudor times.
 The Angevin dynasty which replaced the Norman one was also emphatically
French and primarily oriented towards its Continental possessions.

In between William the Conqueror and the Black Prince no "English" monarch
spoke English as his first language, and it's doubtful if many of them even
learned it as a second, acquired tongue.

Post-1066 there was massive French influence on English, and in many personal
habits -- for example, French personal names largely replaced Germanic ones
with in a century or two of the conquest.  Besides the new aristocracy, many
Norman (and other French-speaking) merchants settled in the towns.

Which shows the extraordinary powers of endurance of a language spoken by a
solidly established peasant population.  It's very hard to change such a
linguistic bloc.


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri May 11 08:31:15 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 11 May 2001 09:31:15 +0100
Subject: DLW's Renewed Absence
In-Reply-To: <003b01c0d751$117b7400$496263d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <FRI.11.MAY.2001.093115.0100.>

--On Monday, May 7, 2001 6:54 pm -0500 "David L. White" <dlwhite at texas.net>
wrote:

>         With regard to "mixed languages", I am of course aware of the
> supposed examples in Thomason and Kaufmann.  I must however object to
> their assertion that, in influence between languages, "anything goes".

Hmmm.  May I know where in their book T and K assert that "anything goes"?
My reading of the book reveals only the more cautious claim that we cannot
know what happens in language contact until we look.

[snip]

>         Taking all these things together, plus the fact that finite verbs
> are ordinarily "higher in the tree" than NPs,

OK; I'm afraid I don't understand this.

I don't think it's *generally* true that syntactic theorists put verbs
higher in trees than NPs.  Verb-at-the-top is more a feature of
dependency-based approaches than of constituency-based approaches.  But
some contemporary dependency theorists put verbs and all argument NPs at
the same level in their trees.  Non-Chomskyan constituency theorists
typically put subject NPs higher than verbs.  Chomskyans change their
analysis regularly, but they typically put abstract elements highest in
their trees, not verbs.

> I suggest that the genetic
> descent of a language can always (theoretically) be traced through finite
> verbal morphology, where this exists.

This strikes me as a highly arbitrary proposal, though perhaps an
interesting one.  But it does have the immediate consequence that a
language with no verbal morphology has no ancestor -- unless the intention
is to supplement this proposal with one or more unstated back-up proposals.

> This will never be mixed,

Well, a bold claim.  I confess I can't falsify it off the top of my head.
But I wonder what a survey of, say, native American languages might turn up.

> and its
> affixes will always be found closer to lexical verbs than are foreign
> affixes, if the examples I am aware of are a reliable guide.  Using this
> standard, Mednyj Aleut is Russian, Michif is Cree, and Ma'a is Bantu.
> Each is a rather bizarre and severely influenced version of its putative
> genetic ancestor, but technically there is little reason to think that
> what Thomason and Kaufmann call "normal transmission" of finite verbal
> morphology has in fact been interrupted, for in each case it is there,
> unmixed and un-intruded upon. To some extent it is a matter of what we
> call things rather than what they are,

OK.  Very interesting.  Let me draw attention to two examples.

First, Anglo-Romani.  According to T and K, this consists of wholly Romani
lexis plus wholly English grammar.  According to David White's proposal,
then, Anglo-Romani is English, since it has English verbal morphology.  Is
this a satisfactory conclusion so far?

Now, consider how Anglo-Romani came into existence.  I assume it didn't
spring into being overnight, but must have evolved gradually.  So there are
broadly two possibilities.

First, Anglo-Romani started off as plain English, but was gradually
relexified from Romani until no English lexis was left.  According to
David's proposal, this *must* be what happened, since the alternative below
seems to be impossible.

Second, Anglo-Romani started off as Romani, but it gradually borrowed more
and more grammar from English, until there was no Romani grammar left.
Under David's proposal, this appears to be impossible, since the language,
in this scenario, has shifted from having Romani verbal morphology to
having English verbal morphology -- seemingly in conflict with the proposal
on the table, which sees verbal morphology as inviolate.  It also, of
course, has the peculiar consequence that Anglo-Romani has changed from
being Romani to being English -- an outcome surely more bizarre than
anything contemplated in T and K.

Assuming overnight creation can be excluded, then, David's scenario forces
us to conclude that the first interpretation *must* be right.  Well, this
is an empirical question.

My second case is the Austronesian language Takia.  As it is commonly
described, Takia has borrowed the *entire* grammatical system from the
Papuan language Waskia, so that every Takia sentence is now a
morpheme-by-morpheme calque of the corresponding Waskia sentence -- while
at the same time Takia has borrowed no morphemes at all from Waskia.

So, in Takia, the *patterns* of the verbal morphology are Waskia, while the
*morphemes* are Takia.  In David's scenario, then, which is decisive?  Is
Takia Austronesian, because it exhibits only Austronesian morphemes?  Or is
it Papuan, because it exhibits only Papuan morphological patterns?

A pretty little puzzle, don't you think?

> but in any event I thought it
> worthwhile to point out that the somewhat wild claims of Thomason and
> Kaufmann are arguably exaggerated, as there are restrictions 1) that they
> fail to note, and 2) that can at least possibly be used to determine
> genetic descent, considerably reducing the incidence of "linguo-genesis"
> and/or "mixed languages", perhaps to zero.

Again, I don't see T and K as making any wild claims.  They seem to me to
be doing no more than quoting Hamlet: "There are more things in heaven and
earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

> Be all this as it may, I am
> sure Dr. Trask would not assert that any of the extreme developments
> adduced by Thomason and Kaufmann have anything to do with Proto-Celtic,
> so we are at least in agreement on that.

Indeed we are.

[snip]


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 cjustus at mail.utexas.edu  Thu May 10 13:05:33 2001
From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 08:05:33 -0500
Subject: Urheimat animals
In-Reply-To: <200105071746.NAA18621@panix2.panix.com>
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.080533.0500.>

>On 3 May 2001, Alberto Lombardo wrote:
Would you be referring to Richard Diebold's monograph 5 in JIES

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/lrc/jies/monographs/mono5.html (short
synopsis)

entitled: The Evolution of Indo-European Nomenclature for Salmonid Fish:
                                   The Case of `Huchen' (Hucho Spp.) ?

Carol Justus

[ moderator snip ]

>There has of course been a great deal of work since Thieme, much informed by
>more recent developments in paleobotany and paleoclimatology.  Besides the
>work on IE tree names (Friedrich, _Proto-Indo-European Trees_), there was a
>paper I read in pre-print on the salmonid fishes of Europe and Asia which
>concluded that the salmon of Thieme's work is not the only candidate for the
>referent of the PIE etymon *lok'so-.  (I apologize for being sketchy on the
>details, but it was 25 years ago, and being passed from hand to hand among a
>group of graduate students.  If anyone can identify it, that would be very
>helpful.)

>								Rich Alderson


From xavier.delamarre at free.fr  Thu May 10 17:04:12 2001
From: xavier.delamarre at free.fr (Xavier Delamarre)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 19:04:12 +0200
Subject: Urheimat animals
In-Reply-To: <200105071746.NAA18621@panix2.panix.com>
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.190412.0200.>

le 7/05/01 19:46, Rich Alderson à alderson+mail at panix.com a écrit :

> there was a paper I read in pre-print on the salmonid fishes of Europe and
> Asia which concluded that the salmon of Thieme's work is not the only
> candidate for the referent of the PIE etymon *lok'so-.  (I apologize for
> being sketchy on the details, but it was 25 years ago, and being passed from
> hand to hand among a group of graduate students.  If anyone can identify it,
> that would be very helpful.)

> Rich Alderson

Some literature on the IE salmon (your ref. must be Diebold) :

- Thieme, P. : Der Lachs in Indien, KZ  69 (1951).
- Rudnicki, M. : Wartosc nazw drzewa bukowego, lososia i rdzenia lendh- dla
wyznaczenia prakolekbi (praojczyzny) indoeuropejskiej i slowianskiej, BPTJ
15 (1956), 127-137.
- Krogmann, W. : Das Lachsargument, KZ  76 (1960), 161-178.
- Krause, W. : Zum Namen des Lachses, Nachrichten der Akademie der
Wissenschaften  in Göttingen, Phil.-hist. Klasse,  4 (1961), 83-98.
- Lane, G.S. : Toharian : I.E. and non-I.E. Relationships, in Cardona et
Alii (eds) Indo-European and Indo-Europeans, Philadelphie 1970, 82-83.
- Van Windekens, J.A. : L'origine directe et indirecte de tokharien B laks
'poisson', ZDMG  120 (1970), 305-307.
- Mäntylä, K. : Lachs, Orbis  19 (1970), 172-174. [nom du saumon en i.e. et
en finno-ougrien].
- Diebold, A.R. : Contributions to the Indo-European Salmon Problem, in
Current Progress in Historical Linguistics  ed. William Christie Jr.,
Amsterdam-New York-Oxford, 1976, 341-388.
- Adams D.Q. : PIE. *loKso-  '(anadromous) brown trout' and *koKso-  'groin'
and their Descendents in Tocharian : A Coda to the Lachsargument, IF  90
(1985), 72-82.
- Diebold, A.R. : The Evolution of Indo-European Nomenclature for Salmonid
Fish : The Case of 'Huchen' , Washington 1985, (JIES  Monograph Series, 5).
- Stalmaszczyk, P. & Witczak, K.T. : Tocharica I-III. II. Kuchean laks
'fish', IF  98 (1993), 32-34.

    XD


From centrostudilaruna at libero.it  Sun May 13 20:52:33 2001
From: centrostudilaruna at libero.it (Alberto Lombardo)
Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 22:52:33 +0200
Subject: R: Urheimat animals
Message-ID: <SUN.13.MAY.2001.225233.0200.>

> There has of course been a great deal of work since Thieme, much informed by
> more recent developments in paleobotany and paleoclimatology.

I know, but the name of Thieme had just to mean a serie of studies in a same
direction, not only Thieme's work of 1953. Also the list of the animals was
uncomplete at all.

About the *laks problem, I don't think the objections I read in those years
to Thieme's central ideas were really convincing.

Best regards.


From centrostudilaruna at libero.it  Sun May 13 20:59:34 2001
From: centrostudilaruna at libero.it (Alberto Lombardo)
Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 22:59:34 +0200
Subject: R: Urheimat animals
Message-ID: <SUN.13.MAY.2001.225934.0200.>

-----Messaggio Originale-----
Da: <JoatSimeon at aol.com>
Data invio: domenica 6 maggio 2001 11.41

> In a message dated 5/6/01 3:27:06 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
> centrostudilaruna at libero.it writes:

>> I think we could add to the sentence whales, beavers, elks, many kinds
>> of birds and salmons too

> -- I would certainly agree on "beaver" (PIE *bhebhrus).  Note that Avestan
> retains a derivative with exactly the same meaning -- bawra, 'beaver',
> bawraini, 'of the/pertaining to beavers'.

> Now, in Old Indian/Sanskrit, there has been a semantic shift; there's a
> cognate term, babhru, but it means 'mongoose'.

> So the more northerly Indo-Iranian languages retained the original meaning,
> while in the southerly one, moving into an area where beavers weren't
> known, shifted the term to a roughly similar animal.  Similar in color, at
> least; Sanskrit babhru also means 'red-brown', and the derivation from a
> color term is obvious in PIE *babhrus.

> The neolithic range of the beaver stopped well short of the mediterranean
> and most of Anatolia.  Again, this reinforces the PIE lexicon for animals
> as being specifically north-central Eurasian.

fiber seems to find a correspondance in the gallic Bibr(acte) (a personal
name), in the high old german bibar (modern german Biber), in the lituan bebras
and in sanskrit babhru, which has two different meanings: as adjective it means
“brownred” and as male noun it's the name of the icneumon. Also
the greek phrne comes from the same theme, which is the i.e.
*bhebhru- (I take those informations from the Pokorny).


From edsel at glo.be  Thu May 10 14:16:34 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 16:16:34 +0200
Subject: Umlaut in Crimean Gothic
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.161634.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Gustafson" <stevegus at aye.net>
Sent: Monday, May 07, 2001 5:18 AM

[snip]

> As Ed Selleslagh and Oliver Neukum pointed out, the spellings that looked
> like they showed evidence of i-umlaut may have in fact been artifacts of a
> Dutch spelling system that adds an 'e' to indicate a long vowel, so that the
> 'oe' of Busbecq's writing may have in fact represented /o:/ rather than /0/
> or /oe/.

> Another of Busbecq's spellings that took me aback was "schuuester."  What
> would have been the value of 'sch' here?  Palatisation of the /s/ in
> 'swistar' to /sh/ seems unlikely in this environment, as does its conversion
> to /sk/.   Might this be a German contamination?

[Ed Selleslagh]

In Dutch, 'sch' normally stands for /sx/ (usually <sk, except when from Greek
sigma-chi); it is very common.

But in de Busbecq's 'schuuester' it is obviously not that, but rather the usual
(High)German value. As a matter of fact, 'uu' is a Latinist's representation of
'w' (double-u!!), so the word 'schuuester' is German 'schwester' (Dutch:
zuster, with u = u-umlaut)

Ed


From mich.driessen at planet.nl  Thu May 10 23:22:27 2001
From: mich.driessen at planet.nl (C. Michiel Driessen)
Date: Fri, 11 May 2001 01:22:27 +0200
Subject: Flemish/Dutch dialects
Message-ID: <FRI.11.MAY.2001.012227.0200.>

Michiel Driessen:

I would just like to briefly remark that Selleslagh is completely correct. The
Dutch dialectology is remarkably rich and indeed very interesting. To give an
amazing example: Most Dutch dialects (including the standard language) are
quite ordinary, typically European style vernaculars in the sense that they are
charcterised by a heavy stress accent (in the case of Dutch initial accent).
The dialects of South Limburg Limburg (both the Belgian and the Dutch parts)
are tone languages, however. They have two phonological tones, that can make a
semantic difference and a morphological difference (they create the singular
versus the plural in certain categories of nouns). Selleslagh is also correct,
when he assumes that Dutch dialoctology is mostly descriptive. Unfortunately,
Dutch dialectologists merely confine themselves to reporting phenomena (Of
couse this does have a positive side; Dutch now has an large amount of
excellent dialect descriptions and dialect dictionaries).


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu May 10 17:19:04 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 18:19:04 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.4.30.0105061426330.8965-100000@vesuri.Helsinki.FI>
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.181904.0100.>

--On Sunday, May 6, 2001 2:29 pm +0300 Robert Whiting
<whiting at cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:

> To make it clear what my statement was about:  My entire point was that
> [T] and [D] do not contrast in initial position in English.  My
> statement was not about whether [T] and [D] are phonemes in English or
> not.  The two are not necessarily related ([T] and [D] can still be
> phonemes even if they don't contrast in some environments).

OK; I'll bite.  I will argue that [T] and [D] *do* contrast in initial
position in English.  It is merely that we happen to have no good minimal
pairs for /T/ and /D/ in the language at present -- a completely different
matter.

To begin with, 'thigh' and 'thy' are a perfect minimal pair, *if* we accept
that 'thy' is a word of modern English -- which you may not want to accept.

But there are a number of near-minimal pairs:

  this / thistle
  they / Thalia (also 'theta' in US accents)
  that / thatch
  these / thesis
  thus / thumb
  though / Thor

The absence of minimal pairs is a historical accident, no more.  I have
come across an actress with the first name 'Thandy'.  I see no reason to
suppose her friends would hesitate to call her 'Than', with /T/, producing
a perfect minimal pair with 'than' (strong form).

The point is not whether minimal pairs exist.  The point is whether the
distribution of [T] and [D] can be stated purely in terms of phonological
environments.  Since no such distributional rule exists, /T/ and /D/
contrast in word-initial position, in spite of the lack of minimal pairs.

The observation that initial [D] occurs only in "grammatical" words and
initial [T] only in "lexical" words is just that: an observation.  It is
not, so far as I can see, a rule of English phonology.  As an observation,
it is on a par with the observation that the diphthong /oi/ never occurs in
native English words, but only in borrowed words.

If we English-speakers had first encountered Greek a couple of millennia
later than we did, is there any reason to suppose that we would shrink from
calling a certain Greek letter 'thelta' -- with /D/ -- instead of 'delta'?
Or from extending this word to the mouth of a river?

By the way, is everybody happy that 'thus' is beyond question a grammatical
word, and not a lexical word?

Take another case.  It is extremely difficult to find minimal pairs for
[esh] and [ezh] in *any* position -- and all the pairs I can think of
involve involve either proper names of foreign origin or obscure Scrabble
words.  Would anybody therefore want to argue that [esh] and [ezh] are not
two distinct phonemes -- just because we have no good minimal pairs, or
just because the second occurs only in words of foreign origin?  If not,
why should theta and eth be treated differently?

Finally, I note that /n/ and [eng] *really* do not contrast in word-initial
position in English, even though they contrast elsewhere.  The case of
theta and eth does not appear to me to be similar.

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  Sun May 13 08:38:56 2001
From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting)
Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 11:38:56 +0300
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <01JWLZVSCQTMAM6KGL@LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU>
Message-ID: <SUN.13.MAY.2001.113856.0300.>

On Thu, 16 Nov 2000 CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU wrote:

>On Tuesday Robert Whiting responded at great length to my post

If you thought that was "great length," you ain't seen nothin' yet.

>on the English interdental fricatives, in which I attempted to
>draw some lessons from the German non-distinction between [x] and
>[c,] in _Kuchen_ 'cake' vs. _Kuhchen_ 'little cow', which I
>analyzed as /ku:x at n/ vs. /ku:+x at n/.  The gist of his argument
>seems to be that if it is fair to use phonological boundaries
>(which he identifies as always ultimately morphological
>boundaries), then it is also fair to use morphological and
>lexical information to account for the distribution of the
>intedental fricatives [T] and [D] in English.

A couple of points.  First, I am not trying to use morphological
and lexical information to account for the distribution of
interdental fricatives in English.  I am trying to use it to call
into question the evidence that is used for the distribution of
these sounds, particularly the alleged contrasts.  This is
admittedly a subtle point -- so subtle indeed, that many people
seem to have failed to grasp it.  My arguments are not aimed at
demonstrating that [T] and [D] are not separate phonemes in
English.  I have no particular reason to believe this.  Rather my
arguments are aimed at determining whether it is valid to accept
a contrast as being based on phonology when there may be another
basis for the contrast.  So whether or not [T] and [D] are
phonemes in English is not the issue.  The issue is whether
contrasts that can be shown to be based on some other feature
should be available for use as evidence of phonemic contrast.
Specifically it is about whether everything that looks like a
minimal pair (like [ku:c,en] and [ku:xen] should actually be
considered a minimal pair for purposes of determining phonemic
status.

Second, I do not question the importance of boundaries in
phonology.  I merely say that boundaries are not segmental
phonemes.  Nevertheless, they sometimes provide the only way
to distinguish meaning.  Pairs like 'that's tough' [Dæts't at f]
and 'that stuff' [Dæt'st at f], or 'the Trojan's trumpet' and 'the
Trojan strumpet' (Walt Kelly [creator of Pogo] had a great one
once based on the near identity of 'a tax on frogs too' and
'attacks on frog stew'), if said in an offhand manner at normal
speed, can be difficult for a listener to distinguish.  A voice
spectograph, however, will pick up the differences.  While the
only difference in segmental sounds may be the [t'] in 'tough'
and the [t] in 'stuff', stress onset will register in the
spectograph (as a stronger [s] in 'stuff', and so on) showing
that [t'] and [t] are not phonemes.  In this case, juncture will
correlate with stress onset and one will not be distinguished
from the other phonetically.  So both juncture and stress onset
are phonologically important in English.  But I think that they
should be considered qualitatively different from segmental
phonemes (and from each other).  Boundaries can be considered
"transition phonemes" (after Trager) and stress (as well as
accent and tone) when significant are commonly considered
"suprasegmental phonemes."

Third, I consider your statement "... phonological boundaries
(which he identifies as always ultimately morphological
boundaries) ..." an unwarranted generalization.  We were talking
about juncture which is a specific type of boundary where two
morphemes come together and you have extended this to
phonological boundaries in general.  Syllable boundaries can be
phonological but not necessarily morphological (in fact,
phonological syllable boundaries frequently cut across
morphological boundaries, e.g., 'Halloween', 'formation',
'telepathy', etc.); utterance boundaries are inherently both
phonological and morphological conditions (although if one stops
speaking in the middle of a word, it is not necessarily a
morphological boundary).

So if you have examples of phonological juncture (but not of
other phonological boundaries) that are not ultimately based on
morpheme boundaries, bring it out and we will talk about it (and
to avoid having to have a pointless discussion let us exclude
words that have been folk etymologized or reanalyzed so that
there is now a perceptual morpheme boundary where one may or may
not have originally existed (e.g., furbelow, mangrove, mongoose,
woodchuck, outrage).  But if you don't, then I think it is an
unfair characterization to claim that I ultimately identify all
phonological boundaries as morphological boundaries.  I only
identify those phonological boundaries that depend on the
existence of a morpheme boundary (including word boundaries, real
or perceived) for their existence as ultimately based on
morphological boundaries.

>He overlooks a significant difference between morphological ->
>phonological boundaries and other types of morphological
>information: boundaries can be located precisely between
>morphemes.  It is therefore to show them in phonological
>representations, for their position (and type) seems to matter
>for the phonetic realization.

Not so much overlooks as doesn't give it much weight.  And I
would probably agree with your last sentence if I were sure what
the missing word after "therefore" is (possible?, necessary?,
useful?).  In any case, I agree that they seem to matter for the
phonetic realization (in some cases).  But phonetic realization is
not the same as phonemic analysis.  Phonetics deals with the
actual sounds of speech.  Phonemics deals with the relations of
these sounds, and particularly with the relations of these sounds
in the perception of the speakers.  Phones are realia (capturable
with a voice spectrograph); phonemes are abstractions determined
by an analysis of the distribution of the sounds.  A voice
spectrograph will record the difference between aspirated [t']
and unaspirated [t]; but it won't tell you whether they are
phonemes or not.  [t] and [t'] should appear the same on the
voice spectrogram whether they are phonemic in the speaker's
language (e.g., Chinese) or allophonic (e.g. English).

So I am willing to stipulate that anything that leaves a
footprint in a voice spectrogram is part of the phonetic
realization of the language.  This includes various kinds of
boundaries, which, as I said before, often affect things like
pitch, duration, and pause, as well as stress patterns.
But I am not willing to stipulate that everything that appears
in a voice spectrogram is a phoneme.  Otherwise, why bother with
looking for minimal pairs to make a phonemic analysis?  Just use
a voice spectrograph and it will tell you what the phonemes are.
It doesn't work that way.  What shows up in a voice spectrogram
is the phonetic realization ([...]).  The phonemic analysis of
this phonetic realization (/.../) doesn't show up there.

Which is why I remain a little skeptical of the dictum that
things that don't show up in the phonetic realization can't
affect phonemic analysis since things that do show up in the
phonetic realization don't ipso facto determine phonemicity.

As an example let us consider the effects of devoicing of final
stops in German.  Now there is no difference in the phonetic
realization of 'Rat' "parliament" and 'Rad' "wheel," both being
[ra:t].  Most speakers of German, however, will insist that there
is a difference between the [t] of 'Rat' and the [t] of 'Rad'.
The first is a "real" [t] while the second is a variety of /d/
(occurring before a word or syllable boundary).  One can either
accept the perception of the speakers and say that 'Rat' and
'Rad' are phonemically distinct even though they have identical
pronunciations and phonetic environments, and the first is /ra:t/
and the second is /ra:d/, or we can insist that the phonetic
reality is correct and that both are phonemically /ra:t/.  Here
we are dealing with two levels of phonology, a surface level and
an underlying level.  Phonetic realization (as in a voice
spectrogram) can only recognize the surface level, but this in
not necessarily the determiner of phonemicity.

>But information such as "native/foreign" or "content/function
>word" cannot be so located and cannot be described in any real
>sense as "morphological", but rather as lexical and (for the
>latter, at least) "syntactic".

All true.  Except, of course, that different people will see the
different categories differently depending on how many levels of
linguistic structure they organize language into and what the
relationship between morphology and syntax is in their particular
model (for many people, morphological rules are just a subset of
syntactic rules).  As for whether "content/function word" goes
under syntax or not depends on where one puts word classes (parts
of speech) since this is a higher level classification of word
classes (pronouns, conjunctions, and prepositions are generally
function words while nouns, verbs [excepting auxiliary verbs and
modals], and adjectives [excepting quantifiers] and adverbs
[excepting demonstratives and intensifiers] are generally content
words).  I will agree, though, that most people would put word
classes under syntax (although many others consider them "lexical
categories").  But no matter how you divide language up to study
and analyze it, it is still a completely integrated system.  The
various parts interact with each other and in so doing, influence
each other, especially as this interaction is mediated by human
behavior, which, despite man's being the rational animal (by his
own definition), is often irrational and unpredictable.

But even if what you say is true, it doesn't prove that such
information doesn't affect phonemics.  That is to say that even
"junctures" of the sort that are freely used in all phonemic
descriptions do not necessarily (or even generally) have uniquely
or precisely identifiable reflexes in the utterance.  Therefore,
the fact that information cannot be precisely located in the
phonetic representation does not prove that it does not have
phonemic significance.

>There is no inconsistency in saying that boundaries are
>phonologically relevant while other information is not.

I would agree, so long as "phonologically" refers to "phonetics"
(i.e., what you can see in a voice spectogram).  But if you
include phonemics in phonology (as most people do, one way or
another, some exclusively), then I'm not sure that one can be
apodictic about what is relevant and what isn't.  Since a voice
spectograph can't tell what is a phoneme and what isn't, it
doesn't necessarily follow that only information that can appear
in a voice spectogram can be relevant to what is a phoneme and
what isn't.

But there is a lot of other inconsistency in what you have said.
First, I object to the inconsistency of using essentially
identical evidence to both defend and refute the same
proposition.

You said "It is therefore unlikely, though possible, that German
could coin new words in which [x] and [c,] would (appear to)
contrast in some other environment, ..." and claimed that because
this contrast is "unlikely," then [c,] and [x] are not phonemes
in German.  By implication (if not directly stated), since
English speakers are "likely" to coin words contrasting [T] and
[D], then "... the two are searate phonemes, and have ben so for
some time" despite the fact that they have failed to do so.

But "likely" and "unlikely" are not part of the original
proposition.  The original proposition was that sounds that the
speakers of a language can distinguish and could use
contrastively are phonemes in that language.  This is purely
mechanistic, while injecting "likely/unlikely" introduces a
subjective element because "likely/unlikely" are not absolutes
but are the ends of a sliding scale.  According to the original
proposition, a language can have no allophones that speakers can
distinguish and could use contrastively.  All such sounds must be
phonemes whether they are actually used contrastively or not.
Therefore according to this proposition, [c,] and [x] must be
phonemes in German because the speakers of the language can
distinguish them and could use them contrastively.  "Likely" and
"unlikely" don't come into it in the original formulation.

Indeed, had the original formulation been "sounds that the
speakers of a language can distinguish and could use
contrastively are *likely* to be phonemes," there would have been
no objection.  This creates no categorical imperative.  Such
sounds are likely to be phonemes, but, as the case of German
[c, x] shows, need not be.

So you can't use the original proposition to show that [c,] and
[x] are allophones in German and also to show that [T] and [D]
are phonemes in English.  According to the original proposition,
both pairs must be phonemes.  The fact that [c,] and [x] are
demonstrably allophones with no evidence of contrastiveness in
German clearly disproves the original proposition (if the
original proposition has a test for falsification).  Otherwise,
it has to be claimed that in some dark recess of the
German-speaking mind, not yet discovered and investigated, [c,]
and [x] are considered phonemes by German speakers because they
can distinguish the sounds and could use them contrastively.

In your second piece of inconsistent treatment, you said "...
Kuchen : Kuhchen form a subminimal pair: the vowel of the latter
is clearly (but non-distinctively) longer than the former,
indicating that it was in root-final position, before suffix
-chen" and then you said "True, in my pronunciation, the stressed
vowel of _either_ is longer than that of _ether_ -- but this is
in line with vowel length before other voices vs. voiceless
consonants."  In these two statements you have treated two very
similar phonological cases in completely different ways.

In the first, you have attributed the lengthening of the vowel
entirely to the presence of the morpheme boundary, without making
any allowance for the articulatory fact that you may get a
lengthened vowel when a palatal consonant follows a back vowel
(after all, something has to be going on while the tongue is
repositioning itself for the palatal fricative, which it doesn't
have to do [or not so much] for the velar fricative).  In the
second, you have attributed the lengthening of the vowel entirely
to the normal, purely phonetic and fully automatic, lengthening
of vowels before voiced consonants, without making any allowance
for the presence of the morpheme boundary between the vowel and
the consonant.  And yes, there is a morpheme boundary in 'either'
(OE æ:ghwæðer > æ:gðer > ME aither, either < *a+gi+hwæðer),
although most speakers probably won't recognize it today because
so much phonological activity has taken place around this
boundary.  The 'gi-' in this word is the collective prefix that
also appears in English 'enough' (< OE geno:h; cf. German
'genug').  Now it is possible that you don't realize that this
boundary is there, in which case you can't be blamed for
intentionally failing to mention it, and if you don't realize
that it is there, one can hardly expect a naive native speaker
to.

But when you make the point that the difference between 'Kuchen'
and 'Kuhchen' is that the latter has a morpheme boundary and the
former doesn't and then ignore the fact that one of the
differences between 'ether' and 'either' is that the latter has
a morpheme boundary and the former doesn't, this is inconsistent.
Now, admittedly, the morpheme boundary in 'Kuhchen' is
transparent to speakers of German ('Kuhchen' is not likely to be
a separate lexical item in German, but will always be recognized
as noun + diminutive suffix) while the morpheme boundary in
'either' is not ('either' is a separate lexical item in English
and it is doubtful if a native speaker would realize that
'either' contains 'whether' [although it is still possible that
the '-ther' might be perceived as a morpheme]).

But this just raises the question of whether morpheme boundaries
are only phonological boundaries if the speakers realize that
they are present (i.e., only clearly productive morphology
produces phonemic boundaries whereas frozen or lexicalized
morphology does not).  Another way of posing this question is
whether we are justified in including a morphological boundary in
the phonological representation just because we know that there
is a morphological boundary there, or are we only justified in
including a morphological boundary when we think we can detect
one in the phonetic realization.  This last may be true, but I
don't think it can be taken for granted.  And if it is true, then
a lot of morphological boundaries would have to come out of
phonemic representations.

Besides, in much the same way as speakers might perceive the
'-ther' of words like 'mother', 'father', 'brother' and conclude
that it is a separate morpheme identifying family members, it is
not impossible that speakers could subconsciously recognize the
'-ther' of words like 'either', 'other', 'whether', and 'nether'
as a separate morpheme (which, in fact, it is) and conclude
(correctly) that there is a morpheme boundary in 'either' (even
though it is only perceptual, not productive).  The perceptions
of speakers do not necessarily correspond to linguistic reality.
This is the very essence of folk etymology.  The human brain
looks for patterns -- in fact, it is essentially a pattern
detecting device.  But the fact remains that 'ether' is
monomorphemic and 'either' is not (even if speakers don't realize
it consciously).

So I consider it inconsistent to say that [ku:x at n] and [ku:c, at n]
are subminimal pairs because [ku:c, at n] has a morphological
boundary in it (indicated by a slight lengthening of the vowel
before this boundary which may or may not be attributable to the
boundary) and hence can be analyzed as /ku:+x at n/ while claiming
that [i:T at r] and [i:D at r] are true minimal pairs even though
[i:D at r] has a morpheme boundary in it (with a slight lengthening
of the vowel precisely before this boundary) which, while not as
obvious as the morpheme boundary in /ku:+xen/, may still be
perceivable by speakers.  So if it is possible to analyze
'Kuchen' and 'Kuhchen' as /ku:x at n/ and /ku:+x at n/ then it is also
possible to analyze 'ether' and 'either' as /i:T at r/ and /i:+T at r/.

Finally, you said "And there's no difference in _thigh_ vs.
_thy_."  As you would say, "This is simply wrong." :)  'Thy' is
part of a paradigm; 'thigh' is not.  Let's look at part of the
*synchronic* English personal pronoun system (if we are going to
consider 'thy' as synchronically part of English as everyone has
been; after all, if it isn't, then there is no contrast (even if
only apparent) between initial [T] and [D] in modern English):

        1st person sing.           2nd person sing.

  nom.        I                         thou
  obj.        me                        thee
  pos. 1      my                        thy
  pos. 2      mine                      thine

  (pos. 1 and 2 were originally allomorphs of the same form; 1 is
  now used as a pronominal determiner while 2 is used as the
  possessive pronoun; 1 still has some pronominal functions,
  however)

Now if we look at the oblique forms we can see in all cases what
looks like a pronominal base ('m' in the 1st person, 'th' in the
2nd person) followed by a set of postbases that correspond to
case or, synchronically, function.  It hardly seems illegitimate
to analyze 'thy' as consisting of a monomorphemic, unisegmental
base [D] plus a postbase morpheme [ai] in the same way we could
analyze 'my' into a morpheme [m] plus a morpheme [ai].  The base
tells us the person and number, the postbase tells us the case or
function. That this is true of the English personal pronoun
system in general can be seen from looking at some other forms
where we also find a similar unisegmental base also followed by a
postbase:

             3.m.s.          2.pl.          3.pl.

  nom.         he             you            they
  obj.         him            you            them
  pos. 1       his            your           their
  pos. 2       his            yours          theirs
               hisn*          yourn*         theirn*

  (* substandard; originally by analogy to 1. and 2. singular)

Clearly then, the majority of the English personal pronouns can
be considered to have a firm pattern of a base that indicates
person and number and postbases that indicate case or function.
These pronoun bases could thus be considered as bound morphemes
that occur only in initial position.

Going back to 'thy' vs. 'thigh', 'thigh' is monomorphemic, while
'thy' clearly can be considered to be made up of two morphemes,
[D] and [ai].  Let us further say that the pronoun base 'th' is
always realized as [D] by native speakers.  If we now compare this
with the German pair 'Kuchen' and 'Kuhchen', we see again that
'Kuchen' is monomorphemic (although allowing for the possibility
that it may represent a stem 'kuche-' and  a noun formative 'n')
while 'Kuhchen' is clearly composed of two morphemes, 'Kuh'
"cow," also an independent word, and '-chen', a diminutive
suffix.  German speakers know that the diminutive suffix is
always realized with [c,] regardless of the environment of this
sound, and thus will not consider the [c,] of this suffix a
phoneme even when it appears to contrast with [x].  English
speakers may or may not know that the pronoun base 'th-' is
always realized as [D] and that therefore initial [D] is not
being used as a phoneme even when it appears to contrast with [T],
but it really is begging the question to claim that "there's no
difference in _thigh_ vs. _thy_."

The difference between 'Kuhchen' and 'Kuchen' is that there is a
morpheme boundary in 'Kuhchen' but not in 'Kuchen'.  The
difference between 'thy' and 'thigh' is that there is a
(perceivable if not actual) morpheme boundary in 'thy' but not in
'thigh'.  Now admittedly, the '-chen' morpheme is productive in
German and can be freely used to create new forms while the
morphemes in 'thy' or 'my' are not productive but exist in frozen
forms.  But I can't see that it would take much intuitive power
for an English speaker to look at the forms 'my' and 'thy' and
'me' and 'thee' and figure out, at least subconsciously, which
part of these words carries the pronominal information and which
the case or function information, especially if they know the
rest of the personal pronoun system.  There is reason to believe
then, that native speakers of English may be somehow aware of a
difference between the pronominal bases in [D] and other words in
English with initial [T].  So if it is possible to analyze
'Kuchen' and 'Kuhchen' as /ku:x at n/ and /ku:+x at n/ then it is also
possible to analyze 'thigh' and 'thy' as /Tai/ and /T+ai/.

Now a similar analysis could be done with the deictic base 'th-':

  far deixis 'th-'   near deixis 'h-'   relative 'wh-' (/hw/ > /w/)

      there               here              where
      then               *[OE henne]        when
      thence              hence             whence
      thither             hither            whither
      that                                  what

Again, there is a clear pattern of a unisegmental base carrying
the deictic information and a postbase carrying the function
information, and it is not stretching credulity to point out that
native speakers could notice, even if only subconsciously, this
pattern.  A similar pattern would have been strongly visible in
the early ME forms of 'the' (of which 'that' is simply the neuter
singular) when it was still declined for gender, number, and
case.

It doesn't take too much imagination to see how speakers of
English might make a connection of some kind, even if only
subconscious, between the nature of the pronoun bases and the
deictic bases.  Allowing for a possible case of analogy and one
of dissimilation to smooth up the rough edges, it is easy to see
how the speakers of English could very well consider the pronoun
bases in 'th-' and the deictic base in 'th-' as somehow, at least
functionally, related and qualitatively different from the
initial 'th-' in other words where it functions differently.  If
we want to follow the evidence, then it would seem that native
speakers of English consider that initial [D] is reserved for
these bases (in much the same way as German speakers realize that
the 'ch' of '-chen' is always [c,] even when following a back
vowel) and only [T] should appear in initial position in other
words that do not contain one of these bases.  In short, just
as German speakers realize that [c,] after a back vowel belongs
to the morpheme '-chen', so English speakers realize that initial
[D] belongs to the morpheme(s) 'th-'.

This is not to claim that this analysis represents linguistic
reality or that this is how these words should in fact be
analyzed (linguistically it would be better to analyze the
vocalic nucleus as the pronoun/deictic base and treat the 'th-',
etc. as prebases; this would account for 0 prebases in some forms
like 'I', 'us', 'it' rather than having to claim a 0 pronoun
base).  These apparent morphemes may just be chimeras (although
the very fact that initial [D] predicts meaning already suggests
strongly that it is a morpheme) and since the pronoun system is a
relic from an earlier stage of the language, speakers don't have
to deal with the forms on any productive level.  But the
potential for speakers to perceive them in this way is clearly
there.  Perceptions of reality can't change reality.  But
perceptions of reality can affect reactions to reality.  If
everyone believes that the earth is flat, it still isn't possible
to walk to the edge and jump off.  But if everyone believes that
the earth is flat, it may make people cautious about the
possibility of getting too close to the edge, and a good con man,
or even a well-intentioned do-gooder, could probably raise money
to put up a guard rail around the edge.

In short, the morpheme boundary of /ku:+x at n/ is productive while
the morpheme boundary of /T+ai/ is only perceptual.  But as
Sommerstein says (Modern Phonology, p. 100):

   ... both productive and perceptual factors are capable of
   being used by speakers to make intuitive generalizations, and
   of determining or conditioning linguistic change.

How, or even when, this perception may have come about, I'm not
sure; I am only saying that the evidence indicates that this is a
possible *synchronic* explanation of how initial [T] and [D] are
used by native speakers of English and, if this is so, that is
why there are no new coinings in which [T] and [D] contrast in
initial position.  The sound [D] is restricted to the pronoun
and deictic bases and these bases are not productive (in the
sense that they are not used to create new forms, but then there
are seldom new coinings of function words) in English.  The
contrast between initial [T] and [D] is simply frozen in the
contrast between the pronoun/deictic bases and other words with
initial [T] and hence any new coining in English will have
initial [T] unless it happens to be a pronoun or deictic word
because the [D] in these forms is a morpheme.  It seems to me
that this perception must be at least partially involved in the
observation that 'the' has invariant [D], where it presumably
exists because it is a lenition of [T] in a usually unstressed
form, while 'theology', which invariably has an unstressed [T],
has only [T].

As Herb Stahlke pointed out on 21 Apr 2000, the explanation of
initial [D] as lenition of [T] in function words is less than
satisfying because:

  ... there was no initial contrast until the function words,
  largely deictics and largely unstressed, laxed the initial /th/
  to /dh/.  However, there was a sizable set of content words,
  like "theology" that had initial unstressed syllables beginning
  with /th/, and none of these voiced.

This is unsatisfying because the main difference between function
words like 'the' and content words like 'theology' is that the
former are much more heavily used than the latter ('the' is the
most common lemma in the English language with 6,187,267 tokens
in the 200 million word BNC while 'theology' slips in at 5237
with 1098 tokens).  One must thus rely on frequency of use to
account for the lenition of one and not the other.  But if the
distinction is based, not on function words per se, but on the
perception of a 'th-' morpheme in some words (which because of
the nature of the 'th-' morpheme(s) just happen to be function
words), then this difficulty disappears.  One can then express
the shift of initial [T] to [D] with the rule

    [T] > [D] / # ___ +

which, since # (word boundary) and + (morpheme or formative
boundary) are (as we all agree) phonological (even if not always
phonetic) conditions, does not violate anybody's phonological
rules.  In this case, frequency of use can be used as a
motivation for the rule, but the trigger comes from the morpheme
(or formative) boundary.  Objections that the morpheme boundary
may not be real or that it doesn't show up in the phonetic
representation are groundless if phonology is based on the
perceptions of the speakers of a language and not mechanistically
on the phonetic realization.

If the relationship between initial [T] and [D] is as expressed
in this rule, it turns out that it is not based specifically on a
difference between function words and content words (once again
demonstrating that correlation does not prove causality) which
accounts for the fact that 'through', which is frequently used as
a function word, does not have initial [D].  What it lacks (at
least in the perception of speakers) is the deictic morpheme
'th-'.  The fact that the lenition is not a specific property of
function words also accounts for the fact that function words
like 'for' (rank 11 in the BNC) and 'so' (rank 58) do not show
initial voicing in English.  Finally, since the laxing of [T] in
these words is only motivated by frequency of use, not triggered
by it, the extension of [D] to stressed forms of these words does
not have to be accounted for by analogy.

This analysis also can be used as a basis for explaining the
anomaly that Herb Stahlke discussed in his posting as follows:

   An oddity is that the function word "thither", which is rare
   in contemporary ModE, has initial /th/ for all AmE speakers
   I've consulted.  American dictionaries regularly show /dh-/ as
   a second pronunciation, and British dictionaries I've checked
   either give only /dh-/ or give /th-/ as a second choice.
   Apparently Americans who know the word generally don't treat
   it as a function word.

Again, if the analysis of the distribution if initial [T] and [D]
in English given above is correct, the difference between
American [TID at r] and British [DID at r] is not based on the
perception of 'thither' as a function word in one dialect and not
as one in  the other.  Nor does the word lack the 'th-' deictic
morpheme since it is clearly part of the deixis pattern (thither,
hither, whither).  All that is needed to account for the pattern
is a rule in one dialect that blocks the shift of [T] to [D] if
the word already contains a [D].  Of course, it might also be a
dissimilation rule in the other dialect that operates after the
shift.  [Incidentally, my pronunciation is the American one, but
the word to me is archaic (to the point of obsolescence) and only
used by me in fixed expressions like 'hither and thither' or
'hither, thither and yon', and I only use these when I'm feeling
archaic, generally replacing them in everyday speech with 'here
and there' or 'here, there and everywhere'.  Typically, however,
I still use the compound 'hitherto' productively (i.e., as part
of my speech production).]

Once again, let me stress that this is not the same thing as
saying that [T] and [D] are not phonemes in English.  They simply
aren't contrastive in initial position.  The shift rule has been
presented as a historical rule.  If [T] and [D] are not phonemes
(or even possibly if they are) then it is also a synchronic rule.
That is all it takes to eliminate contrast between initial [T] and
[D] in English.  While [T] and [D] may well be phonemes in English,
what I am saying is that in the same way that [ku:c,en] and [ku:xen]
should not be considered a minimal pair in German, so [Tai] and
[Dai] should not be considered as evidence of the phonemicity of [T]
and [D] in English.  In other words, one should not insist on the
phonemicity of [T] and [D] on the basis of 'thigh' and 'thy'.  That
is what I have said from the start.  The distribution of initial [T]
and [D] in English can be accounted for by (phonological!) rule.

Now there are those who say that if you just consider this a
phonemic distinction, then you don't have to do all this analysis
and this evidence can safely be ignored.  They also say that some
patterns don't need explanations, that they are just there and
that trying to find explanations for patterns just complicates an
analysis that would be much simpler if the patterns were ignored.
But then they can't account for the distribution of initial [D]
and [T] between pronouns/deictics and other words and they can't
account for the lack of new coinings with initial [D] except by
saying that it is just a statistical anomaly.  So all in all, I
think it is better to account for the evidence rather than just
sweep it under the carpet.  I must say that I was surprised to
see you buy into the "any sounds that the speakers of a language
can distinguish are phonemes" bit, but I am glad to see that you
haven't jumped on the "ignore the contradictory evidence"
bandwagon so far.  At least you are presenting facts and
interpreting evidence as you see it.

It is of course possible to claim convincingly that there is no
phonetic difference between 'thy' and 'thigh' except for [T] and
[D], but it can be claimed equally convincingly that there is a
considerable difference between their function and internal
structure.  Now when it can be shown that the words that have
this same internal structure all have [D] to the exclusion of
[T] (that is, if one of these words has an initial dental
fricative it will always be [D], not [T]), it is possible that
the perception of the speakers about the distribution of initial
[T] and [D] is based on something other than phonemic
distinction.  Now there is no doubt that 'thy' and 'thigh' are
different words, just as there is no doubt that 'Kuhchen' and
'Kuchen' or 'Tauchen' and 'tauchen' are different words.  But
speakers of German do not distinguish 'Kuhchen' from 'Kuchen' or
'Tauchen' from 'tauchen' on the basis of a phonemic contrast
between [c,] and [x] but on the perception of a different
morpheme, '-chen' (diminutive; always with [c,]) in one word but
not in the other.  In the same way, in my view, the speakers of
English do not distinguish 'thy' from 'thigh' on the basis of a
phonemic distinction, but on the perception of a different
morpheme 'th-' (pronoun base; always with [D]) in one word but
not in the other.

My point is that this perception is not necessarily based solely
on phonetics.  The perceptions of speakers can sometimes be
perverse:  sometimes speakers will insist that two quite distinct
sounds are the same sound to them (e.g., German [c, x]); at other
times they will insist that two phonetically identical sounds are
different in their perception (e.g. German [t] in 'Rat' and
'Rad'; even more compelling was Sapir's example from Athapaskan).
As far as I know, there is no mechanistic way to determine the
phonemes of a language.  Determination of phonemes has to be done
by linguistic analysis based on what sounds contrast and under
what circumstances.  Different analysts may arrive at different
conclusions about which sounds are phonemes and which not.
Phonemes are psychological entities and their identification is
often subjective, depending on how much weight different analysts
give to which parts of the evidence.

>(I do not mean to imply that boundaries are *always* relevant
>while other information *never* is, only that there is no
>inconsistency in treating them differently.)

A wise precaution, since there always seem to be borderline cases
in which a clear distinction is not possible from the data, even
if, in the vast majority of cases, it is ("All grammars leak").
But, as I say, the inconsistency lies not in treating boundaries
differently from other morphological information, but in treating
some morphological boundaries differently from other
morphological boundaries.  If you only introduce morphological
boundaries into the phonology when you want two sounds not to be
phonemes, but ignore syntactically justifiable morphological
boundaries when you want two sounds to be phonemes, you run the
risk of being inconsistent.

>A few other points: How did _thy_ and _thigh_ differ before the
>former developed a voiced fricative?  Easy: the Old English forms
>were _thi:n_ and _the:oh_, where the final -h represented a velar
>fricative.  The loss of the final consonants in these words seems
>to be much later than the initial voicing.

Here we have a major difference of opinion.  To my knowledge (not
to my sure and certain knowledge, but from what I have gathered
about it), the voicing of initial [T] did not take place before
the 16th century, possibly even later (although, as far as I
know, there is nothing that prevents it from having happened
earlier).

Second, the loss of final [n] in 'thi:n' is not the normal
erosion of final [n] affixes that took place later in, for
example, the verbal infinitive, but rather was a morphological
shift whereby the forms with and without [n] became allomorphs,
with the former being used before words beginning with vowels and
the latter being used before other words.  This use is exactly
paralleled by the use of the forms 'a/an' and 'my/mine'.
Although the 'a/an' usage persists, 'thy/thine' and 'my/mine'
eventually split into two distinct forms, one becoming the
possessive pronoun and the other becoming a possessive pronominal
determiner.  The earlier usage is still found, however, in some
frozen forms (e.g., 'mine host') or in poetic language (e.g.,
'mine eyes have seen ...'). The forms without [n] are already
attested in very early Middle English, thus clearly antedating
the normal erosion of final inflectional [n].

Finally, the loss of the velar fricative was presumably complete
in the London dialect by the time of Chaucer since he rhymes
'high' (written <hye>) with both 'pie' (written <pye>) and 'fly'
(<flye>) and also rhymes 'light' (written <lite>; this, like
'the:oh' also had the form 'le:oht' in Old English;) with
'mite'(<myte>).  In 'thigh', there are writings as early as 1200
that indicate the loss of the velar in this word (<the>, <thee>,
in contrast with <thi> 'thy').  Of course, all of these words
would have been pronounced with [i:] at that time rather than
with [ai] as today after the great vowel shift and
diphthongization of long vowels, but they still all had the same
final sound.

So we can comfortably say that the forms [Ti:] and [Ti:n] were in
use by early ME (11th-12th century) and that 'thigh' would have
had the pronunciation [Ti:] at least by the end of the 14th
century (or possibly as early as 1200).  In order for what you
say to be true ("The loss of the final consonants in these words
seems to be much later than the initial voicing") then this
voicing had to have taken place well before the end of the 14th
century (and possibly before the end of the 12th century).  As I
say, I don't have a firm date for this event, but it has always
seemed to me that it was later rather than earlier (although I
can think of several good reasons why it may have been earlier,
but, even so, I can't put it much before about 1300).  Herb
Stahlke, in his posting of 21 April 2000, said that it didn't
happen until the 18th century, but this seems much too late to
me.  If anyone has solid information, based on evidence, perhaps
we can resolve at least this particular side issue.

>As the possibility of a three-way /ph : p : b/ contrast:  While
>I agree that English speakers tend to hear unaspirated [p] as /b/
>(at least, if the stop has a lenis pronunciation; the fortis
>stops of the Romance languages are normally perceived as /p/),
>systems with this contrast are by no means rare.  It was found in
>ancient Greek and a variety of modern languages.  It could not
>*on typological grounds* be ruled out for some future version of
>English.

I think my point was that it would be difficult to make this
three-way distinction with English /b/ as we presently know it.
The lax unaspirated [p] of English /spin/ is virtually
indistinguishable from the partially voiced /b/ of English /bin/
(that is, if you taped an English speaker saying /spin/ and
saying /bin/ and then erased the part of the tape with the /s/ on
it and ran both through a voice spectograph the two sequences
would appear much the same).  The relevant feature is voicing
onset, which is not an n-ary distinction, but is a continuum.
Thus what distinguishes [b p ph] is where voicing begins with
respect to the releasing of the stop.  If voicing begins before
the stop is released you have [b].  If voicing onset corresponds
to the release of the stop you have unaspirated [p].  If the
beginning of voicing is delayed after the release of the stop,
you have [ph].  The amount of delay determines whether you have a
weakly aspirated stop or a more strongly aspirated one.

Typologically such three-way contrasts do exist, but they have to
be based on stronger distinctions than presently exist among the
current English sounds.  In English, the voicing of [b] starts
very close to the release of the stop making it difficult to
distinguish from lax unaspirated [p].  It is only the phonotactics
of the language that prevents confusion between the two.
Furthermore, even when so based, such contrasts seem to be
unstable, with a tendency for one or more of them to shift out of
the matrix.  Look at what has happened in Greek:  both /ph/ and
/b/ have shifted away from the phonetic center (bilabial stop) of
the matrix to become fricatives.

So, I too would not rule out such a three-way distinction for
some future version of English, but I don't think it could happen
with the English sounds as they are presently realized.

>And finally, I have read Chomsky & Halle.

I rather thought you had.

>Seems to me they thought that had proved we didn't need phonemes
>to do phonology. and that various problems (of the type to which
>the thy thigh controversy belongs) could be resolved if we
>accepted "minor rules".  Well, that's very nice, but that's not
>the framework in which we have been arguing, so I don't see why
>you invoked them.

I invoked them (sounds rather like a pagan ritual :>) because
you said with reference to orthography "... we ignore all sorts
of other distinctions, and it doesn't bother us."  The part that
I was suggesting that you read (but I didn't have the specific
reference at hand) or re-read is on p. 49 where they say:

  The fundamental principle of orthography is that phonetic
  variation is not indicated where it is predictable by general
  rule.  Thus stress placement and regular vowel and consonant
  alternations are generally not reflected.  Orthography is a
  system designed for readers who know the language, who
  understand sentences and know the surface structure of
  sentences.  Such readers can produce the correct phonetic
  forms, given the orthographic representation and the surface
  structure, by means of the rules that they employ in producing
  and interpreting speech.  It would be quite pointless for the
  orthography to indicate these predictable variants.

I'm not sure that they believe that you don't need phonemes to do
phonology (well, I guess they do).  What they don't believe is that
there is a "phonemic" level of abstraction between the abstract
underlying (lexical) representation and the surface
representation that represents any "psychological reality."  What
they proved is that they don't like to talk about phonemes.  But
what they call phonological representations usually look
suspiciously like what others would call phonemic transcriptions
with the morphophonemics thrown in.  It is rather that they like
to lump phonemes and morphophonemes together without referring to
either one and account for morphophonemic alternations by what
they call "readjustment rules" in the difference between what
they call surface phonology and deep phonological structure.  But
they certainly don't deny that there must be some abstract phonic
structure beneath the surface phonetic level, whatever it may be
called.  But even if one does not subscribe to their concept of
phonology, I believe that there are still truths to be found
among their pages.

I brought them up because you mentioned some of the orthographic
peculiarities of English that they make less "peculiar" through
some of their "minor rules" (or "readjustment rules").  Although
I agree that much of what they say is overstated, especially as
they steadfastly refuse to discuss 'details that they consider
irrelevant', as ad hoc explanations for the peculiarities of
English orthography, they make it easier to systematize.  As they
state, again on p. 49, but it is a recurring theme throughout,
"... English orthography, despite its often cited
inconsistencies, comes remarkably close to being an optimal
orthographic system for English."  Despite its rather sweeping
nature, I don't think this is overstated (well, not much anyway;
"not really all that bad" might be better than "close to being
optimal").  Their real contribution, however, lies in
demonstrating that it is possible to evaluate intrinsic
complexity through the concept of markedness.

And incidentally, we don't really need phonemes to do phonology.
If one leaves mentalism (i.e., the perception of the speakers)
out of it, phonemic analysis is an abstraction used by linguists
to make talking about morphemes from the phonetic point of view
easier.  Gábor Sándi has stated (26 Apr 2000) that "the main
purpose of phonemic analysis is to provide for an unambiguous way
to describe the pronunciation of every utterance in a language."
This is rather the opposite of what phonemic analysis is
(although, actually I only object to one word of this
definition).  Phonemic analysis is in this way a reductionist
strategy that linguists use so that they can talk about the
morphemes of a language without getting bogged down in the actual
pronunciation of words and other morphemes.  Whether phonemes
have any "psychological reality" or not is still a matter of
discussion (although one, or at least this one, tends to think
that they do).  But since phonemes are an abstraction, if you do
your abstraction in a different way, then you don't need
phonemes.  The trick is to find a different abstraction that is
consistent across all the levels of language that phonology
affects and still can claim some degree of "psychological
reality."

What phonemic analysis provides us is a unique way to represent
every utterance in a language without worrying about its actual
pronunciation.  In this view, phonemic transcription represents
the limit of how broad a phonetic transcription can be without
violating any of the functional distinctions made by the
language.  Here, phonemic analysis just collects those similar
sounds that don't contrast in a language into a single entity
called a phoneme.  The phoneme then can be used to stand for any
(or all) of its members (allophones) in discussions.  Phonemic
transcription is used to free us from the cumbersome restrictions
of narrow phonetic transcription.  Phonemic transcription in this
sense is just another type of phonetic transcription from which
all the predictable, redundant, non-contrastive elements have
been stripped mechanically.

But a phonemic transcription doesn't describe the pronunciation
of words unambiguously.  It may describe the words unambiguously
because of the property of contrastiveness which all phonemes
must have regardless of whose definition you use, but not their
pronunciation.  One can determine the actual pronunciation of
words from a phonemic transcription only if one has a key that
gives both the rules for the distribution of the allophones of
the phonemes in the transcription and the speech habits of the
speakers of the language.  For example the phonemic transcription
of English /spin/ doesn't tell you that the /p/ here is lax and
unaspirated.  A description of how the word in question is
actually pronounced (a narrow phonetic transcription) would be
more like [sbIn] (allowing for the limitations of the 7-bit
ASCII character set).  An even better example was provided by
Gábor Sándi himself when he said "[Japanese] /huzimori/ is
pronounced [phujimori]."  Clearly, a phonemic transcription is
fairly useless for pronunciation purposes without the key.

The point of this longish digression in an already overly longish
message is not really that we don't need phonemes to do
phonology.  It may be true, but I am not arguing in favor of it.
Yes we could do phonology with phones plus a hideous mess of
morphophonemic and allophonic rules, or with a different kind of
abstraction, in much the same way as we don't need arabic
numerals (or place value notation in general) to do arithmetic,
but could use roman numerals (sign value notation) instead.  But
using phonemes in linguistics and arabic numerals (place value
notation) in arithmetic just makes things a hell of a lot easier.
But the real point of this is actually about the relationship
between phones and phonemes and the relationship between phones,
phonemes, and orthography.

If we look at phonemic transcriptions, we will find that they are
often fairly close to the normal orthography (at least for
English [if we except the vowels and throw in some
morphophonemics], which is principally what we are talking
about).  By comparison, phonetic transcriptions will usually be
widely divergent from the orthography (especially if one gets
beyond a 7-bit ASCII medium).  This is because alphabetic scripts
are based on essentially the same principle as phonemic analysis.
Those who introduced alphabets to language must have used a very
similar analysis, providing a symbol for each non-predictable
(contrastive) sound and leaving the non-contrastive (predictable)
sounds to be sorted out by the speakers (readers).  Alphabetic
systems then will tend to have one symbol (or sequence of
symbols) for each phoneme.  Indeed, the fact that those who
introduced alphabets to writing language used a phonemic-type
analysis is one of the things that indicates that phonemes are
such a linguistically useful concept and may have some
"psychological reality" apart from a mere linguistic abstraction.

So, with this in mind, let's take another look at what you said
about English orthography:

On Sun, 05 Nov 2000 CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU wrote:

>>... we ignore all sorts of other distinctions, and it doesn't
>>bother us.  <s> stands for /s z S Z/ (the latter two as in
>>_pressure_ and _pleasure_ -- in fact, we don't evan have an
>>official way to spell /Z/, though <zh> would seem obvious.  And
>>don't even ask about the vowels: treating <y w> as doublets of
>><i u>, we have effective five vowel symbols for a very large
>>phonemic inventory.  I'd be glad to see ,dh. in use, but it
>>really has nothing to do with whether [T D] are separate
>>phonemes.

You said that "<s> stands for /s z S Z/" but these are all
(except /s/ most of the time) morphophonemic spellings or
allophonic variations.  <s> only represents /S Z/ before a
palatal.  Therefore, I would not expect <s> to represent /S/ or
/Z/ except before a palatal <u> or before the sequence <ion> or
<ial>.  Whether it represents /S/ or /Z/ in these environments
will depend on the form of the basic, underlying word.  Thus the
realization of <s> will be predictable (with, as usual, a very
small number of exceptions).  When the distinction is phonemic
(i.e., not predictable; e.g., 'sea':'she', 'sell':'shell/,
'sore':'shore'/) you can't use <s> for /S/.  Similarly, we can
always write the plural morpheme /s/ with <s> and a native
speaker will know automatically when it is to be pronounced [s]
and when [z], but we can't write /zip/ with <s> because here it
constrasts with [s] in /sip/.  So it is not that "we ignore all
sorts of other distinctions, and it doesn't bother us"; rather we
ignore *predictable* distinctions and it doesn't bother us.

The fact that <s> can be used for /z S Z/ just tells us that
there must be some rule by which English speakers derive /z/,
/S/, or /Z/ from an underlying /s/ whenever this orthography is
used.

You said "in fact, we don't evan have an official way to spell
/Z/, though <zh> would seem obvious."  Part of this stems from
the fact that /Z/ became phonemic after the orthographic rules
were established.  But I can't think of any other way to spell
foreign names like 'Zhukov' or 'Zhdanov' or loanwords like
'muzhik' -- do you have an alternative suggestion?  As with <s>
and <z> and <sh>, when the distinction isn't predictable, you
have to be explicit in the spelling.

I agree that one shouldn't even ask about the vowels.  As far as
I know, English vowels are still shifting on a continuing basis.
I doubt that the writing system has any chance to catch up until
this stops.  Certainly there is precious little phonetic
predictability in English vowel orthography.  On the other hand,
there is a great deal of morpheme identity encoded in English
vowel orthography (e.g., 'pair', 'pare', 'pear'; 'die', 'dye';
'meat', 'meet', etc., etc.).  If these homophonous vowel sounds
were replaced with standardized orthographies, this information
would be lost.  Basically, English vowel orthography has traded
off phonetically specific information for morphologically or
lexically specific information through its myriad variant
orthographies for identical phonetic sequences.  But there are
still regular vowel alternations that are not explicit in the
orthography but are still predictable from the grammatical rules
(divine/divinity, extreme/extremity, etc., etc.).  Finally,
English vowel orthography has advantages in a situation with
continually shifting vowels or numerous dialects with varying
vowel realizations.  'Caught' and 'cot' are still
orthographically recognizable whether they have the same vowel
sound or not.

And to your last statement about the fact that [D T] are always
written only with <th> having nothing to do with whether they are
separate phonemes or not, I still say "maybe not."  But
personally, I think it has a lot to do with it.  But it certainly
has a great deal to do with the contrastive load of [D T] in the
language.  If one accepts the idea that only distinctions that
are not predictable from the rules of grammar need to be marked
in the orthography, then I don't see how the fact that the
difference between [T] and [D] is never marked in the orthography
can indicate anything other than the existence of rules that
predict the presence of [T] or [D] (with the usual small number
of exceptions).  In short, the contrastive load of [D T] is very
nearly zero.  I suppose it depends on whether one considers
phonemes to be just different sounds in a language or whether one
considers them to be sounds that can't be derived from some other
phoneme by a grammatical rule.

Since, in your view, the fact that [D T] are always written
indiscriminately with <th> says nothing about whether they are
phonemes or not, then you should be able to come up with lots of
examples of phonetic (alphabetic or syllabic) writing systems
from around the world where two distinct phonemes are invariably
written with the same symbol (not occasionally, but invariably).
I'll be waiting to see this list (note: logographic and
logo-syllabic systems are excluded since, in general, they don't
represent phonemes directly).

But if the fact that [D T] are always written with <th> says
nothing about whether they are phonemes or not, then so also does
the fact that German [c, x] are always written with <ch> have
nothing to do with whether they are separate phonemes or not.
But guess what? -- they aren't.  The basic principle of
alphabetic systems remains:  one symbol (or fixed sequence of
symbols) per phoneme.  Allophonic or morphophonemic alternations
don't have to be expressed in writing because they are
predictable to native speakers (just as allophonic alternations
don't have to be expressed in phonemic transcription).  In fact,
anything that can be predicted by native speakers from context
(like the vowels in most Semitic langugages or the many English
words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently)
doesn't have to be expressed in writing.  But when you have
contrastive sounds that can't be predicted from context
(phonetic, grammatical, or semantic), the writing system has to
differentiate them or else it fails.

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi


From evenstar at mail.utexas.edu  Mon May 14 03:52:21 2001
From: evenstar at mail.utexas.edu (Shilpi Misty Bhadra)
Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 22:52:21 -0500
Subject: Bactria Margiana Archaeology Complex
Message-ID: <SUN.13.MAY.2001.225221.0500.>

[ moderator edited ]

Most of you probably have already read the article, but if you haven't, it
might be interesting to read. It was on the headliners for the NY Times, now it
is under the science section ... There may the possibility of early writing in
this ca. 2000 BCE culture in Central Asia. Seals were found. Some try to
connect the BMAC with the movements of Indo-Iranians from the steppe.

Bactria Margiana Archaeology Complex
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/13/world/13LOST.html

BMAC is also briefly discussed in pp. 72-74 in Mallory and Adams'
Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture under BMAC

Shilpi Misty Bhadra
University of Texas at Austin
Ancient History, Classics, and Humanities (focus: Indo-European Studies)
senior undergraduate
evenstar at mail.utexas.edu
512-320-0229 (ph)
512-476-3367 (fax)


From edsel at glo.be  Mon May 14 10:12:51 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 12:12:51 +0200
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.121251.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lars Martin Fosse" <lmfosse at online.no>
Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2001 11:14 AM

> David L. White [SMTP:dlwhite at texas.net] skrev 6. mai 2001 16:21:

>> There is good evidence of something like Semitic influence, sub-stratal or
>> not, in Insular Celtic, and I suspected when I first read Dr. Trask's
>> initial posting that something like this woud lie behind the views of the
>> "No-Proto-Celtic" crowd.  The typological lurch of Insular Celtic toward
>> Semitic, illusory (in terms of actual Semites) or not, does indeed make it
>> difficult to construct a unified proto-language.  Difficult, but not
>> impossible.  Such questions as how and when Insular Celtic wound up
>> verb-initial and so on just have to be answered at some point.  They do no
>> make proto-Celtic unviable, or suggest any such scenario as just given
>> above.

> As far as I know, Old Norse is also verb-initial. Should we assume Semitic
> influence there too?

> Would it be possible to get a list of features that point in the direction of
> Semitic?

> Best regards,
> Lars Martin Fosse

[Ed  Selleslagh]

As a non-linguist I wonder if the personal endings of verbs (the person
marker), which are basically remnants of suffixed pronouns, cannot be viewed as
an indication that PIE was actually verb-initial (verb-[suffixed]S-O), at least
with pronouns as subject?

Ed.


From dlwhite at texas.net  Mon May 14 12:42:47 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 07:42:47 -0500
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.074247.0500.>

[ Moderator's note:
  The following quoted material is taken from a post by Rick Mc Callister
  dated 10 May 2001.
  --rma ]

> As a non-linguist, I'll have to take your word on that but could
> someone explain the seeming complexity of mutations wrought by Irish
> numbers on following consonants. As I remember some numbers don't cause
> mutation, and there are two types of mutations caused by other numbers

>>        French liasion is abstractly similar to Celtic mutation, for both
>> might be described as the phonemicization of originally phonetic processes
>> occurring across boundaries.

        It's not too difficult.  Words or types of words that used to end in
a vowel cause lenition, and words that used to end in a nasal cause
"eclipsis" or the nasal mutation.  Thus the sequence of IE numbers that used
to end in /-m/ (7-9?) cause the nasal mutation, with a little bit of
analogical exetnsion somewhere.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon May 14 07:49:41 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 03:49:41 EDT
Subject: IE versus *PIE
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.034941.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/13/01 10:12:32 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
colkitto at sprint.ca writes:

> and linguists may have to discuss family trees in the same way that
> cartographers discuss Mercator's Projection (even Peter's may not entirely
> free of such problems.

-- this is, I think, a good analogy.

It would also be useful to think of language (as indeed culture in general)
as following a Lamarkian rather than Darwinian model of genetic descent.
That is, acquired cultural traits can be "inherited".

Any widespread language is always full of incipient daughter languages, as
dialects spontaneously form and then merge back into the main stem in most
cases; in fact, some quite divergent forms can be re-assimilated, as in the
case of Gullah or Lallans, both of which in their different ways had
almost, but not quite, reached the status of full-blown daughter languages.
 If Scotland had continued to be an independent political entity with its
own standard 'court' form, today it might well be as distinct from Standard
English as Norwegian is from Danish.

For that matter, without modern communications, English would probably be
in the process of splitting into a language-family analagous to Romance
right now, given the very broad geographical spread over the past 500 years
and the existance of numerous, and quite sharply distinct, dialects.


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon May 14 08:25:26 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 09:25:26 +0100
Subject: IE versus *PIE
In-Reply-To: <006c01c0db14$8ddeed80$bd946395@roborr.uottawa.ca>
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.092526.0100.>

--On Saturday, May 12, 2001 2:51 pm -0400, Robert Orr,
<colkitto at sprint.ca>, wrote:

> I think part of the problem is that family tree diagrams tend to be
> oversimplified.  A close reading of the relevant passages of Dixon's book
> shows that he seems to arguing for some sort of recognition  that family
> tree diagrams should be far more complex than normally presented.

In a manner of speaking, yes.  But Dixon's central point is that *apparent*
language families can arise by long-term convergence, by the steady
diffusion of features across language boundaries.  He argues that family
trees of the familiar type only come about in exceptional circumstances --
what he calls 'punctuations'.

> One analogy that we should consider is bushes which can sprout branches
> which later can fuse again, or can fuse with branches from other bushes.

And exactly this has been proposed by Malcolm Ross.  See especially this:

  M. Ross. 1997. 'Speech networks and kinds of speech-community event'. In
  Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs (eds), Archaeology and Language I:
  Theoretical and Methodological Orientations, London: Routledge, pp.
  209-261.

> Of course, it may be impossible to reduce such complexity to a page, and
> linguists may have to discuss family trees in the same way that
> cartographers discuss Mercator's Projection (even Peter's may not entirely
> free of such problems.)

In fact, there has been quite a bit of lively discussion of alternatives to
the traditional family-tree model in the last few years.  I've put together
a little talk on the subject, which I hope to write up for publication one
day.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)


From dlwhite at texas.net  Mon May 14 13:30:40 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 08:30:40 -0500
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.083040.0500.>

[ Moderator's note:
  The following quoted material is taken from a post by Larry Trask dated
  11 May 2001.
  -- rma ]

> Hmmm.  May I know where in their book T and K assert that "anything goes"?
> My reading of the book reveals only the more cautious claim that we cannot
> know what happens in language contact until we look.

        Somewhere in the intro.  Hasty perusal has not revealed where. Do
they say anything does not go?

>>         Taking all these things together, plus the fact that finite verbs
>> are ordinarily "higher in the tree" than NPs,

> OK; I'm afraid I don't understand this.

> I don't think it's *generally* true that syntactic theorists put verbs
> higher in trees than NPs.  Verb-at-the-top is more a feature of
> dependency-based approaches than of constituency-based approaches.  But
> some contemporary dependency theorists put verbs and all argument NPs at
> the same level in their trees.  Non-Chomskyan constituency theorists
> typically put subject NPs higher than verbs.  Chomskyans change their
> analysis regularly, but they typically put abstract elements highest in
> their trees, not verbs.

        I think the "verbal side" is right about subjects, but be that as it
may, many NPS are not subjects, and these are almost all "under" verbs.

>> I suggest that the genetic
>> descent of a language can always (theoretically) be traced through
>> finite verbal morphology, where this exists.

> This strikes me as a highly arbitrary proposal, though perhaps an
> interesting one.  But it does have the immediate consequence that a
> language with no verbal morphology has no ancestor -- unless the intention
> is to supplement this proposal with one or more unstated back-up proposals.

       The back-up proposal is to use basic vocabulary, in the traditional
manner.  And even "isolating" languages usually do habitually associate some
items with the verb.  In Vietnamese there is a word "se" meaning future, for
example.

>> This will never be mixed,

> Well, a bold claim.  I confess I can't falsify it off the top of my head.

        That's the idea.  My only source is TK, but the examples they give
do not falsify it either.

> But I wonder what a survey of, say, native American languages might turn up.

>> and its
>> affixes will always be found closer to lexical verbs than are foreign
>> affixes, if the examples I am aware of are a reliable guide.  Using this
>> standard, Mednyj Aleut is Russian, Michif is Cree, and Ma'a is Bantu.
>> Each is a rather bizarre and severely influenced version of its putative
>> genetic ancestor, but technically there is little reason to think that
>> what Thomason and Kaufmann call "normal transmission" of finite verbal
>> morphology has in fact been interrupted, for in each case it is there,
>> unmixed and un-intruded upon. To some extent it is a matter of what we
>> call things rather than what they are,

> OK.  Very interesting.  Let me draw attention to two examples.

> First, Anglo-Romani.  According to T and K, this consists of wholly Romani
> lexis plus wholly English grammar.  According to David White's proposal,
> then, Anglo-Romani is English, since it has English verbal morphology.  Is
> this a satisfactory conclusion so far?

    Yes.

> Now, consider how Anglo-Romani came into existence.  I assume it didn't
> spring into being overnight, but must have evolved gradually.  So there are
> broadly two possibilities.

> First, Anglo-Romani started off as plain English, but was gradually
> relexified from Romani until no English lexis was left.  According to
> David's proposal, this *must* be what happened, since the alternative below
> seems to be impossible.

        Yes.

> Second, Anglo-Romani started off as Romani, but it gradually borrowed more
> and more grammar from English, until there was no Romani grammar left.
> Under David's proposal, this appears to be impossible, since the language,
> in this scenario, has shifted from having Romani verbal morphology to
> having English verbal morphology -- seemingly in conflict with the proposal
> on the table, which sees verbal morphology as inviolate.  It also, of
> course, has the peculiar consequence that Anglo-Romani has changed from
> being Romani to being English -- an outcome surely more bizarre than
> anything contemplated in T and K.

        Yes, that is why I favor the first.

> Assuming overnight creation can be excluded, then, David's scenario forces
> us to conclude that the first interpretation *must* be right.  Well, this
> is an empirical question.

        Is it?

> My second case is the Austronesian language Takia.  As it is commonly
> described, Takia has borrowed the *entire* grammatical system from the
> Papuan language Waskia, so that every Takia sentence is now a
> morpheme-by-morpheme calque of the corresponding Waskia sentence -- while
> at the same time Takia has borrowed no morphemes at all from Waskia.

> So, in Takia, the *patterns* of the verbal morphology are Waskia, while the
> *morphemes* are Takia.  In David's scenario, then, which is decisive?  Is
> Takia Austronesian, because it exhibits only Austronesian morphemes?  Or is
> it Papuan, because it exhibits only Papuan morphological patterns?

> A pretty little puzzle, don't you think?

        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.

>> but in any event I thought it
>> worthwhile to point out that the somewhat wild claims of Thomason and
>> Kaufmann are arguably exaggerated, as there are restrictions 1) that they
>> fail to note, and 2) that can at least possibly be used to determine
>> genetic descent, considerably reducing the incidence of "linguo-genesis"
>> and/or "mixed languages", perhaps to zero.

> Again, I don't see T and K as making any wild claims.  They seem to me to
> be doing no more than quoting Hamlet: "There are more things in heaven and
> earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

           I have "dreamt" of many things, but _seen_ none of the wilder
ones that TKs "philosophy" would seem to permit.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon May 14 07:52:29 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 03:52:29 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.035229.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/13/01 11:00:09 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> Someone, a relatively disinterested outsider, might take this alone to
> undermine the idea that there was any necessary connection between the names
> for elk, red deer and fallow deer and any particular types of deer.

-- any _single_ instance is not conclusive.  The probabilities become
conclusive for all practical purposes when you add together _all_ the
instances.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon May 14 08:12:59 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 04:12:59 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.041259.EDT.>

[ Moderator's note:
  The following quoted material is from a post by Steve Long dated 10 May 2001.
  -- rma ]

> Because the fallow deer was present in Anatolia but not in most of Europe.
> And since there is no common name in IE, IE languages could not have
> originated in Anatolia.

> Now, as a pretend outsider, you might ask the innocent question.  What if the
> PIEers moved into non-fallow territory and simply forgot the name?  Since
> there was no fallow deer in the north, why would they remember the name?
> There'd be nothing to apply it to.

-- you're missing the point entirely.  The lack of a term for fallow deer in
IE languages _outside_ the prehistoric range of the fallow deer has _nothing
to do_ with the argument.

Fallow deer _are_ present in Anatolia, and they _are_ present in Greece, and
they _are_ present in Italy, and they _are_ present in the Iranian plateau
from extremely early times.  Along with many other animals mentioned in this
context.

All of these areas have IE languages, and all of which, _according to the
Anatolian hypothesis_, would have been Indo-Europeanized from Anatolia.

But the Indo-European languages _of those areas_ lack cognate terms for
fallow deer; and for other animals _common to those areas_.  (Eg., the
chamois, etc.)

That is, Italic, Greek, Anatolian, and Indo-Iranian lack such terms.  And if
those languages had spread from a center _in Anatolia_, then a term for
"fallow deer", which would have been in continuous use, should be
reconstructable to PIE.  It should show up in Anatolian IE, Italic, Greek,
and Indo-Iranian, which would be more than enough for inclusion in the IE
lexicon.

And it doesn't.

Whereas terms for red deer, etc. _are_ reconstructable to PIE.

Of course, you could claim that the IE languages in question first looped up
into northern Eurasian, lost the animal terms, and then looped back down into
their historic positions and picked up local loan-words and/or invented
separate new ones.

This is known as "unnecessary complication of the hypothesis"; now you'd be
invoking migrations and counter-migrations and counter-counter-migrations,
like Renfrew's rather sad attempt in a recent issue of JIES; it's covered
with blobs and arrows moving hither and yon like a tactical rendition of
multiple blitzkreigs.

Which, when you consider that the whole Anatolian mess was originated to try
and _avoid_ positing archaeologically unattested migrations...  rather sad,
as I said.

> If some very early form of IE left Anatolia in say 6000BC, the people
> speaking it who went to or were in Germany or Britain or Ireland might not
> see a fallow deer for another 7000 years.

-- but the people in Anatolia and Greece and Italy and Iran WOULD be seeing
fallow deer, all the time.  Why don't they have cognate lexica for these
animals?

> I think that stepping back and with a critical eye, even the most adamant
> anti-Anatolian can see why an outsider might see this as a very poor
> argument.

-- see above.

> Let me repeat that and add something.  The "fallow deer" does little or
> nothing for the anti-Anatolian position, no matter how correct that position
> is.

-- see above.  As I said, you missed the point completely.


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Mon May 14 14:24:11 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 09:24:11 -0500
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
In-Reply-To: <32.14ac0dd0.282c2686@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.092411.0500.>

	Is there a known etymology for <dama> and Greek <tame>?

>Finally, there is the matter of the fallow deer itself.  It seems it may have
>been introduced into southern Italy in Neolithic times.  There seems to have
>been a native population in Bulgaria and Romania (darn close to the Ukraine)
>from late neolithic times into the present (N. Spassov 2000) and in Greece.
>The fallow deer and its names are actually an interesting example of how we
>should not take the things behind the names for granted.  The dama (Gr. tame)
>in "Dama Dama", it's formal scientific name, is appropriate.  The fallow deer
>appears to have been a very early semi-domesticate, not just another furry
>thing in the woods.  I hope to send a little more on this soon.

>For those who've been kind enough to temporarily see the other side of this
>issue, my appreciation.

>Best Wishes,
>Steve Long

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


From philjennings at juno.com  Mon May 14 23:07:05 2001
From: philjennings at juno.com (philjennings at juno.com)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 18:07:05 -0500
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.180705.0500.>

I have read Steve Long's reasoned and temperate remarks on the "urheimat
animals" issue and I'd be interested in his take, or anyone else's, regarding
the work of Dr. Martin Richards as reported in the NY Times 11/14/2000 under
the title "The Origin of the Europeans."  Since Dr. Renfrew is quoted in this
article, I take it that the Anatolian-originists have grown comfortable with
Richards' findings:  To summarize, 6 percent of Europeans are descended from
the Aurignacian wave of settlement, about 80 percent are descended from the
second Gravettian wave (20k to 30k years ago), and 10 percent are descended
from Middle Eastern farmers (in this context, "Anatolians.")

I assume from my reading of Renfrew that the Anatolian-wave-of-advance
theorists would have preferred the ratios to have been otherwise, ie. 6-10-80,
not 6-80-10.  Is it thought that there was a transfer of farming technology and
language to a group of Europe's indigenous post-Gravettians who blossomed and
constituted the wave-of-advance?

Once this concession is made (if it is made) how does one argue intelligently
that the language transferred completely?  If there are no evidences of PIE
ever being a creole, as some people say they can demonstrate, doesn't that make
it likely that PIE was the language of the indigenous post-Gravettians, rather
than the language they learned from their agricultural tutors?  Part-time
hunters living in isolated Balkan family homesteads did not, after all, make
the total life-style conversion to farming villages/pueblos.  These same
scattered living arrangements must have made it difficult to learn a new
language well or completely.

Already I have exposed my own partiality.  I wonder if there were creoles, and
if proto-Etruscan was one of them, with an essentially PIE grammar and a
largely exotic vocabulary.  But I suppose the same techniques that can detect
that PIE was never a creole, could also detect that Etruscan did not develop
from a creole, however long in the past.

(If my use of the word "creole" here is poorly chosen or offensive, I'm sorry.
I hope you all know what I mean.)


From petegray at btinternet.com  Mon May 14 19:13:52 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 20:13:52 +0100
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.201352.0100.>

> << Likewise, PIE lacks a word for the fallow deer, common throughout southern
>> Europe, but has terms for 'elk' and 'red deer'.... The logical conclusion
>> would be that the IE languages were intrusive in areas which had...
>>fallow deer,... and native to an area with roe deer...>>

> it might be worthwhile looking at statements like
> the one above with a critical eye.

I've been keeping out of this discussion, since I know little about it (not
that that always stops me!), but we would do well to remember the fate of
similar arguments based on the PIE words for Salmon and Birch/beech.  It was
shown way back a long time ago, that the actual semantic content of the
words was not stable, but changed according to the physical context of the
speakers.   We should therefore be very suspicious of arguments that depend
on something as fine as what kind of deer was involved.

I therefore have no choice but to applaud the note of caution sounded above.

Peter


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon May 14 08:15:04 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 04:15:04 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.041504.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/13/01 11:22:57 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes:

> There were tigers in the Caspian region until about 100 years ago.
> How far to the north and west did they live in earlier times?

-- far to the north in eastern Siberia, but as far as I know not as far west
as western Siberia.  There were tigers in the deltas of the rivers feeding
into the Aral Sea, and as you mention, in the Caspian region... not in the
Caucasus, though, IIRC


From mclasutt at brigham.net  Mon May 14 13:40:30 2001
From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 07:40:30 -0600
Subject: Fallow Deer
In-Reply-To: <l03130307b7209a313410@[209.147.211.33]>
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.074030.0600.>

Rick Mc Callister:
	There were tigers in the Caspian region until about 100 years ago.
How far to the north and west did they live in earlier times?

Me:
	According to the sixth edition of Walker's Mammals of the World (1999,
Johns Hopkins, Vol 1, pg. 828), "P. t. virgata (Caspian tiger) occurred in
modern times from eastern Turkey and the Caucasus to the mountains of
Kazakhstan and Sinkiang, in the Middle Ages may have reached Ukraine, also
one report from northern Iraq in 1892, a few individuals still present in
Turkey in the 1970s, now probably extinct."

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 alderson+mail at panix.com  Tue May 15 01:34:32 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 21:34:32 -0400
Subject: Urheimat animals
In-Reply-To: <B7209460.C80%xavier.delamarre@free.fr> (message from Xavier
 Delamarre on Thu, 10 May 2001 19:04:12 +0200)
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.213432.0400.>

On 10 May 2001, Xavier Delamarre wrote in answer to my query:

> Some literature on the IE salmon (your ref. must be Diebold) :

> - Diebold, A.R. : Contributions to the Indo-European Salmon Problem, in
> Current Progress in Historical Linguistics  ed. William Christie Jr.,
> Amsterdam-New York-Oxford, 1976, 341-388.

This is almost certainly the article I had in mind.  The date is certainly in
the right period.

> - Diebold, A.R. : The Evolution of Indo-European Nomenclature for Salmonid
> Fish : The Case of 'Huchen' , Washington 1985, (JIES  Monograph Series, 5).

Carol Justus, in another message, asked whether this might be the article I was
thinking of.  It may have grown out of the earlier article, but is much too
late to be the one I had read in pre-print.

Thanks to you both.

								Rich Alderson


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Wed May 16 01:49:27 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 15 May 2001 21:49:27 EDT
Subject: A Note on Beavers
Message-ID: <TUE.15.MAY.2001.214927.EDT.>

<JoatSimeon at aol.com> (domenica 6 maggio 2001 11.41) writes:
<<...The neolithic range of the beaver stopped well short of the
mediterranean and most of Anatolia.  Again, this reinforces the PIE lexicon
for animals as being specifically north-central Eurasian...>>

The Beaver definitely appears to be a native of Anatolia.  So the beaver is
just another example of an animal that apparently could support an Anatolian
origin for IE languages.

In fact, it appears the beaver could support a origin of the IE languages on
the Eurprates. See: Legge, A. J. and P.A. Rowley-Conwy, "The Beaver (Castor
fiber L.) in the Tigris-Euphrates Basin." Journal of Archaeological Science
13:469-476 (1986).  References to the beaver being absent from "the
mediterranean zone" is to a narrow climate zone, not a location.  The beaver
lived in the south.

<JoatSimeon at aol.com> (domenica 6 maggio 2001 11.41) also writes:
<<-- I would certainly agree on "beaver" (PIE *bhebhrus) .... and the
derivation from a color term is obvious in PIE *babhrus.>>

Boy, beaver just doesn't seem to be a good candidate for a PIE word.
Especially if it's supposed to come from something like "reddish-brown".
You'd have to carry a Pantone color ring around in the woods with you to tell
reddish-brown animals apart.  And what was unique about the beaver or the
beaver's fur was not it's color, which is variable.

There seems to be an extremely transparent meaning in Greek that would be
hard to miss if it wasn't assumed the word was PIE.  <brucho:> and <bruko>
means to chew, to gnaw, to grind, to eat noisily.  <bruchetos> is chattering
of teeth.  <bruche:>, gnashing of teeth.  <diabro:sis>, eating through,
chewing, erosion.  <diabro:ma>, that which is eaten through.

<bibro:sko:> means to eat up, chew up; in its passive forms, e.g.,
<bebro:oetai>,  <bebro:menoi>, something that is eaten, gnawed or chewed up.
<rhiza bebro:menoi> is, e.g., "worm-eaten."  (The <bi-/be-> prefix might also
be considered causal  - e.g., bibazo:, bebaioo: < baino:.)  Also related are
<bebro:thois>, chew up; <brugde:n>, with clenched teeth.  <bruchiao:> is
chatter or some related defect of speech.

If there's anything about a beaver in living form, it's them mighty incisors
and the work they do.

Although the beaver's teeth would be obvious even to city folk who saw a pelt
with the head still in place, country folk would know to identify the beaver
from their work.  They leave plenty of chewed-up things behind - "bebro:-".
The beaver-gnawed tree or fence post is distinctive.  There are plenty of
papers on the beaver's role in ancient land clearance and creating
tree-dammed ponds.  Where there's beaver, there's gnawing.

But the Greek words above don't come from the beaver.  They might come from
just eating. (<bora>, post-Homeric for food.)  Or they might come from
references to the noise -- by gnashing (or gnoshing), chattering or even
roaring --coming from the mouth or throat.  So that <bruche:>, above, is not
only a "gnashing of teeth," but also "bellowing" (in L&S, connected to
bruchaomai).  (See also, bruchêdon, bruche:thmos, bruche:ma,
bruche:te:r and maybe bruchios.) Possibly as collateral extensions, there's
<brochizo:>, hang, strangle.  And post-Homeric <brochthos>, throat, throatful
(as in vomited).  But the connection of the word with beavers I believe comes
later.

Based on a quick look at the texts and glossaries, it appears that the Greeks
did not use a bruch-/bibro- word for the beaver.  But they used it in
connection with animals often.  <bebro:ko:s boos> in Homer is a cow chewed up
by a lion.   And horses chomp the bit, <hippi ie: bruke>.  I think in
Antigone, <bebro:tes> is used to refer to scavenger birds.  A kind of smelt
was called <bebrada>, maybe because it was a chum or cut bait fish. And then
there is the <babuko:s>, the pelican. (If you've ever fed a pelican, you'll
think there was some connection), etc.

Based on all the above, I think that one might guess that the application of
the bebr- word to the beaver is late.  One also might guess that the word
traveled along the trade routes as a common name from the source of the pelt
(later than for the castors) - "the gnawer."

<<Now, in Old Indian/Sanskrit, there has been a semantic shift; there's a
cognate term, babhru, but it means 'mongoose'....>>

I don't know how a mongoose eats or what it leaves behind or if it has musk
glands.  My suspicion would be that this is a fur trade word.  If the pelts
have some similarity.  On the other hand, it may also be that this was by
some analogy to the badger - a closer animal I think - as a harvested animal
and the demand for its glands in the marketplace.  (See, e.g., Joshua T.
Katz, The Curious Case of the Hittite Mustelid, Abstract, Abstracts of
Communications of the 208th Annual Meeting, American Oriental Society, re the
connection of the name for the badger with the testicular gland in northern
IE and the connection to castor.)


In a message dated 5/14/2001 1:45:39 PM, centrostudilaruna at libero.it writes:
<<fiber seems to find a correspondence in the gallic Bibr(acte) (a personal

name), ...>>

<fiber> is probably a reference to the beaver's castors which must be removed
from inside its groin and are attached by ligament-like membranes.  <fibra>
is the older word meaning any "filament" in a plant or animal, generally
identified for some practical purpose, e.g., wicker-making, and it comes to
mean intestines.

<<...in the high old german bibar (modern german Biber), in the lituan bebras
and in sanskrit babhru, which has two different meanings: as adjective it
means “brownred”...>>

Color words logically need to start as a reference to something and then that
word also becomes the name of the color.  "Turquoise" becomes something to
generalize to other objects of similar color.  "Babhru" would therefore
possibly originally refer to a fur, then to furs of similar color, and travel
across languages where fur was traded.

<<Also the greek "phrxne" comes from the same theme, which is the i.e.
*bhebhru- (I take those informations from the Pokorny).>>

Can't find that Greek word.  Is this a reconstr using <phrugo:>, to roast?

Finally this word of caution about what is a beaver and what is not, from
Honore de Balzac:

"Cheapness, monsieur. In the first place, very handsome silk hats can be
built for fifteen francs, which kills our business; for in Paris no one ever
has fifteen francs in his pocket to spend on a hat. If a beaver hat costs
thirty, it is still the same thing-- When I say beaver, I ought to state that
there are not ten pounds of beaver skins in France. That article is worth
three hundred and fifty francs a pound, and it takes an ounce for a hat.
Besides, a beaver hat isn't really worth anything; the skin takes a wretched
dye; gets rusty in ten minutes under the sun, and heat puts it out of shape
as well. What we call 'beaver' in the trade is neither more nor less than
hare's-skin. The best qualities are made from the back of the animal, the
second from the sides, the third from the belly.  I confide to you these
trade secrets because you are men of honor...."

Regards,
Steve Long


From stevegus at aye.net  Mon May 14 20:45:09 2001
From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 16:45:09 -0400
Subject: Flemish/Dutch dialects
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.164509.0400.>

C. Michiel Driessen wrote:

> The dialects of South Limburg Limburg (both the Belgian and the Dutch parts)
> are tone languages, however. They have two phonological tones, that can make
> a semantic difference and a morphological difference (they create the
> singular versus the plural in certain categories of nouns).

Many Scandinavian dialects, at least those outside of Denmark, have tone
phonemes that seem similar.  There are minimal pairs allowing the
distinguishing of different words, and some also are involved in the
distinguishing of singular and plural, especially in some dialects that
drop final -r's.


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Mon May 14 19:23:11 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 14:23:11 -0500
Subject: Three-Way Contrast of Secondary Articulations in PIE
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.142311.0500.>

[ moderator edited ]

Dear Stanley and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stanley Friesen" <sarima at friesen.net>
Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2001 9:11 AM

[SFp]
>>> While I agree many of the roots probably originally were distinct, I do not
>>> think we yet have sufficient information to tell in what manner.  I
>>> certainly doubt there was a single cause for all of the mergers.

>>[PCRp]
>> First, our agreement: there is rarely a single cause for anything.

>> But -- putting glides aside, how were they kept separate?

[SF]
> My point is that in PIE per se, they weren't, except by formatives such as
> the noun stem formatives.  That is, by the time of the reconstructed
> language, the old conditioning factors were gone.

<snip>

[PCR]
Surely this needs a rethink. This might work if CVC-roots had only ONE
root-extension but your scenario means that an IE-speaker would have to
abstract CVC from a CVCC root in order to add other root-extensions. Frankly, I
don't think so.

Pat

PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th
St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE:
http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ec
at ec hecc, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío, geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim
meiþi, er mangi veit, hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138)


From petegray at btinternet.com  Mon May 14 19:18:47 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 20:18:47 +0100
Subject: Semivowels In Sanskrit
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.201847.0100.>

>(so some people don't like
> transcribing an English v by Devanagari v, but use vh).

Thank you, Nath!   That explains David Beckham's odd tattoo.  For those of
you who didn't read about this (and why should you) he had his wife's name
tattooed in Devanagari on his arm, then found the papers laughed at it when
he returned, since it read "Vhictoria".

Nice to know there's a reason!

peter


From pausyl at AOL.COM  Tue May 15 02:21:14 2001
From: pausyl at AOL.COM (pausyl at AOL.COM)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 22:21:14 -0400
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.222114.0400.>

On Thu, 10 May 2001 18:19:04 +0100, Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
wrote:

>--On Sunday, May 6, 2001 2:29 pm +0300 Robert Whiting
><whiting at cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:

>> To make it clear what my statement was about:  My entire point was that
>> [T] and [D] do not contrast in initial position in English.  My
>> statement was not about whether [T] and [D] are phonemes in English or
>> not.  The two are not necessarily related ([T] and [D] can still be
>> phonemes even if they don't contrast in some environments).

>OK; I'll bite.  I will argue that [T] and [D] *do* contrast in initial
>position in English.  It is merely that we happen to have no good minimal
>pairs for /T/ and /D/ in the language at present -- a completely different
>matter.

>To begin with, 'thigh' and 'thy' are a perfect minimal pair, *if* we accept
>that 'thy' is a word of modern English -- which you may not want to accept.

>But there are a number of near-minimal pairs:

[ moderator snip ]

>By the way, is everybody happy that 'thus' is beyond question a grammatical
>word, and not a lexical word?

I'm actually on Larry Trask's side (for the most part) in this discussion,
but I assume that the argument from Robert Whiting's side would be best
stated in terms of "closed-class" vs. "open-class" words; _thus_ would seem
to be in the closed class.  _thy_ is surely English (think of the "Lord's
Prayer"), but it's also a closed-class item.  And I would judge the
Traskian point above about /oi/ never occurring in native English words,
even if true, to be irrelevant to the discussion:  It seems to me that no
amount of introspection would help an intelligent (but linguistically
untrained) native speaker of English to decide that _boy_ (the etymology of
which is disputed) is a loanword; however, it seems plausible that that
same speaker could uncover the fact that all words beginning with /D/
are "closed-class" or the like.  Whether all this is relevant to the
phonemicity of /D/ vs. /T/ is a completely different argument, however.  If
we take that same "intelligent (but linguistically untrained) native
speaker of English" as our judge again, it's clear that a minimal pair
like "either" vs. "ether" would establish the phonemic distinction.

>Take another case.  It is extremely difficult to find minimal pairs for
>[esh] and [ezh] in *any* position -- and all the pairs I can think of
>involve involve either proper names of foreign origin or obscure Scrabble
>words.

The best pair I could come up with is _Confucian_ (with [esh]) vs.
_confusion_ (with [ezh]).

Paul S. Cohen


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue May 15 09:04:13 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 15 May 2001 10:04:13 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.4.30.0105131029200.1015-100000@vesuri.Helsinki.FI>
Message-ID: <TUE.15.MAY.2001.100413.0100.>

--On Sunday, May 13, 2001 11:38 am +0300 Robert Whiting
<whiting at cc.helsinki.fi> wrote [in his recent PhD thesis ;-) ]

> But the fact remains that 'ether' is
> monomorphemic and 'either' is not (even if speakers don't realize
> it consciously).

Aw, come on, Bob.  I emphatically deny that 'either' is bimorphemic in
contemporary English, any more than 'feather' is.  It is *historically*
bimorphemic, of course, but that observation is neither here nor there.
Anyway, if we're looking at history, 'ether' is not monomorphemic either:
it's a transparent derivative of the Greek verbal root <aith-> 'burn'.
This root gave rise to a number of derivatives in Greek, including the one
leading to our word 'Ethiopia'.

By what right can you invoke one etymology but not another, when neither is
known to native speakers?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)


From g_sandi at hotmail.com  Tue May 15 21:50:36 2001
From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi)
Date: Tue, 15 May 2001 21:50:36 -0000
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <TUE.15.MAY.2001.215036.0000.>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
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From edsel at glo.be  Mon May 14 10:50:30 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 12:50:30 +0200
Subject: Pelasgian/was Etruscans
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.125030.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas G Kilday" <acnasvers at hotmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2001 7:40 AM

[Ed Selleslagh]

Thank you for this interesting contribution.

> The simple word occurs only in Gen. 6:14, but the derivative <gophriyth>
> 'sulfur, brimstone' (presumably named after similarity to burning
> tree-resin) is found 7 times in the OT. The usage of the simple word in the
> compound suggests that <go:pher> actually means 'resin', perhaps a specific
> (fragrant?) type.
> DGK

[Ed]

Note that when yellow sulphur is heated it turns into a black thick and sticky
stuff, very similar to pitch. Yellow powder is the stable form at room
temperature, but the pitch form is extremely slow in reverting to the more
stable form when cooled down.

What about the idea that <go:pher> (or its Pelasgian or whatever parent)
originally meant "glue", "sticky stuff" or even "goo" ?  After all, already in
the Neolithic, resin vel sim. was used to stick flint points to arrows etc...


From r.piva at swissonline.ch  Tue May 15 22:16:31 2001
From: r.piva at swissonline.ch (Renato Piva)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 00:16:31 +0200
Subject: Pelasgian/was Etruscans
Message-ID: <WED.16.MAY.2001.001631.0200.>

Hebr. go:pher may well mean cypressus, but also any other resinous tree, while
gr. kyparissos needs no further definition. Besides that, if a solution within
IE is possible, then one should prefer this reconstructed solution to any
hypothesis of substrate or borrowing. We therefore should consider the fact
that -issos may be reconstructed as from *-iskos, with no substrate involved.

All of these words have been analysed by R. Lanszweert, Papyros: ein
mykenisches Schimpfwort?. Indogermanica et Caucasica. Festschrift K.H.Schmidt,
ed. R.  Bielmeier and R. Stempel, Berlin and N. York 1994, 77-96. On p. 82, R.
Lanszweert reconstructs IE *pk'u-perih2 "Schafspiess" (i.e. "spit for
sheep-meat") for Greek kypeiron, kyperos, kypairos "Name einer Wiesenpflanze
mit aromatischer Wurzel, 'Zyperngras, Cyperus longus rotundus'". From prehist.
Greek *ku-parjo, the name of the tree kyparissos, developed through analogy of
shape:  a tree looking like a spit or a spear.

Lanszweert doesn't say anything about the name of the island, but I think that
Cyprus was named after the copper mines and bronze production (as far as I
remember, copper bars were pike-shaped, but I may be wrong). For details see
Lanszweert.

R. Piva

Douglas G Kilday wrote:

[ moderator snip ]

> All three variants (Lat. cupressus, Gk. kuparissos, Heb. go:pher) are most
> likely derived from pre-Greek substrate, which I have been calling
> "Pelasgian", also known as "Aegean" or "Aegeo-Anatolian". The Latin spelling
> with cypr- reflects a belief (probably mistaken) that the word was borrowed
> from Greek.

[ moderator snip ]


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Mon May 14 17:35:17 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 12:35:17 -0500
Subject: Etruscans
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.123517.0500.>

Dear Douglas and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas G Kilday" <acnasvers at hotmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2001 11:11 PM

<snip>

> Yes, psychotropic substances can spread like wildfire, along with the words
> which denote them: hence the difficulty in finding the linguistic source of
> "wine" (not to mention "hemp").

<snip>

[PCR]
I have heard the idea that *wei-no- is not native IE but it has always puzzled
me to know why this view is held.

To my way of thinking, it obviously means simply 'vine'.

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 larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Wed May 16 12:38:03 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 13:38:03 +0100
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <004e01c0dc65$7701fb00$3a05703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <WED.16.MAY.2001.133803.0100.>

--On Monday, May 14, 2001 12:12 pm +0200 Eduard Selleslagh <edsel at glo.be>
wrote:

> As a non-linguist I wonder if the personal endings of verbs (the person
> marker), which are basically remnants of suffixed pronouns, cannot be
> viewed as an indication that PIE was actually verb-initial
> (verb-[suffixed]S-O), at least with pronouns as subject?

Most of you will be acquainted with W. P. Lehmann's book arguing that PIE
must have been an SOV language with typical SOV syntax.  After that book
appeared, someone -- I think it was Paul Friedrich, but I'm not sure, and I
apologize if I've got this wrong -- wrote a riposte, in which he argued
that PIE must have been VSO.  This article was mischievous in tone, and the
author made it clear that he was writing only as a devil's advocate, in
order to show that a plausible case could be made for VSO order, if anybody
wanted to do that.  I think the article was in Lingua, but I can't remember
that either.  Gad -- why have I forgotten so much stuff?

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  Wed May 16 06:26:40 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 06:26:40 -0000
Subject: Olives/was: Lactose Intolerance/Renfrew
Message-ID: <WED.16.MAY.2001.062640.0000.>

Patrick C. Ryan (7 May 2001) wrote:

>For whatever it may contribute to the discussion, I think there is a fair
>possibility that *eleiwa: can be analyzed as consisting of *el-, 'brown' +
>*eiwa:, 'yew', itself a composite of *ei-, 'red' + **we/o-, 'berry'. Please
>notice the double asterisks for **we/o-; I am aware that it would be difficult
>to prove this root from inside IE.

Two difficulties: First, the Greek forms have -ai-, not -ei-. The latter is
attested in the Etruscan form, but that is almost certainly borrowed from
Greek. The same diphthongal shift is found in Etr. Eivas 'Ajax' from Gk.
Aiwas, Eita 'Hades' from Aide:s, Creice 'Greek' from *Graikos (Lat.
Graecus), etc.

Second, reflexes of *eiw- in the sense 'yew' are restricted to Germanic (OE
i:w, OHG i:wa, NHG Eibe), Celtic (OIr e:o, Welsh yw, Corn. hiuin, Bret.
ivin), Late Latin glosses (ivu, ivum) presumed of Celtic origin, and
Gallo-Romance (e.g. Fr. top. Les Ifs 'The Yews'). Greek has (s)mi:lax, Latin
taxus. This usage of *eiw- was apparently "coined" when North European
IE-speakers moved west into yew-country, so it's hard to envision it being
the base of *elaiw- 'olive'. As for the etymology, I don't rule out a
compound such as *ei-we/o-, but it seems equally plausible to regard PIE
*eiw- as meaning simply 'berry' or 'berry-tree', with the o-grade *oiw-
behind Lat. u:va 'grape'.

The distribution of the yew (Taxus baccata) has some bearing on the IE
homeland problem. The variety of yew-names in IE languages indicates that
the plant was unknown to PIE-speakers. According to the map at
www.conifers.org, the yew is not found between the Carpathians and the
Urals, with the exception of Ciscaucasia, Crimea, and lowlands NW of Crimea.
Hence we don't want to put the homeland _too_ close to the Black Sea or the
Caucasus; it should be further north.

DGK


From bmscott at stratos.net  Wed May 16 06:38:00 2001
From: bmscott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 02:38:00 -0400
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
In-Reply-To: <l0313030eb7259ac713f2@[209.147.211.33]>
Message-ID: <WED.16.MAY.2001.023800.0400.>

On 14 May 2001, at 9:24, Rick Mc Callister wrote:

>  Is there a known etymology for <dama> and Greek <tame>?

For <tame>, Gk. <dama:n> 'to tame', and Lat. <doma:re>
'to tame, subdue' Watkins (2000) gives PIE *demH2-.

Brian M. Scott


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu May 17 03:46:39 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 23:46:39 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <WED.16.MAY.2001.234639.EDT.>

<< In a message dated 5/13/01 11:00:09 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:
> Someone, a relatively disinterested outsider, might take this alone to
> undermine the idea that there was any necessary connection between the names
> for elk, red deer and fallow deer and any particular types of deer.

In a message dated 5/16/2001 12:00:14 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com writes:
<<-- any _single_ instance is not conclusive.  The probabilities become
conclusive for all practical purposes when you add together _all_ the
instances. >>

I appreciate that point-of-view.  But understand that I cannot address ALL
the probabilities all at once.  Unfortunately, these statements about animals
can be asserted in one sentence.  But it wouldn't be productive to examine
them critically all in one sentence.  There wouldn't be much point in saying,
no, they don't.

Imagine how you'd feel if I wrote that a computer analysis of 45 plant words,
taken all together, have just pretty much proven that IE originated in the
Levant.  I'm sure you would want to look into the details before you bought
anything.

It seems to me that the fundamental flaw in most of these animal names is the
assumption that they held a single meaning for as much as 3000 years among
peoples who had no writing, no picture books, no schools, no biology
departments and no encyclopedias.   And once their meaning shifted, they're
usefulness in telling us about local fauna loses a lot of weight.  Because if
they shifted once they could have shifted a dozen times.  And because, given
thousands of years, these speakers may have been using the same phonetics,
but talking about something completely different, time and time again.

I know you don't agree with that, but all I ask is that you consider how
someone else might see this as a weakness in the proposition.

Regards,
Steve Long


From colkitto at sprint.ca  Wed May 16 12:54:07 2001
From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 08:54:07 -0400
Subject: Fallow Deer - it gets worse
Message-ID: <WED.16.MAY.2001.085407.0400.>

Steve Long:

>>> Consider, for example, that when English speakers came to America, they
>>> impliedly misppplied the very deer names mentioned above ......  Anyone
>>> familiar with these two types of deer, not just in appearance but also in
>>> terms of what they output, will know how big a miscue this was.  What is
>>> striking here is that IE speakers were giving animals they were supposedly
>>> already quite familiar with completely opposite names.

There's a more recent, and illustrative, example from settlement in
Australia.  The Tasmanian Wolf and the mysterious Queensland marsupial tger
are less closely related to wolves and tigers than humans are (and one might
note that the earliest settlers probably only knew wolves from fairy tales,
rather than as a real animal, let alone the tigers)

Cf. the folksong (all of which I do not remember)

"... wolves and tigers upon Van Diemen's land"

Robert Orr


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu May 17 03:54:21 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 23:54:21 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer/ The Original *Kerwos?
Message-ID: <WED.16.MAY.2001.235421.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/16/2001 12:24:09 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com writes:

<< -- you're missing the point entirely.  The lack of a term for fallow deer in
I.E. languages _outside_ the prehistoric range of the fallow deer has _nothing
to do_ with the argument.... Fallow deer _are_ present in Anatolia, and they
_are_ present in Greece, and they _are_ present in Italy, and they _are_
present in the Iranian plateau from extremely early times...  But the
Indo-European languages _of those areas_ lack cognate terms for fallow deer;...
That is, Italic, Greek, Anatolian, and Indo-Iranian lack such terms.  And if
those languages had spread from a center _in Anatolia_, then a term for "fallow
deer", which would have been in continuous use, should be reconstructible to
PIE.  It should show up in Anatolian I.E., Italic, Greek, and Indo-Iranian,
which would be more than enough for inclusion in the I.E.  lexicon.  And it
doesn't.

Whereas terms for red deer, etc. _are_ reconstructible to PIE.>>

Heartfelt convictions sometimes make us avoid seeing the real issues.

The real issue here is that the reconstructible PIE words for red deer may
have in fact originally also referred to the fallow deer.  Or may even have
started as words for the fallow deer.

Hittite, "kurala", may have referred to a fallow deer.  I have nothing that
indicates otherwise.  Ivanov has it that another possible "I.E. deer word",
"hartagga", in Hittite referred specifically to a bear.  CD Buck says that
the word used especially for a deer in Sanskrit was "mr:ga", which looks a
lot like the horse word "marka".  (BTW, in Slavic, deer is "jelen" (cf.,
Pol.,"zielony", green, definitely not red; cf, Greek, "chalkeios") which
might connect it to the "yellow deer" which is what the fallow is called in
Iran.  "Fallow" might even suggest the same color connection.)

The Greeks don't seem to have a word for specifically the red deer or fallow
deer.  Xenophon in "On Hunting" and Aristotle in "On Animals" make no
distinction between kinds of deer, except male and female and fawn.
(Aristotle does seem to describe the Moose/European Elk, calling it
"hippelaphus", another horse name, which now stands for a subspecies of
cervus elaphus.)

I saw a while ago that there is a Turkish University (I think) on the web
that uses "the Hittite symbol" for deer as its emblem.  The symbol is in the
form of an "h" and the backward seraph absolutely looks just like the rack on
a mature fallow stag or a moose, certainly not a red deer.  If that was what
the original Anatolian speakers called a deer, than the deer words in I.E.
may have started with a fallow deer.

As to where the fallow deer "is" or rather was:  there is evidence that it
was imported into Sardinia and Sicily in the late neolithic.  The evidence
for it being in Europe otherwise is arguable, but Spassov writes that finding
the Romanian/Bulgarian herd settles whether there really was a native fallow
population in Europe since the ice age, showing that was otherwise not clear.
 The problem with the animal is the problem with the more modern word for the
animal.  The fallow may have been introduced into Greece as it apparently was
into northern Italy and the rest of Europe, as a semi-domesticate.  A number
of archaeologists in southeastern Europe have reported finding the remains of
"fallow roe deer" and "small, young elk antlers" in Greece and the Ukraine,
which doesn't help matters.  Mature moose and fallow both have palmated
antlers; red, roe and axis deer do not.

An objective observer might find it possible from all this that the name for
the fallow deer may not in fact be absent in I.E. languages.  That it might
in fact be the name for deer in I.E. languages, later specifically given to
the red deer in areas where the fallow was no longer found.

Since Indo-Iranian doesn't have the I.E. deer names, that doesn't help with
any deer name.  Italian doesn't count, apparently no native fallow.  And
Greek and Hittite don't seem to distinguish between fallow and red deer.  So,
yes, words for the fallow deer may be reconstructible back to PIE.  One of
them might be *ker-wo-s - if that word didn't refer to horned or antlered
animals in general.  The issue here is meaning, not phonology.

Now, stepping back, what can all that prove or disprove about Anatolia as the
origin of I.E. languages?  The fallow deer may look like it supports a
non-Anatolian origin.  But again, once we make ourselves get past the initial
glitter of the unsupported statement, once we look into the matter with some
care, the idea doesn't really carry that much substance.

Regards,
Steve Long


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Wed May 16 19:36:20 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 14:36:20 -0500
Subject: A Note on Beavers
In-Reply-To: <a7.e756a06.283336a7@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.16.MAY.2001.143620.0500.>

Here are some other possibilities along a similar semantic line in Spanish.

broca "embroidery hoop, type of nail, etc."
	1350 "sharp object, barbed object" [Corominas 1980]
	< Catalan broca [Corominas 1980]
	see Portuguese broca "drill, drill bit"
	< ? Celtic [Corominas 1980]
	< Latin < Celtic word for "pointed tool or weapon head"
	[Partridge 1958: 60]
	see Medieval Latin brocâre "to prick" < Celtic [Partridge 1958: 56]
	see Celtic brûko < *bruk-, *brak-, *brek- "to break"
	[Partridge 1958: 59]

broche "brooch", "stuck-up, aloof with equals & sycophantic to superiors
	(Costa Rica)"
	1633 [Corominas 1980]
	< French broche "jewel" [Corominas 1980]
	see Portuguese broche "brooch, clasp, stud"
	see broca "reel, drill" [Corominas 1980]
	< ? Celtic [Corominas 1980]
	see Vulgar Latin *brocca "spike, horn, tap" [Random House 1973: 171]
	see Medieval Latin broca [Random House 1973: 171]
	see Latin brocchus, broccus "bucktooth" [Random House 1973: 171]

brocheta "skewer"
	see French brochet "pike" [MacBain]
	see French broche "cooking spit" < Gaulish [wde 188-89]
	see Gaelic broc, Irish, early Irish brocc; Welsh, Cornish, broch;
	Breton broc'h "a badger" [MacBain]
	< Celtic *brokko-s; *bork-ko- "grey one" [MacBain]
	< Indo-European *bherk, *bhork "bright" [MacBain]
	see Greek phorkós "grey", Lithuanian berszti, English bright [MacBain]
	see French broche < Latin *brocca, "a spike, a spit"
	< Latin broccus "bucktooth, bucktoothed" [MacBain]
	see English broach, brooch [MacBain]
	see Greek brúkô "bite" [MacBain]
	Gaelic broc originally "biter, gripper" [MacBain]
	see Russian barsúku, Turkish porsuk, Magyar borz; or *brokko-s,
	< *bhrod-ko-s, Sanskrit bradhná "dun" [Bezzenberger cit. MacBain]
	see Latin broccus, brocchus "buckteeth" [Ernout & Meillet 118]
	< ? [Ernout & Meillet 118]
	see Roman surnames Brocchilô, Broccus, Brocchius, Broccgiânus,
	 Brocchîna, Brocchilla [Ernout & Meillet 118]

bronco "rough, rude, harsh. hoarse"
	1490 "piece, cut branch", "knot in wood" [Corominas 1980]
	see Portuguese bronco "coarse, stupid, dull"
	< Latin vulgar *bruncus [Corominas 1980]
	< broccus "sharp" + truncus "log" [Corominas 1980]
	see English branch [rmcc]

	perhaps from IE *bhrei, *bhri: "to cut, break" [Watkins (AMH IE
Roots) 1985: 9]
	BUT, of course IE /bh/ is supposed to go to Greek /ph/
	Any chance the Greek forms are loanwords from another IE language?

>Boy, beaver just doesn't seem to be a good candidate for a PIE word.
>Especially if it's supposed to come from something like "reddish-brown".
>You'd have to carry a Pantone color ring around in the woods with you to tell
>reddish-brown animals apart.  And what was unique about the beaver or the
>beaver's fur was not it's color, which is variable.

>There seems to be an extremely transparent meaning in Greek that would be
>hard to miss if it wasn't assumed the word was PIE.  <brucho:> and <bruko>
>means to chew, to gnaw, to grind, to eat noisily.  <bruchetos> is chattering
>of teeth.  <bruche:>, gnashing of teeth.  <diabro:sis>, eating through,
>chewing, erosion.  <diabro:ma>, that which is eaten through.

><bibro:sko:> means to eat up, chew up; in its passive forms, e.g.,
><bebro:oetai>,  <bebro:menoi>, something that is eaten, gnawed or chewed up.
><rhiza bebro:menoi> is, e.g., "worm-eaten."  (The <bi-/be-> prefix might also
>be considered causal  - e.g., bibazo:, bebaioo: < baino:.)  Also related are
><bebro:thois>, chew up; <brugde:n>, with clenched teeth.  <bruchiao:> is
>chatter or some related defect of speech.

>If there's anything about a beaver in living form, it's them mighty incisors
>and the work they do.

[snip]

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


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Thu May 17 07:04:39 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 03:04:39 EDT
Subject: A Note on Beavers
Message-ID: <THU.17.MAY.2001.030439.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/16/01 2:25:15 AM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com
writes:

> The Beaver definitely appears to be a native of Anatolia.

-- not of, as I said, most of Anatolia.

> Boy, beaver just doesn't seem to be a good candidate for a PIE word.

-- it's generally accepted.  If you have any evidence to the contrary, please
state.

> Especially if it's supposed to come from something like "reddish-brown".

-- our word for "bear" comes from a term meaning "the brown one".  That
doesn't make it any less a word for "bear".  That is elementary linguistics.

> There seems to be an extremely transparent meaning in Greek that would be
> hard to miss if it wasn't assumed the word was PIE.

-- proven, not assumed.

> But the Greek words above don't come from the beaver.

-- the PIE word for "beaver" was *bhebhrus.

>From which Galish "bebru", Avestan "bawra, Lithuanian "bebras", etc.

> Based on all the above, I think that one might guess that the application of
> the bebr- word to the beaver is late.

-- no.  Securely placeable in PIE and with cognates in Celtic, Germanic,
Italic, and Indo-Iranian.


From hwhatting at hotmail.com  Wed May 16 12:57:42 2001
From: hwhatting at hotmail.com (Hans-Werner Hatting)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 14:57:42 +0200
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <WED.16.MAY.2001.145742.0200.>

Original message:

>From: "David L. White" <dlwhite at texas.net>
>Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 08:30:40 -0500

(snip)

>> First, Anglo-Romani.  According to T and K, this consists of wholly Romani
>> lexis plus wholly English grammar.  According to David White's proposal,
>> then, Anglo-Romani is English, since it has English verbal morphology.  Is
>> this a satisfactory conclusion so far?

>     Yes.

>> Now, consider how Anglo-Romani came into existence.  I assume it didn't
>> spring into being overnight, but must have evolved gradually.  So there are
>> broadly two possibilities.

>> First, Anglo-Romani started off as plain English, but was gradually
>> relexified from Romani until no English lexis was left.  According to
>> David's proposal, this *must* be what happened, since the alternative below
>> seems to be impossible.

>         Yes.

>> Second, Anglo-Romani started off as Romani, but it gradually borrowed more
>> and more grammar from English, until there was no Romani grammar left.
>> Under David's proposal, this appears to be impossible, since the language,
>> in this scenario, has shifted from having Romani verbal morphology to having
>> English verbal morphology -- seemingly in conflict with the proposal on the
>> table, which sees verbal morphology as inviolate.  It also, of course, has
>> the peculiar consequence that Anglo-Romani has changed from being Romani to
>> being English -- an outcome surely more bizarre than anything contemplated
>> in T and K.

>         Yes, that is why I favor the first.

(snip)

Let me put in some information I recollect from a seminary on Romani I
attended way back at university:

1. English gypsies were speaking a version of Romani with *Romani* grammar
when they immigrated into England;

2. Gradually, they started to use English among themselves, and English also
became the language taught to children;

3. Nowadays, English Romani (with Romani lexicon and English morphology) is
a "secret" group languages into which speakers - who have English as first
language - are initiated by older speakers.

If this information is correct, English Romani is indeed basically English
relexified with Romani vocabulary. We have a case of language change where
the lexicon of the old language is preserved for special purposes. English
Romani goes farther than most other secret languages (like German
"Rotwelsch" or Russsian "blat", in which the basic function words (pronouns,
conjunctions, auxiliaries etc.) are normally from the "base" language which
provides the morphology), but essentially the same principle is at work - a
secret language is formed by relexifying a "base language" from other
sources.

Best regards,
H. W. Hatting


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Fri May 18 06:50:40 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 18 May 2001 02:50:40 EDT
Subject: European Genetics/IE
Message-ID: <FRI.18.MAY.2001.025040.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/16/2001 1:12:27 AM, philjennings at juno.com writes:
<< I have read Steve Long's reasoned and temperate remarks on the "urheimat
animals" issue and I'd be interested in his take, or anyone else's, regarding
the work of Dr. Martin Richards as reported in the NY Times 11/14/2000 under
the title "The Origin of the Europeans."  Since Dr. Renfrew is quoted in this
article, I take it that the Anatolian-originists have grown comfortable with
Richards' findings:... I assume from my reading of Renfrew that the
Anatolian-wave-of-advance theorists would have preferred the ratios to have
been otherwise,...

A couple of things to be aware of:
1. Back in 1987, Renfrew was coming off of Ammerman & Cavalli-Sforza (1984)
"The Neolithic Transition and the Genetics of Populations in Europe."  In
that work, Cavalli-Sforza proposed that the European genetic population
structure was determined mainly by population dispersal in the Neolithic, by
a process called in that book "Neolithic demic diffusion."

The mass migration of agriculturalists described by Cavalli-Sforza and
adopted by Renfrew does not seem to fit the picture anymore.  Not that the
coming of the neolithic and Near Eastern practices did not completely revamp
every aspect of life for Europeans during that time (including possibly
language.)  It's just that it is looking like neolithization was mainly a
"conversion," not a migration.

Renfrew has repeatedly said that his ideas work either way and I suppose so.
More importantly, at least that means he's not out of sync with many of the
archaeologists (e.g., Zwelbil, Bogucki) who have there hands in the dirt - as
Renfrew once did - who are finding strong evidence that large mesolithic
populations adopted agriculture, sometimes slowly, well after
agriculturalists showed up.  And that those converting agriculturalists may
often have been natives themselves.

Good updates are "Europe's First Farmers", ed by T. Douglas Price, (Cambridge
UP 2000) and "The Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eu
rasia", ed by D. Harris (Smithsonian 1996).  There is some big news that just
broke about an LBK settlement found out of the way in northern Germany, which
seems to confirm that vigorous mesolithic cultures came around only after a
period of direct exposure.

Interestingly, there is a lot of evidence that these mesolithic peoples
adopted neolithic styles and rituals before they actually started herding
domesticated animals and raising domesticated plants.  In Britain, they
appear to be honoring cattle and grains and building neolithic-style houses,
but still living on wild game and fish.  This jives with Sheratt's suggestion
that conversion to the Near Eastern style may have less to do with economic
productivity and more to do with the introduction of beer and such.

2. Aside from Richards, there is an important report to be aware of and that
is "The Genetic Legacy of Paleolithic Homo sapiens sapiens in Extant
Europeans: A Y Chromosome Perspective",  Semino, Passarino, Oefner, Lin,
Arbuzova, Beckman, Benedictis, Francalacci, Kouvatsi, Limborska, Marciki,
Mika,  Primorac, Santachiara-Benerecetti, Cavalli-Sforza, Underhill,
published in SCIENCE (November 10, 2000).  I have a PDF of this report if
anyone would like to see it.

In that report, the Y chromosome approach appears to produce a slightly
larger ancient heritage from the Near East among modern Europeans.  There is
also a small window left open for the Kurgan hypothesis due to a more recent
gene variant.  The report states:

"Haplotype Eu19 has been also observed at substantial frequency in northern
India and Pakistan as well as in Central Asia. Its spread may have been
magnified by the expansion of the Yamnaia culture from the 'Kurgan culture'
area (present-day southern Ukraine) into Europe and eastward, resulting in
the spread of the Indo-European language. An alternative hypothesis of a
Middle Eastern origin of Indo-European languages was proposed on the basis of
archaeological data." (citing Mallory and Renfrew).

It SHOULD be noted though that this 'Kurgan' gene moving west practically
stops dead in Poland and Hungary and as the reports says, "is virtually
non-existent in Western Europe" as well as rare in Greece.

Also, Cavalli-Sforza has not been very good at archaeological data and is
apparently unaware of strong evidence of the massive Scythian incursions into
eastern Europe starting about 600BC that practically wipe out Halstatt east
of the Tisza River and in most of Poland and create a virtual no-man's land
in that area for a few centuries.  Obviously no genes can be carried in empty
territory and that would suggest that Eu19 reflects later "Indo-Iranian"
migrations (e.g., Scythian and Sarmatian) into eastern Europe as well as it
does anything to do with Yama (which of course is also "archaeological data"
and currently seems to be dating no earlier than 2000BC.)

3. In, "Genetics and the population history of Europe,"  PNAS January 2, 2001,
Barbujani and Bertorelle argue that Richards data actually supports the mass
migration of neolithic agriculturalists as the main origin of the modern
European population.  They argue that variations attributed to the
paleolithic are actually more recent development and due to local founder
effect.  I also have a PDF of this paper.

4. In the archives of this list you'll find a theory, best articulated by
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal, that pre-dates Renfrew's, and that originates the
earlier ancestor of IE languages in Anatolia, but I believe places PIE or
*PIE on the Danube in connection with Tripolye culture.  Renfrew, who did
brilliant work many decades ago, does not always seem to be up-to-date on
many of these issues, either genetic, linguistic or archaeological.  What
seems to drive the Anatolian theory is not any particular theorist or
spokesperson, but rather it seems the continuous accumulation of evidence
from various sources that seem to support it, whether or not those sources
are aware of it.

philjennings at juno.com also writes:
<<Once this concession is made (if it is made) how does one argue
intelligently that the language transferred completely?  If there are no
evidences of PIE ever being a creole, as some people say they can
demonstrate, doesn't that make it likely that PIE was the language of the
indigenous post-Gravettians, rather than the language they learned from their
agricultural tutors?  Part-time hunters living in isolated Balkan family
homesteads did not, after all, make the total life-style conversion to
farming villages/pueblos.  These same scattered living arrangements must have
made it difficult to learn a new language well or completely.>>

Remember that with the Anatolian hypothesis, you are talking about 3500 years
between the IE's expansion across Europe and the first written evidence of an
IE language in Europe.  That would be, at 5 generations per hundred years,
about 700 generations for the language family to win someone over in the
family.  Another factor is the unifying effect of neolithization.  No other
single event in European cultural pre-history covered anywhere close to so
much of Europe and created trade networks anything like it.  Paleolithic
migrations arguably did not end up bringing people from a core source into
Europe and mesolithic cultures were relatively localized.  Finally, scattered
living arrangements don't seem to be the rule.  It seems that close
settlements along rivers and other trade routes were true for the great
majority of the population in mesolithic and neolithic times.

hope this helps

Regards,
Steve Long


From sarima at friesen.net  Wed May 16 13:51:20 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 06:51:20 -0700
Subject: Three-Way Contrast of Secondary Articulations in PIE
In-Reply-To: <00ed01c0dcab$567c9f20$06474241@patrickr>
Message-ID: <WED.16.MAY.2001.065120.0700.>

At 02:23 PM 5/14/01 -0500, proto-language wrote:

>[PCR]
>Surely this needs a rethink. This might work if CVC-roots had only ONE
>root-extension but your scenario means that an IE-speaker would have to
>abstract CVC from a CVCC root in order to add other root-extensions.
>Frankly, I don't think so.

I am not quite sure what you are getting at here.  Why do you keep going
back to root-extensions when I do not ever mention them?

I see no reason to postulate an *active* process of root extension in PIE -
or at least not a common process of that sort.  Most variant root
extensions could either be inherited from the pre-PIE stage (from *older*
suffixes), or be due to individual development in the various separate
languages.  (For instance variations of the -k/-g sort look to me like
inter-dialect borrowings from *after* the breakup of the proto-language).

For those CVC roots that only occur with various extensions, I am not even
sure there is any evidence that the PIE speakers were aware of them as
such.  I would tend to treat them as effectively separate roots unless
there is some evidence of PIE phase awareness of the base.  But either way,
the extensions by themselves are sufficient to establish differentiation,
so no further means is necessary. A CVC root with extensions is no longer
truly homophonous with another such root with different extensions.

The sorts of suffixes I see as being productive in PIE were the *stem*
formatives and verbal suffixes of the *-ske- sort, rather than the extensions.

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


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Wed May 16 09:28:16 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 09:28:16 -0000
Subject: Etruscan / Pelasgian
Message-ID: <WED.16.MAY.2001.092816.0000.>

philjennings at juno.com (27 Apr 2001) wrote:

>Dr. White also explains the wide dispersion of -assos names (like Tartessos)
>as possibly due to later Greek mediation.  It is in fact extreme to think of
>early Pelasgians in Spain.  But the name Tarhuntassa came and went before the
>Greeks came snooping very far into Asia Minor.  Some kind of pre-Greek
>dispersion really did happen.

Yes, this would be an extreme view. Tarte:ssos can hardly be of Pelasgian
origin. The suffix (if it is that) was probably reworked by Greeks to
conform to familiar toponyms like Hume:ssos.

>I am friendly to the idea of a dispersion of an originally unified linguistic
>community into Italy, Greece and Asia Minor.  I can see why those focused on
>Asia Minor might talk of Anatolians, and those focused on Greece might talk of
>Pelasgians.  I'm sure the people directly involved would have been surprised
>to hear themselves described by either term.

>Anatolian is sometimes held to be so early that it is on sister-sister terms
>with the entire remainder of IE.  Perhaps Pelasgian can have the distinct
>qualities Kilday gives it, if it is acknowledged as a third sister, close
>enough to Anatolian to be joined at the hip.  (Er, "joined at the assos?")

Well, I find the "three sisters" more appealing than the "right fork".
Presumably all three (Narrow PIE, Proto-Hittite, and Proto-Pelasgian)
originated somewhere north of the Black Sea. Pelasgians (sensu lato) were
the first to migrate SW around the Black Sea, leaving toponyms on the Danube
and phytonyms in pre-Dacian, then spreading west into south-central Europe
and east into coastal Anatolia and beyond.  Narrow IE-speakers expanded west
into central Europe and east into central Asia. Proto-Hittites must have
stayed put until the late 3rd mill. BCE, when they too came SW around the
Black Sea into Anatolia. (One thing missing from the debate on this list is
what speakers of "Anatolian IE" were doing before they intruded into
Anatolia, if indeed they did so.)

Linguistically, it should be noted that "Pelasgian" is much further removed
from "Narrow PIE" than "Anatolian IE" is. The failure of the "IE
Pelasgianists" (Georgiev, van Windekens, et al.) to convince anyone but
themselves is a strong reason _not_ to regard "Pelasgian" as a branch of IE.
Nevertheless, out of several hundred proposed "IE Pelasgian" etymologies,
about a dozen look like genuine cognates.

OTOH Etruscan is so far removed from anything looking like IE that I see no
hope of regarding it as a "fourth sister". As for the proposal that
Proto-Etruscan was a creole with non-IE lexicon and PIE grammar, how do we
explain the fact that Etruscan grammar is thoroughly non-IE?

DGK


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Fri May 18 15:19:27 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Fri, 18 May 2001 15:19:27 -0000
Subject: Pelasgian/was Etruscans
Message-ID: <FRI.18.MAY.2001.151927.0000.>

Renato Piva (16 May 2001) wrote:

>Hebr. go:pher may well mean cypressus, but also any other resinous tree, while
>gr. kyparissos needs no further definition. Besides that, if a solution within
>IE is possible, then one should prefer this reconstructed solution to any
>hypothesis of substrate or borrowing.

If you give me enough elbow-room, I'll give you IE etymologies of Hanukkah,
moccasin, and boomerang. A solution within IE is always possible. It isn't
necessarily the most plausible. In my opinion, what "one should prefer" is
the solution with the fewest special assumptions. If we look at Gk.
<leirion> ~ Lat. <li:lium>, Gk. <peirins> ~ Lat. <pi:lentum>, Gk. <kedros> ~
Lat. <citrus>, etc. we can make one assumption and derive the words from
substrate, or we can make a set of assumptions to rationalize irregular
development from PIE or peculiar borrowing between branches of IE. My guess
is that most IEists, who take pride in regular sound-correspondences, would
rather invoke substrate than postulate a bunch of funny stuff happening to a
group of words within IE.

>We therefore should consider the fact that -issos may be reconstructed as from
>*-iskos, with no substrate involved.

Then why are there still Greek words in -iskos?

>All of these words have been analysed by R. Lanszweert, Papyros: ein
>mykenisches Schimpfwort?. Indogermanica et Caucasica. Festschrift K.H.Schmidt,
>ed. R. Bielmeier and R. Stempel, Berlin and N. York 1994, 77-96. On p. 82, R.
>Lanszweert reconstructs IE *pk'u-perih2 "Schafspiess" (i.e. "spit for
>sheep-meat") for Greek kypeiron, kyperos, kypairos "Name einer Wiesenpflanze
>mit aromatischer Wurzel, 'Zyperngras, Cyperus longus rotundus'". From prehist.
>Greek *ku-parjo, the name of the tree kyparissos, developed through analogy of
>shape:  a tree looking like a spit or a spear.

Very ingenious, but does anyone besides R. Lanszweert take R. Lanszweert
seriously? Can he pronounce his own reconstructions? How common is the
typology of ejectives with laryngeals? Perhaps this paper should have been
subtitled "Woerterschimpf". And if <kupeiron> and <kuparissos> are related
as implied here, why is resemblance to a sheep-spit a more plausible
connection than aromaticity? For that matter, how distinctive is a
sheep-spit compared to a goat-spit, hog-spit, or (most aptly) bull-spit?

>Lanszweert doesn't say anything about the name of the island, but I think that
>Cyprus was named after the copper mines and bronze production (as far as I
>remember, copper bars were pike-shaped, but I may be wrong). For details see
>Lanszweert.

So copper got its name from the shape of the bars, which reminded speakers
of pikes, which in turn reminded them of spit-shaped trees, etc., etc.
Somehow, substratal derivation just got a lot more palatable.

DGK


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Sat May 19 16:21:19 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 16:21:19 -0000
Subject: Pelasgian Place-names
Message-ID: <SAT.19.MAY.2001.162119.0000.>

Rick Mc Callister (7 May 2001) wrote:

>	Would the source of Latin tarquin- /tarkwin, tar_qu_in/ & Etruscan
>tarchun /tarkhun?, tarxun?/ be something like /tarhwin, tarxwin/ ?

I would guess something like [tarkhun.-] where [n.] had the quantity of a
short syllable and sounded like /in/ to Latin-speakers. Etruscan gentilicia
based on this stem never have <i> written before <n>, nor <v> in place of
<u>. The reduction of [u] to [w] must have occurred in the Latin form,
[tarkwin-] from *[tarkuin-].

Similarly Etr. Armne must have been something like [arm.n.e] (cf. Lat.
Ariminum). Rasna must have had a "long" nasal, [rasn:a] (Gk. Rasenna).
Length of nasals was evidently allophonic in Etruscan, whose orthography
does not distinguish [n:] and [n.] from initial/final [n].

>	Early Latin had an /h/, and borrowed Greek /kh/ was usually
>transcribed as <ch>, so I'm guessing the <qu-> had to come from something
>else

Early Latin /h/ was probably closer to [x] or (unvoiced) [W] than to the
simple aspiration [h]. Archaic texts don't show aspirated stops (triumpe,
Bacanal, etc.); the aspiration was generally dropped in pre-classical
borrowings. The names Tarchunie and Thanchvil entered Latin in the 6th cent.
BCE, so the forms Tarquinius and Tanaquil lack any written indication of
aspiration. OTOH the classical poets heard and represented aspiration, so
Etr. Tarchu became Lat. Tarcho(n).

>	Or is it possible that Etrucan <chu-> was a conventional spelling
>for /khw-/?

Not likely, since Etruscan orthography _usually_ distinguishes the semivowel
(written F, transcribed <w>) from the vowel (written V, transcribed <u>).
Some inscriptions (mostly from marginal areas) use the vowel-sign for both,
as Latin does. Hence Lat. Quintus usually becomes Etr. Cvinte, but sometimes
is written Cuinte. Anyhow, there are plenty of examples of <-chv-> for
/-khw-/ in epitaphs of women named Thanchvil.

DGK


From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi  Thu May 17 11:17:07 2001
From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting)
Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 14:17:07 +0300
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <69681205.3198507544@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <THU.17.MAY.2001.141707.0300.>

On Thu, 10 May 2001, Larry Trask wrote:

> --On Sunday, May 6, 2001 2:29 pm +0300 Robert Whiting
> <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:

>> To make it clear what my statement was about:  My entire point was that
>> [T] and [D] do not contrast in initial position in English.  My
>> statement was not about whether [T] and [D] are phonemes in English or
>> not.  The two are not necessarily related ([T] and [D] can still be
>> phonemes even if they don't contrast in some environments).

> OK; I'll bite.  I will argue that [T] and [D] *do* contrast in initial
> position in English.  It is merely that we happen to have no good minimal
> pairs for /T/ and /D/ in the language at present -- a completely different
> matter.

> To begin with, 'thigh' and 'thy' are a perfect minimal pair, *if* we accept
> that 'thy' is a word of modern English -- which you may not want to accept.

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 'tauchen'.  If [T] and [D] contrast in 'thigh' and 'thy',
then so do [c,] and [x] in German.

> But there are a number of near-minimal pairs:

>   this / thistle
>   they / Thalia (also 'theta' in US accents)
>   that / thatch
>   these / thesis
>   thus / thumb
>   though / Thor

> The absence of minimal pairs is a historical accident, no more.  I have
> come across an actress with the first name 'Thandy'.  I see no reason to
> suppose her friends would hesitate to call her 'Than', with /T/, producing
> a perfect minimal pair with 'than' (strong form).

It is not a minimal pair as long as there is a morpheme boundary involved.
Unless, of course, you claim that morpheme boundaries are not phonological
conditions.  And every one of your near minimal pairs involves a morpheme
boundary after [D].

> The point is not whether minimal pairs exist.  The point is whether the
> distribution of [T] and [D] can be stated purely in terms of phonological
> environments.  Since no such distributional rule exists, /T/ and /D/
> contrast in word-initial position, in spite of the lack of minimal pairs.

You stick by your contention that morpheme boundaries are not phonological
conditions then?

> The observation that initial [D] occurs only in "grammatical" words and
> initial [T] only in "lexical" words is just that: an observation.

Quite true.  But the observation that morphemes are units of meaning is,
I think, more than an observation.  It is a basic principle of how human
language works.  Duality of patterning says that morphemes are made up of
phonemes and that morphemes have meaning (iconically, indexically, or
symbolically) but that phonemes do not have any inherent meaning.  Initial
[D] in English is a morpheme because it has meaning associated with it.
Admittedly, it is grammatical meaning rather than lexical meaning, but
meaning nonetheless.

> It is not, so far as I can see, a rule of English phonology.

No, the fact that these are all function words is not particularly
phonologically significant.  The fact that they all begin with a
functional morpheme is.

> As an observation, it is on a par with the observation that the
> diphthong /oi/ never occurs in native English words, but only in
> borrowed words.

But is the diphthong /oi/ a morpheme?  What morphemic function do you
claim it has?

> If we English-speakers had first encountered Greek a couple of millennia
> later than we did, is there any reason to suppose that we would shrink from
> calling a certain Greek letter 'thelta' -- with /D/ -- instead of 'delta'?
> Or from extending this word to the mouth of a river?

If I had a brother, would he like mayonnaise?  If the universe didn't work
the way it does, would it work some other way?  Are questions about the
way things might be applicable to the way things are?

What you need to establish your point is not answers to questions like
"What would the world be like if Napoleon had conquered Russia?" but an
example of an initial [D] in English that is not a deictic or a pronoun
(i.e., does not begin with the pronominal/deictic morpheme).  It doesn't
even have to contrast with a word with initial [T].  Any word that begins
with [D] in which the [D] is not a morpheme would be sufficient to justify
your claim that the fact that all words in English that begin with [D] are
pronouns or deictics is mere coincidence and that the distribution of
initial [T] and [D] is not predictable by any phonological rule.

> By the way, is everybody happy that 'thus' is beyond question a grammatical
> word, and not a lexical word?

I have no problem with 'thus'.  It is as much a grammatical word as
'hence' or 'so', and it is clearly a deictic.  I have more problem with
'though' as a deictic, which I think is a borderline case.

> Take another case.  It is extremely difficult to find minimal pairs for
> [esh] and [ezh] in *any* position -- and all the pairs I can think of
> involve involve either proper names of foreign origin or obscure Scrabble
> words.  Would anybody therefore want to argue that [esh] and [ezh] are not
> two distinct phonemes -- just because we have no good minimal pairs, or
> just because the second occurs only in words of foreign origin?  If not,
> why should theta and eth be treated differently?

But whether [T] and [D] are separate phonemes is not the issue.  I thought
I had at least made that much clear.  Have you not had your second cup of
coffee yet?  Since you quoted my statement to this effect at the opening
of your posting, I don't see how else you could have missed it.  So any
arguments about whether lack of contrasts proves lack of phonemicity will
not be entertained because in the long run, there is no such thing as
"proof" that two sounds are not phonemes any more than there is "proof"
that two languages are not related.  One can only say that the evidence
that they are is inadequate.  So arguments about the lack of contrasts of
[S] and [Z] and whether this affects their phonemic status are completely
irrelevant to whether initial [T] and [D] contrast in English.

> Finally, I note that /n/ and [eng] *really* do not contrast in word-initial
> position in English, even though they contrast elsewhere.  The case of
> theta and eth does not appear to me to be similar.

No, it is not similar at all.  [eng] is prohibited phonotactically from
appearing in initial position in English (except in loan words; we've done
this before).  In this instance, [eng] behaves like a cluster rather than
a single segment.

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi


From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi  Thu May 17 12:02:54 2001
From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting)
Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 15:02:54 +0300
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <200105161023.f4GANGn16321@no-spam.it.helsinki.fi>
Message-ID: <THU.17.MAY.2001.150254.0300.>

On Mon, 14 May 2001 pausyl at AOL.COM wrote:

> On Thu, 10 May 2001 18:19:04 +0100, Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
> wrote:

>> --On Sunday, May 6, 2001 2:29 pm +0300 Robert Whiting
>> <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:

>>> To make it clear what my statement was about:  My entire point was that
>>> [T] and [D] do not contrast in initial position in English.  My
>>> statement was not about whether [T] and [D] are phonemes in English or
>>> not.  The two are not necessarily related ([T] and [D] can still be
>>> phonemes even if they don't contrast in some environments).

>> OK; I'll bite.  I will argue that [T] and [D] *do* contrast in initial
>> position in English.  It is merely that we happen to have no good minimal
>> pairs for /T/ and /D/ in the language at present -- a completely different
>> matter.

>> To begin with, 'thigh' and 'thy' are a perfect minimal pair, *if* we accept
>> that 'thy' is a word of modern English -- which you may not want to accept.

<snip>

> I'm actually on Larry Trask's side (for the most part) in this
> discussion, but I assume that the argument from Robert Whiting's side
> would be best stated in terms of "closed-class" vs. "open-class"
> words; _thus_ would seem to be in the closed class.  _thy_ is surely
> English (think of the "Lord's Prayer"), but it's also a closed-class
> item.

Closed-class is part of the definition of function or grammatical words.
See Fowler, _Understanding Language_ (1974), 199.

> And I would judge the Traskian point above about /oi/ never occurring
> in native English words, even if true, to be irrelevant to the
> discussion:

Entirely.

> It seems to me that no amount of introspection would help an
> intelligent (but linguistically untrained) native speaker of English
> to decide that _boy_ (the etymology of which is disputed) is a
> loanword; however, it seems plausible that that same speaker could
> uncover the fact that all words beginning with /D/ are "closed-class"
> or the like.

This is also irrelevant.  The fact that initial [D] occurs only in
function or grammatical (or closed-class) words is not what keeps initial
[T] and [D] from contrasting in English.  What keeps them from contrasting
is the fact that initial [D] in English is always a morpheme.

> Whether all this is relevant to the phonemicity of /D/ vs. /T/ is a
> completely different argument, however.

Thank you.  At least on person understands the issue.

> If we take that same "intelligent (but linguistically untrained)
> native speaker of English" as our judge again, it's clear that a
> minimal pair like "either" vs. "ether" would establish the phonemic
> distinction.

Only in some dialects.  But it is agreed that 'either' and 'ether' are
harder to dispose of.  But this is also irrelevant to whether initial
[T] and [D] contrast in English.

>> Take another case.  It is extremely difficult to find minimal pairs for
>> [esh] and [ezh] in *any* position -- and all the pairs I can think of
>> involve involve either proper names of foreign origin or obscure Scrabble
>> words.

> The best pair I could come up with is _Confucian_ (with [esh]) vs.
> _confusion_ (with [ezh]).

My favorite is 'assure', 'azure', and 'adjure'.  This only works for one
pronunciation of 'azure' however, rather like 'either' and 'ether'.  The
deciding thing for the phonemicity of /Z/ is that it appears to be an
allophone of both /z/ and /j/ (j with hachek) and there is a classical
phonological rule that says that allophones can only belong to one
phoneme.  Since an allophone can't belong to two different phonemes
without violating the bi-uniqueness rules, /Z/ must be a phoneme, at
least by classical phonological rules.

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri May 18 10:47:43 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 18 May 2001 11:47:43 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <E14zyWC-0004Ql-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <FRI.18.MAY.2001.114743.0100.>

--On Monday, May 14, 2001 10:21 pm -0400 pausyl at AOL.COM wrote:

[on the 'thigh'/'thy' question]

> I'm actually on Larry Trask's side (for the most part) in this discussion,
> but I assume that the argument from Robert Whiting's side would be best
> stated in terms of "closed-class" vs. "open-class" words; _thus_ would
> seem to be in the closed class.  _thy_ is surely English (think of the
> "Lord's Prayer"), but it's also a closed-class item.  And I would judge
> the Traskian point above about /oi/ never occurring in native English
> words, even if true, to be irrelevant to the discussion:  It seems to me
> that no amount of introspection would help an intelligent (but
> linguistically untrained) native speaker of English to decide that _boy_
> (the etymology of which is disputed) is a loanword; however, it seems
> plausible that that same speaker could uncover the fact that all words
> beginning with /D/ are "closed-class" or the like.

A very interesting point, but I wonder.  Naive native speakers of English
seem to have few if any intuitions about word classes.  Is there really any
evidence that such naive speakers are aware, or can readily become aware
without coaching, of the contrast between open and closed classes?

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  Wed May 16 14:26:16 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 09:26:16 -0500
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <WED.16.MAY.2001.092616.0500.>

Gabor Sandi wrote many sensible things, which I have omitted here.  I
can only make a few remarks, as a Germanist, confirming them.

1. Kuchen [ku.x at n] vs. Kuhchen [ku:ç@n] is not a minimal pair.  I've
said this before, but it bears repeating: there is a difference not only
in the medial fricative, but also in the length of the stressed vowel,
which must be attributed to the presence or absence of a morpheme
boundary.  So it tells us nothing about the status of [x ç], which could
perfect well be one phoneme, except that

2. They have now come to contrast in initial position, at least before
/a/, albeit only in loan words, and only for certain speakers.  I have
noticed this for some time, and am pleased that a Duden author has too.
This strongly favors the analysis as separate phonemes.

3. Separate analysis is also favored by the incontestable fact that
German speakers can, and easily do, hear the difference between them,
which is not typical of allophones.

4. In Rhenish dialects, [ç] has split from [x] and merged with /s^/.
This muddies the waters too.

5. Swiss dialects have only [x], never [ç].  More mud.

More discussion now?  German makes "thy thigh" look easy!

Leo Connolly


From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi  Thu May 17 12:58:29 2001
From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting)
Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 15:58:29 +0300
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <93893860.3198909853@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <THU.17.MAY.2001.155829.0300.>

On Tue, 15 May 2001, Larry Trask wrote:

> --On Sunday, May 13, 2001 11:38 am +0300 Robert Whiting
> <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi> wrote [in his recent PhD thesis ;-) ]

>> But the fact remains that 'ether' is
>> monomorphemic and 'either' is not (even if speakers don't realize
>> it consciously).

> Aw, come on, Bob.  I emphatically deny that 'either' is bimorphemic in
> contemporary English, any more than 'feather' is.  It is *historically*
> bimorphemic, of course, but that observation is neither here nor there.
> Anyway, if we're looking at history, 'ether' is not monomorphemic either:
> it's a transparent derivative of the Greek verbal root <aith-> 'burn'.
> This root gave rise to a number of derivatives in Greek, including the one
> leading to our word 'Ethiopia'.

> By what right can you invoke one etymology but not another, when neither is
> known to native speakers?

But I'm not invoking etymology (except to show that the morpheme boundary
really is there), I'm invoking perceptual categories.  Certainly there is
no productive morpheme boundary in either of these words, and if you read
the posting, then you know that I said as much.  I don't expect naive
native speakers to know about the morpheme boundary in 'either' in the
same way that they know about the morpheme boundary in 'running'.
Similarly, I wouldn't expect your average NNS to know that there is a
morpheme boundary in 'both' or that the 'th' of this word is the same
morpheme as in 'the'.

But whenever there is similarity in meaning, it is possible for speakers
to perceive a morphemic relationship, correct or not.  Thus I would expect
most NNS's to perceive the "-rage" of 'outrage' as the same morpheme as
'rage' (even though it isn't).  Similarly, I would expect them to connect
the "ful-" of 'fulsome' with the morpheme 'full' rather than 'foul'.  And
I wouldn't expect the NNS to connect the "lis-" of 'lissome' with 'lithe'
even if they might be able to connect 'bliss' with 'blithe'.

Try putting it to NNS's like this:

   Which of these words does not belong with the others:

      a) either
      b) other
      c) whether
      d) feather

and see what kind of response you get.  I'd do it myself, but I don't
have access to enough native speakers.  You could even slip it into an
exam and then ask "why?".  I would expect that most speakers would see a-c
as a unit, although it might be a long time before anyone says that they
form a group that all refer to "one thing of two."  Now I certainly
wouldn't expect NNS's to know that the -ther in these words is a reflex of
a PIE comparative suffix.  And, despite the similarity of meanings, I
wouldn't even expect them to know that 'other' and 'hetero-' are not just
anagrams but are cognates.  But I would expect them to be able to
recognize 'either', other', and 'whether' as belonging to the same class
and having a similar meaning.  And when you see similar meanings you tend
to perceive the common element in the words with similar meanings as a
morpheme.

So the answer to your question is that I don't expect them to know the
etymology of either word, but I do expect them to know that 'either'
belongs to a class of words that have similar meanings and share a "-ther"
element and that 'ether' does not belong to this group.  Whether that is
sufficient or not to claim that 'either' and 'ether' is not a minimal
contrast between [T] and [D] or not, I don't know, but this is essentially
beside the point.  The point is that the 'either' : 'ether' contrast has
too many ambivalencies to be unequivocal.  So just pick another example
to establish the contrast of intervocalic [T] and [D].

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi


From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi  Thu May 17 09:31:14 2001
From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting)
Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 12:31:14 +0300
Subject: thy thigh etc. (external sandhi in English)
In-Reply-To: <F66IIhs6hdn1KVHYS8Y0000118e@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <THU.17.MAY.2001.123114.0300.>

On Tue, 21 Nov 2000 Douglas G Kilday <acnasvers at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Leo A. Connolly (16 Nov 2000) writes:

<snip>

>> A few other points: How did _thy_ and _thigh_ differ before the
>> former developed a voiced fricative?  Easy: the Old English forms
>> were _thi:n_ and _the:oh_, where the final -h represented a velar
>> fricative.  The loss of the final consonants in these words seems
>> to be much later than the initial voicing.

> The loss of final consonants probably is later than the
> establishment of initial [T:D] distinction,

Not unless this distinction was firmly in place well before the
time of Chaucer.  The 'thy/thine' (and 'my/mine') allomorphic
distinction is already in evidence in very early ME, and final
[x] > 0 was accomplished by the time of Chaucer as shown by his
rhymes and spellings.  Indeed, one begins to get spellings of
'thigh' as early as 1200 which show the loss of [x] in this word.
So unless you can place the initial [T:D] distinction before
1200, this statement is unlikely to be true.

> but one should not assume that this distinction arose by the
> selective voicing of initial [T] to [D] in what Whiting loosely
> labels "function words".

First, the concept of "function words" is not a Whiting loose
label.  "Function word" and "content word" are technical terms
in grammatical theory, and hardly my invention.  You may, as you
claim, be unaware of the difference, but that does not mean that
there isn't one.  Any grammatical handbook or discussion of
grammar will explain the terms to you.  If you don't have one, a
dictionary will do.  Here are the definitions from Webster's
Collegiate Dictionary 10th edition (2000):

   function word n (1940) : a word (as a preposition, auxilliary
   verb, or conjunction) expressing primarily grammatical
   relationship

   content word n (1940) : a word that primarily expresses
   lexical meaning -- compare FUNCTION WORD

Interestingly, Webster's Encylopedic Unabridged Dictionary (1994)
has a longer definition of "function word":

   function word, a word, as a pronoun or preposition, that is
   used in a language as a substitute for another or as a marker
   of syntactic relationship; a member of a small, closed form
   class whose membership is relatively fixed.  Cf. empty word,
   full word.

but has no definition of "content word" using instead the term
"full word":

   full word, (esp. in Chinese grammar) a word that has lexical
   meaning rather than grammatical meaning; a word or morpheme
   that functions grammatically as a contentive. Cf. empty word.

I don't particularly like this last part since, although
"contentive" fairly obviously means "content word" (rather than
something that makes Mr Borden's cows give milk), the dictionary
nowhere defines either contentive or content word.

But, all things considered, "function word" and "content word"
are well-established categories that distinguish words that have
purely predictable grammatical function from words that have
(from the point of view of sentence structure) unpredictable
content.  In general, content words provide the new information
(content) in an utterance and function words tie this information
together in a particular way.  For example, simple sentence
structures can be used as a way of introducing new content words
in teaching situations by using a fill-in-the-blank approach:

   This              is              a              ___________.
   function word     function word   function word  blank for any
   demonstrative     copula          indefinite     content noun
   pronoun                           determiner     or NP

The blank can then be filled in with any noun or noun phrase:
e.g., 'house', 'screwdriver', 'mastadon', 'very sorry-looking
piece of equipment', 'cuneiform tablet written in Sumerian in
2012 BC by a scribe named Ur-Suena'.  This approach is frequently
used in phrase books for foreign languages where a functional
sentence skeleton is provided, followed by a list of content
words that can be used to fill out the sentence in various
situations.

It should be obvious from this that function words are among the
most commonly used words in a language because they are used over
and over again whenever the grammatical function they serve is
invoked in speech or writing while content words only appear when
their content needs expressing.  Any corpus analysis will confirm
this.  In fact there is a sort of Zipf's Law for this because
function words are relatively few in number but are used very
frequently while the number of content words is huge (and growing
constantly) but the individual words are much rarer in use.  This
(the presence of initial [D] in many function words) accounts for
the fact that [D] is one of the most common consonants in English
speech (ranking 6th) while its contrastive partner [T] is one of
the rarest (only more common than [Z]) despite the fact that
there are many more English words with [T] than with [D].

Basicly, content words tell what is being talked about and
function words tell what is being said about it.  You can see
this by taking a simple sentence and stripping out the functional
elements leaving the content words:

  I saw the book on a shelf in the room.
    see     book      shelf        room

A simple check on this can be had by looking at the opening lines
of Lewis Carroll's celebrated (by linguists) poem "Jabberwocky":

    'Twas brilling and the slithy toves
    Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
    All mimsy were the borogoves,
    And the mome raths outgrabe.

One could hardly ask for a better illustration of the difference
between function words and content words.  It can immediately be
seen that there is nothing grammatically incorrect or even
inconsistent in the passage.  This is because all the function
words and other functional elements have been left intact.  The
content words, on the other hand, are all semantically empty.
Although they are all phonotactically acceptable English words
they have no meaning in the lexicon.  The result is that we know
exactly what is being said, but we have no idea what is being
talked about.  One could further note that if the function words
were removed or replaced with semantically empty expressions, the
result would be completely unintelligible gibberish.

Words can be both function words and content words depending on
how they are used, and sometimes a content word becomes a
function word (grammaticalization) through usage (e.g., French
'pas' "step" ==> "no, not"), but the concept of function words
and content words remains clear.

So people do not assume that there was a selective voicing of
[T] to [D] on the basis of any loose labels.  They assume it on
the basis of the evidence.  A succinct summary is provided by
Edward Finegan in "English" in Bernard Comrie (ed.), _The World's
Major Languages_ (London & Sydney: Croom Helm 1987), p. 91

   Significantly, initial /<edh>/ in Modern English is limited to
   the function words _the_, _this_, _that_, _these_, _those_,
   _they_ and _them_, _there_ and _then_, _thus_, _thence_,
   _though_ and _thither_, with initial voiceless /<theta>/ in
   Old English later becoming voiced by assimilation when
   unstressed, as these words often are.

This is not just an appeal to authority (although expert
authority does have its appeal).  This is to show that this is
the generally accepted position, not something that I have made
up to entertain the list.

But this was published some 13-14 years ago.  Perhaps it is no
longer the mainstream opinion.  Perhaps I missed your review of
this work where you pointed out to the misinformed multitudes
that "what [these words] share is definiteness, not some murky
'functionality'."  If so, please tell me where it is published so
that I can see what evidence you base this assertion on.

Besides, function words wasn't my label to start with.  I
originally referred to them as deictic words and pronouns.
Somebody else introduced the term function words, presumably
because this is how they are usually referred to in the
literature, and I just let it ride because, well, they *are* all
function words, and function words is easier to write than
pronouns and deictic words.  But in the final analysis, I don't
think that the voicing of initial [T] in these words relies
specifically on the fact that they are function words.

> (It escapes me how <thy> has any more "function" or less
> "content" than <through>.

No doubt.  But pronouns are quintessential function words.
Pronouns (particularly personal pronouns) have very general
reference and little inherent meaning and essentially carry only
grammatical information (person, number, gender, case).  Their
specific referents come from their immediate surroundings.

'Through' is also often a function word, although not invariably
since it is also used as an adverb and an adjective.
Furthermore, it has a lexicalized stressed variant 'thorough'
(always an adjective), something that is characteristic of
function words.  I suspect that what keeps 'through' out of the
group of function words with initial [D] is that it doesn't
appear to be a word with a pronominal/deictic 'th-' base as the
other members of the group do.

> What English words with initial [D] share is definiteness, not
> some murky "functionality".)

Definiteness is a functional (grammatical) category.  But where
is the definiteness in 'though'?  As a conjunction, 'though' is a
function word, but is no more definite than 'but' (with which it
is sometimes synonymous).  It can be adversative, disjunctive, or
conditional, but not definite.  But, even though it lacks any
overt "definiteness," it can still be considered a deictic or a
demonstrative.  While modern 'though' is a Scandinavian loan, it
replaced an OE word that was homonymous with part of the 'the'
demonstrative family, and was probably perceived as part of this
family despite lacking definiteness.  Finally, in some northern
dialects of British English it is pronounced with [T], clearly
indicating that it is a borderline case.

But I will agree partially with your premise.  These words *are*
all function words, but the fact that they have initial [D] is
not specifically because they are function words, but because
they share some other feature.  So you were on the right track;
you have just taken a disastrously wrong turn.

> Old English clearly did not consider [T:D], [f:v], and [s:z]
> to be phonemic oppositions.

Good.  Then we can dispense with the notion that any sounds that
the speakers of a language can distinguish are phonemes.

> The characters "thorn" and "edh" are used indiscriminately in
> the manuscripts, and no special signs for "v" or "z" are found.

The writing of [v] in foreign words (like 'fers/vers' "verse")
was done with the <u/v> graph, as later.  You will find both
spellings (<f> and <u/v>) in OE sources (although writings with
<f> are more common).  You will also find writings like
<Uespatianus>, <Uenus>, <Uesoges>, <Nouembris>, and, of course,
<Eue> (Adams bryd).  But you won't find *<Fespatianus>, etc.  In
native words, you will find 'over' written both <ofer>
(historical spelling) and <ouer> (pronunciation spelling) already
in OE.

The writing of [z] is found almost exclusively in foreign names,
particularly in the Bible:  <Azariah>, <Baldazar> (for later
Balshazzar or Balthazar, etc.), <Zabulon>, and so forth.
According to the grammar, z (named zede) was used for writing
Greek words.  Hence <zodiacus> and <zefferus>.

The Anglo-Saxon latin alphabet consisted of the 23 letters of the
then current latin alphabet (lacking j, v [u and v were simply
graphic variants at this time and counted as a single letter],
and w) plus two necessary signs left over from the runic alphabet
(thorn and wen or wyn) and one unnecessary sign (eth or edh)
added by the Irish monks who introduced the latin alphabet to
England.  There were also vowel ligatures notably <æ> (ae) that
represented sounds that had had signs in the runic alphabet but
these were not counted as separate letters although this sign had
a name ("ash") inherited from the name of the runic character.

So it is not true that "no special signs for 'v' or 'z' are
found" in OE.  They are there, but they aren't used frequently
and generally only in foreign words (except that 'u' is sometimes
substituted for wen or for <f> in intervocalic position in native
words).  What you can say without fear of contradiction is that
they are not used to indicate contrasts between [f] and [v] or
[s] and [z] because there aren't any in OE.

> In the usual treatment the OE fricatives are regarded as unvoiced
> when doubled, when adjacent to unvoiced stops, and when occurring
> initially or finally in words or compound-elements. The first two
> conditions are solidly established, but the third may be doubted:
> did morphemic boundaries in OE necessarily make adjacent
> fricatives unvoiced in connected speech?

Probably.  Otherwise words like 'nothing' (OE na:thing < na:n +
thing) and 'anything' (< æ:nig + thing) would doubtless have [D]
rather than [T] since these compounds came into existence in OE.
Since the environments around the boundaries in these words are
invariant, surely the sandhi-type rule that you propose below
would have been more likely to operate here than in the more
variable environments of the boundaries between words.  I can't
see any alternative:  if there was a sandhi rule operating across
morpheme boundaries it would have fixed 'nothing' and 'anything'
with [D] already in OE.  Similarly, compounds like 'within' and
'without' would have been fixed with [D] at an early date by such
a rule.  Since none of this happened, it speaks against the
existence of such a rule.

> Some light is shed on the problem by the "Cuckoo Song"
> manuscript of circa 1240, which contains an Early Middle English
> folk-song in parallel with a Medieval Latin hymn. The English of
> the song shows no significant influence from Norman French or
> Latin. The scribe uses typical ML orthography with "u" and "v"
> indiscriminately representing both the vowel [u] and the voiced
> fricative [v], which creates no ambiguity in practice. For the
> English text, the scribe requires "w" and "thorn" to convey the
> non-ML sounds. More importantly, he carries the ML graphemic
> distinction "f:u/v" into his English transcription. We find "f"
> in <after>, but "u" in <nauer>, <calue>, and most significantly
> <bucke uerteth> '(the) buck farts'. Here the scribe has preserved
> initial [v], conditioned by a final vowel in the previous word.
> This verb appears in later ME as <farten>; it is unattested in OE
> but is a transparent cognate of Greek <perdomai> and Sanskrit
> <pardate>.

By your own description, the scribe has not "preserved" initial
[v] in this word but has shifted initial [f] to [v] since the
cognates clearly show that the sound is etymologically [f] (<
PIE *p per Grimm's law).  The [v] can have been "preserved" here
only if there was some kind of sandhi rule in operation for which
this writing then becomes the only evidence.  Using the word
"preserved" to describe this writing is begging the question.  It
is building what you are trying to prove into the argument

> The manuscript does not distinguish [s:z] and [T:D] because
> these oppositions are unknown in Medieval Latin.

A contrast between [s] and [z] may not have existed in Medieval
Latin, but there were Medieval Latin words that historically had
inherent [z] (e.g., 'zodiacus') borrowed from Greek.  In fact,
the letter <z> was added to the latin alphabet specifically to
write the large influx of Greek loan words after the Roman
conquest of Greece.  That's why it's tucked in at the end of the
alphabet.

There certainly was no contrast between [T] and [D] in Latin (of
any stripe) since [D], certainly, and [T], probably (although
possibly in late periods), never existed in Latin.  Graphic <th>
in classical Latin represents [th] (aspirated rather than
spirantized) and was not native to Latin, but entered through
Greek influence both from loanwords (e.g., 'bibliotheca') and
from the prestige of Greek literature and learning which caused
aspirated pronunciations (and eventually spellings) to be
introduced into native Latin words after the conquest of Greece.
Before that time Greek words with [th] were borrowed into Latin
with [t].

A similar phenomenon occurred in English.  When the <th> was
restored in words like 'throne' (ME 'trone') and 'authentic' (ME
'autentik' based on the prestige of classical literature and
learning, there was probably a "knock-on" effect so that <th>
found its way into some words of classical origin that had never
had theta, such as 'anthem' and 'author/authority'.

> In my opinion the Early ME dialect recorded here most likely
> made no phonemic distinction between voiced and unvoiced
> fricatives, but maintained an allophonic contrast on the basis of
> adjacent sounds regardless of morphemic boundaries, and this
> scheme was probably inherited from OE. For the composer of the
> "Cuckoo Song" the words <thin> and <thih> would have begun with
> [T] or [D] according to the unvoiced or voiced nature of the
> preceding sound.

"Composer" or "copyist"?  Do you have proof that these sounds
were in the original, or only that they are in this particular
copy?  Since, as far as I know, there is only one manuscript, the
question is rhetorical.  But the thing about folk songs is that
they often (perhaps even usually) don't have a composer.  That's
what makes them folk songs.

Sounds like the writer/copyist was Irish or Welsh.  I must say
that I have never heard of this sandhi rule for OE.  Can you give
me a reference to a publication of it so I can see if there is
any other evidence besides the _hapax phenomenon_ <bucke
uerteth>?  Surely if such a sandhi rule could be proved for OE,
those who claim massive Celtic influence on English would be all
over it like a shot even though it is only similar, not identical,
to Celtic lenition (mutation).

But if <bucke uerteth> is the only evidence, this is certainly
too flimsy a foundation on which to build such an elaborate
structure.  There are simply too many other ways to account for
this single piece of evidence.  For example:

  a) The writer/copyist might have been a speaker of a language
     that had a similar rule (e.g., Irish or Welsh), which
     influenced his writing.

  b) The dialect of the writer/copyist might have shifted (or
     been in the process of shifting) initial [f] to [v].  Some
     English dialects did do this.  In fact the only native
     (inherited) modern English words with initial [v] ('vat'
     [cf. G 'Faß'], 'vixen' [cf. G 'Füchsin'], 'vane' [cf. G
     'Fahne']) are borrowings into the standard dialect from just
     such a dialect.

  c) The distinction between [f] and [v] was not considered
     phonemic by the writer/copyist and, although he had
     different signs available to make the distinction, he felt
     no compulsion to indicate it consistently in the writing of
     English (in much the same way as thorn and edh and <s> and
     <z> were used).

  d) The use of the voiced member of a voiced/voiceless allophone
     pair may have been sound-symbolic, used perhaps as a jeu
     d'esprit in a word where the writer/copyist considered a
     voiced sound more appropriate to the meaning.

Other explanations are also possible (like the simplest one that
the writer/copyist meant to write <f> and wrote <u> instead; this
is usually called "scribal error").

And all this assumes that the writing <uerteth> actually
represents the verb 'fart', which is not universally accepted.
Admittedly, OED takes it this way, but others have taken it as a
form of a verb based on _vert_ 'green' (Cambridge History of
American and English Literature).  More convincing in my view is
a loan based on Latin _vertere_, French _vertir_ 'turn'.  There
are quite a number of borrowed English compounds based on this
root ('avert', 'divert', 'convert', 'revert', 'pervert', invert,
etc.), but the bare root seems unknown as a verb (although common
in other words:  'version', 'vertigo', 'vertex', 'verse',
'versus', etc.).  The native cognate is found in the suffix
'-ward(s)'.  Perhaps this hapax legomenon is a borrowing that
never became established or even an aphetic form of some compound
used to preserve the meter (this is, after all, a song).

Although there is nothing philologically unsound about a
derivation from 'fart', it seems out of place in the context of
the song.  No one has ever been able to explain to me why a
farting buck is a transparent metaphor of spring (from eating all
the newly sprouted greenery?).  Admittedly, I have lost touch
with 13th century England, and it is possible that in early
spring the air was redolent with buck farts, and your average
churl or thane took a deep breath and said "Ah, spring -- the
buck is farting."  Or perhaps the metaphor is auditory rather
than olofactory and buck farts were so sonorant that in spring
they resounded from every hillside and could be heard for miles
around, and your average ch. or th. said "Hark, sumer is icumen
in -- the buck farteth."  But I have a hard time seeing it this
way.  In keeping with with the rest of the song and the
parallelism within this couplet, some more visible physical
activity rather than an auditory or olofactory one would be more
appropriate.  Thus "the bullock starts, the buck turns/twists
(about)" is better suited to the context and the structure of the
song.  The main advantage to translating "the bullock starts, the
buck farts" is that it preserves the rhyme and scan of the
original (bulloc sterteth/bucke verteth).

As I say, this is just my own impression, based on a solid urban
tradition.  So if some of our more bucolic colleagues have
knowledge of why there may be more to this metaphor than meets
the eye (ear, nose), and why a farting buck heralds the coming of
spring/summer, please share it.

But in the absence of corroborating evidence, calling <bucke
uerteth> unequivocal evidence for a sandhi rule involving
voiced/voiceless fricatives in OE and ME (when in fact it is
neither the most likely nor the most plausible explanation) and
then using this rule to account for the present distribution of
these sounds in modern English (when in fact it doesn't) seems a
bit on the fanciful side.

As you say, this is your opinion, but in my opinion, statements
like "most likely ... maintained an allophonic contrast on the
basis of adjacent sounds regardless of morphemic boundaries, and
this scheme was probably inherited from OE", are considerably
stronger than the evidence warrants.  "May have" rather than
"most likely" and "could have been" rather than "was probably"
are more appropriate to a theory built on a single piece of
evidence without corroboration, especially in the face of
conflicting evidence.

> Turning now to Chaucer we find the "f:v" distinction
> consistently made, initially and medially, even in native words
> like <yeven> 'to give' from OE <giefan>. The character "z" is
> used only in foreign words, mostly from French and Arabic:
> <zeles>, <zodiak>, <azimut>, etc. Chaucer retains "s" for medial
> [z] in native words: <hasel>, <hasard>, <bosard>, etc. Printed
> editions give no information about the dental fricatives, using
> "th" everywhere.

The history of the orthography of the English fricatives, given
both here and below, is quite correct (except that ME 'give' is
generally considered a Scandinavian borrowing rather than derived
from OE 'giefan', 'gifan' and except for the loose labelling of
<zeles>, <zodiak>, and <azimut> as "from French and Arabic"; all
of these words come into English from French or Late Latin; all
are borrowings into French (or Latin), the first two from Greek,
the last from Arabic; the one word that comes into French (or
Late Latin) from Arabic (via Spanish) is actually based on a
Latin borrowing into Arabic), but basically it just shows what I
have been saying all along:  there is no need to distinguish
sounds in writing until they are used phonemically.  As long as
the distinction is allophonic or morphophonemic or
non-contrastive, there is no need for a graphic distinction.

But the picture given here, while factually correct, implies
quite a bit more regularity than is actually found in Chaucer's
spelling.  While he does use <z> only in foreign words (as was
done in OE), he also uses <s> for [z] in foreign words (as was
also done in OE) and he also frequently writes <z> for the plural
morpheme in foreign words (but this could be a borrowing from
French).

For example in two consecutive sections (Astrol. I 19-20) he
spells 'azimuths' as

    Azymuthz
    A3imutz (3 for yogh; probably a miswritten or miscopied <z>)
    azymutz
    azimutes

Furthermore in these same sections he writes 'zenith' as both
<senyth> and <cenyth>, but not with <z>; he also writes 'horizon'
as both <Orisonte> and <orizonte>.  So his spelling is pretty
much all over the place as far as indicating [z] with both <s>
and <z>, in foreign words.

> Chaucer's language has a large component of recent loanwords
> in <v-> sometimes forming minimal pairs with older words in <f->:
> <vailen> 'to have value' ~ <failen> 'to fail', <vers> 'verse' ~
> <fers> 'chess-queen'.

The thing is, all four of these words are foreign to English.
And _fers_ 'chess-queen' is not older in English than 'verse'
which occurs already in OE (written both <uers> and <fers> but
without any indication of a sandhi rule governing which is used;
they are simply in free variation).  There were plenty of loan
words with initial [v] as well as with intervocalic [f] (e.g.,
'coffer') in English before the 14th century.  It is just that
before this time English speakers didn't consider [f] and [v]
different sounds.  So long as they didn't contrast this was
possible.

Now, while it is true that there was an earlier borrowing of
'verse' in OE with a variable initial <f>/<u/v>, there is no
indication of a sandhi rule affecting which way it is written.
Since <f/uers> was neuter in OE, it is often preceded by <thaet>
as the correct form of the definite article, and one finds both
<thaet fers> and <thaet uers> -- simply free variation.  This is
not to deny that some speakers may have had such a rule.  There
is just no indication that it was the norm.  Similarly, there is
no rule involved in the OE variation in the writing of <ofer> and
<ouer>.  This last word was always pronounced with [v] in OE,
just as <f/vers> was probably always pronounced with [v] despite
the fact that it was much more frequently written as <fers>.  In
OE there was no contrast between [f] and [v] and hence no
consistency in the way they were written was required, although
speakers could probably tell the difference between the sounds.

One could legitimately question the extent to which OE written
materials actually reflect the spoken language of the time and
to what extent written OE was influenced by Latin with its
[f]/[v] contrast.  Most people who knew how to write OE (mostly
monks and/or bureaucrats) were familiar with, if not fluent in,
Latin.  Did OE monks and bureaucrats know Latin?  Well, does the
Pope know Latin?  Did the writer/copyist of the Cuckoo Song know
Latin?  The answer is right there in the manuscript.  Your saying
that "The English of the song shows no significant influence from
Norman French or Latin" is again begging the question.  These
things being so (as Caesar was wont to say), it is difficult to
ascribe <f>/<u/v> orthographic variants in OE or even in early ME
to the single cause of a sandhi rule that voiced initial
voiceless fricatives in a voiced environment across morpheme
boundaries (especially when such a rule is not in evidence in
recent compounds).

> It appears that this large influx of words beginning with [v]
> which does not alternate allophonically with [f] has forced the
> older words beginning with [f/v] to abandon the voiced allophone
> and become words beginning with invariant [f].  That is, this
> influx of loanwords has created a new phonemic distinction /f:v/
> in initial position which the orthography of Chaucer's time (late
> 14th cent.) regards as fully established.

Rather, it was the French (Latin) contrast between [f] and [v]
that was imported in pairs like 'failen' and 'vailen' and
'coffer' and 'cover' or 'coffin' and 'coven'.  English now had to
deal with words with inherent [f] and inherent [v] in contrastive
positions.  'Vers' "verse" probably was reborrowed from French in
ME along with 'fers' "chess-queen".  But this time there is an
[f]/[v] contrast so the two sounds can't be treated as variants.
Furthermore, the fact that OE <f/uers> was not fixed with initial
[f] but with initial [v] runs counter to your assertion.  So the
[f]/[v] contrast was just imported along with the words.

But this is true whether there was a sandhi rule operating or
not.  Speakers now have to take account of words beginning with
inherent initial [v] (borrowed) as well as with inherent initial
[f] (native or borrowed) as well as words with inherent
intervocalic [f] and inherent intervocalic [v].  If there are a
lot of borrowed words with initial [v], especially when some of
them contrast with words with initial [f], either borrowed or
native, and there are a lot of borrowed words with intervocalic
[f] then speakers either have to nativize the borrowed words
with initial [v] to [f] and nativize the borrowed words with
intervocalic [f] to [v] (and lose the contrast in both cases) or
they have to accept the [f]/[v] contrast as phonemic.  Obviously
they did the latter.  But this certainly doesn't require a sandhi
rule for its implementation.

In fact, the observation that native words were fixed with
invariant [f] rather speaks against such a sandhi rule.
Otherwise, one might have expected at least some native words to
have been fixed with initial [v].  After all, if what you say is
true, English no longer had words with inherent initial [f], but
only a sandhi-governed initial [f]/[v] alternation.  Since you
claim that this situation had existed since OE, native speakers
could have had no memory of words with inherent initial [f] by
the 14th century.  Unless, of course, you want to argue that
'vat', 'vane', and 'vixen' are not borrowings from the southern
dialects, but are in actuality such words.  But then you have to
account for the distribution of [v] in these particular words:
e.g., why in 'vixen' but not in 'fox'?

If definiteness is the criterion, then surely we would expect
'four' and 'five' to be written *<vour> and *<vive>.  While 'for'
and 'fore' might have flopped back and vorth between initial [f]
and [v] for centuries, surely invariable compounds like 'before'
and 'afore' would have been fixed as *<bevore> and *<avore>
within a week if there was a sandhi rule operating that voiced
fricatives in a voiced environment across morpheme boundaries.
So phonemicization of [v] doesn't require a sandhi rule for its
implementation.  In fact, it is easier to explain without one.
Otherwise you have to say that native words in initial [f] and
borrowed words in initial [v] is just another huge statistical
anomaly.

This is a choice that is faced whenever there is a massive influx
of loanwords that use a segment in a position where it doesn't
occur in the borrowing language.  Speakers will either nativize
the segment or leave it as it is.  In the latter case, if it
doesn't contrast (or at least not heavily) with native segments
then it may simply be retained as a foreign phone(me) and will
ever be a marker of a foreign word (e.g. [z] in Latin words of
Greek origin).  If it does contrast heavily, or even if speakers
just happen to like the sound, it will become a new phoneme, and
will eventually find its way into new environments and contrasts
and new (native) words, perhaps even ousting some native phoneme
in certain words.

> For initial [s:z] Chaucer has only the sub-minimal pair <zeles>
> 'zeals' ~ <seled> 'sealed', and since "z" is otherwise used to
> denote loanwords this provides no direct evidence for a phonemic
> opposition.

Hallelujah -- alhamdulillah -- barak hashem.  At last someone who
realizes (and is willing to admit) that distinctions that can
have other explanations do not necessarily provide evidence of
phonemic contrast.

> The status of initial [T:D] in Chaucer is equivocal.
> Contractions like <artow> 'art thou' and <seistow> 'sayest thou'
> suggest that <thou> already had invariant [D], since the old rule
> would require [T] here and [tT] usually contracts to [T], which
> would yield *<arthow> etc. However, this argument is extremely
> weak. Statistical analysis of Chaucer's alliterations in "th"
> might resolve the issue, but I am not aware of such a study.

Extremely weak is perhaps an understatement.  Actually, in
addition to contractions, <t> in 'thou' (and the other cases of
this pronoun) is often found after [s], [t], and [d].  Thus you
find things like 'bi-hold tou'.  Any conclusions about whether
initial <th> in these words was voiced, either invariantly or
environmentally are very iffy.  But I will agree that the
possiblility that it was already voiced is not excluded.

> At any rate it is clear that the English /f:v/ distinction
> resulted from loanwords and was well established by Chaucer's
> time. The /s:z/ distinction, if not already made by Chaucer,
> followed shortly. It can be attributed partly to loanwords,
> partly to the earlier establishment of /f:v/ as phonemic.

There are other factors, which you seem anxious to ignore,
involved in the phonemicization of the voiced fricatives as well.
One of these is the collapse of the English short vowel system
and the loss of final inflectional '-n' followed by loss of final
[@] (schwa).  This uncovered some of the former intervocalically
voiced fricatives (particularly in infinitives) and left them
bare at the ends of words, which removed the phonetic
conditioning environment that both created and maintained the
identity of the allophones.  Since they couldn't remain
allophones without the conditioning environment, something had to
happen to the voiced fricatives that were now in word final
position.

Another factor was the loss of intervocalic long fricatives
[ff TT ss] which were simplified into [f T s] producing
intervocalic unvoiced fricatives which could contrast with the
intervocalic voiced fricatives [v D z] which had previously
been simply allophones of [f T s] in intervocalic position.
Since it was no longer possible to predict [f T s] or [v D z]
based on intervocalic position, something had to happen to the
intervocalic voiceless/voiced fricatives that were no longer
predictable from their environment.  For instance, modern 'since'
comes from a contraction of ME 'sithens' (with adverbial genitive
-s) which in turn came from OE 'siththan' (itself a compound of
'si:th' "after" and 'tham' or 'thon' [dative or instrumental of
"that"]).

So the loss of the conditioning environments that identified the
voiced fricatives as allophones of the voiceless fricatives may
have had as much (or more) effect on phonemicization of voiced
fricatives as the massive influx of French loanwords in the
13-14th century.  Certainly the two events reinforced each other.
And the large number of loans with inherent initial [v] and the
smaller number with inherent [z] quickly established these two
sounds as phonemes in English.  New coinings with /z/ and
contrasts between /s/ and /z/ follow very soon (e.g., 'fuss',
'fuzz', 'buzz') because of the suitability of [z] for expressive
and imitative words.  Now that /z/ is a phoneme instead of just a
sound in the language it is possible to have words with inherent
[z] in them in any position (so long as phonotactic constraints
are observed).

But [T] and [D] did not have any such crutches to aid in their
phonemicization.  English was not in contact with any languages
with a [T]/[D] phonemic opposition.  In fact, ME did not have any
source of words with [D] at all (except Celtic where it existed
only as a lenition of [d]) and [T] was only available through the
medium of classical Greek or Latin (or more rarely, through
Celtic).  Even French had lost the [T] pronunciation and hence a
number of words borrowed from French lacked <th> (e.g., ME
'trone' "throne").  As a result, the same thing that happened
with the [f]/[v] and the [s]/[z] oppositions just did not happen
with [T]/[D].  There simply was no massive import of words with
[D] or with a [T]/[D] contrast to make it happen.

> The [T:D] opposition was left as an orphaned allophonic pair,
> very difficult for speakers to maintain, especially in initial
> position. They would have been obliged to enunciate some words
> with invariant initial [f], [v], [s], [z] and others with
> variable [T] or [D] according to the preceding sound. Under these
> circumstances any mechanism tending to fix [T] or [D] in
> particular words would have operated rather strongly.

Now it's my turn to say that I don't see why.  According to you
this sandhi rule had been operating for over 500 years and now,
with the loss of two of the allophone pairs to which it applied,
speakers are suddenly anxious to get rid of it.  One of the
principles of sound change rules is that they operate until they
no longer have anything to operate on and then they disappear.
It should have been no more difficult to maintain this alleged
sandhi rule for [T]/[D] than it was to maintain it for the other
fricatives in the face of other fixed voiceless/voiced
oppositions (as in the stops).

But I must say that you paint a vivid picture of the difficulties
faced by 14-15th century speakers of English.  One can almost see
the churls and thanes tossing and turning on their straw pallets
or feather beds, driven to sleeplessness by the difficulty of
maintaining the allophonic alternation of initial [T] and [D] now
that [f] and [v] and [s] and [z] have become phonemic contrasts.
Much of the energy of the English-speaking peoples during this
time must have gone into finding a solution to this problem.  It
is easy to see now that the Hundred Years' War wasn't about
English territorial claims in France, but was just a fit of pique
because the French hadn't fixed initial [T] and [D] with their
loanwords at the same time that they fixed [f]/[v] and [s]/[z].
And Richard III wasn't pleading for a "horse" at Bosworth Field,
but for a "source" (obviously for fixing the runaway allophonic
variation of initial [T] and [D]).  Shakespeare just got it
wrong -- but what can you expect from someone who was secure with
his invariant initial [T] and [D] and who never gave a thought to
the struggles that his forebears went through to bring him that
security.

> In my opinion this probably began with the statistics of
> utterances: demonstratives like <the> and <this> commonly follow
> prepositions, which in a majority of cases end in voiced sounds.

And you call functionality murky.  Do you have any other examples
of syntactically conditioned phonetic change?  I have seen a lot
of ontological ingenuity expended by classical phonologists to
devise a purely phonetic environment for some obviously necessary
sound change, but this is a new one.

If the shift to [D] is syntactically statistical in nature (i.e.,
it occurs when a variable sound is pronounced more often one way
than the other), why shouldn't it have affected all nouns
beginning with [T].  After all, nouns are commonly preceded by an
article, either definite or indefinite and these always end in a
voiced sound.  I rather suspect that nouns are preceded by
articles more often than demonstratives are preceded by
prepositions (especially prepositions that end precisely in
voiced sounds).  About the only thing that would make this
scenario play is the fact that demonstratives, being function
words, occur very frequently in spoken language -- much more
frequently than nouns, which are content words.  So why not say
that function words, which are used much more heavily than
content words, were subject to this effect?  Oops, I almost
forgot -- you can't say this because you don't know what function
words are.  It escapes you how 'the' has any more "function" or
less "content" than 'theology'.

Or, if the shift to [D] is syntactically statistical in nature,
why shouldn't it have affected the verb 'think' which is among
the most common lexical verbs in English (rank 64 in the BNC with
153,881 tokens, right behind the deictic 'then' at 63).  After
all, this verb, which requires an animate subject, is most often
preceded by a personal pronoun, all of which (except for the
neuter, which can't properly be a subject of this verb) end in a
voiced sound.  And when it isn't preceded by a pronoun it is most
often preceded by either a modal verb or an adverb ending in a
voiced sound.  If it is because 'think' is not a demonstrative,
then your environment for the sound change is still semantically
or syntactically conditioned, not phonetically conditioned.

Or, if the shift to [D] is syntactically statistical in nature,
why shouldn't it have happened already in OE where, before the
loss of final inflectional n and the eventual loss of all final
short vowels, many more words ended in vocalic sounds than in ME.

> Once the invariant [D] was fixed in the most common
> demonstratives, it would have spread by analogy to the other
> "th"-words of pronominal origin which carry definiteness.

Are there any "th"- pronouns that are indefinite?

Besides, this doesn't account for the spread of this feature to
the conjunction 'though' which does not have any of the
characteristics you deem necessary for this change; i.e., it
lacks definiteness, it never follows a preposition (or even an
article).

This is one reason why the mainstream theory that [D] in these
words is a lenition of [T] in unstressed forms of function words
is easier to believe.  Rather than basing the distinction on
"definiteness," categorizing these words as function words
accounts for all of them (which "definiteness doesn't do [cf.
'though']).  Besides, 'that' is not infrequently used in an
indefinite sense ('That's just the way it is').  So if you want a
"one size fits all" covering term for all the English words with
initial [D] it has to be "function word" not "definiteness,"
despite the fact that definiteness is the most obvious
characteristic of things like the definite article.  Ultimately,
though, I don't think that the phenomenon can be completely
ascribed to the fact that these are all function words.

Lenition in function words is a normal development because
function words are usually unstressed.  It is content words that
tend to be stressed because, well, they carry the content of an
utterance.  Function words are mostly predictable from the
grammatical structure.  I realize that this all sounds like
mumbo-jumbo if you don't know the difference between function
words and content words, but I suppose that at some point you
will just have to learn.

Function words often have stressed and unstressed forms.
Sometimes these are even lexicalized ('of' and 'off', 'through'
and 'thorough', and although not (yet) lexicalized, any native
speaker will know the difference between 'please' and
'puh-leeze', which have similar but quite distinct meanings [one
indicates a polite request, the other is a warning]).  Lenition
of pronominal forms would also be a natural thing, as is shown by
the fact that all the "h"-pronouns have a lenited form without
the "h" ('e, 'er, 'im, 'is, 'ers).  In fact, we even have a
nursery rhyme to imprint on young minds the fact that unstressed
'beside her' rhymes with 'spider'.

These lenited forms of the "h"-pronouns are obviously very old,
because, despite the fact that the third person plural pronouns
with "th" in English are Scandinavian loans, there is still a
native lenited form ('em) from the old "h"-pronoun plurals used
as an unstressed form of 'them' ('Give 'em hell, Harry', 'stick
'em up').  So the lenition of the "th"-pronouns would have been
a completely natural event considering the example of the
"h"-pronouns, which must have already existed before the
replacement of the "h"-pronoun plurals with "th"-pronoun plurals.
The structural similarity of the "th" pronouns and the "th"
deictics provides a strong basis for similar phonetic treatment,
whereas other words with initial [T] lack this structure and are
not affected.  The fact that these lenitions occur in pronouns
may also be significant because other very frequent function
words like 'for' and 'so' do not show any tendency for lenition.

> The situation would then have resembled the pre-Chaucerian stage
> of ME in which one class (recent loanwords) had invariant initial
> [v] and another class (older words) had variable initial [f/v].
> In that case the older class was forced to fix its initial sound
> as [f], establishing /f:v/ as a phonemic distinction. In the case
> under discussion the non-pronominal, non-definite words beginning
> with [T/D] were forced to fix their initial sounds as [T], which
> yielded the fixed opposition in initial [T:D] that is found
> today. I would guess that the process was complete (in East
> Midland at least) by 1500, if indeed it was not by Chaucer's
> time.

An entertaining story, and every bit as plausible as how the
elephant got its trunk or how the camel got its hump, but I'm
afraid that that's all that it is.  It depends on too many
suppositions that are not borne out, and even contradicted, by
the evidence.  In summary, it specifically requires:

   a) That there was a sandhi rule that voiced initial unvoiced
      fricatives in voiced environments across morpheme
      boundaries.  This is a sine qua non for your theory.  The
      only evidence for this is <bucke uerteth> in the Cuckoo
      Song and that requires accepting this interpretation out of
      a wide range of other possible interpretations.  Opposing
      this is the fact that compounds created in OE do not show
      any evidence of this sandhi rule and that OE writes loans
      with initial [v] with either <f> or <u/v> but such
      variation is not with regard to such a sandhi rule but
      simply free variation.

   b) That the importation of loans with initial [v] forced the
      abandonment of the alleged sandhi rule by requiring words
      with variable initial [f]/[v] to be fixed with [f].  This
      process is not illustrated by any of the evidence that you
      have provided.  In fact, the importation of 'verse' with
      initial [v] caused the earlier loan of the same word with
      variable initial <f>/<v> to be fixed as [v].  Rather, the
      evidence suggests that the [f]/[v] distinction has been
      imported along with the words since all the contrastive
      pairs that you have advanced are loan words.

   c) That by analogy to this unproved (and contradicted) fixing
      of words with initial [f]/[v] alternation with initial [f],
      words with "definiteness" with an alleged initial [T]/[D]
      alternation were fixed with initial [D] because
      "demonstratives like <the> and <this> commonly follow
      prepositions, which in a majority of cases end in voiced
      sounds."  No evidence is provided that this is what
      happened, or even that this can happen; this is simply
      presented as a "just-so story."  Since this contrasts with
      the currently accepted theory, surely some evidence is
      needed.  The mainstream view is that the words with initial
      [D] in English are unstressed forms of function words with
      a lenited initial consonant.  Lenition arises not from a
      sandhi rule but because the unstressed form facilitates
      assimilation of the initial consonant to the vocalic
      nucleus.  The mainstream view is supported by the facts
      that:  The forms with initial [D] are all function words;
      function words frequently have stressed and unstressed
      forms; lenition of initial consonants is found in
      unstressed forms of some function words.  The only counter
      to this that you offer is that you don't know what function
      words are or you can't understand how function words work.

   d) That this fixing of initial [D] spread from common
      demonstratives that "commonly follow prepositions, which in
      a majority of cases end in voiced sounds" to certain other
      words with [T], the criterion for the spread being
      "definiteness."  This ignores the fact that words that lack
      "definiteness" have this feature ('though') while words
      that have "definiteness" ('three', 'thirty', 'thirteen',
      'thrice') lack it.

   e) That the fixing of words with "definiteness" with initial
      [D] forced all other words in the language with an initial
      dental fricative to be fixed with [T].  The only evidence
      for this is that all the other words that don't fall into
      this small group with initial [D] do have initial [T].  But
      they might always have had invariant initial [T] and the
      situation would be exactly the same.  [BEEP - BEEP - BEEP
      -- Warning, Occam's Razor violation -- two entities
      proposed (sandhi rule, fixing rule) where only one
      (lenition rule) is required.]

   f) That because this process of fixing initial [T] and [D] is
      analogous to the alleged fixing of initial [f] and [v] and
      of initial [s] and [z] and since these last pairs are now
      phonemic distinctions, the contrast between [T] and [D] is
      also a phonemic distinction.  This ignores the fact that
      there is no predictable difference in meaning between words
      like 'fers' and 'vers' that can be based on the fact that
      one has initial [f] and the other has initial [v], whereas,
      in sharp contrast, all words with initial [D] share,
      according to you, a feature called "definiteness" (however
      you may want to define this so that it covers all these
      words, as long as the definition is independent of the
      sound [D]) and words with initial [T] lack this
      "definiteness."

      In other words, according to your scenario initial [D] in
      English is a marker of "definiteness" and initial [T] is a
      marker of "non-definiteness."  Thus the occurrence of
      initial [T] or initial [D] in a word can be predicted on
      the basis of some inherent semantic or lexical quality of
      the word and vice versa.  So, if what you say about words
      with initial [D] sharing "definiteness" is true, then the
      distinction between initial [T] and [D] is not phonemic
      because the occurrence of one or the other predicts
      something about the meaning of the word in which it occurs.
      Phonemes are units of sound, not of meaning.  Morphemes are
      units of meaning.  If a sound predicts meaning, then it is
      not (just) a phoneme.  If the only contrast that you have
      involves a prediction of meaning, then you can't use that
      contrast to prove a phonemic distinction.

> Hence one should not say that <thy> or its antecedent
> "developed" a voiced fricative. What happened, one way or
> another, is that the pronunciation with the unvoiced fricative,
> occurring after unvoiced sounds, was lost in this word.

Or, it was lost when the (comparatively rare) stressed forms of
these words were pronounced with [D] by analogy to the unstressed
forms.

> So is the initial [T:D] distinction phonemic in present-day
> English? Absolutely; it can and should be written /T:D/.

This is one of the problems that one often encounters with
hypotheses that are based on different interpretations of the
same evidence.  Even when the interpretation is put forward with
due diffidence and properly qualified with appropriate
conditionals (although, admittedly, this was not done in this
case), by the time the conclusions are reached, they are
absolute.  The hypothesizer seems to forget that other
interpretations are possible and the conditionals and modals have
disappeared.  There is a gradual promotion of "possible" (p > 0)
to "probable" (p > .5) culminating in conclusions that are
"absolute" (p = 1).

This is not the dispute the truth value of your conclusion.  It
may very well be true.  All I say is that it doesn't follow
necessarily from the argument presented.  It is possible to have
a false premise and an invalid argument and still reach a valid
conclusion.

> It was phonemic as soon as the process of fixing invariant [T]
> and [D] on particular words was completed, even though minimal
> pairs for these phones probably did not exist at that time.

But the "fixing" of invariant [T] and [D] on particular words is
just a supposition, and an unnecessary one at that, based almost
entirely on the highly questionable <bucke uerteth> as an
indication that there was a systematic allophonic variation in
initial fricatives in English.  Without this alleged variation,
there is no "fixing."  The problem here is that, even if the
supposition is correct, there is still a conditioning environment
involved in the "fixing" of initial [D].  According to the
scenario, only words with "definiteness" have initial [D].  Since
initial [D] has meaning associated with it, it can't be
considered a phoneme on the basis of a contrast with another word
that doesn't have "definiteness".  Phonemes are not units of
meaning.  Initial [D] is a unit of meaning, even in your
scenario.  If you start with salami, no matter how you slice it,
it's still salami.

> Minimal pairs are luxury items. They are nice to have, but one
> can (and in many situations must) establish phonemic oppositions
> without them.

Quite true.  But the availability of minimal pairs is still more
often the rule rather than the exception.  A lack of minimal
pairs is often an indication of fairly recent phonemicization.
It is also a measure of the functional load of the contrast in
the language.  If [T] and [D] are phonemes, then their functional
load in English is very nearly zero.  Obviously all (or even
most) of the phonemes of a language cannot have a nearly zero
functional load, so minimal pairs for phonemes will be much more
common than not.  But then I have never said anything different.
What I have said is that even an apparent (purely phonetic)
minimal pair (like German [ku:c,en] and [ku:xen], or Comanche
[papi] and [pavi], or even English [Tai] and [Dai]) should not be
accepted uncritically as evidence of phonemicity.  There is no
mechanistic way to determine phonemes, and that includes minimal
pairs taken in isolation.

But my point is not different from yours.  If [T] and [D] are to
be established as phonemes, it must be done without using the
opposition of 'thigh' and 'thy' as evidence.

> When distinct phones occur in contrastive distribution in
> corresponding morphemic positions, they are either allophones of
> one phoneme or represent distinct phonemes.

Sometimes they are both, although not in the same situation.
Consider the [T] in 'path'.  Now consider the plural and the
possessive singular of this word.  The first has [Dz] and the
second has [Ts].  Is the [D] of the plural a different phoneme
from the [T] of the possessive singular?  If it is, then the
plural form is a suppletion while the possessive singular is not.
But suppletions are completely unpredictable (i.e., the
suppletive form cannot be derived from the base form by any kind
of generalized rule: e.g., 'am', 'be', 'was'; 'fero', 'tuli,
'latus'), whereas the [D] of the plural is predictable from a
final spirant voicing rule that operates in the environment
[PLURAL].  Now consider the [T] in 'faith'.  The plural of this
word has [T].  Is the [T] of 'faith' the same phoneme as the [T]
of 'path'?  There is no reason to say that they are not.  Is the
[T] of 'faiths' the same phoneme as the [D] of 'paths'?
Classical phonology says that they can't be. Now consider the [T]
in 'bath'.  This word has both forms of the plural, with [Ts] and
with [Dz] (i.e., a speaker can use either one, and the hearer,
even if he has the other pronunciation, will not take the
received form as a different word).  Is the [T] of one
pronunciation a different phoneme from the [D] of the other? If
they are, then the two forms of the plural must be different
words.  But instead, the two forms are simply variants of the
same word, so the two sounds are in free variation.

Similarly, in the morphemes of the plural, possessive, and third
person singular of the verb, the variations of the
(morpho)phoneme //s// ([s z Iz]) are predictable from the
phonetic environment.  But final [s] and [z] are also phonemes
('fuss':'fuzz').  Thus /s/ and /z/ are contrastive in 'fuss' and
'fuzz' but are distributed allophonically in the plural morpheme.
To avoid the confusion and complication of conflicting
definitions resulting from this situation we use a reductionist
strategy known as "once a phoneme, always a phoneme" so that we
don't have to deal the complications of sounds that are sometimes
allophones or morphophonemic alternations of one another and
sometimes phonemes.

While phonemes/allophones may a mutually exclusive
relationship in a particular situation, it is not mutually
exclusive across the entire language.  Thus [k]:[s] in
'kill':'sill' or 'cat':'sat' is phonemic while [k]~[s] in
'public' ~ 'publicity' ~ 'publication' ~ 'publicize' is
allophonic or morphophonemic.  We simply make it mutually
exclusive across the entire language with the axiomatic dictum
"once a phoneme, always a phoneme."  This is another way of
saying that just because two sounds can be shown to be
allophonically distributed in some situation does not mean that
they are not phonemes if their phonemicity can be demonstrated
elsewhere.

If sounds exhibit only non-contrastive (complementary,
predictable, or free variation) distribution across the language
we label them allophones, but if they exhibit contrastive
(non-predictable) distribution somewhere in the language we label
them phonemes.  The problem arises when they exhibit contrastive
but predictable distribution.  Then we can't call them allophones
because they contrast.  But we shouldn't call them phonemes
because they are predictable.  If the prediction is made on the
basis of a grammatical environment, they are usually called
morphophonemes, and if they can be otherwise shown to be
phonemes, then we can invoke "once a phoneme ..."  But in order
to invoke "once a phoneme ..." you have to have that "once a
phoneme."  If you don't have it, you shouldn't use the
morphophonemic alternation to establish phonemicity, because it's
not the same thing.  Phonemic contrasts are arbitrary.
Morphophonemic alternations are based on some predictable
difference in meaning, function, or phonetic environment.
Phonemic contrasts should tell you nothing about the meaning of a
word except that it is different from some other word with
different phonemes.  Phonemes effect meaning; they don't affect
it.

This is where [T] and [D] are now.  They should be phonemes
because [f]/[v] and [s]/[z] are phonemes and the [T]/[D]
alternation was created at the same time, by the same historical
change.  If the others have become phonemes, then so should [T]
and [D] have become phonemes.  But as you have gone to lengths to
point out, [D] did not have the same driving force for
phonemicization behind it that [v] and [z] did, lacking the
massive influx of Romance and classical loanwords that were so
instrumental in the phonemicization of especially [v] and to a
lesser extent [z].

Another reason why [T] and [D] should be phonemes is because
otherwise there is a hole in the pattern, since the distinction
between [T]/[D] is voiceless/voiced which is normally phonemic in
English.  But there are other holes in the pattern of English
phonemes as there are holes in the phonemic patterns of many, if
not most, languages (in fact, Hockett considered "gaps,
asymmetries and 'configurational pressures'" to be a universal of
phonological systems), so this is not sufficient, by itself, to
declare these sounds phonemes.

But in any case you shouldn't use a contrast where [D] indicates
that a word has "definiteness" (in your view) or is a pronoun or
deictic (in my view) and [T] indicates that a word lacks these
qualities as evidence of phonemicity.  Even though we expect [T]
and [D] to be phonemes we shouldn't accept questionable evidence
just because it confirms our expectations.  Once we have evidence
that [T] and [D] are phonemes, then we can consider 'thigh' and
'thy' as a phonemic contrast (even though it isn't) because of
"once a phoneme ...".  But you can't establish the phonemicity of
[T] and [D] on the basis of such a contrast because it really
isn't phonemic.

> Allophones are regularly distributed according to phonologic
> environment.

Yes, but phonologic != (does not equal) phonetic.  While the
greatest part of phonology does involve phonetics, it is not the
only factor that affects phonology.  Phonetics is about speech
sounds.  Phonetics studies speech sounds independently from the
rest of language.  It treats speech sounds as if they have no
other purpose but to be speech sounds.  But linguistically,
speech sounds do not exist to be speech sounds; they exist to
convey semantic information (meaning) between speakers of a
language.  Phonemics is about the relations among the speech
sounds of a particular language.  These relations are
abstractions and exist in the perception of the speakers of the
language.  They are not necessarily detectable from a phonetic
transcription of the spoken language.  The fact that phonemes
cannot be deduced from a phonetic transcription implies that
there are factors other than purely phonetic ones that affect
phonemicity.

> No conceivable phonologic rule could predict the distribution of
> [T] versus [D] in modern English words.

Fine.  Show me a nice fat (or even a thin) content noun or verb
or adjective in English with initial [D] and I will believe it.
It doesn't even have to contrast with a word with initial [T].
The existence of an English word that begins with [D] that isn't
a pronoun or deictic (or that doesn't have "definiteness") would
be sufficient to show that you can't predict which modern English
words begin with [D] and which with [T].  Just one.  So where is
it?

And don't say that phonologic == phonetic.  Phonologic refers to
the relations of the speech sounds of a language in the
perception of its speakers.  Saying that phonologic is the same
as phonetic implies that speakers know nothing about their
language except its speech sounds.  In order to say that "No
conceivable phonologic rule could predict the distribution of
[T] versus [D] in modern English words," you have to equate
phonologic with phonetic.  So if you mean phonetic, say phonetic.
The distribution of initial [T] and [D] is quite predictable in
English.  I can quite easily conceive of a phonologic rule that
predicts their distribution.  Saying that there isn't one is like
putting on a blindfold and then saying "I can't see."

Your claim that classical phonology can't predict the distribution
of initial [T] and [D] in English is simply a limitation of
classical phonology, not a reason for denying the obvious truth
of the predictability of initial [T] and [D] in English.

> They are indeed distinct phonemes.

This may be true, but it isn't established by your argument.

Even if everything you say is true, the difference between words
with initial [D] and initial [T] in English is not arbitrary but
is based on "definiteness."  This is not the basis of a phonemic
distinction.  It's still salami, just sliced differently.
Besides, whether [T] and [D] are distinct phonemes or not is not
the issue.

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi


From leo at easynet.fr  Sun May 20 03:25:29 2001
From: leo at easynet.fr (Lionel Bonnetier)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 05:25:29 +0200
Subject: mobile pronouns (was: No Proto-Celtic?)
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.052529.0200.>

Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

> As a non-linguist I wonder if the personal endings of verbs (the person
> marker), which are basically remnants of suffixed pronouns, cannot be viewed
> as an indication that PIE was actually verb-initial (verb-[suffixed]S-O), at
> least with pronouns as subject?

There's a trend in many languages to put shorter words/phrases
nearer to their grammatical head:

  Tell /us/ your story
  (instead of Tell your story to us)

  Tell /it/ to the clan
  (instead of *Tell the clan it)

In a SOV language, when S is a short pronoun, and you feel S is
linked to V rather than O, you might switch to OSV or OVS, the
latter being preferred if the OV group is felt as a strong
cluster.

That's another non-linguist's opinion...

(Hello everybody, I'm new on the list. I've always been
interested in linguistics, but I work in technical programming,
though I'm trying to get to natural language processing and
semantics. Etymology is a constant source of inspiration for
me to shed light on how ideas interconnect.)


From xavier.delamarre at free.fr  Sun May 20 19:58:12 2001
From: xavier.delamarre at free.fr (Xavier Delamarre)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 21:58:12 +0200
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <99867835.3199009083@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.215812.0200.>

le 16/05/01 14:38, Larry Trask à larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk a écrit :

> Most of you will be acquainted with W. P. Lehmann's book arguing that PIE
> must have been an SOV language with typical SOV syntax.  After that book
> appeared, someone -- I think it was Paul Friedrich, but I'm not sure, and I
> apologize if I've got this wrong -- wrote a riposte, in which he argued
> that PIE must have been VSO.  This article was mischievous in tone, and the
> author made it clear that he was writing only as a devil's advocate, in
> order to show that a plausible case could be made for VSO order, if anybody
> wanted to do that.  I think the article was in Lingua, but I can't remember
> that either.  Gad -- why have I forgotten so much stuff?

    And Calvert Warkins answered that both were probably wrong (his article
on syntax reprinted in his "Selected Writings", IBS), PIE being a flexional
language, with free word order (every student in Latin knows this) where the
SOV / VSO controversy has no relevance.

    XD


From blf10 at cus.cam.ac.uk  Mon May 21 13:50:43 2001
From: blf10 at cus.cam.ac.uk (bruce fraser)
Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 14:50:43 +0100
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <MON.21.MAY.2001.145043.0100.>

 I believe Prof. Trask refers to Friedrich's chapter 'The Devil's Case...',
in the 1976 Festschrift 'Linguistic Studies Offered to Joesph Greenberg...',
which is rather difficult to track down. The basis of the argument appears
in Friedrich's 'PIE Syntax: the order of meaningful elements' (1975), and he
also discusses it in JIES 4, (1976).

Bruce Fraser

----------
>From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
>Date: Wed, 16 May, 2001, 1:38 PM

> Most of you will be acquainted with W. P. Lehmann's book arguing that PIE
> must have been an SOV language with typical SOV syntax.  After that book
> appeared, someone -- I think it was Paul Friedrich, but I'm not sure, and I
> apologize if I've got this wrong -- wrote a riposte, in which he argued
> that PIE must have been VSO.  This article was mischievous in tone, and the
> author made it clear that he was writing only as a devil's advocate, in
> order to show that a plausible case could be made for VSO order, if anybody
> wanted to do that.  I think the article was in Lingua, but I can't remember
> that either.  Gad -- why have I forgotten so much stuff?


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun May 20 04:32:55 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 00:32:55 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.003255.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/19/01 9:51:53 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com
writes:

> It seems to me that the fundamental flaw in most of these animal names is the
> assumption that they held a single meaning for as much as 3000 years among
> peoples who had no writing, no picture books, no schools, no biology
> departments and no encyclopedias.

-- why not, when they're supposedly in the same place observing the same
animals?

When you consider that PIE-speakers used their *uksen (oxen), under a *yukom
(yoke) to pull their *weghom (waggon) home from the ceremony where they
*hwedh (wed) their brides, it isn't surprising at all.  Those are all around
5000 years old as of now.

Our first recorded Anatolian, Greek and Indo-Iranian sources are themselves
around 3000 years old and 3000 years nearer the ur-language; if these
languages started in Anatolia and spread east and west, they existed in an
environment with many common faunal elements.

One would expect cognate terms for that fauna in those languages.  Not for
all of them, but for many of the principle ones.

Why would Anatolian, Greek, and Indo-Iranian, etc., all have different,
non-cognate terms for "fallow deer" and "lion", etc., if they all
continuously (and from the origins of PIE) existed in an environment where
these animals were common?  As they were, in Anatolia, Greece, the Balkans,
and the Iranian plateau?

We have unambiguous PIE terms for "horse", "cow", "wolf", and so forth.
Vocabulary loss for large mammals in the early IE languages is quite slow --
particularly for non-predators.

Therefore it's a good rough check to see which areas have animals which don't
produce PIE cognates.

Those which don't are _consistently_ those which describe southern,
Mediterranean species.

If the IE languages started in the Anatolia-Mediterranean area, and spread
north, they should _have_ a set of cognates for southern fauna and _lack_ a
set of cognates for northern fauna -- that is, the separate IE languages in
the north should have come up with separate, new words for the northern
animals as they came into contact with them.

Instead, we have exactly the reverse:  the IE languages have a _common_
lexicon for the northern fauna, and the IE languages of the Mediterranean and
Asia have _separate_ terms for the southern fauna -- while sharing the terms
for animals common to both zones.  Celts and Iranians had cognate terms for
"wolf": but Iranians and Anatolians had different, non-cognate words for
"lion".

This is precisely what one would expect if the PIE-speakers lived in an
environment _with_ wolves and _without_ lions.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun May 20 05:56:17 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 01:56:17 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer/ The Original *Kerwos?
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.015617.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/19/01 10:46:41 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> The real issue here is that the reconstructible PIE words for red deer may
> have in fact originally also referred to the fallow deer.  Or may even have
> started as words for the fallow deer.

- Then why aren't there cognates of this term used in Anatolian or Indo-Iranian
for "fallow deer"?

There are reflexes of this word in:

Baltic -- Lith. 'ellenis' (red deer)
Slavic -- OCS 'jeleni (red deer)
Greek -- Mycenaean e-ra-pi-ja ('pertaining to deer'), and classical Greek
(red deer)
Armenian -- eln (hind, female deer)
Tocharian -- yal (gazelle)

etc.

Not one single one of them means "fallow deer".

Since there aren't _any_ instances of this word meaning "fallow deer", you
might as well claim that *h(1)elh(1)en was the PIE word  word for "tortoise",
or "giraffe".

There are specific PIE terms for "red deer/elk" and "roedeer".  None for
"fallow deer", nor is there _any_ indication that the term for red deer may
have meant fallow deer.

You are putting forward the hypothesis that there was a word for "fallow
deer" which survived ONLY in places with no fallow deer, where it underwent
semantic tranferral to another animal -- the _same_ animal in every case.

Except in Greece, where, despite there being fallow deer around, it was
_also_ transferred to red deer.

That, to be frank, is grotesque.

> The Greeks don't seem to have a word for specifically the red deer or fallow
> deer.

-- actually, they did.  And it's from *h(1)elh(1)en, via pre-Greek
*h(1)elh(1)nbhos, specifically referring to "red deer", _cervus elaphus_.

And, of course, a reflex of *iorks, "roedeer".

> Since Indo-Iranian doesn't have the I.E. deer names, that doesn't help with
> any deer name.

-- well, yes, it does.  Again, we see that Greek, Anatolian, and Iranian have
no common lexical items for "fallow deer".

Or, as I seem to need to keep reminding you, for the other southern faunal
items.  Once can be coincidence.


From bmscott at stratos.net  Tue May 22 07:30:45 2001
From: bmscott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott)
Date: Tue, 22 May 2001 03:30:45 -0400
Subject: Fallow Deer/ The Original *Kerwos?
In-Reply-To: <8a.6b81141.2834a56d@aol.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.22.MAY.2001.033045.0400.>

On 16 May 2001, at 23:54, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

>  (BTW, in Slavic, deer is "jelen" (cf., Pol.,"zielony", green,
> definitely not red; cf, Greek, "chalkeios") which might connect it
> to the "yellow deer" which is what the fallow is called in Iran.
> "Fallow" might even suggest the same color connection.)

Aren't <jel-> and <ziel-> here just the expected reflexes of PIE *el-
and *g^hel- resp.?  And if so, how is Pol. <zielony> relevant?

Brian M. Scott


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon May 21 10:38:47 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 11:38:47 +0100
Subject: Genetic Descent
In-Reply-To: <000f01c0dc7a$21f689e0$1a2a63d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <MON.21.MAY.2001.113847.0100.>

--On Monday, May 14, 2001 8:30 am -0500 "David L. White"
<dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

[LT on Thomason and Kaufman]

>> Hmmm.  May I know where in their book T and K assert that "anything
>> goes"? My reading of the book reveals only the more cautious claim that
>> we cannot know what happens in language contact until we look.

>         Somewhere in the intro.  Hasty perusal has not revealed where.

I'm afraid I still can't find any such statement.

> Do they say anything does not go?

Not that I know of, but it's been years since I read the book.

[A small intervention. I am grateful to Hans-Werner Hatting for his
information on Anglo-Romani, which concludes by observing that Anglo-Romani
is indeed a variety of English.  As it happens, this conclusion is endorsed
by Sarah Thomason in her new book Language Contact: An Introduction,
(Edinburgh UP, 2001).  I'll be citing this book further below.]

[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.

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?

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"?

Anyway, I now want to talk about another language, discussed by Thomason in
her new book.  That language is Laha, spoken in the Moluccas, where the
locally dominant language is a variety of Malay, which is distantly, but
not closely, related to Laha.  The principal investigator here is James T.
Collins:

  J. T. Collins. 1980. 'Laha, a language of the central Moluccas'. Indonesia
  Circle 23: 3-19.

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."

But now consider the following.  The Laha are reportedly regarded by
themselves, and by others, as a distinct ethnic group with a distinct
language.  All Laha-speakers are also fluent in Malay, but other speakers
of Malay do not speak Laha.  The conclusion of Collins, and of Thomason, is
that Laha has developed as follows: it started out as a language entirely
distinct from Malay, but, under enormous pressure from Malay, it has
gradually, in piecemeal fashion, absorbed more and more Malay grammar,
until today the grammar is almost entirely Malay, and only a few bits of
Laha grammar survive -- for the moment, since it is possible that these few
fragments will also give way to Malay grammar in the future.

Therefore, using David White's criterion, Laha has changed from being a
language entirely distinct from Malay to a mere variety of Malay.  Is this
reasonable?  Earlier, David rejected a similar scenario for another
language as impossible in principle.

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.

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

Thomason expressly endorses position (2), as does Collins.  Native speakers
of Laha also take position (2).  Apparently Moluccans who don't speak Laha
also accept position (2).

David, what's your view?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun May 20 06:41:28 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 02:41:28 EDT
Subject: European Genetics/IE
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.024128.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/20/01 12:15:07 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:


> Remember that with the Anatolian hypothesis, you are talking about 3500 years
> between the IE's expansion across Europe and the first written evidence of
> an IE language in Europe.

-- which is, of course, itself absurd, given the interrelationships of the IE
languages and the degree of differentiation in the earliest attested examples.


From r.piva at swissonline.ch  Sun May 20 19:36:28 2001
From: r.piva at swissonline.ch (Renato Piva)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 21:36:28 +0200
Subject: Pelasgian/was Etruscans
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.213628.0200.>

Douglas G Kilday wrote:

> If you give me enough elbow-room, I'll give you IE etymologies of Hanukkah,
> moccasin, and boomerang. A solution within IE is always possible.

I have no doubt on this. Some people would do anything for glory ...
Serious: Because we know their story, we can take for granted that these words
aren't of IE origin, so nobody expects you to even try to find another
derivation.  But if we ignored completely where Hanukkah, mocassin, and
boomerang had been used before they came into moderrn languages, IE would be
one of many possible hypothesis to be verified or falsified. The fact is that
'kypeiron is a word found in ancient Greek, and Greek is an IE language.

> It isn't necessarily the most plausible. In my opinion, what "one should
> prefer" is the solution with the fewest special assumptions.

The easiest way may not always be the best. It only depends on what you mean by
<special>.

> If we look at Gk. <leirion> ~ Lat. <li:lium>, Gk. <peirins> ~ Lat.
> <pi:lentum>, Gk. <kedros> ~ Lat. <citrus>, etc. we can make one assumption
> and derive the words from substrate, or we can make a set of assumptions to
> rationalize irregular development from PIE or peculiar borrowing between
> branches of IE.

Or, you can assume Etruscan intermediation for li:lium (with dissimilation l_r
> l_l) and citrus. IMHO, in lack of further material the best and most honest
solution would be a <non liquet>.  For pi:lentum, one should be even more
prudent. The meaning is not the same as in Greek: *peirins, -inthos (the Nom.
is not attested!) is a "wicker basket tied upon the cart", while Lat. pi:lentum
means more specifically "voiture de gala ŕ quatre roues, qui servait au
transport des matrones dans les cérémonies publiques" according to
Ernout-Meillet. Besides that, the word is not attested before classical time
(Verg., Hor.), and Porphyrius says it is a Gaul word (cf. carpentum).

What you call "one assumption" is in fact also a set of assumptions, some of
which are implicit: You assume 1. that kyparissos is the same as Hebr. go:pher
(which is an unknown tree translated in numerous ways in the Septuagint; o.k.,
one of them is kyparissos, but that may be due to phonetical association; the
name of the cypress in Hebrew is bro:s' or bro:t); 2. that there is no
borrowing in either way, because both words come from a common "Pelasgian"
source; 3. that -issos is not Greek; 4.  that the suffixation had no function
(otherwise, it could have remained *kyper, *kypar, *go:pher or the like).

> My guess is that most IEists, who take pride in regular
> sound-correspondences, would rather invoke substrate than postulate a bunch
> of funny stuff happening to a group of words within IE.

In R. Lanszweert's reconstruction there is nothing weard about regular
sound-correspondences, and the semantic analogy involved is not just <funny
stuff>.  Assumptions such as the ones suggested have to be discussed seriously.
Whether you agree or not. It is very easy to hide behind a wall of <subtrate>,
but it may lead only to deviating attempts such as those one can read in the
works of such omnicomparatists as Trombetti, van Windekens, Furnée, etc.. IE
languages were able to form compounds, so in my view there was only a limited
need of loans. Just look at what German or Modern Greek are doing. But beware:
I'm not saying there were no loans at all. We only need to be careful with what
we call <substrate>: <substrate> risks to become a waste-basket for anything
difficult to analyse. Many of the words for which we do invoke subtrate may
only be obscured compounds waiting to be rediscovered. Such Greek words do not
occur in other IE languages, as they were specific of the Greek contest. But
the same may apply to any single IE language, of course.

> Then why are there still Greek words in -iskos?

Because -iskos and -issos differ in expressivity: -issos can be the mycenaean
expressive variation of -iskos (through *-iskjos). Exactly as there are both
'polemos and 'ptolemos < *pjolemos, 'polis and 'ptolis < *pjolis, 'skyla and
'syla < *ssyla < *skjyla, etc. Expressivity is a reality in every language - or
shall we say that 'ptolemos, 'ptolis ans 'syla are substrate words?

> Very ingenious, but does anyone besides R. Lanszweert take R. Lanszweert
> seriously? Can he pronounce his own reconstructions?

I don't see any difficulty in pronouncing *pk'u-perih2. Can you pronounce all
of the reconstructed words? If you don't believe that such "complicated" words
may exist, take a look at the Kartvelian languages, or simply try to pronounce
Georg.  vprtskvnis, a regular verb form meaning "they let us pay for it". Of
course, the initial cluster in *pk'u-perih2 was quite instable, thus it was
simplified very soon to k- in Gk and c- in Lat., while it led to fs'- in Av.
and ks.- in AI.

> How common is the typology of ejectives with laryngeals?

I think this question doesn't apply here, or am I misunderstanding you?

> Perhaps this paper should have been subtitled "Woerterschimpf".

Have you read it?

> And if <kupeiron> and <kuparissos> are related as implied here, why is
> resemblance to a sheep-spit a more plausible connection than aromaticity?

Ask the ancient Greeks. Why is resemblance to a beetle a more plausible
connection than to the typical, hideous hum of the engine in the case of a
famous car?

> For that matter, how distinctive is a
> sheep-spit compared to a goat-spit, hog-spit, or (most aptly) bull-spit?

Ask the Indoeuropeans, but *pek'u- may also mean cattle. In any case, Lat.
cuspis comes from *pk'u-spid, see P. Thieme, Radices postnominales, in; Akten
d. VII.  Fachtagung etc., Wiesbaden 1985.

>> Lanszweert doesn't say anything about the name of the island, but I think
>> that Cyprus was named after the copper mines and bronze production (as far
>> as I remember, copper bars were pike-shaped, but I may be wrong).

> So copper got its name from the shape of the bars, which reminded speakers
> of pikes, which in turn reminded them of spit-shaped trees, etc., etc.
> Somehow, substratal derivation just got a lot more palatable.

I think I was wrong in what the name of the Island is concerned, but I guess
you wouldn't be right, either. I probably mixed it up with Gk. 'obeloi "spits
used as money" (in Plutarch and elsewhere according to LSJ). I'd like to
correct myself: It seems that the name of the metal is secundary to the name of
the Island. In turn, the Island seems to be named after the colour (henna) won
from the plant called kypros - which by chance is also the colour of the metal.
This word is of Semitic origin (Hebr. kopher), as already stated by E. Masson
and others. Gk. 'kypeiron and ky'parissos have probably nothing to do with
kypros or Cyprus (or copper). If you still wonder, how a spit can be the origin
of the name of a tree, see Ovidius, Met.  10, 106: metas imitata cupressus "the
cypress looking like the obelisk" (obelisk is diminutive of obelos "spit").

RP

[ Moderator's note:
  I have included the following correction, originally received in a separate
  message, for the sake of brevity.
  --rma ]

Message-ID: <3B091422.457549F8 at swissonline.ch>
Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 15:12:02 +0200
References: <F216JXDvCeqTPcaWC1Q00001ff8 at hotmail.com>

In my last posting I wrote:

        li:lium (with dissimilation l_r > l_l)

It should be assimilation, of course.

Sorry.

RP


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Tue May 22 03:02:35 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 23:02:35 EDT
Subject: About the Yew1
Message-ID: <MON.21.MAY.2001.230235.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/19/2001 10:00:49 PM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<<The distribution of the yew (Taxus baccata) has some bearing on the IE
homeland problem. The variety of yew-names in IE languages indicates that the
plant was unknown to PIE-speakers. According to the map at www.conifers.org,
the yew is not found between the Carpathians and the Urals, with the
exception of Ciscaucasia, Crimea, and lowlands NW of Crimea. Hence we don't
want to put the homeland _too_ close to the Black Sea or the Caucasus; it
should be further north.>>

The same map, of course -- at www.conifers.org -- shows that the yew is also
currently NOT "found" in all of northern Anatolia or along the lower Danube
in a region that looks like it may reach Hungary.

So one may also want to put that old homeland a bit farther east or a bit
farther south.  At least based on where the yew is said to be now.

It's a different question where the yew was 5500 - 7500 years ago.  The
conifers web site itself cites "Hartzell, The Yew Tree, 1991" for the
statement: "Some palynological evidence suggests that the yew was
substantially more abundant in Europe during the late Pleistocene (10,000
years ago)."   This is a little off the current data.  But relevant perhaps
to the Anatolian hypothesis, where the yew may have been even less "abundant."

Actually there have been dramatic changes in tree populations and
distributions over the last 8,000 years in Europe.  Perhaps the most
surprising - discovered by the first British C-14  analyzers - was the almost
complete and dramatically quick wipe-out of the elm about 3500BC.  At first
attributed to neolithic farmers, it is now considered to have been the result
of climatic changes -- observable also in the range of other species --
causing perhaps a sudden susceptibility to disease.  A pretty good,
relatively recent web site for information about the sometimes drastic
changes in tree distribution and ranges during the Holocene can be found at
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nercEUROPE.html.

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.)

Also on the web site is some info on the transition that the forests went
through, the effects of climatic change, human deforestation and the Black
sea flood during the 5000-2000BC period.  There are some maps showing the
expansion of the steppes climate in both the Ukraine and Anatolia.

On another note, a good example of how drastic the changes could be on a
local basis is the Aran Islands: "Those familiar with the treeless topography
of the Aran Islands might be surprised to know that only a few thousand years
ago, Inishere was covered with trees, particularly oak, pine, elm, hazel,
alder, birch and willow and then, later on, yew.... Most of the pollen
recovered during the first half of the Holocene was from trees....  The top
two metres of sediment includes rye pollen, an indication of early farming on
Inishere and a crop grown to this day."

The sometimes late appearance of yew again suggests that the distribution of
yew was not and is not a matter of nature acting alone.

Most modern yew forests seem to be relicts or matters of human cultivation.
Killarney National Park brags that it has one of only three surviving yew
woods in Europe.  The largest concentration of yew in Europe are currently
found in the Carpathians, totaling 20,000 hectares.  This may be attributed
perhaps to the foresight of Polish Kings in the 1400's who banned the cutting
of yew and other trees that were being depleted, across southern Poland and
the then-Polish province of the Ukraine.

In Bulgaria, the government acted to give total protection to the yew and
other "relict" trees in 1989.  At that time, it was observed that the region
may not have had many such trees "in ancient times."  On the other hand, the
Crimean yews may date back to a time when the yew was more widespread in the
Ukraine, even in neolithic times.  Or they may have even been introduced by
trade with hypothetical PIEists.  See Dickson, J.H., The Yew tree (Taxus
baccata L.) in Scotland - native or early introduction or both? (PNN 1994).

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."

With regard to the Ukraine I have: "The territory of Ukraine is mostly a
level, treeless plain, called "steppe". There are the Crimean Mountains in
the Crimean peninsula and the Carpathians in the west, but they are not very
high. Mixed forests of pine and fir-trees, beeches, limes, oaks and elms
cover the mountains, but the thickest woods can still be found in the
northern part of the republic, in Volyn.  Kiev and Cherkassy lie in the midst
of Ukrainian southernmost pine forest."

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.

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.

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 try to get to all that in my next post.

Regards,
Steve Long


From sarima at friesen.net  Sun May 20 18:30:48 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 11:30:48 -0700
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.4.30.0105171503330.7929-100000@vesuri.Helsinki.FI>
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.113048.0700.>

At 03:58 PM 5/17/01 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote:
>Try putting it to NNS's like this:
>
>    Which of these words does not belong with the others:
>
>       a) either
>       b) other
>       c) whether
>       d) feather
>
>and see what kind of response you get.  I'd do it myself, but I don't
>have access to enough native speakers.  You could even slip it into an
>exam and then ask "why?".  I would expect that most speakers would see a-c
>as a unit, ...

Of course they would!  "Feather" is the only *concrete* word in the
list!  None of the others refers to a physical object.  That alone is
enough to make a speaker split it out as not belonging.

To make this a valid test you would have to make the third word something
abstract - something that has no concrete referent.

[P.S. in my dialect at least all four have a [D]].

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


From ERobert52 at aol.com  Sun May 20 20:28:45 2001
From: ERobert52 at aol.com (ERobert52 at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 16:28:45 EDT
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.162845.EDT.>

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]

> 2. They have now come to contrast in initial position, at least before
> /a/, albeit only in loan words, and only for certain speakers.  I have
> noticed this for some time, and am pleased that a Duden author has too.
> This strongly favors the analysis as separate phonemes.

On the other hand, maybe the distinction in 'Cha-' words is phonotactically
conditioned - isn't it always [c,] in words beginning 'Chal-' and 'Char-' and
always [x] in 'Cha-' followed by anything else? (Excluding of course where it
is [k], [S] or [tS]). And it can't be borrowing that causes this distinction
- 'Charkow' has /x/ (usually realised as [x]) in the source language but [c,]
in German.

Ed. Robertson


From connolly at memphis.edu  Mon May 21 05:45:56 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 00:45:56 -0500
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <MON.21.MAY.2001.004556.0500.>

Robert Whiting wrote, concerning the endless thy thigh debate::

> But I'm not invoking etymology (except to show that the morpheme boundary
> really is there), I'm invoking perceptual categories.  Certainly there is
> no productive morpheme boundary in either of these words, and if you read
> the posting, then you know that I said as much.  I don't expect naive
> native speakers to know about the morpheme boundary in 'either' in the
> same way that they know about the morpheme boundary in 'running'.
> Similarly, I wouldn't expect your average NNS to know that there is a
> morpheme boundary in 'both' or that the 'th' of this word is the same
> morpheme as in 'the'.

If the speakers do not "know" of a supposed morpheme boundary in
_either_, you have a *big* problem.  If you through [T] and [D] into one
phoneme, and if the speakers must have access to a rule voicing /T/ in
certain morphological-phonetic environments (else they could not produce
the correct output), and if the morpheme boundary somehow explains why
_either_ has [D] while _ether_ does not, then how do they know to let
the rule operate?  Historical morpheme boundaries cannot form the
environment for a synchronic rule unless they are also, and still,
synchronic boundaries, which is what you have in effect just denied.

Leo Connolly


From pausyl at AOL.COM  Mon May 21 05:43:42 2001
From: pausyl at AOL.COM (Paul S. Cohen)
Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 01:43:42 -0400
Subject: thy thigh etc. (external sandhi in English)
Message-ID: <MON.21.MAY.2001.014342.0400.>

On Thu, 17 May 2001 12:31:14 +0300, Robert Whiting <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
wrote:

[snip]
>'Through' is also often a function word, although not invariably
>since it is also used as an adverb and an adjective.
>Furthermore, it has a lexicalized stressed variant 'thorough'
>(always an adjective), something that is characteristic of
>function words.  I suspect that what keeps 'through' out of the
>group of function words with initial [D] is that it doesn't
>appear to be a word with a pronominal/deictic 'th-' base as the
>other members of the group do.
[snip]

I submit that what keeps _through_ out of all this is that, unlike the
other closed-class/function words, what follows the initial fricative is
not a vowel. That is, the word does not (and did not) afford the correct
phonetic environment.  In fact, I would posit that word-initial (and
syllable-initial) voiced fricative + /r/ (or /l/) are phonotactically un-
English.


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Mon May 21 14:50:01 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 14:50:01 -0000
Subject: thy thigh etc. (external sandhi in English)
Message-ID: <MON.21.MAY.2001.145001.0000.>

Robert Whiting (17 May 2001) wrote:

>On Tue, 21 Nov 2000 Douglas G Kilday <acnasvers at hotmail.com> wrote:

>> but one should not assume that this distinction arose by the
>> selective voicing of initial [T] to [D] in what Whiting loosely
>> labels "function words".

>First, the concept of "function words" is not a Whiting loose label.
>"Function word" and "content word" are technical terms in grammatical theory,
>and hardly my invention.

>Interestingly, Webster's Encylopedic Unabridged Dictionary (1994) has a longer
>definition of "function word":

>    function word, a word, as a pronoun or preposition, that is
>    used in a language as a substitute for another or as a marker
>    of syntactic relationship; a member of a small, closed form
>    class whose membership is relatively fixed.  Cf. empty word,
>    full word.

>but has no definition of "content word" using instead the term "full word":

>    full word, (esp. in Chinese grammar) a word that has lexical
>    meaning rather than grammatical meaning; a word or morpheme
>    that functions grammatically as a contentive. Cf. empty word.

>I don't particularly like this last part since, although "contentive" fairly
>obviously means "content word" (rather than something that makes Mr Borden's
>cows give milk), the dictionary nowhere defines either contentive or content
>word.

I thought it was Mr. Carnation's cows who were contented. Anyhow, I'm not
going to dispute the fact that "function word" and "content word" are
well-established labels. What I don't like about the above is the twisted
oxymoron "functions as a contentive" when contentives and "function words"
are allegedly mutually exclusive. This is a dysfunctional family of
definitions. Contentives are no less functional in language than
non-contentives. Since the latter govern contentives, I propose replacing
the bonehead term "function word" with "gubernative".

>In fact there is a sort of Zipf's Law for this because function words are
>relatively few in number but are used very frequently while the number of
>content words is huge (and growing constantly) but the individual words are
>much rarer in use.

Excuse my skepticism, but I can't believe the _net_ number of contentives in
a given language is growing constantly. As new contentives enter a language,
others exit. Lexica don't have rubber walls.

>Basicly, content words tell what is being talked about and function words tell
>what is being said about it.  You can see this by taking a simple sentence and
>stripping out the functional elements leaving the content words:

>   I saw the book on a shelf in the room.
>     see     book      shelf        room

Let's try this (admittedly archaistic) variant:

    I saw thee on a shelf in the room.
      see           shelf        room

According to your analysis elsewhere, pronouns (particularly those with
[D-]) are "function words" which according to the above do _not_ tell what
is being talked about. So I was _not_ talking about "thee", and in fact it's
impossible to talk about "thee". Something's still murky.

>But this [Finegan ap. Comrie] was published some 13-14 years ago.  Perhaps it
>is no longer the mainstream opinion.  Perhaps I missed your review of this
>work where you pointed out to the misinformed multitudes that "what [these
>words] share is definiteness, not some murky 'functionality'."  If so, please
>tell me where it is published so that I can see what evidence you base this
>assertion on.

The assertion is based on the intuition of a semi-naive native speaker
(myself).

>Besides, function words wasn't my label to start with.  I originally referred
>to them as deictic words and pronouns.  Somebody else introduced the term
>function words, presumably because this is how they are usually referred to in
>the literature, and I just let it ride because, well, they *are* all function
>words, and function words is easier to write than pronouns and deictic words.

Obviously I failed to follow the thread back into the archive. I would have
had no objection to "deictic words and pronouns".

>'Through' is also often a function word, although not invariably since it is
>also used as an adverb and an adjective.  Furthermore, it has a lexicalized
>stressed variant 'thorough' (always an adjective), something that is
>characteristic of function words.  I suspect that what keeps 'through' out of
>the group of function words with initial [D] is that it doesn't appear to be a
>word with a pronominal/deictic 'th-' base as the other members of the group
>do.

If memory serves, both are from OE <thurh>, so it is "through" which is the
partially grammaticalized unstressed variant of "thorough", not vice versa.
I suspect the fact that it is _not_ derived from a pronominal or deictic
base, but is akin to Lat. <trans> 'across', <intrare> 'to cross in, enter',
Skt. <tarati> 'he crosses over', etc. has a lot to do with its lack of
definiteness and lack of [D-].

>Definiteness is a functional (grammatical) category.  But where is the
>definiteness in 'though'?  As a conjunction, 'though' is a function word, but
>is no more definite than 'but' (with which it is sometimes synonymous).  It
>can be adversative, disjunctive, or conditional, but not definite.  But, even
>though it lacks any overt "definiteness," it can still be considered a deictic
>or a demonstrative.

That is how I was considering it. If you "point out" or "demonstrate"
something, it acquires definiteness. As a conjunction, "though" means
"despite the fact that" and "the fact" is definite. As an adverb, "though"
means "nevertheless", which specifies a definite degree of difference
(nothing). I'd like to see a sentence in which "but" and "though" are
interchangeable.

>But I will agree partially with your premise.  These words *are* all function
>words, but the fact that they have initial [D] is not specifically because
>they are function words, but because they share some other feature.  So you
>were on the right track; you have just taken a disastrously wrong turn.

Thanks (I think).

>So it is not true that "no special signs for 'v' or 'z' are found" in OE.
>They are there, but they aren't used frequently and generally only in foreign
>words (except that 'u' is sometimes substituted for wen or for <f> in
>intervocalic position in native words).  What you can say without fear of
>contradiction is that they are not used to indicate contrasts between [f] and
>[v] or [s] and [z] because there aren't any in OE.

I stand corrected.

>> [Did] morphemic boundaries in OE necessarily make adjacent
>> fricatives unvoiced in connected speech?

>Probably.  Otherwise words like 'nothing' (OE na:thing < na:n + thing) and
>'anything' (< f:nig + thing) would doubtless have [D] rather than [T] since
>these compounds came into existence in OE.  Since the environments around the
>boundaries in these words are invariant, surely the sandhi-type rule that you
>propose below would have been more likely to operate here than in the more
>variable environments of the boundaries between words.  I can't see any
>alternative:  if there was a sandhi rule operating across morpheme boundaries
>it would have fixed 'nothing' and 'anything' with [D] already in OE.
>Similarly, compounds like 'within' and 'without' would have been fixed with
>[D] at an early date by such a rule.  Since none of this happened, it speaks
>against the existence of such a rule.

Obviously, had I thought of these examples, I could have spared myself some
embarrassment.

>Sounds like the writer/copyist [of the "Cuckoo Song"] was Irish or Welsh.  I
>must say that I have never heard of this sandhi rule for OE.  Can you give me
>a reference to a publication of it so I can see if there is any other evidence
>besides the _hapax phenomenon_ <bucke uerteth>?  Surely if such a sandhi rule
>could be proved for OE, those who claim massive Celtic influence on English
>would be all over it like a shot even though it is only similar, not
>identical, to Celtic lenition (mutation).

>But if <bucke uerteth> is the only evidence, this is certainly too flimsy a
>foundation on which to build such an elaborate structure.  There are simply
>too many other ways to account for this single piece of evidence.

Yes, I now see that it was incredibly foolish to erect such a structure on
the flimsy foundation of a single letter. Of course, that was back in the
last millennium. I'm a lot older and wiser now.

>And all this assumes that the writing <uerteth> actually represents the verb
>'fart', which is not universally accepted.  Admittedly, OED takes it this way,
>but others have taken it as a form of a verb based on _vert_ 'green'
>(Cambridge History of American and English Literature).  More convincing in my
>view is a loan based on Latin _vertere_, French _vertir_ 'turn'.  There are
>quite a number of borrowed English compounds based on this root ('avert',
>'divert', 'convert', 'revert', 'pervert', invert, etc.), but the bare root
>seems unknown as a verb (although common in other words:  'version',
>'vertigo', 'vertex', 'verse', 'versus', etc.).  The native cognate is found in
>the suffix '-ward(s)'.  Perhaps this hapax legomenon is a borrowing that never
>became established or even an aphetic form of some compound used to preserve
>the meter (this is, after all, a song).

I sincerely doubt that <uerteth> represents a borrowing from Latin or
Romance, given the bucolic nature of the song and the absence of other
non-AS vocabulary.

>Although there is nothing philologically unsound about a derivation from
>'fart', it seems out of place in the context of the song.  No one has ever
>been able to explain to me why a farting buck is a transparent metaphor of
>spring (from eating all the newly sprouted greenery?).

That was precisely the explanation given to me years ago by a professor of
English literature, and in this case authority has appeal. Consuming large
quantities of fresh vegetation produces flatulence.

>In keeping with with the rest of the song and the parallelism within this
>couplet, some more visible physical activity rather than an auditory or
>olofactory one would be more appropriate.  Thus "the bullock starts, the buck
>turns/twists (about)" is better suited to the context and the structure of the
>song.  The main advantage to translating "the bullock starts, the buck farts"
>is that it preserves the rhyme and scan of the original (bulloc sterteth/bucke
>verteth).

Since the previous couplet has the clear auditory parallel of a bleating ewe
and lowing cow, your argument has some weight. It is less clear that the
growing seed, blowing (fermenting?) mead, and springing wood are intended as
a visual parallel. At any rate, the song is too short to allow any firm
stylistic conclusions to be drawn. I would guess that here, as in folk-songs
generally, the anonymous author was more concerned with phonetic parallelism
(i.e. rhyming and scansion) than with higher-level parallelism.

>> It appears that this large influx of words beginning with [v]
>> which does not alternate allophonically with [f] has forced the
>> older words beginning with [f/v] to abandon the voiced allophone
>> and become words beginning with invariant [f].  That is, this
>> influx of loanwords has created a new phonemic distinction /f:v/
>> in initial position which the orthography of Chaucer's time (late
>> 14th cent.) regards as fully established.

>Rather, it was the French (Latin) contrast between [f] and [v] that was
>imported in pairs like 'failen' and 'vailen' and 'coffer' and 'cover' or
>'coffin' and 'coven'.  English now had to deal with words with inherent [f]
>and inherent [v] in contrastive positions.  'Vers' "verse" probably was
>reborrowed from French in ME along with 'fers' "chess-queen".  But this time
>there is an [f]/[v] contrast so the two sounds can't be treated as variants.
>Furthermore, the fact that OE <f/uers> was not fixed with initial [f] but with
>initial [v] runs counter to your assertion.  So the [f]/[v] contrast was just
>imported along with the words.

Yes, I see your point. ME swallowed the contrast whole. The model I proposed
introduced unnecessary complexity.

>If there are a lot of borrowed words with initial [v], especially when some of
>them contrast with words with initial [f], either borrowed or native, and
>there are a lot of borrowed words with intervocalic [f] then speakers either
>have to nativize the borrowed words with initial [v] to [f] and nativize the
>borrowed words with intervocalic [f] to [v] (and lose the contrast in both
>cases) or they have to accept the [f]/[v] contrast as phonemic.  Obviously
>they did the latter.  But this certainly doesn't require a sandhi rule for its
>implementation.

Agreed.

>While 'for' and 'fore' might have flopped back and vorth between initial [f]
>and [v] for centuries, surely invariable compounds like 'before' and 'afore'
>would have been fixed as *<bevore> and *<avore> within a week if there was a
>sandhi rule operating that voiced fricatives in a voiced environment across
>morpheme boundaries.  So phonemicization of [v] doesn't require a sandhi rule
>for its implementation.  In fact, it is easier to explain without one.
>Otherwise you have to say that native words in initial [f] and borrowed words
>in initial [v] is just another huge statistical anomaly.

Yes, unless one argues that unvoiced fricatives were regular in OE and early
ME in utterance-initial position (including words uttered in isolation). But
then "before" and "afore" could only be explained by special pleading
(restorative rules, different categories of morphemic boundaries) and that
would just create a bigger mess. It seems better just to abandon my
proposal.

>> The status of initial [T:D] in Chaucer is equivocal.
>> Contractions like <artow> 'art thou' and <seistow> 'sayest thou'
>> suggest that <thou> already had invariant [D], since the old rule
>> would require [T] here and [tT] usually contracts to [T], which
>> would yield *<arthow> etc. However, this argument is extremely
>> weak. Statistical analysis of Chaucer's alliterations in "th"
>> might resolve the issue, but I am not aware of such a study.

>Extremely weak is perhaps an understatement.  Actually, in addition to
>contractions, <t> in 'thou' (and the other cases of this pronoun) is often
>found after [s], [t], and [d].  Thus you find things like 'bi-hold tou'.  Any
>conclusions about whether initial <th> in these words was voiced, either
>invariantly or environmentally are very iffy.  But I will agree that the
>possiblility that it was already voiced is not excluded.

What we need then is the study of Chaucerian alliterations. Perhaps someone
did this for a master's thesis, and the result is gathering dust in the
basement of an obscure college.

>> At any rate it is clear that the English /f:v/ distinction
>> resulted from loanwords and was well established by Chaucer's
>> time. The /s:z/ distinction, if not already made by Chaucer,
>> followed shortly. It can be attributed partly to loanwords,
>> partly to the earlier establishment of /f:v/ as phonemic.

>There are other factors, which you seem anxious to ignore, involved in the
>phonemicization of the voiced fricatives as well.  One of these is the
>collapse of the English short vowel system and the loss of final inflectional
>'-n' followed by loss of final [@] (schwa).

>Another factor was the loss of intervocalic long fricatives [ff TT ss] which
>were simplified into [f T s] producing intervocalic unvoiced fricatives which
>could contrast with the intervocalic voiced fricatives [v D z] which had
>previously been simply allophones of [f T s] in intervocalic position.  Since
>it was no longer possible to predict [f T s] or [v D z] based on intervocalic
>position, something had to happen to the intervocalic voiceless/voiced
>fricatives that were no longer predictable from their environment.  For
>instance, modern 'since' comes from a contraction of ME 'sithens' (with
>adverbial genitive -s) which in turn came from OE 'siththan' (itself a
>compound of 'si:th' "after" and 'tham' or 'thon' [dative or instrumental of
>"that"]).

I wasn't "anxious to ignore" these factors, but dealing with them would have
doubled the length of my posting (OK, for you that's not a valid
consideration).

>> The [T:D] opposition was left as an orphaned allophonic pair,
>> very difficult for speakers to maintain, especially in initial
>> position. They would have been obliged to enunciate some words
>> with invariant initial [f], [v], [s], [z] and others with
>> variable [T] or [D] according to the preceding sound. Under these
>> circumstances any mechanism tending to fix [T] or [D] in
>> particular words would have operated rather strongly.

>Now it's my turn to say that I don't see why.  According to you this sandhi
>rule had been operating for over 500 years and now, with the loss of two of
>the allophone pairs to which it applied, speakers are suddenly anxious to get
>rid of it.  One of the principles of sound change rules is that they operate
>until they no longer have anything to operate on and then they disappear.  It
>should have been no more difficult to maintain this alleged sandhi rule for
>[T]/[D] than it was to maintain it for the other fricatives in the face of
>other fixed voiceless/voiced oppositions (as in the stops).

The sandhi rule, by hypothesis, only applied to three pairs of allophones in
the first place. You have succeeded in convincing me that the initial /f:v/
and /s:z/ oppositions were acquired directly from contrasting loanwords,
with the assistance of the loss of conditioning factors in other positions.
But with the sandhi rule superseded for two of the three pairs, what's so
outlandish about proposing that speakers would have trouble maintaining this
otherwise obsolete rule for the one remaining pair, given its phonetic _and_
phonologic similarity to the other two? Or do you generativists simply deny
that this sort of analogical process can happen?

>But I must say that you paint a vivid picture of the difficulties faced by
>14-15th century speakers of English.  One can almost see the churls and thanes
>tossing and turning on their straw pallets or feather beds, driven to
>sleeplessness by the difficulty of maintaining the allophonic alternation of
>initial [T] and [D] now that [f] and [v] and [s] and [z] have become phonemic
>contrasts.

Yes, I think I'll turn to painting, since I don't seem to have much of a
future as a grammarian.

>> In my opinion this probably began with the statistics of
>> utterances: demonstratives like <the> and <this> commonly follow
>> prepositions, which in a majority of cases end in voiced sounds.

>And you call functionality murky.  Do you have any other examples of
>syntactically conditioned phonetic change?  I have seen a lot of ontological
>ingenuity expended by classical phonologists to devise a purely phonetic
>environment for some obviously necessary sound change, but this is a new one.

This proposal does not involve "syntactically conditioned" phonetic change.
The conditioning itself is purely phonetic.

>> Once the invariant [D] was fixed in the most common
>> demonstratives, it would have spread by analogy to the other
>> "th"-words of pronominal origin which carry definiteness.

>Are there any "th"- pronouns that are indefinite?

I forgot you "do grammar". There should have been a comma, between "origin"
and "which". (BTW, since commas carry meaning, does this mean they can't be
phonemes, suprasegmental or otherwise?)

>Besides, this doesn't account for the spread of this feature to the
>conjunction 'though' which does not have any of the characteristics you deem
>necessary for this change; i.e., it lacks definiteness, it never follows a
>preposition (or even an article).

I don't agree about the definiteness, but the other objection holds, so this
feature must have been spread by analogy.

>This is one reason why the mainstream theory that [D] in these words is a
>lenition of [T] in unstressed forms of function words is easier to believe.
>Rather than basing the distinction on "definiteness," categorizing these words
>as function words accounts for all of them (which "definiteness doesn't do
>[cf.  'though']).  Besides, 'that' is not infrequently used in an indefinite
>sense ('That's just the way it is').

That's _not_ an indefinite sense of "that"; it's a definite sense without
explicit antecedent. The definiteness is definitively proved by the fact
that "that" is equated with "_the_ way it is" (note the _definite_ article).

I concede that lenition is easier to swallow than my statistical proposal.
But it does _not_ account for all the words, since some of them ("though",
"thus", and the 2nd-sg. pronouns) seldom or never have unstressed forms
comparable to "the". Whatever model we use to start the process must be
augmented by analogical spread.

>Function words often have stressed and unstressed forms.  In fact, we even
>have a nursery rhyme to imprint on young minds the fact that unstressed
>'beside her' rhymes with 'spider'.

This isn't a "fact" in my dialect, where "spider" has the schwa-like nucleus
and "beside her" does not. The rhyme only works in my dialect with an
unnatural pronunciation of "spider".

>       [...summary of defects of DGK's posting...]
>
>       This [model of fixing [D]] ignores the fact that words that lack
>       "definiteness" have this feature ('though') while words
>       that have "definiteness" ('three', 'thirty', 'thirteen',
>       'thrice') lack it.

Numerals are non-definite. I can say "Three dogs pooped on the porch"
(indef.) or "Those three dogs etc." (def.). OTOH numeral adverbs like
"thrice" are indefinite. If I want to be definite, I must use an analytic
form: "those three times".

>       In other words, according to your scenario initial [D] in
>       English is a marker of "definiteness" and initial [T] is a
>       marker of "non-definiteness."  Thus the occurrence of
>       initial [T] or initial [D] in a word can be predicted on
>       the basis of some inherent semantic or lexical quality of
>       the word and vice versa.  So, if what you say about words
>       with initial [D] sharing "definiteness" is true, then the
>       distinction between initial [T] and [D] is not phonemic
>       because the occurrence of one or the other predicts
>       something about the meaning of the word in which it occurs.
>       Phonemes are units of sound, not of meaning.  Morphemes are
>       units of meaning.  If a sound predicts meaning, then it is
>       not (just) a phoneme.  If the only contrast that you have
>       involves a prediction of meaning, then you can't use that
>       contrast to prove a phonemic distinction.

I don't believe I stated or implied that initial [T] was a marker of
anything. Most English words in [T-] are non-definite (neither inherently
definite nor indefinite) but some proper nouns acquire definiteness by
context or agreement.

I must say I agree with the argument in your other postings that [D-] is
morphemic in ModE. But I do _not_ agree that this precludes initial [T:D]
from being phonemic. If your argument above is valid, then not only is that
contrast not phonemic, but the contrast of initial [D] with _any_ other
phoneme is not phonemic. For example, "that" contrasts with "cat", but the
[D-] of "that" is morphemic, while the [k-] of "cat" is not. According to
your analysis, initial [D] and [k] are _not_ distinct phonemes. So is [D] an
allophone of [k] in this position, or is [D] something other than a phoneme?
Maybe just a plain phone? (A geologist once told me "That's not a rock; it's
a vein-filling"...)

>The distribution of initial [T] and [D] is quite predictable in English.  I
>can quite easily conceive of a phonologic rule that predicts their
>distribution.  Saying that there isn't one is like putting on a blindfold and
>then saying "I can't see."

>Your claim that classical phonology can't predict the distribution of initial
>[T] and [D] in English is simply a limitation of classical phonology, not a
>reason for denying the obvious truth of the predictability of initial [T] and
>[D] in English.

If I prefer classical phonology to hard-rock, new-wave, punk-rap (or
whatever your phonology is) it's a matter of taste. I'm not trying to deny
any truths, obvious or otherwise. Your phonology may be ideal for reducing
synchronic languages to compendia of generative rules. My interests are
primarily diachronic and historical (and I am grateful for being set
straight on these matters of ME phonetics). In my opinion, description with
your phonology runs the risk of creating synchronic "rules" which serve only
to neutralize historical events or processes, and this obscures what I
attempt to study.

DGK


From douglas at nb.net  Sun May 20 10:11:17 2001
From: douglas at nb.net (Douglas G. Wilson)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 06:11:17 -0400
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.4.30.0105171423280.7929-100000@vesuri.Helsinki.FI>
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.061117.0400.>

Just a footnote, not intended to invalidate the point about initial /D/.

Are there "non-grammatical" English words beginning with /D/?

I will take as a working definition of "English word": "any word which
appears in a conventional English-language dictionary, excluding proper
names". I also exclude pronunciations which are designated as foreign, if
an alternative "English" pronunciation is given.

I find two:

"dhal" /Dal/ (an Arabic letter);

"duinhewassel" /DIn at was@l/ (a Scots designation of minor nobility, variant
of "duniewassal").

Marginal examples, true ... slightly better perhaps than the imaginary
river dhelta.

Probably there are a few more?

-- Doug Wilson


From edsel at glo.be  Sun May 20 11:10:16 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 13:10:16 +0200
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.131016.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Whiting" <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2001 1:17 PM

[snip]
> What you need to establish your point is not answers to questions like
> "What would the world be like if Napoleon had conquered Russia?" but an
> example of an initial [D] in English that is not a deictic or a pronoun
> (i.e., does not begin with the pronominal/deictic morpheme).  It doesn't
> even have to contrast with a word with initial [T].  Any word that begins
> with [D] in which the [D] is not a morpheme would be sufficient to justify
> your claim that the fact that all words in English that begin with [D] are
> pronouns or deictics is mere coincidence and that the distribution of
> initial [T] and [D] is not predictable by any phonological rule.

>> By the way, is everybody happy that 'thus' is beyond question a grammatical
>> word, and not a lexical word?

> I have no problem with 'thus'.  It is as much a grammatical word as
> 'hence' or 'so', and it is clearly a deictic.  I have more problem with
> 'though' as a deictic, which I think is a borderline case.

[snip]

[Ed Selleslagh]

I totally agree with you. But I don't think you have to distinguish deictics
and pronouns beginning with the morpheme (not phoneme) [D]: the pronouns
involved have or had a deictic meaning, just like the definite article.

Note that in Dutch, probably the closest relative of English, all these words
begin with [d] (< IE /t/) (Dutch doesn't have interdental fricatives). That
includes 'though', Du. cognate: 'doch' [dox] (meaning something like 'but',
'nonetheless' in slightly elevated style). Ditto for 'thus', Du. '(al)dus'. But
Dutch also has preserved 'toch' [tox], meaning something like 'nonetheless'
(normal and colloquial): bizarre, isn't it?

In Latin, the corresponding deictic morpheme is [t], like in 'tantum', 'talis'
etc...(Interrogative <qu>, Eng. <wh>, also a morpheme in both languages).

The American confusion about the initial consonant of 'thither' is most likely
due to a lack of familiarity with the old bases (archaic usages) of the
language. It is just as deictic as 'there', an extremely common word, about
which there is no doubt at all in the mind of any English speaker, even
non-native.

Virtually all of this is common knowledge, but I thought it was a useful
reminder that there is nothing mysterious about this deictic morpheme, as
opposed to the theta of lexical words, which is just a consonant (with possibly
postion-determined allophonic pronunciations) belonging to the root or one of
the roots in compounds, or to another, non-deictic, morpheme like the -th in
e.g. 'length', Du. 'lengte'. Note the t in Dutch.

Ed.


From pausyl at AOL.COM  Sun May 20 17:58:56 2001
From: pausyl at AOL.COM (Paul S. Cohen)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 13:58:56 -0400
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.135856.0400.>

On Thu, 17 May 2001 14:17:07 +0300, Robert Whiting <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
wrote:

>On Thu, 10 May 2001, Larry Trask wrote:

[ moderator snip ]

>> Finally, I note that /n/ and [eng] *really* do not contrast in word-initial
>> position in English, even though they contrast elsewhere.  The case of
>> theta and eth does not appear to me to be similar.

>No, it is not similar at all.  [eng] is prohibited phonotactically from
>appearing in initial position in English (except in loan words; we've done
>this before).  In this instance, [eng] behaves like a cluster rather than
>a single segment.

Actually, there's another possible view of this situation that's completely
consistent with classical phonemics:  since [[eng]] and [h] are in
complementary distribution in English (yes, I know about the Trager&Smith
tradition of talking about [h] and [[schwa]] being allophones), and since
they are, in some sense, phonetically similar (they comprise a class that
can be characterized as "the back, continuant consonants"), why not put
them together as allophones of /[eng]/ or /h/ (whichever you like)?
Occam's Razor would seem to demand doing so.  This, I would hope, shows off
some off the inadequacies of classical phonemics.

Bob Whiting wants to allow morpheme boundaries as part of the allowable
phonological conditioners in deciding whether it's "one phoneme or two",
and I'm in full agreement.  In the American school of phonemics, this
position goes back at least to Kenneth Pike in the 1940's, despite the fear
of "mixing levels" in that school.  It's clear that perspicuous analysis of
phonological systems often requires it.  In fact, I would go a step
farther:  There are times when perspicuous phonemic/phonological analysis
requires the use of other phonetic, morphological, and syntactic
characterizations as well.  One may choose to draw the line in various
places in deciding phonemicity, but being too restrictive will often
eliminate generalizations--even some that naive speakers are making--
whether consciously or unconsciously.  An example that I am very familiar
with concerns the tensing and raising of [ae] (that is "ash") in the New
York City area.  In broad outline (and I'll omit irrelevant details) [ae]
is tensed and raised in front of voiced stops, /m/, /n/, and fricatives
when these are followed by an obstruent or a major morpheme boundary, so
that, e.g., the stressed vowel of _adder_ 'snake' is not tensed and raised,
but that of _adder_ 'adding machine; one who or that which adds' is.  If
morpheme boundaries are not allowed, we have to posit two phonemes.  Not a
very satisfying solution.  But wait; there's more.  _I can fish._ (with
emphatic or contrastive stress on _can_) has no tensing and raising of the
[ae] if it means 'I am able to fish', but has tensing and raising if it
means 'I work in a fish cannery'.  Pretty straightforward then:  must be a
phonemic split.  Not so fast:  It turns out that all words that can have
[schwa] as their only vowel, *always* have untensed and unraised [ae] in
their stressed form, at least in one major subdialect.  (This list, which I
have termed "weak words", includes _am, as, can, had, has, have, than_.)
Wait, I hear you say; why not talk about "function words" or "closed-class
words"?  Because, _can't_ *is* always tensed and raised.  What sets it
apart is that it can never have [schwa] as its only vowel--i.e., it is
never completely unstressed.

Anyhow, one phoneme or two?  You be the judge.

Paul S. Cohen


From sarima at friesen.net  Sun May 20 18:22:34 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 11:22:34 -0700
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.4.30.0105171232040.7929-100000@vesuri.Helsinki.FI>
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.112234.0700.>

At 02:17 PM 5/17/01 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote:

>On Thu, 10 May 2001, Larry Trask wrote:

>>   this / thistle
>>   they / Thalia (also 'theta' in US accents)
>>   that / thatch
>>   these / thesis
>>   thus / thumb
>>   though / Thor
>> ...

>It is not a minimal pair as long as there is a morpheme boundary involved.
>Unless, of course, you claim that morpheme boundaries are not phonological
>conditions.  And every one of your near minimal pairs involves a morpheme
>boundary after [D].

Huh?  I see no morpheme boundaries *after* [D] in any of the above
words!  The words 'this', 'they', 'that', 'these', 'thus', and *especially*
'though' are mono-morphemic in my dialect.

Oh, in *Old* English all of them except 'thurh' could have been analyzed as
multi-morphemic, but that has nothing to do with the current state of affairs

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


From pausyl at AOL.COM  Sun May 20 20:44:45 2001
From: pausyl at AOL.COM (Paul S. Cohen)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 16:44:45 -0400
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.164445.0400.>

On Thu, 17 May 2001 15:02:54 +0300, Robert Whiting <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
wrote:

>On Mon, 14 May 2001 pausyl at AOL.COM wrote:

[ moderator snip ]

>> I'm actually on Larry Trask's side (for the most part) in this
>> discussion, but I assume that the argument from Robert Whiting's side
>> would be best stated in terms of "closed-class" vs. "open-class"
>> words; _thus_ would seem to be in the closed class.  _thy_ is surely
>> English (think of the "Lord's Prayer"), but it's also a closed-class
>> item.

>Closed-class is part of the definition of function or grammatical words.
>See Fowler, _Understanding Language_ (1974), 199.

I have no real disagreement with Bob Whiting on this point.  I chose to
insert the term "closed-class" to obviate having to argue about whether
words like _thus_ have too much lexical meaning to be "function words".
I'll settle for "function words".

>> And I would judge the Traskian point above about /oi/ never occurring
>> in native English words, even if true, to be irrelevant to the
>> discussion:

>Entirely.

>> It seems to me that no amount of introspection would help an
>> intelligent (but linguistically untrained) native speaker of English
>> to decide that _boy_ (the etymology of which is disputed) is a
>> loanword; however, it seems plausible that that same speaker could
>> uncover the fact that all words beginning with /D/ are "closed-class"
>> or the like.

>This is also irrelevant.  The fact that initial [D] occurs only in
>function or grammatical (or closed-class) words is not what keeps initial
>[T] and [D] from contrasting in English.  What keeps them from contrasting
>is the fact that initial [D] in English is always a morpheme.

Here I'm not so sure.  There's something to be said for trying to model
what's going on in the naive native speaker's sprachgefuehl, as opposed to
trying to make the simplest descriptively adequate grammar.  It's not clear
to me that initial /D/ constitutes a morpheme in (Modern) English, any more
than initial /sn/ 'nose' or /sl/ 'smooth movement' does (i.e., what used to
be known as phonesthemes).  What is clear is that /D/ starts all and
only "th" closed-class (or function, if you like) words, at least for the
highly-educated.  One datum relevant to this last point is the fact that
many speakers have /T/ as the first sound in _thither_ (for most people,
surely a word they rarely if ever hear), apparently indicating that either
they don't see it as a member of the class in question or that for them
there *is* a (marginal?) /D/~/T/ contrast initially.  The situation is not
100% clear, and that's the key point:  We need to be careful to describe
the data accurately, and to worry less if our grammars leak a bit around
their doctrinaire edges.


From connolly at memphis.edu  Mon May 21 05:36:33 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 00:36:33 -0500
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <MON.21.MAY.2001.003633.0500.>

On May 17 Robert Whiting wrote, among other things, concering the
thy:thigh question:

>   The fact that initial [D] occurs only in
> function or grammatical (or closed-class) words is not what keeps initial
> [T] and [D] from contrasting in English.  What keeps them from contrasting
> is the fact that initial [D] in English is always a morpheme.

I beg your pardon?  If [D-] is a morpheme, then _thy_, _this_, _then_
etc. must consist of at least two morphemes each.  If _thy_ matches
_thou_ and _thee_, or _then_ matches _when?_, what does _though_ match?
How could _though_, or _thus_, have more than one morpheme?

Leo Connolly


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon May 21 08:41:58 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 09:41:58 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.4.30.0105171232040.7929-100000@vesuri.Helsinki.FI>
Message-ID: <MON.21.MAY.2001.094158.0100.>

--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 'tauchen'.  If [T] and [D] contrast in 'thigh' and 'thy',
> then so do [c,] and [x] in German.

No.  The German contrast depends crucially on the presence of a morpheme
boundary.  The English one does not.

[on my minimal pair 'Than' (for 'Thandy') and 'than']

> It is not a minimal pair as long as there is a morpheme boundary involved.

But there isn't.

> Unless, of course, you claim that morpheme boundaries are not phonological
> conditions.

I do not.

[on my list of near-minimal pairs like 'this' / 'thistle']

> And every one of your near minimal pairs involves a morpheme
> boundary after [D].

Certainly not.

> You stick by your contention that morpheme boundaries are not phonological
> conditions then?

No.  I never said any such thing.  It is beyond dispute that morpheme
boundaries can have phonological consequences.  Accordingly, it seems to be
in order for our theories of phonology to take morpheme boundaries into
account.

[LT]

>> The observation that initial [D] occurs only in "grammatical" words and
>> initial [T] only in "lexical" words is just that: an observation.

> Quite true.  But the observation that morphemes are units of meaning is,
> I think, more than an observation.  It is a basic principle of how human
> language works.  Duality of patterning says that morphemes are made up of
> phonemes and that morphemes have meaning (iconically, indexically, or
> symbolically) but that phonemes do not have any inherent meaning.  Initial
> [D] in English is a morpheme because it has meaning associated with it.
> Admittedly, it is grammatical meaning rather than lexical meaning, but
> meaning nonetheless.

I'm sorry, but I must disagree flatly.  I have no problem with grammatical
morphemes, or even with semantically and functionally empty morphemes.  But
I cannot see that word-initial [D] is ever a morpheme at all.

First, word-initial [D] has no recognizable meaning or function.

Second, if we segment it away as a morpheme, then we are left with all
those unanalyzed residues like <-is>, <-en>, <-ere> and <-e>.  These must
now also be analyzed as morphemes, or as sequences of morphemes, and the
position is impossible.  Remember, a morpheme boundary has to have a
morpheme on each side of it -- not just on one side.

It is reasonable to take initial [D] as a *marker* of closed-class
membership, perhaps.  But it is not reasonable to take it as a morpheme.

> No, the fact that these are all function words is not particularly
> phonologically significant.  The fact that they all begin with a
> functional morpheme is.

I've just denied this.

[on my /oi/ example]

> But is the diphthong /oi/ a morpheme?  What morphemic function do you
> claim it has?

It is not a morpheme.  It is merely a marker -- in this case, a marker of
non-native origin, as is the consonant [ezh].

[on my hypothetical example of a Greek 'dhelta']

> If I had a brother, would he like mayonnaise?  If the universe didn't work
> the way it does, would it work some other way?  Are questions about the
> way things might be applicable to the way things are?

> What you need to establish your point is not answers to questions like
> "What would the world be like if Napoleon had conquered Russia?" but an
> example of an initial [D] in English that is not a deictic or a pronoun
> (i.e., does not begin with the pronominal/deictic morpheme).  It doesn't
> even have to contrast with a word with initial [T].  Any word that begins
> with [D] in which the [D] is not a morpheme would be sufficient to justify
> your claim that the fact that all words in English that begin with [D] are
> pronouns or deictics is mere coincidence and that the distribution of
> initial [T] and [D] is not predictable by any phonological rule.

Indeed.  Let me clarify my point.

Word-initial [eng] is prohibited by English phonology and is wholly
unpronounceable by most English-speakers.  When we borrow foreign words or
names containing initial [eng], it is always eliminated in one way or
another.

But initial [D] is not unpronounceable in English at all, and I cannot see
that it is prohibited by English phonology.  So, what we need as a test
case is a noun or a name with initial [D] borrowed into English from a
language that permits it.

Unfortunately, there appear to be few such languages, and English seldom
borrows anything from most of them.  But I've pinned my hopes on Greek, the
one contemporary language which both permits initial [D] and lends words
into English.  But Greek is not ideal, because of our long-standing
tradition of converting Greek words and names into English by conventions
which are more appropriate to classical Greek than to the modern language.
The chief exception is food and drink, in which modern Greek pronunciations
are usually the basis of the English form, as with 'souvlaki' and
'tzatziki'.  So, what we need is for the Greeks to come up with a prince of
a dish which we English-speakers will delightedly take up -- and which has
a name starting with [D].  Sadly, Greek chefs have not so far obliged us on
this matter -- at least as far as I can think.  C'mon, Greek chefs: we need
you! ;-)

[on my example of no good minimal pairs for [esh] and [ezh]]

> But whether [T] and [D] are separate phonemes is not the issue.  I thought
> I had at least made that much clear.  Have you not had your second cup of
> coffee yet?  Since you quoted my statement to this effect at the opening
> of your posting, I don't see how else you could have missed it.  So any
> arguments about whether lack of contrasts proves lack of phonemicity will
> not be entertained because in the long run, there is no such thing as
> "proof" that two sounds are not phonemes any more than there is "proof"
> that two languages are not related.  One can only say that the evidence
> that they are is inadequate.  So arguments about the lack of contrasts of
> [S] and [Z] and whether this affects their phonemic status are completely
> irrelevant to whether initial [T] and [D] contrast in English.

I did not miss your point, and I was not suggesting that [T] and [D] do not
contrast at all.  I was merely making the quite different point that an
absence of minimal pairs is not at all the same thing as an absence of
contrast.

Let me close with another example.  English freely permits the cluster /ts/
in certain positions, notably finally, as in 'wits' and 'cats'.  But,
traditionally, it does not permit this cluster initially.  However, lots of
other languages do, and we have borrowed a number of words which have
initial /ts/ (cluster or affricate) in the source language.  What happens?

In my experience, educated speakers have little difficulty pronouncing
initial /ts/ in words like 'tsunami', 'Zeitgeist' and 'tsar'.  But most
uneducated speakers either do not use these words or do not pronounce them
with /ts/, which they find difficult.  I well recall the agonized struggles
of a pub quizmaster who was trying to read the word 'tsunami' off his
question sheet. He simply couldn't do it, and his attempts were so
disastrous that we, the contestants, couldn't even guess what word he was
trying to say.

On the other hand, 'tsetse fly' seems to be very widely pronounced with
initial /ts/ by Americans -- though not by Brits, who invariably call the
creature a 'tetsy fly'.  The American word 'tsuris' seems to offer no
difficulty to those speakers who use it -- though not all do.  And
everybody I know pronounces 'tzatziki' with initial /ts/ -- though my
British dictionaries assure me that initial /t/ is also very common in
Britain, even in educated speech.  (I've never heard it.)

I conclude, therefore, that initial /ts/ is still not firmly a part of
English phonology, but that it is beginning to penetrate our phonology.
Interestingly, the word that seems to be most widely used with initial /ts/
is 'tzatziki' -- the name of an item of Greek cuisine.  Well done, those
Greek chefs!  (All right, I know the name is really of Turkish origin, but
it was the Greeks who passed it on to us.)

So, we need one or two comparable test cases with initial [D].  I'm waiting.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Mon May 21 16:41:40 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 11:41:40 -0500
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.4.30.0105171232040.7929-100000@vesuri.Helsinki.FI>
Message-ID: <MON.21.MAY.2001.114140.0500.>

	I've always heard <Thalia> pronounced
/Taely@/ (same vowel as <Sally>
or /Ta:ly@/ --like the news anchor Thalia Assuras
never as /Teyly@/

[snip]
>> But there are a number of near-minimal pairs:

<snip>
>>   they / Thalia (also 'theta' in US accents)
[snip]

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


From Enrikay1 at aol.com  Wed May 23 06:04:39 2001
From: Enrikay1 at aol.com (Enrikay1 at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 02:04:39 EDT
Subject: PIE
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.020439.EDT.>

I do hate to waste any of your time for something so trivial, but I feel a
need to quench my curiosity.  Let me state right now that I am not a
linguist, but rather a mere undergraduate student of W. European languages at
Indiana University with a great desire to move my studies easterward within
the IE language family.  I'm sure that there are no TY, Berlitz or Pimsleur
courses for the study of PIE, but are there any books that teach the
best-we-can-at-this-time-construct PIE?  Is there some authoritative book(s),
which would help me understand PIE and consequently the development of the IE
languages as seen today?  If any one of you would be so kind as to point me
in the right direction, it would be much appreciated.  I'm very excited about
receiving more of your e-mails!

With much gratitude,
Eric

[ Moderator's comment:
  I'd like to collect the refined responses to Eric's query into a boilerplate
  response I can send out when such questions come in from time to time.  (I've
  already recommended Sihler and Meillet in a private response, thereby showing
  my prejudices.)  I will post the proposed canned response for discussion when
  I think there is some concensus.
  -- rma ]


From dwanders at socrates.Berkeley.EDU  Fri May 25 14:51:36 2001
From: dwanders at socrates.Berkeley.EDU (dwanders at socrates.Berkeley.EDU)
Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 07:51:36 -0700
Subject: UCLA Indo-European Studies Bulletin 9.2
Message-ID: <FRI.25.MAY.2001.075136.0700.>

A new issue of the Indo-European Studies Bulletin (formally affiliated
with UCLA) is now available. Subscription information is found at the
bottom of this message.

Contents of IES Bulletin, Vol. 9, No. 2, January/February 2001 (published
April 2001); 60 pp.
ISSN:1533-9769

Articles:
"Celtoscepticism: Some Intellectual Sources and Ideological Implications" by
John Koch
"The Petroglyphs of Central Asia from the Viewpoint of the Indo-Iranian
Hypothesis by Andrzej Rozwadowski

Notes and Brief Communications:
Short Necrologies: Edgar Polome (Drinka) and Erich Neu (Melchert)

Conference Reports:
Late Prehistoric Exploitation of the Eurasian Steppe, McDonald Inst.,
Cambridge, England, January 12-16, 2000 (Jones-Bley/Hanks)
Colloquium: Greater Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite Language Family,
Univ. of Richmond, March 17-19, 2000 (Melchert)
Sixth Germanic Linguistics Annual Confesrence, Univ. of Wisconsin at
Milwaukee, April 28-30, 2000 (Pierce)
Eleventh International Mycenological Colloquium, Univ. of Texas at Austin,
May 7-13, 2000 (Garcia-Ramon)
Long-Range Linguistic Comparison: Prospects on the Eve of the Third
Millennium, Moscow, May 28-June 2, 2000 (Yakubovich)
Horses and Humans: The evolution of human/equine relations symposium,
Powdermill Nature Reserve, Penn., Oct. 17-21 (Jones-Bley)

Book Reviews:
Albanianischen Etymologien by Bardhyl Demiraj (reviewed by Martin Huld)
Albanian Etymological Dictionary by Vladimir Orel (reviewed by Martin Huld)
Historische Laut- und Formenlehre der lateinischen Sprache by Gerhard
Meiser (reviewed by Joshua Katz)
Beitrge zu altpersischen Inschriften by Rdiger Schmitt (reviewed by
Hanns-Peter Schmidt)
Proceedings of the Third European Conference of Iranian Studies. Part
1: Old and Middle Iranian Studies edited by Nicholas Sims-Williams
(reviewed by Hanns-Peter Schmidt)

Electronic Resources
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Contribution levels (which pay for this bi-annual bulletin and support IE
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publication is published by the Friends and Alumni of Indo-European
Studies.

For a listing of the contents from previous issues, please go
to: http://www.indo-european.org/page3.html
and, for earlier issues, http://www.indo-european.org/page6.html.

Please direct any inquiries to: Deborah Anderson at
dwanders at socrates.berkeley.edu
or: FAIES, 2143 Kelton Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90025.


From sarima at friesen.net  Wed May 23 03:17:48 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 22 May 2001 20:17:48 -0700
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <B72DEE74.D10%xavier.delamarre@free.fr>
Message-ID: <TUE.22.MAY.2001.201748.0700.>

At 09:58 PM 5/20/01 +0200, Xavier Delamarre wrote:
>     And Calvert Warkins answered that both were probably wrong (his article
>on syntax reprinted in his "Selected Writings", IBS), PIE being a flexional
>language, with free word order (every student in Latin knows this) where the
>SOV / VSO controversy has no relevance.

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.

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


From colkitto at sprint.ca  Wed May 23 04:04:19 2001
From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 00:04:19 -0400
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.000419.0400.>

[ moderator edited ]

> Although Watkins did suggest that SOV was the most likely order.

Robert Orr

> >And Calvert Warkins answered that both were probably wrong (his article
> on syntax reprinted in his "Selected Writings", IBS), PIE being a
> flexional language, with free word order (every student in Latin knows this)
> where the SOV / VSO controversy has no relevance.

>    XD


From edsel at glo.be  Wed May 23 11:25:29 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 13:25:29 +0200
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.132529.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Xavier Delamarre" <xavier.delamarre at free.fr>
Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2001 9:58 PM

[ moderator snip ]

>     And Calvert Warkins answered that both were probably wrong (his article
> on syntax reprinted in his "Selected Writings", IBS), PIE being a flexional
> language, with free word order (every student in Latin knows this) where the
> SOV / VSO controversy has no relevance.

[Ed]

It seems to me that this 'free word order' in Latin belongs rather to poetic
license or special uses (e.g. emphasis) than to normal speech, which seems to
have been rather strictly SOV. But there are indeed exceptions to this general
statement ("sunt mihi mitia poma"). Of course it is true that flexion allows a
lot of freedom since it decouples word function from its place in a sentence,
up to a point.

Besides, similar exceptions also occur in Latin languages (normally SVO), e.g.
in (rather archaic or colloquial) Spanish: "Vendese esta casa" (this house is
for sale, cette maison se vend), "Vino un hombre" (a man came, un homme est
venu, il est venu un homme).

Ed Selleslagh


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Thu May 24 17:16:12 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 13:16:12 -0400
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <B72DEE74.D10%xavier.delamarre@free.fr>
Message-ID: <THU.24.MAY.2001.131612.0400.>

i may regret bringing this up, but here goes anyway  (note that i havent
read Watkins' article yet).  'free word order language' as it is usally
used to describe languages like Latin doesn't mean that any order goes in
any situation, it just means that there's a lot of flexibility and a large
group of possible orders that can be used, each under the proper discourse
situations.  so while SOV, VSO and OSV might all be possible word orders
in Latin, for example, they aren't all equally possible, and they wouldn't
all be used in the same situation.  different orders are used to focus or
topicalize different elements in the clause, so e.g. if you were asked
who Brutus murdered, you might answer with an OSV or OVS sentence, but if
you were asked who murdered Caesar, you might use SOV or SVO.  this sort
of correlation between word orders and discourse contexts has been shown
to exist in `free word order' languages like Finnish and Russian, and i
expect Latin was no different.  crucially, in these languages there is a
clear sort of default word order that tends to be used in neutral
circumstances.  e.g. in Finnish the relative ordering of subject and
object is largely determined by whether the items referred to are old or
new to the discourse.  that is, a person or thing that was mentioned in
the previous sentence will tend to occur early in the sentence, while
something being mentioned for the first time that day will tend to occur
at the end.  so when the subject is old and the object is new, you get
SVO, and when the subject is new and the object is old, you get OVS.  but
what about when both are old or both are new?  this is one of those
neutral circumstances, and here we get SVO.  OVS sounds extremely odd in
such a situation.  so in spite of the great deal of variation in Finnish
word order (other orderings are also possible under other circumstances),
it makes a lot of sense to say that Finnish is basically SVO, but can have
other orders if the circumstances demand it.  so it's not the case at all
that the SOV/VSO controversy has no relevance for Latin.  in addition to
the possibility of all sorts of crazy word orders, every student of Latin
also knows that the 'typical' word order is SOV.  every intro. textbook of
Latin has a brief section on word order where SOV is given as 'typical' or
'normal' or something like that, followed by an explanation of how
commonly we find something deviating from the norm.  good textbooks
will go on to note that this isn't haphazzard, but that there are reasons
for different word orders to show up, like which word is considered most
important for some reason, which word a sentence is 'about' etc.  in fact,
i think studies have been done of word order patterns in the Latin texts
that show they do have discourse motivations.  i'll try to find info on
them when i get a chance.

>     And Calvert Warkins answered that both were probably wrong (his article
> on syntax reprinted in his "Selected Writings", IBS), PIE being a flexional
> language, with free word order (every student in Latin knows this) where the
> SOV / VSO controversy has no relevance.

>     XD


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Thu May 24 17:37:17 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 13:37:17 -0400
Subject: mobile pronouns (was: No Proto-Celtic?)
In-Reply-To: <005401c0e0dc$ef994480$7f22b4d4@leo>
Message-ID: <THU.24.MAY.2001.133717.0400.>

a point that should be brought up here is that languages seem to prefer
suffixes to prefixes in general, but it is not the case that languages
prefer VS order.  in fact it's strongly dispreferred.  and clitic pronouns
generally appear closer to the beginning of the sentence than full noun
phrases do, so positing a proto-language that was SV with full NP
subjects but VS with pronoun subjects would strike me as very odd (do such
languages exist?).  so i don't think we can argue based on agreement
suffixes alone that a language was VS at some point in its history.

On Sun, 20 May 2001, Lionel Bonnetier wrote:

[ moderator snip ]

> In a SOV language, when S is a short pronoun, and you feel S is
> linked to V rather than O, you might switch to OSV or OVS, the
> latter being preferred if the OV group is felt as a strong
> cluster.

> That's another non-linguist's opinion...

> (Hello everybody, I'm new on the list. I've always been
> interested in linguistics, but I work in technical programming,
> though I'm trying to get to natural language processing and
> semantics. Etymology is a constant source of inspiration for
> me to shed light on how ideas interconnect.)


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Wed May 23 07:11:04 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 03:11:04 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.031104.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/22/2001 10:34:16 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com writes:
<< When you consider that PIE-speakers used their *uksen (oxen), under a *yukom
(yoke) to pull their *weghom (waggon) home from the ceremony where they *hwedh
(wed) their brides, it isn't surprising at all.  >>

Nor would it be surprising if bride and groom sat down afterwards and enjoyed
a celebratory dinner of fallow deer, which they would have called *kerwos -
what PIE speakers may have called it in Anatolia.

And it would have been a "gay" affair.  No, not that kind of "gay."  Words
never changed meaning back then, like they do now.  PIEians weren't like the
rest of us humans.

Regards,
SLong


From hwhatting at hotmail.com  Wed May 23 09:10:16 2001
From: hwhatting at hotmail.com (Hans-Werner Hatting)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 11:10:16 +0200
Subject: Fallow Deer/ The Original *Kerwos?
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.111016.0200.>

On Wed, 16 May 2001 23:54:21 EDT Steve Long wrote:
>(BTW, in Slavic, deer is "jelen" (cf.,Pol.,"zielony", green, definitely not
>red; cf, Greek, "chalkeios")

Slavic "jelen'" is not connected to Polish "zielony". "jelen'" is originally
an n-stem formation (Proto-Slavic *el-en-) of the root PIE *el- (whither
"elm" and "elk"), which Watkins (AHD of IE roots s.v. el2-) quotes with an
original meaning "red, brown", while "zielony" goes back to a Slavic
"zelenu0-" ("u0" is to denote the back yer) belonging to the PIE root
*g'hel- "green, yellow".

Best regards,
Hans-Werner Hatting


From edsel at glo.be  Wed May 23 11:42:35 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 13:42:35 +0200
Subject: About the Yew1
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.134235.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: <X99Lynx at aol.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2001 5:02 AM

[snip]
> Actually there have been dramatic changes in tree populations and
> distributions over the last 8,000 years in Europe.  Perhaps the most
> surprising - discovered by the first British C-14  analyzers - was the almost
> complete and dramatically quick wipe-out of the elm about 3500BC.  At first
> attributed to neolithic farmers, it is now considered to have been the result
> of climatic changes -- observable also in the range of other species --
> causing perhaps a sudden susceptibility to disease.
[snip]
> Regards,
> Steve Long

[Ed Selleslagh]
In Belgium, most elms are disease-ridden (actually by a parasite) and in danger
of disappearance.

Ed.


From philjennings at juno.com  Thu May 24 00:04:49 2001
From: philjennings at juno.com (philjennings at juno.com)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 19:04:49 -0500
Subject: European Genetics/IE
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.190449.0500.>

On Fri, 18 May 2001 02:50:40 EDT, Steve Long responded to my earlier email
under the topic Fallow Deer/A Closer Look, which mentioned a study by Dr.
Martin Richards reported in the NY Times, a study that on its face might seem
discouraging to advocates of IE's Anatolian origins.

Part of Steve Long's answer was an argument that even if Richards was right,
and the great IE wave-of-advance through central-northern Europe was an advance
of indigenous Europeans converted to the neolithic lifestyle, the central
tenets of the IE-Anatolian-originists are still plausible.

Another part of his answer indicated that Richards might not be right.

There may be reasons why the IE-Anatolianists should hope that Richards is
wrong, because otherwise they need to explain why mesolithic-to-neolithic
Europeans changed languages, and did so without leaving evidence.

However, I have been reminded that the extreme Kurganists are far more
vulnerable both to the genetics argument and to questions of language-change
motivation:  It seems that the IE-Kurganites forcibly converted western Europe
to their language, fighting uphill against a population gradient of established
farmers, and then vanished to a genetic zero except in Greece, minus an
archeological residue of pillaged settlements and oppressive castles (again,
except in Greece).  And all this happened not so long before written history
began.  Where are the half-finished jobs, the creoles?  There is a Folkish
substrate in proto-Germanic, and suspicions about proto-Celtic, but mostly the
language conversion swept clean over a vast area.

This extreme Kurgan position is unbelieveable.  I fuss over the
Anatolian-origins theory because it is worth considering, despite the fact that
here too, people talk of language-conversion, and not the creolized conversion
of my Norwegian grandparents in North Dakota, but the school-advantaged
conversions of modern Internet users, a complete shift minus evidence of what
they spoke before.

Why do both sides make extreme conversion claims?  Because if IE stemmed from a
creole, even one buried a long time in its past, that fact would be detected.
Is this really true?  If we can detect that an ancient proto-language came from
a creole or an amalgam of many sources, how many such proto-languages have been
shown to be of mixed origins?  If the answer is zero the world around, perhaps
our ability to detect ancient creoles is not all that acute.  The key issue
might be, how long has the creole been buried and obscured by later
developments?

It does seem to me that mesolithic-to-neolithic Europeans might pick up a great
deal of vocabulary from Anatolian agriculturalists, and create a language with
dual roots.  If I were to write a story with many simplifications, I'd have
Anatolian colonists coming into the Balkan/Greek area, building "pueblos" on
the model of Catal Huyuk, and setting up cooperative agreements with indigenous
hunters, trade agreements leading to marriages, wives going out to live in
scattered places, bringing grazing stock and seeds.  I'd have the scattered
population prospering more than the pueblo urbanites, who eventually dwindle
out of the picture.  Here everything is mixed, hunters with farmers, language
with language.

But putting down my pastoral flute and setting this story aside, what are the
central tenets of the IE-Anatolian-originists?  I'm pretty sure of two of them:
(1) that IE, or PIE, or *PIE has a time depth of seven thousand years or more,
and that (2) early in its development, IE/PIE/*PIE was influenced by
Afro-Asiatic, Karvellian and Caucasian languages.

The second tenet should be arguable on the basis of linguistics alone,
without getting dirty out in the field.

As for the first, the Bactria Margiana Archaeology Complex apparently sprang
into bloom around 2300bce, and some people think it's the Indo-Iranian
"homeland."  The big Kurgan breakout was around 2300bce or not much before,
which indicates that pioneers very swiftly, possibly within one generation, set
themselves up at a considerable distance from where they started.  Time depth
was not necessary.  Running the clock backward, as JoatSimeon at aol.com
intimates, we might not need another thousand years, and I imagine frowns and a
very grudging concession of two thousand years at most.  But even two thousand
years of marching backwards down the Balkans doesn't get us to the Anatolian
homeland.

Perhaps, as Steve Long suggests, all we need is to trace backward to Tripolye.
What Kilday calls "narrow IE" might start in Tripolye, proto-Hittite nearby,
and proto-Pelasgian up the Danube.  All are related and carry the freight of a
vocabulary with Afro-Asiatic, Kartvellian and Caucasian loan-words.  Even
proto-Etruscan (much more freighted) might be a laggard part of this generous
Balkan/Greek picture, since p-E has four thousand years to go its own way.

In this scheme, there are stops and stages from Homeland Anatolia to the Kurgan
steppes, and generations of mother-daughter languages, of which IE is much more
a daughter than a mother, however successful a mother in the long run.  I take
heart that a scheme similar to this has been advanced by Miguel Carrasquer
Vidal, whose linguistic credentials are vastly superior to mine, and who also
detects Indo-Europeanisms in Etruscan grammar.


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Thu May 24 09:37:19 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 09:37:19 -0000
Subject: Etruscans
Message-ID: <THU.24.MAY.2001.093719.0000.>

Patrick C. Ryan (14 May 2001) wrote:

>I have heard the idea that *wei-no- is not native IE but it has always puzzled
>me to know why this view is held.

>To my way of thinking, it obviously means simply 'vine'.

The difficulty in reconstructing PIE *wei-no- is the monophthong (presumed
long) in Umbrian <vinu>, Faliscan <vino>. These languages retain -ei- in
other words. If they borrowed "wine" from Latin, it is very likely that they
did so before the 2nd cent. BCE, when -ei- became -i:- in Latin. Therefore,
the resemblance between <vi:num> and <vi:tis>, <vi:men> (from PIE *wei- 'to
turn, twist, plait') should be regarded as fortuitous.

The other reflexes given are Gk. <woinos>, Arm. <gini>, Heb. <yayin>, Arab.
<wayn>, Geez <wain>. The source was presumably in the eastern Mediterranean.
I do _not_ refer this to "Pelasgian", due to the -oi- in the Greek form.

DGK


From dlwhite at texas.net  Wed May 23 16:48:09 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 11:48:09 -0500
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.114809.0500.>

        I am, like the Enchanter Tim, a busy man, but I will oblige.

> --On Monday, May 14, 2001 8:30 am -0500 "David L. White"
> <dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

> [LT on Thomason and Kaufman]

>>> Hmmm.  May I know where in their book T and K assert that "anything
>>> goes"? My reading of the book reveals only the more cautious claim that
>>> we cannot know what happens in language contact until we look.

>>         Somewhere in the intro.  Hasty perusal has not revealed where.

> I'm afraid I still can't find any such statement.

        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.

> [A small intervention. I am grateful to Hans-Werner Hatting for his
> information on Anglo-Romani, which concludes by observing that Anglo-Romani
> is indeed a variety of English.  As it happens, this conclusion is endorsed
> by Sarah Thomason in her new book Language Contact: An Introduction,

        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.

> [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.

> 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.

> 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.  And since when is the equivalent
of a mental coin toss to be preferred to a clear standard?  Since borrowing
of categories, without borrowing of specific morphmes to express these, is
not relevant, the case in question is practically indentical to the case of
Anglo-Romani.

> Anyway, I now want to talk about another language, discussed by Thomason in
> her new book.  That language is Laha, spoken in the Moluccas, where the
> locally dominant language is a variety of Malay, which is distantly, but
> not closely, related to Laha.  The principal investigator here is James T.
> Collins:

>   J. T. Collins. 1980. 'Laha, a language of the central Moluccas'. Indonesia
>   Circle 23: 3-19.

> 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."

> But now consider the following.  The Laha are reportedly regarded by
> themselves, and by others, as a distinct ethnic group with a distinct
> language.  All Laha-speakers are also fluent in Malay, but other speakers
> of Malay do not speak Laha.

        The Romani are regarded by themselves, and by others, as a distinct
ethnic group with (where it survives) a distinct language.  All Anglo-Romani
speakers are fluent in English, but other speakers of English do not speak
Anglo-Romani.  Why come to a different conclusion in the two cases, unless
coin tossing is the latest fashion?

> The conclusion of Collins, and of Thomason, is
> that Laha has developed as follows: it started out as a language entirely
> distinct from Malay, but, under enormous pressure from Malay, it has
> gradually, in piecemeal fashion, absorbed more and more Malay grammar,
> until today the grammar is almost entirely Malay, and only a few bits of
> Laha grammar survive -- for the moment, since it is possible that these few
> fragments will also give way to Malay grammar in the future.

> 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.

> Is this
> reasonable?  Earlier, David rejected a similar scenario for another
> language as impossible in principle.

> 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.  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.

> (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
woyld 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.

> Thomason expressly endorses position (2), as does Collins.  Native speakers
> of Laha also take position (2).  Apparently Moluccans who don't speak Laha
> also accept position (2).

        What the naive natives think has nothing to do with anything.  It is
fairly easy to find naive natives in the English-speaking world who think
that English is a Romance language.

> David, what's your view?

        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.
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.  But, operating in the semi-dark (Thomason is
routinely vague about the facts of her example languages), I see no reason
to think that the situation is not comparable to Anglo-Romani or Mednyj
Aleut, which are surely not mutually comprehensible with English or Russian
respectively (or for that matter Romani or Aleut), but which nonetheless can
be identified (even by Thomason, in the first case) as forms of "abruptly
re-lexified" English or Russian.

Dr. David L. White


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Thu May 24 11:55:48 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 06:55:48 -0500
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <THU.24.MAY.2001.065548.0500.>

Dear IEists:

Three questions regarding the root listed in Pokorny as 1. *g^en-, 'erzeugen',
came up in a discussion on another list; and without argumentation, I would be
grateful for the opinions of list members on them.

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?

2. that the primary meaning was 'produce' and that the meaning of 'beget' was
secondary;

3. that in the case of the Greek reflex /gennao:/, it should be regarded as a
denominative verb derived internally in Greek from /genna:/ rather than *both*
words being derived from an IE form.

Looking forward to your input.

Thank you.

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 zsau at hobbiton.org  Wed May 23 09:50:06 2001
From: zsau at hobbiton.org (Tristan Alexander McLeay)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 19:50:06 +1000
Subject: thy thigh etc. (external sandhi in English)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.4.30.0105171157430.7929-100000@vesuri.Helsinki.FI>
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.195006.1000.>

I don't know how relevant this is to the whole discussion, but I originally
couldn't tell the difference between [T] and [D], even though I was using
them in the regular fashion, as far as I can tell, but 'with' seems to have
lots of fun, alternating between /wIT/, /wID/, /w at T/, and /w at D/, depending
on it's stress, it's compoundness, and the voicing of the next sound.
I am an Australian, speaking English natively, with native-speaking parents.
(well, mother is ESL, but can't remember Dutch very well, and speaks English
as well as a native anyway)

Tristan


From edsel at glo.be  Wed May 23 12:02:13 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 14:02:13 +0200
Subject: thy thigh etc. (external sandhi in English)
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.140213.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas G Kilday" <acnasvers at hotmail.com>
Sent: Monday, May 21, 2001 4:50 PM

[snip]
>(BTW, since commas carry meaning, does this mean they can't be
> phonemes, suprasegmental or otherwise?)

> DGK

[Ed Selleslagh]
What meaning? Only function.Besides, between a final and an initial vowel a
comma has the value of 'hamza'.

Ed.


From petegray at btinternet.com  Wed May 23 18:40:38 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 19:40:38 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc. (external sandhi in English)
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.194038.0100.>

> I would posit that word-initial (and
> syllable-initial) voiced fricative + /r/ (or /l/) are phonotactically un-
> English.

Can we really move from "don't occur" to "can't occur"?   English speakers
have no trouble with names like Vladivostock or words like zloty.   Or do
you simply mean "don't occur"?

Peter


From petegray at btinternet.com  Wed May 23 19:04:28 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 20:04:28 +0100
Subject: thy thigh [Germ x/c].
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.200428.0100.>

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

>> 2. They have now come to contrast in initial position, at least before
>> /a/, albeit only in loan words, and only for certain speakers.

I had a thought about "durch".  Following the usual rule, it is pronounced
with /c,/, after a consonant.   But the actual pronunciation of the word is
often not with a consonantal /r/ but the back vowel replacement /upside down
a/.  This means we have a context in which a back vowel (or two, actually)
is followed by the front /c,/.   Of course there's an explanation for this
in the underlying pronunciation with /r/, but it still seems to show that
the difference between /x/ and /c,/ is not purely phonetically determined.

Compare the difference between clear and velarised /l/ in English - I cannot
think of any factors other than pure phonetics which determine the choice.

Peter


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu May 24 09:56:27 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 10:56:27 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <F179JSFsxf4yp8ARf3s0000e2c9@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <THU.24.MAY.2001.105627.0100.>

--On Monday, May 21, 2001 2:50 pm +0000 Douglas G Kilday
<acnasvers at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Excuse my skepticism, but I can't believe the _net_ number of contentives
> in a given language is growing constantly. As new contentives enter a
> language, others exit. Lexica don't have rubber walls.

Debatable.  If we look at the consecutive editions of any good desk
dictionary of English, we find that these become steadily larger over time,
in spite of the best efforts of lexicographers to prune any items which
seem to have dropped out of use.  It seems that very many of the new words
do not replace anything: 'geopathic', 'mogul' (in the skiing sense),
'cellphone', 'hahnium', and, of course, 'tzatziki'.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu May 24 09:58:37 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 10:58:37 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <F179JSFsxf4yp8ARf3s0000e2c9@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <THU.24.MAY.2001.105837.0100.>

--On Monday, May 21, 2001 2:50 pm +0000 Douglas G Kilday
<acnasvers at hotmail.com> wrote:

> That is how I was considering it. If you "point out" or "demonstrate"
> something, it acquires definiteness. As a conjunction, "though" means
> "despite the fact that" and "the fact" is definite. As an adverb, "though"
> means "nevertheless", which specifies a definite degree of difference
> (nothing). I'd like to see a sentence in which "but" and "though" are
> interchangeable.

OK.  How about this one?

  She is bright but careless.
  She is bright though careless.

Any good?

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  Thu May 24 16:04:27 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 11:04:27 -0500
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <THU.24.MAY.2001.110427.0500.>

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]

>> 2. They have now come to contrast in initial position, at least before
>> /a/, albeit only in loan words, and only for certain speakers.  I have
>> noticed this for some time, and am pleased that a Duden author has too.
>> This strongly favors the analysis as separate phonemes.

> On the other hand, maybe the distinction in 'Cha-' words is phonotactically
> conditioned - isn't it always [c,] in words beginning 'Chal-' and 'Char-' and
> always [x] in 'Cha-' followed by anything else? (Excluding of course where it
> is [k], [S] or [tS]). And it can't be borrowing that causes this distinction
> - 'Charkow' has /x/ (usually realised as [x]) in the source language but [c,]
> 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


From dlwhite at texas.net  Thu May 24 02:59:17 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 21:59:17 -0500
Subject: Phonemes of New York Dialect
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.215917.0500.>

> An example that I am very familiar
> with concerns the tensing and raising of [ae] (that is "ash") in the New
> York City area.  In broad outline (and I'll omit irrelevant details) [ae]
> is tensed and raised in front of voiced stops, /m/, /n/, and fricatives
> when these are followed by an obstruent or a major morpheme boundary, so
> that, e.g., the stressed vowel of _adder_ 'snake' is not tensed and raised,
> but that of _adder_ 'adding machine; one who or that which adds' is.  If
> morpheme boundaries are not allowed, we have to posit two phonemes.  Not a
> very satisfying solution.  But wait; there's more.  _I can fish._ (with
> emphatic or contrastive stress on _can_) has no tensing and raising of the
> [ae] if it means 'I am able to fish', but has tensing and raising if it
> means 'I work in a fish cannery'.  Pretty straightforward then:  must be a
> phonemic split.  Not so fast:  It turns out that all words that can have
> [schwa] as their only vowel, *always* have untensed and unraised [ae] in
> their stressed form, at least in one major subdialect.  (This list, which I
> have termed "weak words", includes _am, as, can, had, has, have, than_.)
> Wait, I hear you say; why not talk about "function words" or "closed-class
> words"?  Because, _can't_ *is* always tensed and raised.  What sets it
> apart is that it can never have [schwa] as its only vowel--i.e., it is
> never completely unstressed.

> Anyhow, one phoneme or two?  You be the judge.

        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.

Dr. David L. White


From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Wed May 23 13:30:10 2001
From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max Wheeler)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 14:30:10 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <E152WfO-0001rI-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.143010.0100.>

--On Sunday, May 20, 2001 13:58 -0400 "Paul S. Cohen" <pausyl at AOL.COM>
wrote:

> Actually, there's another possible view of this situation that's
> completely consistent with classical phonemics:  since [[eng]] and [h]
> are in complementary distribution in English (yes, I know about the
> Trager&Smith tradition of talking about [h] and [[schwa]] being
> allophones), and since they are, in some sense, phonetically similar
> (they comprise a class that can be characterized as "the back, continuant
> consonants"), why not put them together as allophones of /[eng]/ or /h/
> (whichever you like)? Occam's Razor would seem to demand doing so.  This,
> I would hope, shows off some off the inadequacies of classical phonemics.

Actually [eng] and [h] share no features that are not shared more widely.
[eng] is not [continuant] as normally understood. At best some phonologists
might once have linked them as [+sonorant] (though nowadays [h] would be
seen as [-sonorant]) but even then they don't share this characteristic to
the exclusion of [?], [m], [n]. The phonetic similarity criterion requires
at least that the potential co-allophones be no less similar to each other
than either is to something else.

And if you allow proper names (and whyever not?) it isn't even true that
[eng] and [h] are in complementary distribution, since both occur between
unstressed vowels in e.g. Birmingham, Callaghan, Houlihan, Monaghan.

> Bob Whiting wants to allow morpheme boundaries as part of the allowable
> phonological conditioners in deciding whether it's "one phoneme or two",
> and I'm in full agreement.  In the American school of phonemics, this
> position goes back at least to Kenneth Pike in the 1940's, despite the
> fear of "mixing levels" in that school.  It's clear that perspicuous
> analysis of phonological systems often requires it.  In fact, I would go
> a step farther:  There are times when perspicuous phonemic/phonological
> analysis requires the use of other phonetic, morphological, and syntactic
> characterizations as well.  One may choose to draw the line in various
> places in deciding phonemicity, but being too restrictive will often
> eliminate generalizations--even some that naive speakers are making--
> whether consciously or unconsciously.  An example that I am very familiar
> with concerns the tensing and raising of [ae] (that is "ash") in the New
> York City area.  In broad outline (and I'll omit irrelevant details) [ae]
> is tensed and raised in front of voiced stops, /m/, /n/, and fricatives
> when these are followed by an obstruent or a major morpheme boundary, so
> that, e.g., the stressed vowel of _adder_ 'snake' is not tensed and
> raised, but that of _adder_ 'adding machine; one who or that which adds'
> is.  If morpheme boundaries are not allowed, we have to posit two
> phonemes.  Not a very satisfying solution.  But wait; there's more.  _I
> can fish._ (with emphatic or contrastive stress on _can_) has no tensing
> and raising of the [ae] if it means 'I am able to fish', but has tensing
> and raising if it means 'I work in a fish cannery'.  Pretty
> straightforward then:  must be a phonemic split.  Not so fast:  It turns
> out that all words that can have [schwa] as their only vowel, *always*
> have untensed and unraised [ae] in their stressed form, at least in one
> major subdialect.  (This list, which I have termed "weak words", includes
> _am, as, can, had, has, have, than_.) Wait, I hear you say; why not talk
> about "function words" or "closed-class words"?  Because, _can't_ *is*
> always tensed and raised.  What sets it apart is that it can never have
> [schwa] as its only vowel--i.e., it is never completely unstressed.
>

Well with a phonemic split you expect to find evidence of the original
conditioning environment; with only the examples Paul gives, then the
answer to

> Anyhow, one phoneme or two?  You be the judge.

could well be 'the jury's still out'.

But many speakers who have pronunciations like Paul describes have split
the following class:
sad, glad, bad
(according to Labov) so that these words don't all have the same vowel. So
real split.

As has happened with British English GAS/PASS, most English PUTT/PUT,
though with these grammatical conditioning seems never to have entered the
story.

Max
____________________________________________________________
Max W. Wheeler
School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer
BRIGHTON BN1 9QH, G.B.

Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975 Fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 Email:
maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk
____________________________________________________________


From sarima at friesen.net  Wed May 23 13:49:58 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 06:49:58 -0700
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.064958.0700.>

At 01:58 PM 5/20/01 -0400, Paul S. Cohen wrote:
>whether consciously or unconsciously.  An example that I am very familiar
>with concerns the tensing and raising of [ae] (that is "ash") in the New
>York City area. ...

>Anyhow, one phoneme or two?  You be the judge.

Sound like two to me.  It is used by itself to carry differences in meaning.

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


From colkitto at sprint.ca  Wed May 23 12:24:07 2001
From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 08:24:07 -0400
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.082407.0400.>

>"duinhewassel" /DIn at was@l/ (a Scots designation of minor
>nobility, variant of "duniewassal").

duniewassal (duine uasal) with a D?  Naaaa ......

and does acceptance of "dhal" as an English word imply all the other
letters of the Arabic alphabet as well? ('ain, qaf, etc.?)

Robert Orr


From douglas at nb.net  Wed May 23 14:29:31 2001
From: douglas at nb.net (Douglas G. Wilson)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 10:29:31 -0400
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <125018638.3199426918@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.102931.0400.>

>So, what we need is for the Greeks to come up with a prince of
>a dish which we English-speakers will delightedly take up -- and which has
>a name starting with [D].  Sadly, Greek chefs have not so far obliged us on
>this matter -- at least as far as I can think.  C'mon, Greek chefs: we need
>you! ;-)

Isn't that stuffed grape leaf called "dolmos"? Unfortunately, always with
/d/ in my experience.

A true story: I saw a local restaurant had put up a big sign advertising
its new specialty: "GYROS". So I went in and asked for /Giros/ ['G' = IPA
gamma] or so. Blank stare. I tried /jiros/, /giros/. Blank stare. "What is
it that you are advertising on the big new sign by the door?" I asked.
Answer: /dZairouz/. I would never have thought of that except as a joke --
and this is from the restaurateur advertising the item.

-- Doug Wilson


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu May 24 10:02:38 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 11:02:38 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.0.20010520054142.00aa4a40@127.0.0.1>
Message-ID: <THU.24.MAY.2001.110238.0100.>

--On Sunday, May 20, 2001 6:11 am -0400 "Douglas G. Wilson"
<douglas at nb.net> wrote:

> Just a footnote, not intended to invalidate the point about initial /D/.

> Are there "non-grammatical" English words beginning with /D/?

> I will take as a working definition of "English word": "any word which
> appears in a conventional English-language dictionary, excluding proper
> names". I also exclude pronunciations which are designated as foreign, if
> an alternative "English" pronunciation is given.

> I find two:

> "dhal" /Dal/ (an Arabic letter);

> "duinhewassel" /DIn at was@l/ (a Scots designation of minor nobility, variant
> of "duniewassal").

> Marginal examples, true ... slightly better perhaps than the imaginary
> river dhelta.

Ah, splendid, and many thanks.  These words are not in my desk dictionary,
and I didn't know them -- and me a Scrabble-player, too.  I happen to know
that 'dhal' is legal in British tournament Scrabble in another sense.  I
don't know if the second is, but I don't suppose I'll ever get a chance to
play it anyway.  Can't recall the last time I played a 12-letter word.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu May 24 10:14:01 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 11:14:01 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <E152WfO-0001rI-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <THU.24.MAY.2001.111401.0100.>

--On Sunday, May 20, 2001 1:58 pm -0400 "Paul S. Cohen" <pausyl at AOL.COM>
wrote:

[on non-initial [eng] in English]

> Actually, there's another possible view of this situation that's
> completely consistent with classical phonemics:  since [[eng]] and [h]
> are in complementary distribution in English (yes, I know about the
> Trager&Smith tradition of talking about [h] and [[schwa]] being
> allophones), and since they are, in some sense, phonetically similar
> (they comprise a class that can be characterized as "the back, continuant
> consonants"), why not put them together as allophones of /[eng]/ or /h/
> (whichever you like)? Occam's Razor would seem to demand doing so.  This,
> I would hope, shows off some off the inadequacies of classical phonemics.

Perhaps not necessarily.  Putting [eng] and [h] into a single phoneme was
proposed by somebody in print several decades ago, perhaps not entirely
seriously.  Apart from the violence this analysis does to native-speaker
intuitions, it founders on the rocks of phonetic similarity: [eng] and [h]
have no phonetic features in common apart from those few shared with all
consonants.

And phonetic similarity is certainly a necessary condition in classical
phonemics, and it was recognized as such: see, for example, page 108 of
Hockett's classic 1958 textbook.  In English, using a following apostrophe
to mark aspiration, we find that *each* of [p'], [t'] and [k'] is in
complementary distribution with *each* of unaspirated [p], [t] and [k].  On
distributional grounds alone, then, we have a free choice: we can group
[p'] with any one of [p], [t] and [k], and similarly for the other cases.
Even the most rigorous classical phonemicist never believed that these
several analyses were equally plausible, and therefore a criterion of
phonetic similarity is essential.  Of course, before the advent of
distinctive features, the notion of phonetic similarity could not be
defined in a principled way.  But features allow us to build a principled
criterion of phonetic similarity -- and any version of this criterion I can
think of rules out the assignment of [eng] and [h] to a single phoneme.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu May 24 10:28:06 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 11:28:06 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <E152X4K-0002cQ-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <THU.24.MAY.2001.112806.0100.>

Somebody -- I think it was Paul Cohen, but I'm not sure, and my apologies
if not -- wrote this:

>>> And I would judge the Traskian point above about /oi/ never occurring
>>> in native English words, even if true, to be irrelevant to the
>>> discussion:

Let me clarify this.  The point I was trying to make is this: not everything
which is *true* of English is linguistically significant.  It is true that
/oi/ never occurs in native English words, but I cannot see that this is a
linguistically significant statement about English -- in great contrast to the
absence of word-initial [eng] in English, which I firmly believe really *is*
linguistically significant.

Take another case or two.  The rules governing the possible word-initial
consonant clusters in English clearly permit the initial clusters /skl-/
and /gj-/ (second = US /gy-/).  Yet we do not have such words in the
language, apart from the Greek-derived technical term 'sclerosis', the
obscure and French-derived heraldic term 'gules', and the obsolescent and
possibly expressive word 'gewgaw' -- 'obsolescent', because my students
don't know it.  However, I cannot see that the general absence of these
initial clusters is a significant fact about English phonology: it is
merely a historical accident, no more.

And I was arguing that the seeming absence of initial [D] in English
lexical items is likewise a historical accident, and not a significant fact
about English phonology.

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 edsel at glo.be  Thu May 24 10:19:57 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 12:19:57 +0200
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <THU.24.MAY.2001.121957.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Leo A. Connolly" <connolly at memphis.edu>
Sent: Monday, May 21, 2001 7:36 AM

> On May 17 Robert Whiting wrote, among other things, concering the
> thy:thigh question:

>>   The fact that initial [D] occurs only in
>> function or grammatical (or closed-class) words is not what keeps initial
>> [T] and [D] from contrasting in English.  What keeps them from contrasting
>> is the fact that initial [D] in English is always a morpheme.

> I beg your pardon?  If [D-] is a morpheme, then _thy_, _this_, _then_
> etc. must consist of at least two morphemes each.  If _thy_ matches
> _thou_ and _thee_, or _then_ matches _when?_, what does _though_ match?
> How could _though_, or _thus_, have more than one morpheme?

> Leo Connolly

[Ed Selleslagh]

[D-] most certainly IS a morpheme or, maybe better, as Larry Trask puts it, a
marker - even though its older form was probably something more like [Di:],
[De] or [D@]. It is, IMHO, a deictic prefix (or marker), just like <wh-> is a
interrogative one (Latin t- and qu-).

However, not all - initial or otherwise - [D]'s are equal: some have a
different origin, like in <thou> etc., which don't belong to the same 'closed
class'. As far as I can judge, <either> etc. belong to still another class. It
seems to me that lumping them all together in one class is a purely an
empirical and practical way of describing the present state of the language,
where the different origins are not readily visible any longer, at least not to
the 'naive' speaker. But I'm sure any better IE-ist than me (easy to find!) can
show you the various origins of these different classes.

In <thus> we have a deictic [D], since it means 'in THIS way'. Its match is
<how>, the initial h being the relict of the interrogative prefix/marker.

The fact that <though> doesn't have and probably never had a match (e.g. with
<wh->) shows that it belongs to another class.

Ed.


From lmfosse at online.no  Sat May 26 11:07:46 2001
From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 13:07:46 +0200
Subject: SV: PIE
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.130746.0200.>

Enrikay1 at aol.com [SMTP:Enrikay1 at aol.com] skrev 23. mai 2001 08:05:

> best-we-can-at-this-time-construct PIE?  Is there some authoritative book(s),
> which would help me understand PIE and consequently the development of the IE
> languages as seen today?  If any one of you would be so kind as to point me
> in the right direction, it would be much appreciated.  I'm very excited about
> receiving more of your e-mails!

Here are some suggestions. They are given sine ira et studio, without any
preferences and evaluations. I have included some material on Indo-European
culture as well. If you plan to make a boilerplate "intro to Indo-European
studies", they may come in handy.

Beekes, R. S. P. 1996. Comparative Indo-European linguistics : an
introduction. Amsterdam ; Philadelphia: J. Benjamins Pub.

Meillet, Antoine. 1970. The Comparative Method in Historical Linguistics.
Paris: Librairie Honore Champion, Editeur.

Meillet, A. 1964. Introduction a l'Etude Comparative des Langues Indo-Eu
ropeennes. Forge Village: University of Alabama Press.

Kurylowicz, Jerzy. 1964. The Inflectional Categories of Indo-European.
Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag.

Lindeman, Fredrik Otto. 1987. Introduction to the 'Laryngeal Theory'. Oslo:
Norwegian University Press.

Schmitt, Rudiger. 1967. Dichtung und Dichtersprache in indogermanischer
Zeit. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.

Schmitt, Rudiger, ed. 1968. Indogermanischer Dichtersprache, Wege der
Forschung. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

Szemerenyi, Oswald. 1989. Einfuhrung in die vergleichende
Sprachwissenschaft. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

Watkins, Calvert, ed. 1969. Indogermanische Grammatik, Formenlehre. Edited
by J. Kurylowicz. Vol. III/1, Indogermanische Grammatik. Heidelberg: Carl
Winter Universitatsverlag.

Jamison, S. 1979. The case of the agent in Indo-European. Die Sprache
15:129-143.

Kurylowicz, J. 1935. Etudes indoeuropeennes I. Krakow.

Kurylowicz, J. 1956. L'apophonie en indo-europeen. Krakow.

Winter, W. 1965. Evidence for Laryngeals. The Hague.

Meillet, A. 1950. Les dialectes indo-europeennes. Paris.

Cowgill, Warren, and Manfred Mayrhofer. 1986. Indogermanische Grammatik.
Band I. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag.

Lehmann, W. P. 1980. The Reconstruction  of Non-Simple Sentences in
Proto-Indo-European. In Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. Amsterdam.

Lehmann, Winfred P. 1974. Proto-Indo-European Syntax. London.

Lehmann, Winfred P. 1993. Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics.
London and New York: Routledge.

Sergent, Bernard. 1995. Les Indo-Europeens. Histoire, langues, mythes.
Paris: Editions Payot & Rivages.

Mallory, J. P., and Douglas Q. Adams. 1997. Encyclopedia of Indo-European
culture. London ; Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn.

Mallory, J. P. 1989. In search of the Indo-Europeans : language,
archaeology, and myth. New York, N.Y.: Thames and Hudson.


Best regards,
Lars Martin Fosse

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


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sat May 26 19:08:52 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 20:08:52 +0100
Subject: PIE
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.200852.0100.>

> are there any books that teach the best-we-can-at-this-time-construct PIE?
> Is there some authoritative book(s), which would help me understand PIE and
> consequently the development of the IE languages as seen today?

[Oh Moderator:  this is to add to your collection]

O J L Szemerenyi "Introduction to Indo-Euorepan Linguistics"  OUP 4th
edition 1990
    Despite its very conservative phonology, it is an essential book, since
it gives all the evidence and most of the theories, even when it disagrees
with the modern consensus.  I don't think one can study PIE without it.

P Baldi "An introduction to the Indo-European Languages"  Southern Illinois
University  1983
   A rather more light-weight book, but a good introduction with some
information about later developments of, and within, each dialect group.

Rami & Rami "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.

W P Lehmann "Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics"  (Routledge
1993).
   Rather more than an introduction, but good for post-beginners, laying out
some of the divergent ideas, and attempting to look under the surface.

R S P Beekes  "Comparative Indo-European Linguistics"  (Benjamins 1995)
   A laryngeal-friendly Szemerenyi, but without his incisive depth.  Still a
good one to have.

Peter


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Fri May 25 21:53:51 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 17:53:51 EDT
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <FRI.25.MAY.2001.175351.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/25/01 3:52:42 PM Mountain Daylight Time, edsel at glo.be
writes:

>

[ Moderator's note: Presumably something on word order. -- rma ]

-- or for that matter, there are certain situations (poetry) where "came a
man" can be used in English.


From g_sandi at hotmail.com  Sat May 26 11:56:33 2001
From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 11:56:33 -0000
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.115633.0000.>

[ moderator edited ]

I agree that the expression "free word order" is something of a misnomer. In
heavily flexional languages (e.g. classical Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, as well
as my native Hungarian) you can mix up elements more than you can in, say,
English and Chinese, but every specific order other than the default one brings
some additional semantic or grammatical information.

E.g. in Hungarian, you can say "La'tom a kutya't" (I see the dog), and this is
the default (unmarked) order. If you say "A kutya't la'tom" (the dog I see),
there is a contextual inference: "I see the dog, but not something else that
has just been mentioned (e.g. the cat), or that I am thinking about". There is
definitely semantic information added by the changed word order. I would guess
that the difference between Latin "canem video" and "video canem" similarly
brings in some kind of inferential distinction, but I leave it to people
knowing more Latin than I do (this wouldn't be hard...) to tell us what this
difference is.

Hungarian leaves off the copula in the third person present (sing. or plural)
in sentences of the type "the house is big" and "he is the president", although
not in sentences like "he is in London". As a result, word order acquires
grammatical significance in the following pair of constructions:

"A ha'z piros" (the house is red)

"A piros ha'z" (the red house)

There is a problem, however, when we try to extrapolate from evidence in
flexional languages to PIE, and specifically to the issue of the origin of IE
personal endings in verbs. If, for example, the singular endings -m, -s, -t of
athematic verbs are to be derived from postposed personal pronouns, we are
looking at a stage in the language which may have been as isolating as modern
Chinese for all we know, with a fixed word order. They might have said:

*Wodon i es me (I am/was in the water)

*Wodon i es se (you are/were in the water)

*Wodon i es te (he/she/it is/was in the water)

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).

As for postposed particles for nouns (as the proposed *i for "in" above), there
are plenty of parallels in modern languages, from Hungarian "A hajo' a hi'd
ALATT van" (the boat is UNDER the bridge), to Japanese "Fune ga hashi NO SHITA
arimasu" (idem).

The coagulation of postposed particles and pronouns with preceding nominal and
verbal elements is for me one of the most fascinating aspects of pre-PIE
linguistics. I wonder what other participants in this group think about it?

With my best wishes to all,
Gabor Sandi


From blf10 at cus.cam.ac.uk  Sat May 26 18:08:15 2001
From: blf10 at cus.cam.ac.uk (bruce fraser)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 19:08:15 +0100
Subject: No Proto-Celtic: word order
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.190815.0100.>

I'm not conversant with the details for Latin, but in ancient Greek there
are three aspects of S, V, and O ordering which could usefully be
considered:

1) Clauses with explicit subject, ver b and object are in the minority
(around 30%), and, in fact, clauses with explicit subjects are also in the
minority, so 3-term and even 2-term (subject and verb) orderings are not,
strictly speaking, major features of the language. So all such typological
generalizations have severe limitations as models.

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.

3) The words themselves affect their order. Pronouns tend to precede verbs
not just if they are enclitic, and so (often) in second position, but
because they are always small: orthotonic personal pronouns like 'ego' and
demonstratives also normally precede verbs. So do nouns, because in
classical Greek they are usually smaller (verbs have more extensive
inflections. This may not apply to earlier Greek, where enclitic verbs were
common, or later Greek, where the change to a stress accent changes the
picture).

In sum, word order appears to reflect 'weight to the right' (cf. Behaghel
1909 and many subsequent commentators). I would not wish to bore with
statistical detail, or enumerate possible reasons (interesting though such
speculation might be) but simply suggest two general rules-of-thumb, which
might apply to all the languages we're studying:
1) 'structure' does not equal 'syntax': word morphology is also crucial.
2) 'clause' does not equal 'sentence': clause linking is also important.

Bruce Fraser


From xavier.delamarre at free.fr  Tue May 29 22:37:25 2001
From: xavier.delamarre at free.fr (Xavier Delamarre)
Date: Wed, 30 May 2001 00:37:25 +0200
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010522201339.00b60850@getmail.friesen.net>
Message-ID: <WED.30.MAY.2001.003725.0200.>

le 23/05/01 5:17, Stanley Friesen à sarima at friesen.net a écrit :

> At 09:58 PM 5/20/01 +0200, Xavier Delamarre wrote:

>> And Calvert Warkins answered that both were probably wrong (his article
>> on syntax reprinted in his "Selected Writings", IBS), PIE being a flexional
>> language, with free word order (every student in Latin knows this) where the
>> SOV / VSO controversy has no relevance.

> 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.

    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'.

    It is striking the the SOV /SVO / VSO is a typical obsession of the
English speaking scholarly world, possibly due to the mother tongue where
word order is more important than in the other IE languages.

    I would rather recommend, as Watkins did, to learn PIE syntax in the
last three volumes of (Brugmann-)Delbrueck's Grundriss, than in Lehmann's or
Friedrich's books.

    XD


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sat May 26 04:42:03 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 00:42:03 EDT
Subject: Linguistic Succession in Historic Comparison:
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.004203.EDT.>

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.

This took place in a single generation; 20-40 years.  But only very small
groups of Nguni speakers were involved; they spread like a snowball rolling
downhill, sweeping up large numbers of individuals from other linguistic
groups, assimilating them through their systems of polygamous marriage and
'regimental' military organization.

Genetically, it would be virtually impossible to trace these migrations; they
were more of a cultural ripple in populations already in place, in strictly
_genetic_ terms.  Not much hard archaeological evidence, either, since the
material cultures are quite similar -- some differences in settlement pattern
and pottery.  Most of the distinctive Nguni material culture is highly
perishable in archaeological terms; organic materials.

There are millions of (Nguni) Matabele-speakers in Zimbabwe today, for
example.  Prior to the 1830's, that area was Shona-Karonga speaking.

The Matabele arrived from Zululand via the Transvaal, several tens of
thousands strong.  However, most of those tens of thousands were originally
Sotho-speaking natives of the Transvaal who'd been overrun by the original
small band from the Zulu country.

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.

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.


From alderson+mail at panix.com  Sat May 26 16:12:06 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 12:12:06 -0400
Subject: *G^EN-
In-Reply-To: <000901c0e448$7c25bc80$fbf1fea9@swbell.net>
 (proto-language@email.msn.com)
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.121206.0400.>

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.

								Rich Alderson


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sat May 26 18:57:01 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 19:57:01 +0100
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.195701.0100.>

>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.

Peter


From jozo.kapovic at zg.tel.hr  Sun May 27 15:29:43 2001
From: jozo.kapovic at zg.tel.hr (=?windows-1250?Q?Mate_Kapovi=E6?=)
Date: Sun, 27 May 2001 17:29:43 +0200
Subject: FYI (pre-IE reconstructions)
Message-ID: <SUN.27.MAY.2001.172943.0200.>

-----Original Message-----
From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv at wxs.nl>
Date: 2001. travanj 05 11:05
Subject: FYI

>I've uploaded a pair of .doc's (for now) to http://home.planet.nl/~mcv
>on pre-Indo-European and pre-Basque phonological and morphological
>reconstructions.  Sorry for the cross-post.  Comments welcome.

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.

M. K.


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Mon May 28 06:53:52 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 28 May 2001 02:53:52 EDT
Subject: Genetic Descent/Verb Morphology
Message-ID: <MON.28.MAY.2001.025352.EDT.>

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.>>

(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. >>)

Just a quick note.  If we follow through on Dr White's formula above, we seem
to begin to have an "operational" definition of a "genetic relationship."

I presume that "finite verbal morphology" has been given trump card status
above because of the often repeated dictum that such morphology is the least
likely to be borrowed.  Or, as Dr. White seems to be suggesting, may never be
borrowed.

I'd just like to note what should be an interesting corollary to this
position.

If what Dr. White finds is true, then the absence of shared "finite verbal
morphology" in any two languages should put in doubt any "genetic
relationship" between those two languages - no matter what other shared
features might be present.

And of course by "shared" I don't mean by way of a reconstruction that
reconciles what are two different morphologies on their face.  Such
reconstructions are based on a genetic relationship already being
established.  Here, we are talking about a situation where the genetic
relationship is not yet established, and no reconstruction has been justified.

Also Dr. White seems to indicate that any "finite verbal morphology" from
native Laha grammar at all would overturn his hypothesis that these types of
mixed languages don't exist.

I'm wondering if such a mixed language does in fact exist - one that has
"finite verbal morphology" from both of two unrelated languages - whether
that would change his apparent point: that verb morphology is a way to
identify the real genetic lineage in these "mixed language" situations?

As to the observation that these mixed languages are somehow rare, I'd ask
how one would know that - if "(non-grammatical) lexicon,... nominal
morphology, derivational or non-finite verbal morphology, or (worse yet) mere
categories,..." (quoting Dr. White) are such unreliable indicators of genetic
relationship.  There seem to be a good many languages that have been related
to one another based on the items above, but not on shared finite verb
morphology.  Perhaps they are all just mixed languages?

Regard,
Steve Long


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue May 29 08:49:48 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 29 May 2001 09:49:48 +0100
Subject: Genetic Descent
In-Reply-To: <001301c0e3a8$36486960$fc2a63d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <TUE.29.MAY.2001.094948.0100.>

--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.

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?

[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.

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

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?  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?

>> [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.

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

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?

>> 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.

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.

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?

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

No one is proposing a coin toss.  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?  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.

> Since
> borrowing of categories, without borrowing of specific morphmes to
> express these, is not relevant, the case in question is practically
> indentical to the case of Anglo-Romani.

Who says that the borrowing of categories is not relevant?  It appears that
you have just declared this by fiat.  Languages borrow words and morphemes
at least as often as they borrow grammatical categories.  So why is the
etymology of morphemes sacrosanct, but not the etymology of grammatical
categories and patterns?

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?

[LT]

>> Anyway, I now want to talk about another language, discussed by Thomason
>> in her new book.  That language is Laha, spoken in the Moluccas, where
>> the locally dominant language is a variety of Malay, which is distantly,
>> but not closely, related to Laha.  The principal investigator here is
>> James T. Collins:

>>   J. T. Collins. 1980. 'Laha, a language of the central Moluccas'.
>>   Indonesia Circle 23: 3-19.

>> 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."

>> But now consider the following.  The Laha are reportedly regarded by
>> themselves, and by others, as a distinct ethnic group with a distinct
>> language.  All Laha-speakers are also fluent in Malay, but other speakers
>> of Malay do not speak Laha.

>         The Romani are regarded by themselves, and by others, as a
>         distinct ethnic group with (where it survives) a distinct
> language.  All Anglo-Romani speakers are fluent in English, but other
> speakers of English do not speak Anglo-Romani.  Why come to a different
> conclusion in the two cases, unless coin tossing is the latest fashion?

What is this thing with coin-tossing?  No one is suggesting any such thing.
What T and K are suggesting is that every case of contact is different, and
that each case must be carefully examined before any conclusions can be
drawn: we cannot simply decide in advance, by fiat, what is possible and
what is not.  Is that unreasonable?

>> The conclusion of Collins, and of Thomason, is
>> that Laha has developed as follows: it started out as a language entirely
>> distinct from Malay, but, under enormous pressure from Malay, it has
>> gradually, in piecemeal fashion, absorbed more and more Malay grammar,
>> until today the grammar is almost entirely Malay, and only a few bits of
>> Laha grammar survive -- for the moment, since it is possible that these
>> few fragments will also give way to Malay grammar in the future.

>> 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.

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?

>> Is this
>> reasonable?  Earlier, David rejected a similar scenario for another
>> language as impossible in principle.

>> 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"?

> 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.

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.

>> (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 woyld 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.

All right -- Kormakiti Arabic, then.

[snip]

>         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.

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.

> 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.

To be honest, I can't see why this is relevant.  The point is, in Collins's
interpretation, that Laha grammar was originally different from Malay
grammar but no longer is, except in a few details.

> But, operating in the semi-dark (Thomason is
> routinely vague about the facts of her example languages), I see no reason
> to think that the situation is not comparable to Anglo-Romani or Mednyj
> Aleut, which are surely not mutually comprehensible with English or
> Russian respectively (or for that matter Romani or Aleut), but which
> nonetheless can be identified (even by Thomason, in the first case) as
> forms of "abruptly re-lexified" English or Russian.

I am not so sure, but I'll see what I can find out, when the last pile of
scripts disappears from my desk.

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  Wed May 30 14:29:56 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Wed, 30 May 2001 14:29:56 -0000
Subject: Pelasgian/was Etruscans
Message-ID: <WED.30.MAY.2001.142956.0000.>

Renato Piva (20 May 2001) wrote:

>The fact is that
>'kypeiron is a word found in ancient Greek, and Greek is an IE language.

According to A.M. Davies, no more than 40% of the Greek lexicon is
transparently IE. 8% is known to be non-IE, and the remaining 52% has no
recognized etymology. Even if half of this remainder turned out to be IE
(unattested in other branches), a third of Greek vocabulary would be non-IE
in origin. Of course, the bulk of commonly used Greek words is IE, as are
most of the inflections.

>Or, you can assume Etruscan intermediation for li:lium (with [as]similation
>l_r > l_l) and citrus.

If this assimilation (l_r > l_l) is typical of Etruscan, why do we find the
praenomina Larce, Larza, Larth, Laris, Laru, etc., the gentilicia Larce,
Larcna, Larthu, Larna, Larste, Lartle, etc., the noun <larca> 'type of
vessel', the words <larezul> and <lursth>, and the inscription <lur-anus>?
Etruscan clearly prefers /a/ between initial /l/ and /r/, but there is no
tendency to assimilate the /r/.

Furthermore, many of the West Romance reflexes of this word have l_r: Sp. &
Port. <lirio>, Catal. <lliri>, Sard. <gliri>, Prov., Piem., & Lomb. <liri>,
Pign. <lirru>. Italian has retained the second /l/ but fortited the first in
<giglio>. The simplest explanation is that Romance-speakers have a strong
tendency to _dissimilate_ l_l into l_r which continues the phenomenon seen
in Lat. <a:la:ris>, <mi:lita:ris>, etc. It would be very odd if speakers
adopted an assimilated form only to have their descendents reverse the
process. Therefore, I think we see in <li:lium> the more conservative
sequence of consonants. The Greek form <leirion> is in my view not
systematically dissimilated, but the Attican dialect of Pelasgian converted
*-eil- to *-eir-, while the Italian dialect retained *-eil- > Lat. -i:l-.
The other examples are Gk. *peirins ~ Lat. <pi:lentum> and Gk. <seirios>
'blazing' (epithet of dog-star; cf. gloss "seir = ho he:lios" (Suidas,
Hsch.)) ~ Lat. Si:lius (gent.).

Etruscan intermediation does an equally poor job of getting Lat. <citrus>
out of Gk. <kedros>. Generally, short /e/ in an initial Greek syllable
remains /e/ in the Etruscan borrowing: Cerun < Geruone:s, Ecapa < Hekabe:,
Ec(h)tur < Hekto:r, Thet(h)is < Thetis, etc.

>IMHO, in lack of further material the best and most honest solution would be a
><non liquet>.  For pi:lentum, one should be even more prudent. The meaning is
>not the same as in Greek: *peirins, -inthos (the Nom. is not attested!) is a
>"wicker basket tied upon the cart", while Lat. pi:lentum means more
>specifically "voiture de gala ` quatre roues, qui servait au transport des
>matrones dans les cirimonies publiques" according to Ernout-Meillet. Besides
>that, the word is not attested before classical time (Verg., Hor.), and
>Porphyrius says it is a Gaul word (cf. carpentum).

One can be prudent without throwing up the hands and grumbling "nihil
liquet". The transfer of sense between *peirins and <pi:lentum> is no more
difficult than some of the etymologies accepted by most IE scholars. I don't
claim that Pelasgian derivation is established, but the pattern of
peir-/pi:l- vs. leir-/li:l- is suggestive. When enough patterns have been
observed which fit neither the accepted scheme for derivation from PIE nor
any correspondence expected for direct or indirect borrowing, a good case
can be made for derivation from substrate. As for the other specific
objections, _most_ Latin and Greek words are not attested before classical
time, and the claim that a word is Gaulish doesn't mean that the base must
be _native_ Gaulish.

>What you call "one assumption" is in fact also a set of assumptions, some of
>which are implicit:

By "one assumption" I was referring only to the group of words represented
in Greek and Latin which constitute the "core" of the reconstructed
Pelasgian vocabulary, according to hypothesis. Extending the matter to West
Semitic, Armenian, or what-not indeed requires further assumptions.

>You assume 1. that kyparissos is the same as Hebr. go:pher (which is an
>unknown tree translated in numerous ways in the Septuagint; o.k., one of them
>is kyparissos, but that may be due to phonetical association; the name of the
>cypress in Hebrew is bro:s' or bro:t);

There are several misunderstandings here. I know of only one occurrence of
<go:pher> in the OT (Gen. 6:14), where it modifies the construct for 'wood'
in the expression <te:bhath !'ac,ey-gho:pher> 'ark of gopher-wood'.
Comparison with expressions like <!e:c, s^emen> 'oleaster' lit. 'oil-tree'
indicates that <go:pher> is not the name of a tree as such, but the name of
something it produces. The derivative <gophriyth> 'sulfur, brimstone'
suggests that <go:pher> means 'resin' vel sim. Eduard Selleslagh has
proposed 'glue, sticky stuff' as the original meaning.

It is not necessary for the Hebrew name for 'cypress' to be cognate with the
Greek. By hypothesis, Hebrew acquired <go:pher> 'glue, resin' vel sim. from
Pelasgian. The wood denoted by the Hebrew phrase doesn't even have to be
cypress-wood. There are plenty of cases of IE dendronyms referring to
different trees in different branches of IE. For that matter, Heb.
<b'ro:s^/b'ro:th> can mean 'cypress' or 'pine', and the Aramaic cognate
means 'juniper'.

>2. that there is no borrowing in either way, because both words come from a
>common "Pelasgian" source;

That was my "one assumption" concerning the group of words.

>3. that -issos is not Greek;

There are certainly Greek words of IE origin like <dissos> 'double' and
<melissa> 'honeybee'. I never claimed or assumed that all words having
particular endings were necessarily derived from substrate. The fact that
numerous toponyms and phytonyms end in -ssos and -nthos is highly suggestive
of substratal derivation, but it doesn't make these endings etymological
markers. If I appeared to imply that, I'm sorry.

>4.  that the suffixation had no function (otherwise, it could have remained
>*kyper, *kypar, *go:pher or the like).

I have _never_ claimed that -issos or any identifiable morpheme has no
function. If you recall the Etruscan discussion with MCV, I was the one
arguing vehemently against the interpretation of Beekes and van der Meer,
who consider Etr. -thi to be an optional (i.e. functionless) suffix. You'll
see Berlusconi taking a vow of poverty before you see me supporting
linguistic forms without functions.

In the Greek words of presumed Pelasgian origin, I regard -issos or more
generally -ssos as a denominative suffix: it produces nouns from other
nouns. I'm sure I've posted this opinion before. If *kupar- means 'glue,
resin, fragrance' vel sim., <kuparissos> denotes an object (such as a tree)
associated with it.

>In R. Lanszweert's reconstruction there is nothing weard about regular
>sound-correspondences, and the semantic analogy involved is not just <funny
>stuff>.  Assumptions such as the ones suggested have to be discussed
>seriously.
>Whether you agree or not. It is very easy to hide behind a wall of <subtrate>,
>but it may lead only to deviating attempts such as those one can read in the
>works of such omnicomparatists as Trombetti, van Windekens, Furnie, etc..

In my opinion the problem with Trombetti and his successors isn't "hiding
behind substrate" but failing to recognize that comparative work requires
the identification of _patterns_, not merely _resemblances_. Larry Trask had
a rather eloquent posting on this topic recently. Anyone can find
resemblances between any languages, and there has never been a shortage of
impressionistic "decipherments" of Etruscan having all the value of spilled
alphabet soup.

>IE languages were able to form compounds, so in my view there was only a
>limited need of loans. Just look at what German or Modern Greek are doing. But
>beware:  I'm not saying there were no loans at all. We only need to be careful
>with what we call <substrate>: <substrate> risks to become a waste-basket for
>anything difficult to analyse. Many of the words for which we do invoke
>subtrate may only be obscured compounds waiting to be rediscovered. Such Greek
>words do not occur in other IE languages, as they were specific of the Greek
>contest.  But the same may apply to any single IE language, of course.

And the same problem that you see in substrates is lurking in the method of
compound-recovery. Obscured compounds can fill a waste-basket just as
quickly as substratal forms. In fact, if the method involves free-lance
restoration of "lost" consonants, we have dragged ourselves down to the
alphabet-soup shenanigans of the "IE Etruscanists".

>> Then why are there still Greek words in -iskos?

>Because -iskos and -issos differ in expressivity: -issos can be the mycenaean
>expressive variation of -iskos (through *-iskjos). Exactly as there are both
>'polemos and 'ptolemos < *pjolemos, 'polis and 'ptolis < *pjolis, 'skyla and
>'syla < *ssyla < *skjyla, etc. Expressivity is a reality in every language -
>or shall we say that 'ptolemos, 'ptolis ans 'syla are substrate words?

I find this extremely difficult to take seriously. The function of <ptolis>
and <ptolemos> is to make preceding syllables long by position, which is a
mechanical feature of poetry and has nothing to do with expressivity.
Admitting arbitrary "expressive" phonetic mutations is the linguistic
equivalent of inviting Hell's Angels to your daughter's wedding. It should
be crystal-clear to any sane comparativist that no useful results can emerge
from such anarchy.

>I don't see any difficulty in pronouncing *pk'u-perih2. Can you pronounce all
>of the reconstructed words? If you don't believe that such "complicated" words
>may exist, take a look at the Kartvelian languages, or simply try to pronounce
>Georg.  vprtskvnis, a regular verb form meaning "they let us pay for it".  Of
>course, the initial cluster in *pk'u-perih2 was quite instable, thus it was
>simplified very soon to k- in Gk and c- in Lat., while it led to fs'- in Av.
>and ks.- in AI.

If you see no difficulty in pronouncing this, why would _native_ speakers
have any trouble with the initial cluster? Isn't instability just another
waste-basket for etymological difficulty?

>> How common is the typology of ejectives with laryngeals?

>I think this question doesn't apply here, or am I misunderstanding you?

I misunderstood your notation. I thought ['] indicated the preceding stop
was glottalized. Not that it matters ...

>Have you read [R. Lanszweert's paper]?

It's on my reading list, and I'll get to it when I can. In the interest of
good taste, I'll avoid further comments until I've read it.

>Ask the ancient Greeks. Why is resemblance to a beetle a more plausible
>connection than to the typical, hideous hum of the engine in the case of a
>famous car?

Because the car in question is being contrasted with a hundred boxy-looking
others.

>> For that matter, how distinctive is a
>> sheep-spit compared to a goat-spit, hog-spit, or (most aptly) bull-spit?

>Ask the Indoeuropeans, but *pek'u- may also mean cattle. In any case, Lat.
>cuspis comes from *pk'u-spid, see P. Thieme, Radices postnominales, in; Akten
>d. VII.  Fachtagung etc., Wiesbaden 1985.

I'll withhold pkomment until I've read the kpaper. I'm still puzzled by the
notion that Proto-Greeks would retain 'sheep' or 'cattle' or anything as a
prefix for something looking like a spit.

>I think I was wrong in what the name of the Island is concerned, but I guess
>you wouldn't be right, either. I probably mixed it up with Gk. 'obeloi "spits
>used as money" (in Plutarch and elsewhere according to LSJ). I'd like to
>correct myself: It seems that the name of the metal is secundary to the name
>of the Island. In turn, the Island seems to be named after the colour (henna)
>won from the plant called kypros - which by chance is also the colour of the
>metal.  This word is of Semitic origin (Hebr. kopher), as already stated by E.
>Masson and others.

This makes as much sense as anything I've seen. Henna was used for covering
women's nails with a reddish hue, so Heb. <ko:pher> lit. 'covering' (also
'village', 'pitch', 'ransom') was applied. The resemblance between this and
<go:pher> seems fortuitous.

>Gk. 'kypeiron and ky'parissos have probably nothing to do with kypros or
>Cyprus (or copper). If you still wonder, how a spit can be the origin of the
>name of a tree, see Ovidius, Met.  10, 106: metas imitata cupressus "the
>cypress looking like the obelisk" (obelisk is diminutive of obelos "spit").

Fine, but it's not *oiobelos, *bouobelos, or the like, is it?

DGK


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sat May 26 03:55:30 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 23:55:30 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <FRI.25.MAY.2001.235530.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/25/01 5:16:39 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com
writes:

> Nor would it be surprising if bride and groom sat down afterwards and enjoyed
> a celebratory dinner of fallow deer, which they would have called *kerwos -
> what PIE speakers may have called it in Anatolia.

--  no, that was their word for "teryaki BBQ giraffe".

There's just as much evidence for that.

In fact, just about as much evidence as there is for the whole "Anatolian
hypothesis", which is to say, zero.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sat May 26 04:06:43 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 00:06:43 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.000643.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/25/01 5:16:39 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com
writes:

> Words never changed meaning back then, like they do now.

-- well, this is a little odd, considering your argument is that a langauge
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.

Not to mention the names of deities, ceremonies and poetic kennings.

After 5000 years and 7000 miles of separation.

In which case, to account for their current degree of divergence, the Romance
languages must have started diverging around... when?  2000 BCE?

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


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu May 31 07:47:01 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 03:47:01 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <THU.31.MAY.2001.034701.EDT.>

On 14 May 2001, at 9:24, Rick Mc Callister wrote:
<<Is there a known etymology for <dama> and Greek <tame>?>>

In a message dated 5/19/2001 10:27:19 PM, bmscott at stratos.net replied:
<<For <tame>, Gk. <dama:n> 'to tame', and Lat. <doma:re>
'to tame, subdue' Watkins (2000) gives PIE *demH2-.>>

It's a bit more complex in Greek and Latin.  I'm not sure about <dama:n>, I
don't see that particular form.

The development perhaps points to the transfer of the word from cattle and
horses to deer.  The Romans kept herds of deer in compounds as may have been
the practice in the Near East.  Note that while the fallow deer is modern
taxa "dama", the official taxa "damaliscus" refers to the "damalis" as cow
(-like.)

As far as Greek goes:
damazo: - to tame, to break in, to subdue (breaking in an untamed mule of six
years in Homer as: "damasasthai";  pres. part. "damazo:n ti" in Xenophon.)
This form of verb seems to be "a derivative."

damasis - taming, subduing

Damaios - interpreted as Horse-Tamer, epithet of Poseidon

Damasippos - horse-breaking, of Athena

Damate:r - Dor., Arc., Thess. and Boeot. form of goddess Demeter

damase:no:r - man-subduing (lion)

damasikondulos - subduing with the knuckles (boxer)

da:mante:r - tamer (of wild animals?)

da:male:s - subduer (Eros)/ young steer

da:ma:lis - young cow, heifer

dama:los - interpreted as perhaps a calf

damalopodia - calves' feet

da:ma:le:phagos - beef-eating

da:ma:le:botos - interpreted as browsed by heifers

dme:sis - taming, breaking ("hippo:n" - Iliad17:476)

dme:te:r - tamer (early)

dmo:s - slave or animal taken in war (cattle raid or perhaps the hunt?)

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.

In Latin:

damma (dama) - "a general name for beasts of the deer kind; a fallow deer,
buck, doe, antelope, chamois" (L-S); also an early word for "venison"

damium  -  an animal sacrifice "in honorem Bonae Deae"; the part sacrificed

damalio - a calf

damula - interpreted as either a fawn or a small fallow-deer

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


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat May 26 06:37:11 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 02:37:11 EDT
Subject: Deer and Yellow words
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.023711.EDT.>

Regarding the posts from Hans-Werner Hatting and Brian M. Scott below, I
think I need to mention some things:

1. Note that I used "cf." in (... deer is "jelen" (cf., Pol.,"zielony",...).
In law, cf. in a citation means "compare".  It is somewhat noncommittal,
meant to note a parallel that may be relevant in some indirect way.  In
paleontology and taxonomy, "cf." refers to a tentative identification, one
that may not be correct.

Obviously, both of these correspondents feel that the etymologies here are
settled and there is absolutely no connection between the words.  I prefer to
think this is something about which reasonable persons can differ reasonably.

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

3.  Because of the above, I must honestly find such etymologies as "*el2-)
originally" meaning "red, brown" and *g'hel- "originally" meaning "green,
yellow" as unsatisfactory and dubious.  But once again this is the type of
thing that reasonable persons may differ about reasonably.  When these terms
eventually, due to some material process or by analogy, came to mean colors,
they were probably originally based on specific things or actions - not on a
concept of independent colors.  What those objects were is a different
question.

And of course I do not know how it would affect these reconstructions if for
example "*el2-" and *g'hel- originally referred to the same thing - e.g., a
deer hide - or different parts of a deer - antlers and hides.  Again, I
suspect it is likely that these words refer to by-products as to the live
animal.  Homer never mentions an elephant using the elephant word.  The word
is only used to describe ivory.

4. The reason that I cf'ed - Pol.,<zielony> - was because it sent to me with
a group of other words - <jalos-sko>, cow; <gala:z:> (?), branch;
<jalow-iec>, barren or withered field or forest; BUT SEE <plowa>, flaxen,
yellow > <plowa zwierzyna>, red deer - and together with other examples
including some Hebrew el- words that do seem somehow to connect antlers and
branches, if I understand correctly.  That connection does make sense.  Wood
and antler were worked in much the same way and some start out looking
structurally pretty much the same.  Antlers branch.  Wood branches. Both can
be colored brown- yellow- green (unripe) - red.  Thus, maybe, elms and elks
together, as mentioned below.

I originally wrote:
(BTW, in Slavic, deer is "jelen" (cf., Pol.,"zielony", green, definitely not
red; cf, Greek, "chalkeios") which might connect it to the "yellow deer"
which is what the fallow is called in Iran. "Fallow" might even suggest the
same color connection.)

In a message dated 5/22/2001 11:37:40 PM, bmscott at stratos.net writes:
<<Aren't <jel-> and <ziel-> here just the expected reflexes of PIE *el-
and *g^hel- resp.?  And if so, how is Pol. <zielony> relevant?>>

In a message dated 5/25/2001 6:42:05 PM, hwhatting at hotmail.com writes:
<< Slavic "jelen'" is not connected to Polish "zielony". "jelen'" is originally
an n-stem formation (Proto-Slavic *el-en-) of the root PIE *el- (whither "elm"
and "elk"), which Watkins (AHD of IE roots s.v. el2-) quotes with an original
meaning "red, brown", while "zielony" goes back to a Slavic "zelenu0-" ("u0" is
to denote the back yer) belonging to the PIE root *g'hel- "green, yellow". >>

Steve Long


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sat May 26 04:10:06 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 00:10:06 EDT
Subject: European Genetics/IE
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.001006.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/25/01 6:31:05 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
philjennings at juno.com writes:

> but mostly the language conversion swept clean over a vast area.

-- this is a non-argument.  Exactly the same thing happened in the spread of
Indo-Iranian over an equally vast, equally densely populated area in the
Bronze Age.  If there, why not earlier in Europe?


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sat May 26 04:19:51 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 00:19:51 EDT
Subject: European Genetics/IE
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.001951.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/25/01 6:31:05 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
philjennings at juno.com writes:

> Because if IE stemmed from a creole, even one buried a long time in its
> past, that fact would be detected.  Is this really true?

-- ah... yes.  Creoles have highly distinctive, and extremely similar,
characteristics.

PIE has none of those characteristics; in fact, it's at the extreme opposite
end of the linguistic spectrum.  For example, it's a very highly inflected
language.

> As for the first, the Bactria Margiana Archaeology Complex apparently sprang
> into bloom around 2300bce, and some people think it's the Indo-Iranian
> "homeland."  The big Kurgan breakout was around 2300bce or not much before

-- ah... no.  The mainstream consensus would posit that the original PIE
speakers were roughly coterminous with the Sredny Stog (4500-3500 BCE) and
Yamna cultures of the eastern Ukraine and western Kazakhstan.

The European spread of PIE in the area between the Rhine delta and the Volga
would be associated with the Corded Ware/Battle Axe culture and then its
Beaker offshoot, from around 3200 BCE through the third millenium.

The eastern extension would be the Anafasevo culture of roughly the same
period, which brought the neolithic-pastoral economy to the eastern part of
the steppes, and is often cited as a percusor of the Tocharians.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sat May 26 04:32:01 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 00:32:01 EDT
Subject: European Genetics/IE
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.003201.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/25/01 6:31:05 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
philjennings at juno.com writes:

> As for the first, the Bactria Margiana Archaeology Complex apparently sprang
> into bloom around 2300bce, and some people think it's the Indo-Iranian
> "homeland."

-- ah... no.

The mainstream consensus would posit that the original PIE speakers were
roughly coterminous with the Sredny Stog (4500-3500 BCE) and  Yamna cultures
of the eastern Ukraine and western Kazakhstan.  This coincides pretty well
exactly with the consensus linguistic terminus ad quem for PIE, and has all
the right technologies.

The European spread of PIE in the area between the Rhine delta and the Volga
would be associated with the Corded Ware/Battle Axe culture and then its
Beaker offshoot, from around 3200 BCE through the third millenium.

That is the last big archaeological "turnover" in that area before historic
times, with massive and very rapid shifts in burial practice, settlement
patterns, and economies --
a huge area between Holland and Moscow was "reformatted" culturally within
the space of a few centuries.

The eastern extension would be the Anafasevo culture of roughly the same
period, which brought the neolithic-pastoral economy to the eastern part of
the steppes, and is often cited as a percusor of the Tocharians.

By the late 2000's BCE we're on the border of the Andronovo period in the
eastern steppes, thought (with assoicated cultures to the west) to be
specifically Indo-Iranian, and giving us very early chariot burials with
distinct links to Vedic ritual practice.   The Indo-Europeanization of the
Iranian plateau and northwestern India -- post-2000 BCE.

Meanwhile, movement into the Balkans (or, much less likely, through the
Caucasus) brought the proto-Anatolian speakers to Anatolia sometime between
3500 and 2500 BCE, probably towards the earlier part of that periodl

So by roughly 2500  BCE, a fairly uniform field of PIE dialects would extend
from the Atlantic to Gansu in China, after a dispersal starting in the
mid-fourth-millenium BCE.

These would already be undergoing differentiation, but the central and
western dialects would still be mutually comprehensible -- from Balto-Slavic
to Germanic-Italic-Celtic; the Graeco-Armenian and Indo-Iranian zones would
be diverging somewhat more (satemization, for instance), and Anatolian rather
more so.

In the next thousand to two thousand years, the various dialects would assume
more-or-less their early historic ranges and start to assume the
characteristics we reconstruct as Proto-Celtic, Proto-Italic, and
Proto-Germanic.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sat May 26 04:50:27 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 00:50:27 EDT
Subject: European Genetics/IE
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.005027.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/25/01 6:31:05 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
philjennings at juno.com writes:

> It seems that the IE-Kurganites forcibly converted western Europe
> to their language, fighting uphill against a population gradient of
> established

-- nobody is talking about hordes of frenzied Aryans slashing their way out
of the Ukraine and into the works of comparative philologists.

It's more productive to think of a set of migrating memes, carried by people
-- often fairly small numbers, although (crucially) _locally_ dominant.

A society which has better methods of assimilating foreigners can "eat out"
one that has no such mechanisms in a few generations, and no large dramatic
conquests are necessary.  It's more like a cultural reorganization.

Remember, we're talking about pre-State forms of social organization, without
clear boundaries or means of acting in concert over large areas.

If a band of People X move in, there's no large scale organization to throw
them out.

If they have a method of attracting individuals -- say they're patrilocal,
polygamous, and have a system of young people attaching themselves to
chieftain's households  or being initiated into phratries or age-sets --
their numbers can grow quite rapidly and they can take in outsiders _as
individuals_.

If they're also more mobile and more aggressive, you don't get vast campaigns
of conquest, but a series of local brawls with a fairly uniform outcome;
eventually, each area becomes the source of new swarms of small groups hiving
off.

Area A ==> Area B ==> Area C, and so forth, and by the time you're in Area X,
virtually none of the _genes_ come from Area A.  But the _memes_ do - and
language is a meme.


From philjennings at juno.com  Fri May 25 23:47:06 2001
From: philjennings at juno.com (philjennings at juno.com)
Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 18:47:06 -0500
Subject: thy thigh, etc. (external sandhi in English)
Message-ID: <FRI.25.MAY.2001.184706.0500.>

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 edsel at glo.be  Sat May 26 08:49:21 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 10:49:21 +0200
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.104921.0200.>

----- 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]
[snip]
> 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.

Very much like English.

Ed.


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sat May 26 18:43:09 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 19:43:09 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.194309.0100.>

> .  If we look at the consecutive editions of any good desk
> dictionary of English, we find that these become steadily larger over time,
> ....  It seems that very many of the new words
> do not replace anything:

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  Sat May 26 20:22:36 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 15:22:36 -0500
Subject: thy thigh etc. (external sandhi in English)
In-Reply-To: <00a801c0e3c1$eb1b44c0$9c35073e@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.152236.0500.>

[snip]

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

[snip]

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

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


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Mon May 28 15:19:26 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Mon, 28 May 2001 15:19:26 -0000
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <MON.28.MAY.2001.151926.0000.>

Larry Trask (24 May 2001) wrote:

>[DGK]
>>Excuse my skepticism, but I can't believe the _net_ number of contentives
>>in a given language is growing constantly. As new contentives enter a
>>language, others exit. Lexica don't have rubber walls.

>[LT]
>Debatable.  If we look at the consecutive editions of any good desk
>dictionary of English, we find that these become steadily larger over time,
>in spite of the best efforts of lexicographers to prune any items which
>seem to have dropped out of use.  It seems that very many of the new words
>do not replace anything: 'geopathic', 'mogul' (in the skiing sense),
>'cellphone', 'hahnium', and, of course, 'tzatziki'.

[DGK]
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. 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.

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.

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.

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.


From alderson+mail at panix.com  Sat May 26 16:26:39 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 12:26:39 -0400
Subject: hang-ing by a thread of phonetic similarity [was: Re: Return of
 the minimal pairs]
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.122639.0400.>

In response to Paul Cohen's posting regarding the status of [h] and [N] as
allophones of a single phoneme in English, both Max Wheeler and Larry Trask
bring in the notion of phonetic similarity.

As I was taught it, "phonetic similarity" was introduced into classical
phonemics precisely to counter the argument that complementary distribution
(originally the only criterion in the classical theory) required so defining
them.

								Rich Alderson


From connolly at memphis.edu  Sun May 27 01:41:18 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 20:41:18 -0500
Subject: Phonemes of New York Dialect
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.204118.0500.>

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.  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.

Leo Connolly


From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi  Sat May 26 11:14:06 2001
From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 14:14:06 +0300
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <140908378.3199690958@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.141406.0300.>

On Thu, 24 May 2001, Larry Trask wrote:

> --On Sunday, May 20, 2001 6:11 am -0400 "Douglas G. Wilson"
> <douglas at nb.net> wrote:

>> Just a footnote, not intended to invalidate the point about initial /D/.

>> Are there "non-grammatical" English words beginning with /D/?

>> I will take as a working definition of "English word": "any word which
>> appears in a conventional English-language dictionary, excluding proper
>> names". I also exclude pronunciations which are designated as foreign, if
>> an alternative "English" pronunciation is given.

>> I find two:

>> "dhal" /Dal/ (an Arabic letter);

>> "duinhewassel" /DIn at was@l/ (a Scots designation of minor nobility, variant
>> of "duniewassal").

>> Marginal examples, true ... slightly better perhaps than the imaginary
>> river dhelta.

> Ah, splendid, and many thanks.  These words are not in my desk dictionary,
> and I didn't know them -- and me a Scrabble-player, too.  I happen to know
> that 'dhal' is legal in British tournament Scrabble in another sense.  I
> don't know if the second is, but I don't suppose I'll ever get a chance to
> play it anyway.  Can't recall the last time I played a 12-letter word.

Not quite so fast, Larry.  These may be splendid for your scrabble
strategy, but they don't don't much affect the Engish initial [T] - [D]
situation.

The definition of 'dhal' as "(an Arabic letter)" does not tell the story.
It is not the name of any Arabic letter, but it is the name of the letter
that represents the sound [D].  As such it fills the same ecological niche
as English 'edh'.  So 'dhal', despite its lack of capitalization is the
name of a specific person, place, or thing); it is the name of the symbol
used to represent the sound [D] in Arabic.  If this makes it an English
sound, so then are all the names of Arabic letters English sounds.  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.  You can use 'dhal' in scrabble because it
is in the English dictionary and it is not capitalized, just as you can
use 'psi' and 'xi' in scrabble, but that doesn't mean that they affect
English phonology except in a very peripheral way.

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.  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.  Its
inclusion is completely arbitrary.

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').

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

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Sat May 26 20:14:57 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 15:14:57 -0500
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <140908378.3199690958@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.151457.0500.>

[snip]

dhal, however is /dhal/ rather than /Dal/ --if you're talking about Indian food

>Ah, splendid, and many thanks.  These words are not in my desk dictionary,
>and I didn't know them -- and me a Scrabble-player, too.  I happen to know
>that 'dhal' is legal in British tournament Scrabble in another sense.  I
>don't know if the second is, but I don't suppose I'll ever get a chance to
>play it anyway.  Can't recall the last time I played a 12-letter word.

>Larry Trask

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


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Sat May 26 20:17:36 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 15:17:36 -0500
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <140908378.3199690958@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.151736.0500.>

[snip]

	Another <dh-> word that should be acceptable in Scrabble is dhole.
Perhaps dhoti

>Ah, splendid, and many thanks.  These words are not in my desk dictionary,
>and I didn't know them -- and me a Scrabble-player, too.  I happen to know
>that 'dhal' is legal in British tournament Scrabble in another sense.  I
>don't know if the second is, but I don't suppose I'll ever get a chance to
>play it anyway.  Can't recall the last time I played a 12-letter word.

>Larry Trask

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


From sarima at friesen.net  Sun May 27 13:50:24 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Sun, 27 May 2001 06:50:24 -0700
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <141000341.3199692486@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SUN.27.MAY.2001.065024.0700.>

At 11:28 AM 5/24/01 +0100, Larry Trask wrote:

>Let me clarify this.  The point I was trying to make is this: not everything
>which is *true* of English is linguistically significant.  ...

How true.

>Take another case or two.  The rules governing the possible word-initial
>consonant clusters in English clearly permit the initial clusters /skl-/
>and /gj-/ (second = US /gy-/).  ..., and the obsolescent and
>possibly expressive word 'gewgaw' -- 'obsolescent', because my students
>don't know it.

Hmm, I do not pronounce this with /gj/.  But perhaps because it *is*
obsolescent, and my pronunciation comes only from seeing it in writing.  (I
pronounce it goo-gah);

>And I was arguing that the seeming absence of initial [D] in English
>lexical items is likewise a historical accident, and not a significant fact
>about English phonology.

This seems likely to me, at least in most dialects.  One post just
distributed suggests that in at least one Australian dialect /D/ and /T/
are still allophones.

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


From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi  Tue May 29 15:15:23 2001
From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting)
Date: Tue, 29 May 2001 18:15:23 +0300
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
In-Reply-To: <125018638.3199426918@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.29.MAY.2001.181523.0300.>

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 'tauchen'.  If [T] and
>> [D] contrast in 'thigh' and 'thy', then so do [c,] and [x] in
>> German.

> No.  The German contrast depends crucially on the presence of a morpheme
> boundary.  The English one does not.

> [on my minimal pair 'Than' (for 'Thandy') and 'than']

>> It is not a minimal pair as long as there is a morpheme
>> boundary involved.

> But there isn't.

>> Unless, of course, you claim that morpheme boundaries are not
>> phonological conditions.

> I do not.

> [on my list of near-minimal pairs like 'this' / 'thistle']

>> And every one of your near minimal pairs involves a morpheme
>> boundary after [D].

> Certainly not.

>> You stick by your contention that morpheme boundaries are not
>> phonological conditions then?

> No.  I never said any such thing.  It is beyond dispute that
> morpheme boundaries can have phonological consequences.
> Accordingly, it seems to be in order for our theories of
> phonology to take morpheme boundaries into account.

> [LT]

>>> The observation that initial [D] occurs only in
>>> "grammatical" words and initial [T] only in "lexical" words is
>>> just that: an observation.

>> Quite true.  But the observation that morphemes are units of
>> meaning is, I think, more than an observation.  It is a basic
>> principle of how human language works.  Duality of patterning
>> says that morphemes are made up of phonemes and that morphemes
>> have meaning (iconically, indexically, or symbolically) but that
>> phonemes do not have any inherent meaning.  Initial [D] in
>> English is a morpheme because it has meaning associated with it.
>> Admittedly, it is grammatical meaning rather than lexical
>> meaning, but meaning nonetheless.

> I'm sorry, but I must disagree flatly.  I have no problem with
> grammatical morphemes, or even with semantically and functionally
> empty morphemes.  But I cannot see that word-initial [D] is ever
> a morpheme at all.

Then please read Z. Harris, _Methods in Structural Linguistics_ (Chicago
1951), 192-93 and G. Trager, _Language and Languages_, (1972), 76-79, and
tell me why their analyses are wrong.

> First, word-initial [D] has no recognizable meaning or function.

Okay, since you refuse to read it, let me read it to you.  Z.
Harris, _Methods in Structural Linguistics_ (1951), p. 192:

   Similarly, in _there_, _then_, _thither_, _this_, _that_,
etc., we obtain by the Appendix to 12.22 a segment /D/ with
demonstrative meaning, plus various residue elements with unique
meanings (/is/ 'near', /aet/ 'yonder', etc.).

> Second, if we segment it away as a morpheme, then we are left with all
> those unanalyzed residues like <-is>, <-en>, <-ere> and <-e>.  These must
> now also be analyzed as morphemes, or as sequences of morphemes, and the
> position is impossible.  Remember, a morpheme boundary has to have a
> morpheme on each side of it -- not just on one side.

Gee, Larry, have you ever heard of case endings?  We're not
talking about productive morphology here, but perceptual
morphemes -- the ability of naive native speakers to recognize
units of meaning and base their perceptions of the structure of
their language on them.

Now what you are saying is that a word like 'boysenberry' must be
monomorphemic because if you segment off the morpheme '-berry'
then what you have left is the unanalyzable residue 'boysen-',
which cannot be a morpheme because it has no meaning in English.
Pish and tosh.  What remains is a morpheme precisely because of
what you said above:  "a morpheme boundary has to have a morpheme
on each side of it."  If you take an utterance like 'give Tom a
boysenberry' and identify the morphemes, you have 'give', 'Tom',
'a', '-berry' ('berry' is a morpheme because if we replace
'boysenberry' with 'berry' in the original utterance we still
have the same sense, just a more general statement).  Since
speech is composed of morphemes, what is left over (viz.
'boysen-') is also a morpheme by your very rule.  It is called a
"unique residue" and its meaning is that it differentiates
boysenberries from other kinds of berries (e.g., blueberry,
blackberry, raspberry, cranberry, huckleberry, gooseberry, etc.).

> It is reasonable to take initial [D] as a *marker* of
> closed-class membership, perhaps.  But it is not reasonable to
> take it as a morpheme.

More pish and more tosh.  It is as reasonable to take initial [D]
as a morpheme as it is to take initial 're-' or 'con-' as
morphemes.  According to your analysis, 're-' and 'con-' could be
markers of class membership but not morphemes because if you take
pairs like 'resist'/'consist', 'remit'/'commit',
'revert'/'convert', 'refer'/'confer', etc., then if you segment
off 're-' and 'con-' then you have unanalyzed residues like
'sist', 'mit', 'vert', and 'fer', none of which have any
independent existence in English.  Therefore, 're-' is a class
marker of verbs that have a sense of "again, back, against" and
'con-' is a class marker of verbs that have a sense of "with,
together" according to this analysis.

To go back to native words, '-less' cannot be considered a
morpheme used to create adjectives from a noun X meaning "without
X", but can only be considered a class marker of certain
adjectives, because if we consider 'feckless' or 'gormless' then
the residues 'feck' and 'gorm' have no meaning in English and
therefore can't be morphemes and therefore '-less' can't be
a morpheme because "a morpheme boundary has to have a morpheme on
each side of it."  It is exactly the other way around:  'feck'
and 'gorm' must be morphemes because '-less' is a morpheme (as
shown by such things as 'hopeless', 'helpless, 'fearless',
'witless', 'senseless', 'ruthless', 'peerless', etc., etc.) and
"a morpheme boundary has to have a morpheme on each side of it."
But your analysis requires 'feckless' and 'gormless' to be
monomorphemic.

On the other hand, by your analysis, there must be an English
morpheme 'n-' with negative meaning since pairs like
'either'/'neither', 'or'/'nor', 'ever'/'never' leave a
recognizable morpheme when initial <n> is extracted.

What makes me so sure that initial [D] is a morpheme (perceptual,
not productive)?  After all, in the examples cited above, there
are always clear examples of the morphemic use of one of the
morphemes involved which allows us to say "once a morpheme,
always a morpheme," or there are sufficient other examples to
make an incontrovertible case (e.g., not only 'resist' and
'consist', but also 'assist', 'insist', 'desist', 'persist', and
so on).  But what is needed to identify morphemes is a pattern of
sounds and a corresponding pattern of meanings.  When these
things co-occur, speakers will tend to identify the corresponding
sounds and meanings as morphemes.  Perhaps not consciously (after
all, the average NNS doesn't know what a morpheme is) and perhaps
not even correctly from a historical perspective (this is the
basis of folk etymology), but as part of the way that the NNS
organizes his knowledge of his language.

Showing how this patterning works is easier done than said
("longum iter est per precepta, breve et efficax per exempla"
Seneca, Letters vi.5).  Let us take as an example three deictic
("pointing" or "demonstrating") words: 'there', 'here', 'where'.
Now Larry says that at most initial [D] can be a class marker,
not a morpheme, because if one segments initial <th> then one is
left with an unanalyzed <ere>.  Now unlike the 'boysen-' in
'boysenberry', this <ere> actually appears elsewhere in English;
in fact, in appears in the three deictic words that we are
discussing.  Therefore, if initial [D] (<th>) is a class marker,
then so must initial <h> and initial <wh> be class markers.  It
is a characteristic of class markers that they do not contribute
to the meaning of a word, but only mark it as belonging to a
particular word class (in fact, they can't contribute to the
meaning or else they would be morphemes, wouldn't they?).

So, following Larry's analysis, if <th>- is a class marker, then
<h>- and <wh> must also be class markers.  And if they are class
markers, then there must be an English word <ere> whose meaning
we can establish empirically as "in ___ place."  Now, again
empirically, when the class marker is <th>- ('there') the word
means "in that place", when it is <h>- ('here') the word means
"in this place", and when the class marker is <wh>- ('where') the
word means "in what/which place."  Therefore, if these are class
markers, English must have class markers that mark word-classes
as "far deixis" (<th>-), "near deixis" (<h>-) and
"relative/resumptive/interrogative deixis" (<wh>-).  We can check
this by looking at some of the other triplets where we find a
word <ence> that means "from ___ place/time" and the same class
markers produce 'thence' "from that place/time", 'hence' "from
this place/time', and 'whence' "from what/which place/time"; and
a word <ither> that means "to ___ place/time" and 'thither' "to
that place/time", 'hither' "to this place/time", and 'whither'
"to what/which place/time."

The existence of 'then' "at that time" and 'when' "at what/which
time" implies that there should be a '*hen' "at this time."
Historical investigation shows that indeed there was at one time
but it has been replaced by 'now'.  We know that it existed,
however, because 'hence' is derived from it (of course, if we
didn't have the historical information about the existence of
earlier 'hen(ne)' we could always say that 'hence' is an
analogical form based on the "class marker" <h>- and the forms
'thence' and 'whence').

So we have a (nearly) complete set of adverbs of time/place
comprising far deixis, near deixis, and relative/interrogative
forming as tight a pattern as anyone could ask for.  By simple
linear analysis there is no question where any part of the
meaning of these words comes from.  So let us turn to the adverbs
of manner.  Here, the pattern is not so tight, but the "class
markers" are still recognizable.  The deictic adverbs of manner
are 'thus' and 'how'.  The <h>- of 'how' is really a *<wh> which
has lost its <w> because of the other <w> in the word.  Perhaps
this has forced the far and near deixis into a single form with
<th>- because the near deictic <h>- could not be distinguished
from the <h>- (< <wh>) of the relative/interrogative (or perhaps
not).  In any case, after segmenting the "class markers" we have
two unique residues <us> and <ow> both with the same meaning "in
___ manner".  We can then establish that 'thus' means "in
this/that manner" and 'how' means "in what/which manner."

But wait a minute.  How does the meaning of <us>/<ow> differ from
the meaning of the adverbial marker '-ly'?  This marker is used
to make adverbs from adjectives and adds a sense of "in (a) ___
manner" to the word.  Thus from 'cold' we get 'cold+ly' = "in a
cold manner", from 'warm' we get 'warm+ly' "in a warm manner",
from 'quick' we get 'quick+ly' "in a quick manner", and so on
through hundreds (if not thousands) of such words.  Clearly, if
we follow Larry's analysis, the '-ly' is a class marker of
adverbs because '-ly' has no meaning of its own, it simply marks
adverbs of manner derived from adjectives.

But wait another minute.  In every case where we have '-ly' as an
adverbial marker, what comes before it is clearly a morpheme
('cold', 'warm', 'quick', etc., etc.).  Since '-ly' clearly marks
the sense "in (a) ___ manner" (one can't say that it has the
meaning "in (a) ___ manner", because if '-ly' had meaning it
would be a morpheme, wouldn't it?), then equally clearly is it
<us> and <ow> that mark the same sense in 'thus' and 'how'.
Since it is a morpheme that goes into the blank that completes
the sense (not meaning; can't be, can it?) of the '-ly' adverbs,
then it must be a morpheme that goes into the blank in the
<us>/<ow> adverbs to complete the sense.  And similarly it must
be a morpheme that goes into the blank that completes the sense
of the place/time adverbs.  Otherwise, the method of using
"slots" to show identity of grammatical function is a hoax.

Therefore, the <th>-, <h>-, and <wh>- in the place/time adverbs
are morphemes in the same way that 'cold', 'warm', 'quick', etc.,
etc. are in the manner adverbs, and it is the <ere>, <en>,
<ence>, <ither>, that are the "class markers" in these words,
just as the <ly> and <us>/<ow> in the adverbs of manner are.  The
difference is that <th>-, <h>-, and <wh>- are grammatical
morphemes (have grammatical or functional meaning) while 'warm',
etc. are lexical morphemes.  Another highly significant
difference is that the <ly> marker is productive (or is an
open-class marker if you prefer) while <ere>, etc. are not
productive (or are closed-class markers).  Obviously, the <ere>,
etc. slots do not accept lexical morphemes (because they are
closed-class) and the <ly> slot does not accept grammatical
morphemes (an exception [there always seem to be a few] is the
secondary, doubly-marked 'thusly'; this is simply an example of
using a productive marker to clarify or reinforce a
non-productive marker [in much the same way a child learning
English will often say 'feets' or 'childrens']).

So Larry's analysis is exactly backwards.  Words (pronouns,
adjectives, and adverbs) with far deixis is not a word-class in
English.  It is adverbs (subclassed into adverbs of manner and
adverbs of place/time and further subdivided into adverbs of
far/near/asked-about place/time) that is the word-class.  Hence
initial [D] is not a class marker but is a morpheme with deictic
(demonstrative) meaning.  QED.

To check this analysis, let's take a typical English word-class,
say attributive adjectives, and see what happens through the use
of various "class markers" to modify the original class.  Now
primary attributive adjectives do not have any overt class
marker.  As an example we will take just two (to save space),
let's say 'sharp' meaning "keen, pointed" and 'soft' meaning "not
resisting, not hard."  These are morphemes because they are
sequences of sounds associated with meaning.  How do we change
this meaning through the use of "class markers"?

  Primary meaning + "class marker"   General sense of class marker

  sharp         soft

  sharp+ly      soft+ly               adverb of manner:  "in (a)
                                      ___ manner"
  sharp+en      soft+en               causative/factitive/inchoative
                                      verb:  "to make/become ___"
  sharp+ness    soft+ness             abstract noun:  "quality of
                                      being ___"
  sharp+ish     soft+ish              inexact/relational adjective:
                                      "sort of ___"; "more ___ than not"

So what does it look like?  Are sequence of sounds like 'sharp'
or 'soft' class markers of words having to do with sharpness or
'softness' and so on, or are the meaningless (but full of sense)
particles <ly>, <en>, <ness>, <ish> the real class markers (if
such there be in English)?  Of course it is possible the these
markers are really derivational morphemes (as most people seem to
consider them) and then we don't have to consider words like
'sharply' and 'softness' as monomorphemic.

>> No, the fact that these are all function words is not particularly
>> phonologically significant.  The fact that they all begin with a
>> functional morpheme is.

> I've just denied this.

Denial is not the same as disproof.

In order to disprove it you need to prove that it is completely
impossible for the speakers of English to perceive initial [D] as
a morpheme.  Now a morpheme is a sound or sequence of sounds that
has meaning associated with it.  It is particularly difficult to
prove that there is no meaning associated with initial [D] in
the face of an extremely tight pattern of sound and meaning
correspondences:

        Meaning of initial segment
 far deixis    near deixis     rel./interr.       General Meaning
    <th>-         <h>-            <wh>-         of residual segment
   "that"        "this"        "what/which"

   there       here              where          "in ___ place"
   then       *hen [OE henne]    when           "at ___ time"
   thence      hence             whence         "from ___ place/time"
   thither     hither            whither        "to ___ place/time"


Now if anyone told me that they couldn't see any pattern to the
initial sounds in the columns and the meanings in the rows, then
I would not conclude that there is no meaning associated with
these sounds, but would instead conclude that whoever said this
was not very good at pattern recognition.  I'm sorry, but I just
really don't see how anyone can look at this table and fail to
see a relationship between sound patterns and meaning.  This is
not (with the exception of '*hen') some reconstruction of
something that hasn't existed for centuries or millennia pieced
together from coincidental look-alikes from around the world and
through the ages.  This is the English as she is spoke today.

So you are free to deny it and I will accept your denial as an
admission that you can't see the pattern or are willing to accept
it as coincidence.  But if all you can do in the way of disproof
is to raise points that have already been discussed and dismissed
in the literature, then it is just your word against that of
people like Zellig Harris and George Trager.  What you need to do
to establish your point is to refute with evidence their analyses.
In short, it's your burden of proof.  Now I have heard that
linguists in Britain do not pay any attention to American
structuralism, but I was not aware that they would not even read
books by American structuralists.  But until you read your
homework assigment, there is little point in discussing it in
class.

> [on my /oi/ example]

>> But is the diphthong /oi/ a morpheme?  What morphemic function do you
>> claim it has?

> It is not a morpheme.  It is merely a marker -- in this case, a
> marker of non-native origin, as is the consonant [ezh].

I'd be careful about saying things like this, otherwise Ross
Clark will get you.  He will tell you that native speakers cannot
distinguish non-native words from native words.  They are all
just English words.  On the other hand, I quite agree with you
that there are phonological markers of non-native origin in
English words (and in most other languages as well).

> [on my hypothetical example of a Greek 'dhelta']

<snip>

>> What you need to establish your point is not answers to
>> questions like "What would the world be like if Napoleon had
>> conquered Russia?" but an example of an initial [D] in English
>> that is not a deictic or a pronoun (i.e., does not begin with the
>> pronominal/deictic morpheme).  It doesn't even have to contrast
>> with a word with initial [T].  Any word that begins with [D] in
>> which the [D] is not a morpheme would be sufficient to justify
>> your claim that the fact that all words in English that begin
>> with [D] are pronouns or deictics is mere coincidence and that
>> the distribution of initial [T] and [D] is not predictable by any
>> phonological rule.

> Indeed.  Let me clarify my point.

> Word-initial [eng] is prohibited by English phonology and is
> wholly unpronounceable by most English-speakers.  When we borrow
> foreign words or names containing initial [eng], it is always
> eliminated in one way or another.

Yes, and, as I say, we have done this before.

> But initial [D] is not unpronounceable in English at all, and I
> cannot see that it is prohibited by English phonology.  So, what
> we need as a test case is a noun or a name with initial [D]
> borrowed into English from a language that permits it.

No, it is not prohibited at all.  It only happens to occur in
pronouns and deictic words.  Nothing in the phonotactics of the
language prevents borrowing words with initial [D] or coining new
words with initial [D].  It just hasn't happened.

The situation with initial [D] is paralleled by English words
with initial [v].  There are very few native words with initial
[v] just as there are very few words with initial [D].  This is
because [v] and [D] were originally just allophones of [f] and
[T], respectively, occurring in intervocalic position.  Therefore
initial [f] and [T] were not affected by this allophony and the
voiced sounds in initial position had to find their way there
from somewhere else.  The few native words with initial [v] are
loans from the southern dialects of English, where initial [f]
was voiced to [v], taken into the standard dialect.  But there
are many words with initial [v] that have been borrowed from
Romance which had an [f]:[v] contrast for a long time and so
English has a large number of words with initial [v], almost all
of them loans.  But there are also new coinings with initial [v]
in English (e.g., 'vax', 'Velcro'), which is something that
initial [D] does not share.

So the fact that there have been no borrowed words with initial
[D] even from languages that have this sound (see below), and
especially the fact that there have been no new coinings with
initial [D] in English suggests -- at least to me -- that
speakers recognize some kind of restraint on the use of initial
[D].

> Unfortunately, there appear to be few such languages, and
> English seldom borrows anything from most of them.  But I've
> pinned my hopes on Greek, the one contemporary language which
> both permits initial [D] and lends words into English.  But Greek
> is not ideal, because of our long-standing tradition of
> converting Greek words and names into English by conventions
> which are more appropriate to classical Greek than to the modern
> language. The chief exception is food and drink, in which modern
> Greek pronunciations are usually the basis of the English form,
> as with 'souvlaki' and 'tzatziki'.  So, what we need is for the
> Greeks to come up with a prince of a dish which we
> English-speakers will delightedly take up -- and which has a name
> starting with [D].  Sadly, Greek chefs have not so far obliged us
> on this matter -- at least as far as I can think.  C'mon, Greek
> chefs: we need you! ;-)

You might do better to pin your hopes on Arabic, which has a
phonemic contrast between [d] and [D] (in fact, Arabic has dental
contrasts eight ways to Sunday).  Unfortunately, words with
initial [D] in Arabic don't come into English with initial [D].
An example is 'dahabeah' which is a kind of houseboat used on the
Nile (variants 'dahabeeyah', 'dahabiya', etc., but never with
[D]).

The only loan words that I know of with [D] are two Islamic month
names 'Dhu al-Hijja' and 'Dhu al-Qa`dah' (` for `ayn; dhu is an
indefinite pronoun so 'Dhu al-Hijja' is literally "the one of the
Hajj") and these are clearly more technical terms than everyday
English words.  They will only be known by those who study or
have some interest in Islam (or possibly in menology).  Those who
speak Arabic will pronounce them with [D] as in Arabic, those who
do not (and yes, there are those who study Islam without knowing
Arabic, just as there are those who study Christianity or the
Bible without knowing Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek) will pronounce
them with [d].  Other than that there is only 'dhal', the name of
the letter in Arabic.  Anyone who knows this word is likely to
know its correct pronunciation (this occupies the same niche as
the name of the letter 'edh' in English; i.e., the only place
where <dh> represents [D]).  But this word, like 'edh', has no
existence apart from the sound that it represents.  [D] in these
words is not a symbol, but an icon.  Otherwise, <dh> usually
represent the phryngeal [d.] (sometimes referred to as
"emphatic") in Arabic transcription, as in the place name
'Riyadh'.

While we're on the subject of Greek and the names of letters and
people not being able to pronounce sounds that are not part of
their phonetic inventory (well sort of), there is an interesting
example of the effects of the loss of a sound on an alphabet.
Ancient Greek had a [w] sound and, naturally, a sign to write it
called wau.  Then the [w] sound was lost, and, normally, the
letter would have been lost also.  But the letter couldn't be
gotten rid of because it was part of the number system
(representing 6).  However, it was no longer possible to talk
about the letter using its original name because the sound needed
to say its name no longer existed in the language.  So the letter
had to be renamed, and it was called digamma because that's what
it looked like:  a gamma with an extra stroke.  Thus it is the
only Greek letter whose name reflects its shape rather than its
sound.

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.

<snip>

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu May 31 08:49:52 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 09:49:52 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <10955055.3199617010@maxw.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <THU.31.MAY.2001.094952.0100.>

--On Wednesday, May 23, 2001 2:30 pm +0100 Max Wheeler
<maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk> wrote:

> And if you allow proper names (and whyever not?) it isn't even true that
> [eng] and [h] are in complementary distribution, since both occur between
> unstressed vowels in e.g. Birmingham, Callaghan, Houlihan, Monaghan.

A very interesting point.  The pronunciation described, with /h/ followed
by schwa, is general in the educated speech of England, and perhaps of
Britain.  But it's impossible in my American accent.  I have to follow the
/h/ with a stressed vowel (ash) in every case when I'm speaking in my
native English.  Just recall Dirty Harry.  After 31 years in England, I
have somewhat uncomfortably picked up the British pronunciations, but
(except in 'Birmingham', in which I simply have no /h/), I always feel as
though I'm pronouncing a foreign name, much as when I pronounce 'Goethe' in
English with my best German accent.

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'.  For 'Haughey', Wells gives /h/ as usual in Britain, /k/ as usual
in the US.  Since I never encountered this name before coming to Britain, I
have no good intuitions about how I would have pronounced it before leaving
my beloved homeland, but I now use [x] again, even if nobody else does.

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'?

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 crismoc at smart.ro  Tue May  1 09:55:35 2001
From: crismoc at smart.ro (Cristian Mocanu)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 12:55:35 +0300
Subject: Crimean Gothic
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.125535.0300.>

I am extremely sorry. I hadn't realized that the original posing on this
thread was about de Busbecq's recordings of CG. I thought Diamond's article
meant another CG set of etyma. I have never read the original de Busbecq
letter in its entirety until now.(thanks, Steve Gustafson). So, a thousand
pardons!!!
     However, my original question about the "men" still stands.
        It is clear now that De Busbecq  made the etyma sound more
German/Low German than they probably did.
         Here is some of the "hard stuff" Diamond left out, with the
original Latin equivalents and my somewhat amateurish comments (Feciunt
meliora potentes!)
       I'll start with the two for which one may invoke Hungarian, just as
Diamond did for "menus"
            Iel= vita sive sanitas cf. Hung. "el"=he/she/it lives;
"elo"=living
           Atochta=malum "-ta" appears to be an adjectival suffix.thus, for
"atoch-" cf. Hung "atok"=curse

            Then::
             Kilemschkop=ebibe calicem, can actually be de-composed into
"kilemsch kop" "kil"=cf. Engl. kill" could have meant smth. like "finish",
"terminate"
               Baar=puer, cf. Scand. "barn", Engl.dial."barn" =child (ren)
[not so hard, that one, really]
               Lista=parum;, i.e. lis-ta; lis-cf. Grmanic "lik"
               There are 2 etyma, also left out by Diamond, which display
the kind of incredible similarity that usually provide a temptation for
far-too-amateurish explanations (the likelihood of which is questionable
pending some consistent linguistic or historic "endorsement")
            Fers=vir; cf. Irish, fir, far
            ich malthata=ego dico; malthata,cf.Norw. maal=language
              One quick thing about  "gadeltha". Could it be that the "g"
here is De Busbecq's way of  transcribing some sort of initial glottal stop?
Then it would be fair to paralell it with German "Adel,
edel"=noble.(with-tha as an adjectival suffix).
               Once again, sorry for my previous message!
                                      Best regards,
                                           cristian


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Tue May  1 06:58:58 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 06:58:58 -0000
Subject: Olives/was: Lactose Intolerance/Renfrew
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.065858.0000.>

Rick Mc Callister (25 Apr 2001) wrote:

>	I read a recent article in either Natural History or National
>Geographic (or some similar magazine) that olives were first cultivated in
>present Syria.
>	If so, one would expect a Semitic root for the word
>	Yet, if I remember correctly, the origin of Latin oliua either from
>or cognate to Greek elaia, elaion is unknown
>	As far as I know, Semitic is the only recorded non-intrusive
>language group in that specific area.
>	Arabic has zayt "oil (of any kind)", zaytun "olive", whence Spanish
>aceite, aceituna. I think the Hebrew forms are cognate.

Hebrew has <zayith> 'olive, olive-tree', but the generic term for 'oil'
(also 'fat', 'fatness') is <s^emen>: hence <s^emen zayith> 'olive-oil' and
<ze:yth s^emen> 'oil-olive' (i.e. oil-producing olive-tree). Since
'olive-tree' is expressed in full as <!e:c, hazzayith> 'tree of the zayith'
while 'wild olive-tree, oleaster' is <!e:c, s^emen> lit. 'oil-tree' it seems
likely that <zayith>, like its Arabic cognate, originally meant 'oil'. This
was evidently supplanted by <s^emen>, derived from <s^-m-n> 'to be or become
fat'.

>	If olives are indeed from that area, any idea where the word may
>have come from?

At the risk of being accused again of peddling unfalsifiable hypotheses, I
would refer *elaiw- to Pelasgian.

Latin <oli:va> evidently comes from Etruscan *eleiva by regular changes:
Etr. short /el/ generally becomes Lat. short /ol/, and Old Lat. /ei/ becomes
Class. Lat. /i:/. The Etruscan lexeme is attested in adjectival form (TLE
762, bucchero aryballos) <aska mi eleivana> 'a vessel (am) I pertaining to
oil' = 'I am an oil-vessel'. This in turn looks like a borrowing from
Western Greek <elaiwa:> (cf. Etr. Eivas from WGk Aiwa:s 'Ajax'). I'm not
sure how to explain the shorter Lat. forms <olea>, <oleum> vs. <oli:va>,
<oli:vum>.

This borrowing-path suggests that olives were introduced to Italy by Greeks
trading with Etruscans. The earlier Pelasgians of central Italy presumably
didn't know olives and couldn't contribute the word to the Italic languages.
BTW this hypothesis could be "falsified" by the discovery of olive-pits or
strigils at the Villanovan level or below.

Returning to the Greek forms, we have a chicken-and-egg problem: was oil
(elaion) named after the olive (elaia:) or vice versa? In the Arabic words,
it's clear that 'oil' is the primary notion, and 'olive' is derived. This is
retained in Spanish; one of the first words I learned was "aceite" in the
sense of "motor-oil", not the Filippo Berio stuff. Hence it's plausible that
the original meaning of *elaiw- was 'oil', applied later to an oily edible
fruit and the tree which produces it.

I don't see a problem with Pelasgians antedating Semites in the NE
Mediterranean. Hebrew <ke:ph> 'cliff, crag' and <s'a:s'> 'garment-moth'
(along with Aramaic cognates) are possible derivatives from Psg. substrate
(cf. Gk. Ke:phi:sos 'name of several rivers', <se:s> 'moth').

DGK


From edsel at glo.be  Tue May  1 16:39:30 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 18:39:30 +0200
Subject: Etruscan / Pelasgian
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.183930.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: <philjennings at juno.com>
Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2001 4:10 AM

[snip]

> Isn't Tarhuntassa securely located as a neighbor to Kizzuwatna?
> (I envision this about as far east as the borders of southwest Asia
> Minor can be stretched.  I have heard that Tarhuntassa = later Tarsus.)

> How old a god is Tarhun(d/t)?  Could he possibly be pre-Anatolian (ie.
> Pelasgian on the theory that Pelasgian <> Anatolian)?

[snip]

> Rather than this, Is there not sufficient evidence here and elsewhere,
> that the -assa suffix is Anatolian as well as Pelasgian?

[snip]

> Dr. White also explains the wide dispersion of -assos names (like Tartessos)
> as possibly due to later Greek mediation.  It is in fact extreme to think of
> early Pelasgians in Spain.  But the name Tarhuntassa came and went before the
> Greeks came snooping very far into Asia Minor.  Some kind of pre-Greek
> dispersion really did happen.

[Ed Selleslagh]

I have several questions, some of which are based upon extremely speculative
ideas (somebody has to stick out his neck):

1. Is Tarhun(t) the root for the name Tarquinius?

2. Is it unthinkable that the (Greek) names 'Pelasgoi' and 'Leleges' are based
upon the name of the NE Caucasian Lesghians? The first one with some indigenous
prefix (maybe indicating they're from the lowlands, not from the (Caucasian)
mountains), the second one with Greek reduplication, because of the shortness
of the name. If this could be substantiated, it might mean that the substrate
is non-PIE, non-Anatolian, not even sister-of-Anatolian, or else, of course,
that the Pelasgoi and the Leleges were misnamed or changed their language.
Anyone versed in Lesghian language and ancient history?

3. About -assos/-assa: In Basque there is a "complex" of suffixes composed of
parts of -(a)tz(a/e).  The meanings can be pretty diverse, but an important one
is something like 'place of (many/a lot of) ....' and the like (also: a plant,
tree producing fruit xxx). It looks like if the core meaning was a 'genitive',
'of', 'belonging to' (non existant in modern Basque case endings).  I am not
pretending that this is the origin of -assos/-assa, but rather wondering if the
Basque form might have a common Mediterranean origin, with or without Greek or
Iberian (or whatever) mediation. It could be an indication that this suffix was
wandering around the Mediterranean at an early date.

Don't kill me for this: I'm just wondering....

Ed.


From edsel at glo.be  Tue May  1 17:33:56 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 19:33:56 +0200
Subject: Etruscans
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.193356.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas G Kilday" <acnasvers at hotmail.com>
Sent: Friday, April 27, 2001 8:16 AM

> Having dismissed (correctly I hope) the Eastern sea-route, one can still ask
> when and by which route the Etruscan-speaking community came to Etruria. I
> can't answer this, but I think the best approach is a thorough analysis of
> substratal material. The Tuscan hydronyms Albinia, Alma, Armenta, Arnus, and
> Auser (with Albula = Tiberis) have been interpreted as "Old European" and
> pre-Etruscan. This is difficult to assess: do these names actually contain
> "Old European" elements, or are they Latinized Etruscan, or from some other
> source?

[Ed Selleslagh]

The Tuscan hydronyms cited remind me of the (P-Celtic) Welsh 'aber' (river
(mouth), estuary) and its probable derivatives in Holland and Belgium (from the
Celtic Belgae, I suppose): Amel in Belgium (the French-Belgian river name is
Ambl?ve), Amer in Holland and Belgium (the latter name having been
transferred to the river banks of the lower Eikse Vliet). Indeed, they all
contain A-L/R-B/M(/N), sometimes with metathesis.

Of course, even though the word looks IE, this still leaves the possibility
that the Celts picked it up from another people, somewhere, e.g between the
mouth (in the Black Sea) and the springs (in S. Germany) of the Danube. Or
else: some IE-ans (e.g. P-Italic Umbrians, ...) were living in Etruria before
the arrival of the Etruscans; that would bring us back to the earlier idea that
was based upon the name of the river Ombrone, rightly or wrongly.

> Someone recently cast doubt on the whole program of using toponyms to deduce
> anything, citing the obliteration of native names in Texas and elsewhere by
> the Spanish bureaucracy. This sort of objection only applies when there is a
> literate bureaucratic class. To our knowledge, literacy didn't reach Etruria
> until ca. 700 BCE, so arguments from toponyms should have some validity. The
> problem is the large volume of unedited medieval archival material.

> DGK

[Ed Selleslagh]

This bureaucratic obliteration of native names seems to be a rather modern
phenomenon, linked to the emergence of nation-states obsessed with uniformity
of language, religion, etc...In earlier times, the names were usually only
adapted to the new speech pattern, not translated.

Ed.


From dlwhite at texas.net  Tue May  1 16:49:55 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 11:49:55 -0500
Subject: Cypresses
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.114955.0500.>

> If these "cypresses" are in fact the tree I know as the Red Cedar, they are
> indeed fast growing, as they are common "weeds" in old abandoned fields
> throughout the midwest.

> Linguistically, these names can be rather amusing: the Red Cedar > is
> actually a juniper!

        Yes, they are (as I have recently learned) fast-growing, no they are
not the same tree you know as "red cedar", nor are they junipers.  They are
members of the redwood family (not the cypress family), and are more
properly known as "bald cypress".  They are (with water tupelo) the standard
swamp tree of the American SE, growing easily in water.   (I once saw an
otter swimming merrily along through a cypress forest/lake (just barely) in
Texas.)   But I find it difficult to imagine that a circumference of 6
meters, diameter of about 2, does not require many years to reach.   Nor is
there anything inherently improbable in the idea that cypresses should have
spread up rivers into areas that would not otherwise support them.  I have
heard that the biggest tree in Texas is a cypress of more than 10 meters
circumference on the Frio west of San Antonio, which is not where one would
ordinarily expect to find such things.  But like just about everything else
associated with southern swamps (mocassins, alligators), they spread up the
rivers.  There were once alligators northwest of Waco, and to judge by
"Alligator Creek" between Austin and San Antonio, they once live there as
well.  They still show up as vagrants (so to speak) in Austin every once in
a while, and there are rumors of residents.  But I digress.

Dr. David L. White


From dlwhite at texas.net  Tue May  1 20:33:59 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 15:33:59 -0500
Subject: Indian Names/Red Clay
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.153359.0500.>

> [David White]  In any event, there is certainly a lot of non-red soil
> around, and I find it difficult to imagine that the proposition "The soil
> of Texas is (generally or universally) red" is true.

> In a message dated 4/19/2001 9:11:29 PM, mclasutt at brigham.net writes:
> << But that red clay.  You remember it.  Forever.  It doesn't take a lot of
> it. >>

> Yes, I think what you are saying sounds true.

        Yes, but Sulphur Springs is 250 miles from the Colorado, and in the
basin (indirectly) of the Red River (which might explain a few things, but
not "Colorado"), so attempting to connect "Colorado" with anything around
there is roughly equivalent to attempting to connect "London" with some
feature of the land around Snowdonia.   I saw the Colorado about half way to
the sea from Austin not long ago (no, I was not on a field-trip for the
edification of the list:  I was on my way to play Crocodilian Hunter, which
I did with fair success, in the wilds of suburban Houston), and it is not
red there either.  It is a sort of olive green.    Therefore I continue to
suspect that the original meaning intended was 'colorful' (which the
Colorado is, compared to the muddy brown competition), not 'red'.
        But perhaps what was meant was to connect red clay in NE Texas (more
or less) with "Tejas", but there is no reason to think that the original
perceived link is anything more than a classic example of folk etymology,
which surely would have occurred regardless of whether the story connecting
"Tejas" with a Caddo word meaning 'allies' was true or not.  There is, as
far as I know, no reason at all to doubt the original tale told by the
Spaniards about why they named "Texas" as they did, and as folk-etymology
would have occurred anyway, it means nothing.  It is not as if we are to
imagine that these people would have bothered to check historical records
before concocting a connection.  In any event, I was at Mission Tejas over
the winter, and though I did not check the color of the soil, having of
course no reason to think the issue would come up, I vaguely recall that it
was grayish brown.  One would think that if red soil inspired the name
"Tejas", the soil in question would be found, if anywhere, at Mission Tejas.

Dr. David L. White


From dlwhite at texas.net  Tue May  1 17:06:29 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 12:06:29 -0500
Subject: Voicless Fricative in PIE
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.120629.0500.>

> Unvoiced fricatives not surviving as sibilants in attested IE are
> reconstructed in their terminal state and given a numeral subscript.

        I think this is right.  More anon, once I get my act in (relative)
gear, but the supposed parallels with Semitic are (I think I will be able to
show) over-drawn.

Dr. David L. White


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Tue May  1 17:18:43 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 12:18:43 -0500
Subject: Three-Way Contrast of Secondary Articulations in PIE
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.121843.0500.>

Dear Stanley and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: "Stanley Friesen" <sarima at friesen.net>
Sent: Friday, April 27, 2001 8:36 AM

<snip>

>> [PCR]

>> I have a feeling that you might wish to retract this opinion upon further
>> reflection. IE, as it has been reconstructed, is rife with purported
>> homonyms.  What originally distinguished these homonyms were glides, and
>> before that, in Nostratic, different vowel-qualities.

[SF]

> Why need they always be distinguished?  Real languages today have much
> homonymy.

[PCR]

Yes, but most frequently we can trace the course of degenerative development
that led to these homonyms.

[SF]

> But even then, what I see in the PIE vocabulary is many homonymous *roots*,
> but relative fewer homonymous *words*.  The main distinguishing factors
> were differences in suffixes and stem formants - and occasionally infixes.

[PCR]

First, there are no infixes in IE.

Second, for these 'roots' to be able to have maintained semantic integrity,
they must have been distinguishable in some fashion. The suffixes, etc. (better
root-extensions) are an attempt to continue distinctions that were lost with
the glides.

[PCRp]

>> All roots with an unmodified vowel in IE are Ce/o/-C.

>> Roots with Ca:C, Ce:C, Co:C are all the result of an internal 'laryngeal',
>> or, in the very rare case, the effect of former aspiration. CaC roots are
>> Ca:C roots that have lost length.

[SF]

> Long vowels in PIE seem to also come from other sorts of compensatory
> lengthening, such as degemmination of a following double consonant.

[PCR]

Quite right; and that should have been included in my statement.

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 dlwhite at texas.net  Tue May  1 16:24:20 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 11:24:20 -0500
Subject: Stiff Voice/Slack Voice
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.112420.0500.>

> "Creaky" vs "breathy" (normal) vowel register is common

        I believe creaky vs. breathy (not normal) vowel register is common.
This the "stiff-voice"/"slack-voice" contrast discussed by Ladefoged and
Maddieson.  Slack voice is not what we would call normal, and what LM call
"modal phonation".  So yes, there are languages without modal phonation of
vowels.  (There is an example or two on the UCLA database, for those who may
want to hear what such things sound like.)
        There is, strangely enough, an IE relevance beyond the development
of Sanskrit, and that is that (as I have metioned before) if PIE had this
contrast of vowel "registers" (really phonation types), and it was later
reanalyzed as being "on" associated vowels, then a /CVC/ syllable with an
original "stiff" vowel would wind up with two stiff consonants, and a /CVC/
syllable with an original "slack" vowel
would wind up with two slack consonants.  As it happens, slack voice is a
kind of murmur or "voiced aspiration", so that would result in a lot of
/DHEDH/ roots.  Not quite so nicely, stiff voice is a kind of
glottalization, and this is inherently voiceless, so if stiff voice
consonants were reanalyzed as voiceless, this would result in a lot of /TET/
roots.  Either way, /DHET/ roots or /TEDH/ roots, which do not occur (at
least commonly), would be impossible, as neither an original stiff vowel nor
an original slack vowel could lead to such a result.  This would seem to
explain a root restriction that has not been explained so far.  The
preference for sameness could be seen as going back to the orginal nature of
the vowels.
        I also suggest (again) as part of this that what we know as the
voiced obstruents were pharyngealized, which would explain both the /b/-gap
and the restriction against roots of the /DED/ type, this last because
pharyngealization, being a rather crude gesture, would have to be maintained
across the vowel, and would distort its quality in the direction of /o/,
thereby destroying information.

Dr. David L. White


From alexeyf at zoran.co.il  Wed May  2 12:26:38 2001
From: alexeyf at zoran.co.il (Alexey Fuchs)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 14:26:38 +0200
Subject: Advice needed
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.142638.0200.>

Dear list members!

I am seeking advice on the following topic. I wish to study comparative and
indo-european linguistics (that, in the broadest sense, while specialization
depends on the offered course of studies, my conclusions and penchants).
Lack of resources forced me to delay these studies until I've gained a
practical profession. Sorry for the personal details; the non-practical
profession in question means much more for me (and, I suppose, to you, that
being the reason of my inquiry on this list) than the one I've acquired in
the meantime. The accumulating resources make me plan the beginning of
studies in winter semester of 2002, in a year and a half.

I have decided to apply for studies in Germany; there is no tuition fee,
which makes life much easier, and, probably, there are universities in that
country that offer adequate education in the field of liguistics, at least
giving the opportunity to seek further degrees in other countries (or to
continue at the same location).

The question I bring here is a question of choice. In which university in
Germany would your recommend to begin my education? I was considering
Freiburg University and Freie Universitaet in Berlin. However, I cannot come
to any conclusion without an advice from an educated person.

Please advice me on that matter; if the topic is considered inadequate on
the list, please contact me off-list, if you think you can be more helpful
if I provide more detail, I'd be delighted and grateful to be in
correspondence.

Thank you in advance,
Alexey Fuchs


From connolly at memphis.edu  Wed May  2 03:37:38 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 22:37:38 -0500
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.223738.0500.>

"David L. White" wrote:

>> I have proposed that PIE *p appears as a voiceless bilabial fricative in one
>> inscription in ancient northern Italy (from Prestino; see MSS 58, 1988).

>         Just a not terribly significant note:  development from /p/ to /f/
> (or perhaps a bilabial voiceless fricative) to /h/ is presupposed in the
> common (though perhaps wrong?) etymology of the "Hercynian" forest as being
> both Celtic and relatable to /perkun/.  In other words, it is not always
> assumed that PIE /p/ in Celtic went straight to zero, though I am unaware of
> it leaving any traces in Insular Celtic.

Didn't /pt/ yield /xt/?

Leo Connolly


From sarima at friesen.net  Wed May  2 03:49:52 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 20:49:52 -0700
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <50.14f5be64.281e311c@aol.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.204952.0700.>

At 11:08 PM 4/29/01 -0400, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:
>Even when people 'convert' to a new language, they have to learn it from
>_somebody_; ie., native speakers.  Furthermore, there are more and less
>likely was for this to happen; in a premodern context, small intrusive
>minorities generally get absorbed by their linguistic surroundings rather
>than vice versa, even if they're politically dominant. (Which is why this
>conversation is not being conducted in Norman French.)  Learning a new
>language is difficult for adults, and is seldom undertaken without very
>strong motivation.

True - though it does happen.  In fact the very French you mention is the
result of one such occurrence.  A small minority of Romans managed to
convert a much larger number of Gauls into speaking Latin.

I wonder if part of the difference wasn't time.  The Norman French
incursion into England was essentially a single pulse, after which there
was little additional immigration - indeed the French crown quickly forced
the Norman nobles in England to renounce their French lands, effectively
separating the two groups.  On the other hand the Roman policy of retiring
their veterans into planned communities throughout the Empire continued for
centuries, not to mention the "all roads lead to Rome" economic influence
that Rome had in the empire.

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


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Wed May  2 03:59:20 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 23:59:20 EDT
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.235920.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/1/01 9:56:01 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
dlwhite at texas.net writes:

> The only ones I am aware of that are even just-barely-possibly convincing
> involve cases of a language dying (e.g. Anatolian Greek), which is not
> exactly the most promising way for a new language family to get off the
> ground.
>

-- the same phenomenon has been noted in spoken Gaelic in Ireland along the
edges of the area where it's still spoken; a massive influx of English
vocabulary and syntax.

As you say, it's primarily a phenomenon of "language death".


From dlwhite at texas.net  Wed May  2 13:33:17 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 08:33:17 -0500
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.083317.0500.>

> I think I see a fallacy in their reasoning right here.  At least I have
> been lead to understand that pidgins and creoles are predominantly based on
> a single parent language, and thus cannot really be termed
> "mixtures".  Have I been mislead, or is this the case?

        It is usual for pidgin/creoles to have what is called a "lexifier
language", which forms the overwhelming basis of the lexicon.  There may be
a few quibbles about a few almost un-attested creoles like Chinook Jargon,
but I think that overall the principle is accepted as valid.

Dr. David L. White


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Wed May  2 15:57:53 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 10:57:53 -0500
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <004101c0d164$bff7d980$6d01703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.105753.0500.>

	And also in spoken French
	singular @m 	plural z at m

>[Ed Selleslagh]

>Grammatically determined initial-consonant mutations (I think it's important
>to be that explicit about it) occur in other, still existing, languages too:
>e.g.  (sub-saharan) Fulani ( or Peul). And some Bantu languages, like
>Tshiluba, use initial consonant palatalization for diminutives (so does
>Basque) and all use class-prefix modification (Actually, that may be the
>origin of the Peul phenemena: I wonder if the Celtic equivalent might not have
>a somewhat similar origin, e.g. the female form of the adjective).

>Verbal systems can change quite a bit in 1000 years, let alone in thousands of
>years; just look at what had already happened to Latin and Greek verb by the
>10th or 11th century A.D. - I mean Byzantine (and later) Greek and the various
>Latin languages.

>I really would like to know other people's views on these matters.

>Ed.

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


From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi  Thu May  3 06:24:38 2001
From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 09:24:38 +0300
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <000901c0d12c$b53cc9c0$632363d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.092438.0300.>

On Sun, 29 Apr 2001, David L. White wrote:

>         Two words or expressions are being thrown around here in a way that
> makes me a little uncomfortable.  The first is "lingua franca".  This has
> (if we are not case-sensitive) three meanings:  1) a real language, "Lingua
> Franca", which is (or was) a sort of Mediterranean Romance semi-creole, 2)
> an international business or trade language characteristic of a certain
> place/period, as for example Akkadian, and 3) something in the pidgin/creole
> range.   Meanings 2 and 3, though they can overlap, do not necessarily do
> so, and due to inherent ambiguity the expression "lingua franca" is probably
> best avoided, as considerable confusion is likely to be sown.

I fully agree. In my original mail, I only used the term "lingua franca"
because this is the term that the "Anti-Uralists" use. Indeed, it is
somewhat unclear what exactly is meant by their "Uralic lingua franca",
but at any rate it is some kind of pidgin / creole. On the other hand,
from the writings of Kalevi Wiik etc., one receives the impression that
Proto-Uralic is considered non-uniform, i.e. a group of languages (pidgins
/ creoles?) which resemble each other more or or less closely, because of
convergence. I believe that the term "lingua franca" was chosen because
according to Wiik, (Proto-)Uralic arose as communication medium of the
hunters of large game (e.g. mammoths) of the periglacial zone.

Regards,

Ante Aikio


From anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi  Sat May  5 11:36:13 2001
From: anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi (Ante Aikio)
Date: Sat, 5 May 2001 14:36:13 +0300
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SGI.4.21.0104270802520.23423177-100000@paju.oulu.fi>
Message-ID: <SAT.5.MAY.2001.143613.0300.>

[I originally wrote:]

> These claims would of course deserve no attention from the scientific
> community, were it not that Kalevi Wiik has actively publicized them in
> the Finnish media, and also quite succesfully managed to market them as a
> "linguistic breakthrough" to some archeologists, geneticists and
> historians. Thus, in the recent years Uralists have been forced to mount
> an attack against the "Anti-Uralists", and this may deceptivily look like
> a serious scientific debate to non-linguists. I sure hope the situation
> with Celtic isn't as bad.

Interestingly, just after I happened to mention Kalevi Wiik in the
connection of the discussion on Proto-Celtic, it was pointed out to me in
private correspondence that Wiik is currently also an active supporter of
the "Celtic lingua franca" theory. The following passage is quoted from
Wiik's abstract of his paper "On the Origins and History of the Celts",
which will be read at the "International Colloquium on Early Contacts
between English and the Celtic Languages" (University of Joensuu Research
Station, Mekrij?rvi, Finland, 24-26 August, 2001):

  "The first Celts, therefore, are the Basque-speaking hunters of western
Europe who adopted agriculture and the IE language from the LBK culture
and the Impressed Ware cultures. The area formed a chain of Celtic
dialects: in the north (Rhine area) the dialects were based on the LBK
(Central European) dialect of the IE language, while in the south (eastern
Iberia and southern France), they were based on the Impressed Ware
(Mediterranean) dialect of that language. In addition, the substrata of
the non-IE languages were different along the chain of the Celtic
dialects: the northern dialect had a Basque substratum, while the more
southern dialects had a Basque, Iberian, or Tartessian substratum. The
result was the following chain of Celtic dialects/languages: Lusitanian -
Celtiberian - Gaul - Lepontic.
  During the Bell Beaker period (c. 2800-1800 BC), the Celtic language was
used as a lingua franca by the populations of Western Europe. It was the
language of the ?lite of the Copper Age (Bronze Age). The centre of the
Celtic world was in the ?n?tice culture in 1800-1500 BC, in the Urnfield
culture in 1200-800 BC, in the Hallstatt culture in 800-500 BC, and in the
La T?ne culture in 500-50 BC. The Celtic lingua franca was based on
different Celtic dialects during the six different cultural periods
mentioned."

The complete version of Wiik's abstract can be read on the internet at
http://www.joensuu.fi/fld/ecc/Wiikabstract.htm.

 - Ante Aikio


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Wed May  2 06:25:06 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 02:25:06 EDT
Subject: IE versus *PIE
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.022506.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/2/01 12:19:49 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:

> Linguistic work in the last twenty years has demonstrated beyond dispute
> that linguistic descent can be, and sometimes is, far more complicated than
> our conventional family-tree model would suggest.

-- quite true.

Although one should point out that the family-tree model is overwhelmingly
more _common_; and should therefore be regarded as the "default mode" absent
evidence to the contrary.


From dlwhite at texas.net  Wed May  2 22:30:37 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 17:30:37 -0500
Subject: Greek from PIE
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.173037.0500.>

>>>> Does anyone know a good book describing in detail the development of Greek
>>>> from PIE?

>> Why is nobody mentioning Palmer's book on the subject?  Is it
>> considered discredited?  There is also Lejeune.

>> Dr. David L. White

> And why not Antoine Meillet's "Aper?u d'une histoire de langue grecque",
> Paris 1935 ? (many reprints, German transl., possibly English but I am not
> sure).

        There is also Wright's work on the subject, though being
pre-laryngeal it might be considered little more than a historical
curiosity.   Re-inventing Saussure's wheel from what was known or thought of
PIE at that time might prove an interesting "excercise for the reader."
        And yes, Palmer is a little "introductory", but my impression from
having used his work in combination with Rix, Lejeune, and Sihler is that he
is about 80% of the way toward these.

Dr. David L. White


From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu  Wed May  2 20:40:58 2001
From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 15:40:58 -0500
Subject: Crimean Gothic
In-Reply-To: <l0313036ab71331d4c239@[209.147.211.21]>
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.154058.0500.>

[ moderator edited ]

>	Diamond points out that "Classical" Gothic (my term, not his) is
>not ancestral to Crimean Gothic and that Busbecq somewhat arbitrarily
>called the language Gothic --although Diamond agrees that it was a form of
>Gothic. Diamond does go into some of the details in his article.

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

Are we to consider Diamond an authority here or to confirm the correctness
of his information based on other Gothic authorities? I seem to recall that
he is a biologist, not a linguist, so this foray into Gothic has got to
depend on the authority of Germanicists, hasn't it?

Carol Justus


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Wed May  2 21:46:06 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 17:46:06 -0400
Subject: Crimean Gothic
In-Reply-To: <000201c0d276$fba2d3a0$c80469c2@smart.ro>
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.174606.0400.>

>                There are 2 etyma, also left out by Diamond, which display
> the kind of incredible similarity that usually provide a temptation for
> far-too-amateurish explanations (the likelihood of which is questionable
> pending some consistent linguistic or historic "endorsement")
>             Fers=vir; cf. Irish, fir, far
>             ich malthata=ego dico; malthata,cf.Norw. maal=language

the first one at least is not 'far-too-amateurish'.  it corresponds to
Biblical Gothic wair /wer/ (with nom. sg. -s lost after short vowel + r) =
OE OFris OS OHG wer ON verr Latin vir OIr. fir etc.


From dlwhite at texas.net  Wed May  2 21:41:55 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 16:41:55 -0500
Subject: Umlaut in Crimean Gothic
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.164155.0500.>

        I suppose it should be noted, though it does not matter a great
deal, that finding /i/-umlaut in Gothic (I have not been paying rapt
attention, but I believe that was what was meant) is not terribly
surprising.  At the time that Gothic is attested, none of the Germanic
languages had /i/-umlaut (save possibly of /e/ to /i/?).  Its absence in
Gothic is thus to be taken largely as an archaism, a matter of time, not
space.  /i/-umlaut seems to have developed independently in the other
Germanic languages, not appearing in Old English till around 700, and is
generally taken to be a result of the strong stress accent typical of
Germanic.  If Gothic had this, and had not lost it, then it is surely
reasonable to suppose that it too would have developed /i/-umlaut,
independently, in time.

Dr. David L. White


From rao.3 at osu.edu  Wed May  2 09:42:50 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 05:42:50 -0400
Subject: semivowels
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.054250.0400.>

> Thinking about vocalic /r/, I got to wondering:
> do sequences like these occur in Sanskrit?
> rya, krya, #rya, rva, vya, vra

Peter already gave examples where these result from sandhi.
As far as word internal examples go, I doubt that krya or #rya occur.
But there is no reason why others can't, and do occur: arya-,
arva(n)t-, vyatha-, vraja- all occuring in RV.


From siva-nataraja at infonie.fr  Wed May  2 21:43:38 2001
From: siva-nataraja at infonie.fr (siva-nataraja)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 23:43:38 +0200
Subject: [Help] Phonetic transcription of an Old Irish text
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.234338.0200.>

Hello everyone,

[please note that English  is not my mother tongue]

    I'm working on Old Irish phonetics and transcription rules, and would
need some help : I'm trying to make a phonetic transcription of a text
(from _Sc?l Mucci Mic Dath?_), but I cannot manage to figure out where
some lenited consonants might be (since lenited "c", "t" and "p" are
neither spelled with a punctum delens nor a subsequent "-h" ; in the same
way, a certain number of eclipsed consonants might hide where I do not
expect them to be ("r", "l" and "n", or unvoiced consonants for
instance). Moreover, I read that a lenited "m" could nasalize the
following vowel. But, what if the following phoneme is a consonant ? I
also read that, for example, a "t" between two vowel was voiced, a "d"
lenited. What if this "t" or this "d" precede or follow a consonant?
Clusters of consonants are rather difficult, for me, to interpret. Last,
were broad consonants velarized, as in modern Irish?

    Here is, first line, the text then the transcription and so on
(assuming that "D" is a voiced apico-dental approximant, Eng. "THen", "B"
a voiced bilabial approximant, Esp. "saBer", "~"  indicates the
nasalization of the preceding vowel, "c" is an unvoiced dorso-palatal
stop, Skt. "Ca", "q" a voiced dorso-palatal stop [both slender
realisations of "k" and "g"], Skt. "J?va-", "T" an unvoiced apico-dental
approximant, Eng. "THin", "G" is a voiced dorso-velar approximant, Esp.
"paGo", "P" an unvoiced bilabial approximant, Jap. "Fukeba", "S" an
unvoiced dorso-postalveolar fricative, Eng. "SHunt" [slender "s"], "?" an
unvoiced dorso-palatal spirant, Ger. "iCH" [slender "ch"], that "R", "L"
and "N" are apico-alveolopalatal consonants with tongue retraction, and
are opposed to "r", "l" and "n", the late being apico-dental consonants
[nota bene: I'm not sure of these oppositions],  and, last but not least,
that ' indicates palatalization of the following consonant) :

Tucad d?ib  iarum in   mucc ocus XL
tugaD do:B' iruB  i~n' muk  ogus (40)

dam dia tarsnu cenmotha in  biad ar chena
daB d'a tarsnu cenBo~Ta in' b'aD ar ?ena ||

Mac Dath? fessin icond fherdaigsecht.
mag daTo: Pesin' igonD   erDaixSext ||

"Mo chen duib," ar se,
 mo ?en duB' |  ar Se |

"ni  dabar samail  riss sin.
 n'i daBar saBa~l' R'iS Sin' ||

Ataat aige ocus mucca la Laigniu.
adaad aqe  ogus muka  La LaGn'u ||


A testa  desin   mairfider  d?ib  imb?rach."
a t'esta d'eSin' marP'iD'er du:B' imBa:rax ||

"Is maith in  mucc," ar Conchobar.
 iS maT'  in' muk |  ar konxoBar ||

"Is maith imorro," ar Ailill.
 iS maT'  iBo~Ro | ar al'iL' ||

    I'm sure there are errors in my transcription, especially with
eclipsis and lenition the letters do not show.

    Thanks for your help.

       Regards,

               Vincent Ramos
               France
--
Atta unsar ?u in himinam, weihnai namo ?ein.
Qimai ?iudinassus ?eins ; wair?ai wilja ?eins.


From dlwhite at texas.net  Thu May  3 16:38:27 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 11:38:27 -0500
Subject: Retroflexion
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.113827.0500.>

> here are the regular processes that led to them in Sanskrit:

> ruki-s -> .s
> n that follows r or .s, even with vowels, labials, y, v intervening -> .n
> t/th that immediately follows .s -> .t/.th
> s' (from PIE *k') +t(h) -> .s.t(h)
> h from PIE gh' + t/dh -> .dh (with h -> zero, preceding vowel lengthened.)
> ruki s + d/dh -> .d/.dh (with s -> zero, preceding vowel lengthened if not
> long by position)

        Many thanks for the memory-refreshing examples.

> Only the last two have retroflexing environments that go to zero in
> Sanskrit. However, they are rare in practive: the penultimate can occur
> only with ani.t roots ending in *gh' (only a handful in Sans); the `standard
> examples of the last are isolated words such as ni:.da (< *ni-sd-o, nest)
> and aorist 2nd pl mid, an infrequent category.

        Of course it is only the lost retroflexing environments that are
relevant to phonemicization.  That they are rare is suspicious, though
strictly speaking only one case would be required.

> In Prakrits, -rt- sometimes becomes -.t.t- (and vocalic r+t can become
> a/i/u+.t). But this is dialect dependent and it seems to vary within other
> families as well. Similar developments seem to have occurred in Norwegian,
> and this is why Hock (loc. cited by Oberoi) objects to attributing this to
> `substratum'.

        The idea that only developments that cannot be explained internally
should be explained externally (which seems to be lurking here) is nicely
dismissed in one of the earlier chapters of Thomason and Kaufman.

> Turning now to substratum explanations:

> See now T.A. Hall in Lingua 102 (1997) pp. 203-221: Contrast of
> two laminal shibilants, one alveopalatal and one palato-alveolar (his terms),
> is rare to non-existent and when sound changes lead to such a contrast,
> a shift to a more stable system will follow. One common repair
> mechanism is to make one sound apical. This is the explanation for IA
> retroflex s.

        What is the supposed origin of the contrast between palato-alveolar
and aleopalatal sibilants in the first place?  I note (with some
trepidation) that L&M assert that having "high-domed palates", which renders
retroflex articulations unsually easy to make and distinctive in sound, is
an Indian racial trait.  I find it difficult to believe that it is just a
coincidence that the one IE language that went into India developed such
sounds.

> It is interesting to see the evolution of the view on .s: Once upon a time,
> it was considered to be limited to South Asia. Masica, "Genesis of a
> linguistic area" lists only Chinese in addition. Hall makes gives a large
> number of examples of .s vs 's like contrast, and deems it a
`near-universal'.

        What is this thing " 's "?  A palatalized /s/ or just a typo?  One
of the more common ways of making a [s^] sound is effectively
semi-retroflex.  Perhaps this has something to do with why such sounds in
Russian are now "hard", though in the beginning they should have been (I
guess) "soft".  In any event, it is the retroflex series as a whole that
arouses my suspicions, not just /.s/.

> Also, all the three sibilants fall together as s in MIA. If .s is due to
> substratum influence, this is weird. The substratum induces a change, then
> conveniently disappers allowing Prakrits (which one would to show more
> substratum influence) to reverse the process.

        Not necessarily.  There is a huge span of time involved.  Even the
Vedas do not "remember" a time when Vedic speakers were not in India.
"Language X" could well have died out in the interval, and would hardly be
expected to reach out and exert any sort of influence from the grave.

> Note also that -rt- becomes some sort of (apical) shibilant in (Late?)
> Avestan: This suggests that -rt- was already retracted in PI-Ir and that the
> development of -rt- to -.t.t- in MIA need not invoke the deux ex machina
> of substratum influence.

        Coincidence is, in its own way, just as much a deus ex machina.  The
question is whether the developments seen are really normal from internal
causes alone.
        It is fairly normal for /r/s to be retroflected, and assimilation of
a following dental, as evidently in Norwegian, would not be surprising.
Indeed traditional Sanskrit grammar, if I have understood it correctly,
regards the difference between /r/ and /l/ as being that /r/ is retroflex
whereas /l/ is dental.  So at least phonetically, this sort of development
is normal.  Whether that would lead to a whole retroflex series is another
question.
        I note that what we seem to have here is a conspiracy, as in the
Slavic Conspiracy of Open Syllables, where it seems that some substantial
portion of the population was thinking, or feeling, "We need more
retroflexes here", and seizing upon any convenient phonetic pretext to
create them.  Again we, or at least I, must wonder,  if this sort of thing
is normal from internal causes alone, 1) why we do not see it more often,
and 2) why it happened only in India, where the pre-IE population was
probably both racially and linguistically pre-disposed to favor retroflexes.

> Regarding phonemic status of retroflexes: First of all, note that s/'s/.s
> contrast of Sanskrit is exactly parallel to h/s/s^ of Avestan. Nobody, to
> my knowledge, worries whether Avestan has three phonemes here or
> two. Why then should we worry about Sanskrit?

        It would seem better to answer both questions than neither.  One
good question would be why the development was to /s^/ in Avestan and /.s/
in Sanskrit rather than the other way around.

> Secondly, I don't know how phonemes are defined in inflected languages:
> Do we use inflected words or dictionary forms?

        We use inflected words, in my opinion.

> An additional problem is sandhi: If two words are homophones in some
> contexts due to sandhi, but not in all contexts, do they count for contrast?

        Yes, in my opinion.

> Due to the fact that the conditioning environments for retroflexion do not
> generally go to zero in Sanskrit, it is hard to find inherited contrasting
> words.  If we add the accent, it gets even harder:

        We should not consider the accent, in my opinion.  What flies under
the phonemic radar, so to speak, and therefore is merely phonetic, is what
is predictable from phonetic implementation.  Unless there is something
about the phonetic implementation of stress in Sanskrit that somehow implies
retroflexion (and I find it difficult to imagine what this could be), stress
does not count.  So the task of finding minimal, or near-minimal, pairs is
easier.

        But please note that I am not questioning that the various
retroflexes were phonemic in Sanskrit (after a time), only how they got that
way.  What I would guess is that in the few cases where a
retroflex-conditioning environment went to zero, this was in part because
very many speakers already possessed the ability to hear retroflexes as
phonemic, so that for them, no new contrast was created.  Likewise I would
guess that the main reason that the phonetic implementation of Sanskrit (but
not of Avestan) tended to produced so many cases of retroflexion was that
many speakers already had retroflexes on the brain, or in the mouth.


From mclasutt at brigham.net  Thu May  3 01:46:20 2001
From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 19:46:20 -0600
Subject: Fallow Deer
In-Reply-To: <000701c0d1bd$5d0e0d40$a32363d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.194620.0600.>

The Persian Fallow Deer (Dama mesopotamica or Dama dama mesopotamica) did,
indeed, exist (and was common) throughout Asia Minor before the modern era.
It's butchered bones have been found as far west as Cyprus and the Aegean
littoral.  It has shrunk to its current isolated pockets along the Iran/Iraq
border only after the arrival of the gun in Asia Minor.  As a piece of
trivia, the closest relative (ancient or modern) of the two species of
fallow deer was the Irish elk.

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

-----Original Message-----
From: Indo-European mailing list [mailto:Indo-European at xkl.com]On Behalf
Of David L. White
Sent: Monday, April 30, 2001 15:34

> Likewise, PIE lacks a word for the fallow deer, common throughout southern
> Europe, but has terms for 'elk' and 'red deer'.

        Another kind of fallow deer, not terribly distinct, occurs along the
border between Iraq and Iran, or did until the war there.

[ moderator snip ]


From centrostudilaruna at libero.it  Thu May  3 10:02:05 2001
From: centrostudilaruna at libero.it (Alberto Lombardo)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 12:02:05 +0200
Subject: Urheimat animals
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.120205.0200.>

> The logical conclusion would be that the IE languages were intrusive in
> areas which had chamois, leopards, lions, tigers, elephants, fallow deer,
> etc; and native to an area with bears, foxes, roe deer, lynx, and wolves.

I think we could add to the sentence whales, beavers, elks, many kinds of
birds and salmons too (Thieme 1953). It brings to north in the search of the
native homeland.


From sarima at friesen.net  Wed May  2 23:04:02 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 16:04:02 -0700
Subject: Olives/was: Lactose Intolerance/Renfrew
In-Reply-To: <F109mFkQKfzGVJtOU6G0001235b@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.160402.0700.>

At 06:58 AM 5/1/01 +0000, Douglas G Kilday wrote:
Returning to the Greek forms, we have a chicken-and-egg problem: was oil
>(elaion) named after the olive (elaia:) or vice versa? In the Arabic words,
>it's clear that 'oil' is the primary notion, and 'olive' is derived. This is
>retained in Spanish; one of the first words I learned was "aceite" in the
>sense of "motor-oil", not the Filippo Berio stuff. Hence it's plausible that
>the original meaning of *elaiw- was 'oil', applied later to an oily edible
>fruit and the tree which produces it.

This is especially likely as one of the most important classical uses of
the olive was to make olive oil.  Thus calling the tree the "oil tree",
that is "the tree from which we make oil", is a very good possibility.

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


From Insouciant at aol.com  Thu May  3 12:49:41 2001
From: Insouciant at aol.com (Insouciant at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 08:49:41 EDT
Subject: Olives/was: Lactose Intolerance/Renfrew
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.084941.EDT.>

> Latin <oli:va> evidently comes from Etruscan *eleiva by regular changes:
> Etr. short /el/ generally becomes Lat. short /ol/, and Old Lat. /ei/ becomes
> Class. Lat. /i:/. The Etruscan lexeme is attested in adjectival form (TLE
> 762, bucchero aryballos) <aska mi eleivana> 'a vessel (am) I pertaining to
> oil' = 'I am an oil-vessel'. This in turn looks like a borrowing from
> Western Greek <elaiwa:> (cf. Etr. Eivas from WGk Aiwa:s 'Ajax'). I'm not
> sure how to explain the shorter Lat. forms <olea>, <oleum> vs. <oli:va>,
> <oli:vum>.

Dear Indo-Europeanists:

I believe I have a way to explain the forms <olea>, <oleum> vs. <oli:va>.

First, let's derive <oli:va>:

*eleiwa: 'olive' > *oleiwa: (possibly due to the 'pinguis', i.e. velar,
nature of a final l) > *oli:wa: (cf. di:co : deiknumi) > ol:iva

And then <oleum>:

*eleiwom 'product of the olive tree' > *ole:wom (this e: is a long closed e,
comparable to the spurious diphthong found in the 7-vowel dialects of Greek) >
*ole:om (this is the critical step; at a certain point *wo- > -o- in Latin,
cf. deorsus (< *devorsus) and a similar development *coquo: (< *kwokwo: <
*pekwo:)) > *oleom (shortening of long vowels which immediately preceding
another vowel) > oleum.

<olea> must have been constructed by analogy, for its ancestor *eleiwa:
would've become *oli:va, the same form seen in 'olive'

Hope this helps,

Andrew Byrd


From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com  Thu May  3 13:29:04 2001
From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 09:29:04 -0400
Subject: Olives/was: Lactose Intolerance/Renfrew
In-Reply-To: <F109mFkQKfzGVJtOU6G0001235b@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.092904.0400.>

I seem to recall instances where /ei/ in Old Latin or perhaps more
accurately pre-Latin yielded /e:/ rather than /i:/ before the
semivowel <u>.  Hence *ole:uom > *ole:um by loss of the
semivowel before o/u and then > attested <oleum> by the rule that
"vocalis ante vocalem corripitur."  <Olea> would be a new formation
on the model of <oli:va>.  A similar case is <di:vus> as opposed to
<deus>, both from *deiuos.

Jim Rader

>[Douglas Kilday]
> Latin <oli:va> evidently comes from Etruscan *eleiva by regular changes:
> Etr. short /el/ generally becomes Lat. short /ol/, and Old Lat. /ei/ becomes
> Class. Lat. /i:/. The Etruscan lexeme is attested in adjectival form (TLE
> 762, bucchero aryballos) <aska mi eleivana> 'a vessel (am) I pertaining to
> oil' = 'I am an oil-vessel'. This in turn looks like a borrowing from
> Western Greek <elaiwa:> (cf. Etr. Eivas from WGk Aiwa:s 'Ajax'). I'm not
> sure how to explain the shorter Lat. forms <olea>, <oleum> vs. <oli:va>,
> <oli:vum>.


From sarima at friesen.net  Thu May  3 02:53:19 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 19:53:19 -0700
Subject: Cypresses
In-Reply-To: <002401c0d25e$d1d91ec0$726163d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.195319.0700.>

At 11:49 AM 5/1/01 -0500, David L. White wrote:
>         Yes, they are (as I have recently learned) fast-growing, no they are
>not the same tree you know as "red cedar", nor are they junipers.  They are
>members of the redwood family (not the cypress family), and are more
>properly known as "bald cypress".

Ah, I am not used to seeing them referred to by just the bare
"cypress".   I had forgotten that their range extended into Texas.  They
would indeed be characteristic of watercourses in southern Texas - and you
are right, they are not recent intrusions into the area.

I do not think they grow as fast as Red Cedar, though.

>   They are (with water tupelo) the standard
>swamp tree of the American SE, growing easily in water.

Strictly speaking they require temporarily emergent ground to *sprout*, but
once sprouted they can withstand almost permanent flooding - something very
few trees can do.

>(I once saw an
>otter swimming merrily along through a cypress forest/lake (just barely) in
>Texas.)   But I find it difficult to imagine that a circumference of 6
>meters, diameter of about 2, does not require many years to reach.

Oh, assuredly.  I was just confused by the short version of the name.  The
last time I saw a Bald Cypress swamp was the last time I was in
Florida.  They are quite impressive.

>   Nor is
>there anything inherently improbable in the idea that cypresses should have
>spread up rivers into areas that would not otherwise support them.  I have
>heard that the biggest tree in Texas is a cypress of more than 10 meters
>circumference on the Frio west of San Antonio, which is not where one would
>ordinarily expect to find such things.  But like just about everything else
>associated with southern swamps (mocassins, alligators), they spread up the
>rivers.

My range map shows the (bald) cypress extending well into the San Antonio
area, and it has no special notation on it concerning recent spread.  The
western edge of its range seems to about where the Frio is, or perhaps the
Nueces (hard to tell, as I am using two maps).  I suspect that the tree
would be normal anywhere in that area where there is slow moving
semi-permanent water that occasionally (during droughts) draws down enough
to allow sprouting.  I know that, at least further east, it is not only
found in swamps per se, but also along smaller slow moving streams.

How did this tree get to be called a cypress anyhow?  It is rather a unique
tree, not much like any other tree, not even the true cypresses.

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


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Thu May  3 15:55:44 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 10:55:44 -0500
Subject: Indian Names/Red Clay
In-Reply-To: <001701c0d27e$1d8f0b80$692863d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.105544.0500.>

	colorado is indeed "red" (including muddy red)
	colorido is "colorful, coloring, (brightly) colored" --which
wouldn't work because the Colorado has a dull color

	As far as I know, colorado has always meant "red" in modern Spanish
(i.e. since the discovery of America

[snip]
>        Yes, but Sulphur Springs is 250 miles from the Colorado, and in the
>basin (indirectly) of the Red River (which might explain a few things, but
>not "Colorado"), so attempting to connect "Colorado" with anything around
>there is roughly equivalent to attempting to connect "London" with some
>feature of the land around Snowdonia.   I saw the Colorado about half way to
>the sea from Austin not long ago (no, I was not on a field-trip for the
>edification of the list:  I was on my way to play Crocodilian Hunter, which
>I did with fair success, in the wilds of suburban Houston), and it is not
>red there either.  It is a sort of olive green.    Therefore I continue to
>suspect that the original meaning intended was 'colorful' (which the
>Colorado is, compared to the muddy brown competition), not 'red'.
[snip]

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


From sarima at friesen.net  Thu May  3 02:58:58 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 19:58:58 -0700
Subject: Three-Way Contrast of Secondary Articulations in PIE
In-Reply-To: <006401c0d262$c7081ec0$fbf1fea9@patrickr>
Message-ID: <WED.2.MAY.2001.195858.0700.>

At 12:18 PM 5/1/01 -0500, proto-language wrote:
>Dear Stanley and IEists:
>[SF]

>> But even then, what I see in the PIE vocabulary is many homonymous *roots*,
>> but relative fewer homonymous *words*.  The main distinguishing factors
>> were differences in suffixes and stem formants - and occasionally infixes.

>[PCR]

>First, there are no infixes in IE.

I am not sure what else to call the nasal present formation.  It sure isn't
a suffix!

Let's see, from the root *bheug you get the present *bhunegti. Looks like
an infix to me.

>Second, for these 'roots' to be able to have maintained semantic integrity,
>they must have been distinguishable in some fashion. The suffixes, etc.
>(better root-extensions) are an attempt to continue distinctions that were
>lost with the glides.

While I agree many of the roots probably originally were distinct, I do not
think we yet have sufficient information to tell in what manner.  I
certainly doubt there was a single cause for all of the mergers.

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


From dlwhite at texas.net  Wed May  2 02:32:50 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 21:32:50 -0500
Subject: Pelasgian Place-names
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.213250.0500.>

> Isn't Tarhuntassa securely located as a neighbor to Kizzuwatna?
> (I envision this about as far east as the borders of southwest Asia
> Minor can be stretched.  I have heard that Tarhuntassa = later Tarsus.)

        That would be interesting, if true.  Both words look like possible
/turs^/ words to me.  (Perhaps we should rename these "/tors^/ words".
This lack of a distinction between /u/ and /o/ is annoying.)

> How old a god is Tarhun(d/t)?  Could he possibly be pre-Anatolian (ie.
> Pelasgian on the theory that Pelasgian <> Anatolian)?

        I do not know, but the form of the name is very close to Etruscan
version of "Tarchun", as in various names that come down in Latin as
"Tarquin-", which is a little suspicious.

> But I think the answer must be no.  Tarhun(d/t) is as Anatolian as St.
> Brigid is Irish.  In that case, did the founders of Tarhuntassa append
> a foreign -assa suffix to give their city name "class?"  (I'm from
> Minneapolis so I'm familiar with this practice.)

        My guess, as has been indictated, is that a good many of the rather
suspiciously far-flung Pelasgian names have that sort of origin.  But does
"Tarhun" really occur with a "d" or "t" attached?  That might (or might not)
make it the same thing as the famous /-nthos/, in which case we would have
double-suffixing.

> Rather than this, Is there not sufficient evidence here and elsewhere,
> that the -assa suffix is Anatolian as well as Pelasgian?

        I do not know, but it would not be surprising.  Depending on their
nature, it is not terribly unusual for suffixes to be borrowed.  (Sorry to
be repeating myself to some extent here.)

> Given the location of Tarhuntassa and its obvious Anatolian-ness, can't a
> strong case be made for a bond between Anatolian and the substrate
> everybody's talking about here?

        See Palmer's "The Greek Language" for an over-confident and not very
strong (in my opinion) version of that argument.  And note that in between
"The Latin Language" and "The Greek Language" he seems to have changed his
mind about the Pelasgians, for in the former they are a pre-IE susbtrate,
while in the latter they are Anatolians.  I think he had it right the first
time.   Though attempts have been made to connect "Pelasgian" /-nth/ (or
whatever it was) with a somewhat marginal IE suffix having a meaning of
'animate plural' (as I recall), which might (or might not) make sense for a
place-name suffix, this does not seem to work very well with /huakinth/
'hyacinth', /asaminth-/ 'bath-tub', /merinth-/ 'thread', /erebinth-/ 'pea',
and /olunth-/ 'unripe fig'.

> I suspect Dr. White has given my "right-fork" theory of Anatolian-Pelasgian
> connectedness a death-blow, but alas I am too elementary in my thinking
> processes to understand what he meant by:

>> As for the Pelasgians being a "right fork" of the IE-Anatolians who passed
>> into Greece, if their language had phonetically aspirated /t/s (and
>> presumably /p, k/), which is necessary to explain how Anatolian /t/ could
>> appear as Greek /th/, would we not find "Chorinthos", "Pharnassos", and even
>> (farther afield) "Tharthessos"? To invoke aspiration merely to explain the
>> Greek /th/ for Anatolian /t/ (or even /d/), conveniently ignoring unwanted
>> side effects, is not acceptable. What language in the world aspirates /t/
>> only after /n/?  None that I ever heard of.

> Apparently it is my burden to explain the Greek /th/ for Anatolian /t/ or
> /d/, but I don't know why.  (And certainly I don't know how!)

        Sorry to have been unclear (and over-confident).  What I meant was
that as Anatolian had only /t/ and /d/, no /th/, we would not expect /t/ to
be borrowed as /th/ unless all voiceless plosives were aspirated in
Anatolian, in which case we would expect to find no (or at least few)
examples of "Pelasgian" borrowings with Greek /p-t-k/.   It has since been
brought to my attention that some languages do indeed aspirate voiceless
plosives only after nasals, but the Anatolian words in question show /nt/
varying with later /nd/, which would indicate that Anatolian did not do this
(which is not surprising), but rather was more like English in tendning to
de-aspirate or even voice originally voiceless plosives after nasals.

> Dr. White also explains the wide dispersion of -assos names (like Tartessos)
> as possibly due to later Greek mediation.

        I am not sure I did that, or if I did, whether it was a good idea.
I think there were just enough city-names in /-ssos/ kicking around that
people began to think of /-ssos/ as an appropriate ending for city-names,
just as we have reached the point where we are well-pleased with
country-names that end in "-ia".  As far as I know, there is no evidence of
an "Old Tartessos", somewhere back in the eastern Mediterranean, that a "
New Tartessos" in Spain, with the "New" part conveniently forgotten) would
have been named after.

Dr. David L. White


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu May  3 08:18:48 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 09:18:48 +0100
Subject: Etruscan / Pelasgian
In-Reply-To: <002401c0d264$ed1df560$8d01703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.091848.0100.>

--On Tuesday, May 1, 2001 6:39 pm +0200 Eduard Selleslagh <edsel at glo.be>
wrote:

> 3. About -assos/-assa: In Basque there is a "complex" of suffixes
> composed of parts of -(a)tz(a/e).  The meanings can be pretty diverse,
> but an important one is something like 'place of (many/a lot of) ....'
> and the like (also: a plant, tree producing fruit xxx). It looks like if
> the core meaning was a 'genitive', 'of', 'belonging to' (non existant in
> modern Basque case endings).  I am not pretending that this is the origin
> of -assos/-assa, but rather wondering if the Basque form might have a
> common Mediterranean origin, with or without Greek or Iberian (or
> whatever) mediation. It could be an indication that this suffix was
> wandering around the Mediterranean at an early date.

The Basque suffix is <-tza> ~ <-tze>.  The central and earliest recoverable
function of this suffix appears to be collectivity, as in <area> 'sand',
<areatza> 'beach'.  But it has acquired other functions, most notably
'abstract action', as in <jaio> 'be born', <jaiotza> 'birth', and
'profession', as in <artzain> 'shepherd', <artzantza> 'sheepherding'.

The suffix is common in place names, where the collective sense is probably
present.  However, in the 10th-13th centuries, the suffix is regularly
written as <-zaha>, as in <Artazaha>, <Otazaha>, and others.  The origin of
modern <-tza> in an earlier *<-tzaa> is confirmed by the observation that,
in the Bizkaian dialect, the addition of the article <-a> to a noun ending
in <-tza> produces <-tzaia>, with the usual Bizkaian treatment of */aaa/.
The suffix <-tze> is *probably* a variant of <-tza>, since <-tze> too has
chiefly collective functions, but I won't swear to this.  In the modern
language, <-tze> retains its collective function in cases like <jende>
'people', <jendetze> 'crowd, multitude' (alongside <jendetza>), but its
chief function today is to serve as one of the two suffixes forming gerunds
of verbs, as in <etor-> 'come', <etortze> 'coming' (gerund).

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 philjennings at juno.com  Fri May  4 01:36:35 2001
From: philjennings at juno.com (philjennings at juno.com)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 20:36:35 -0500
Subject: Etruscan / Pelasgian
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.203635.0500.>

Readers on this topic might be interested in an essay by Ardian
Vehbiu.  I doubt I could exaggerate the wisdom here.  I blush to admit
I once spent money to buy one of the Mayani books!

The Internet address is:

http://members.aol.com/plaku/origins.htm

It turns out that the force of the ideas we use to politely probe each
other, can ingratiate con-artists to tyrants, and goad ethnic groups
to hooliganism.  The only innocents among us are those who speak
exclusively of velar fricatives and laryngeals.

I wish it were not so.   If only because I haven't the background to
say a thing about velar fricatives and laryngeals.

I have investigated what "Pelasgian" means to the greater world
beyond linguistics.  It appears that Greeks are quite willing to
accept the Pelasgians as their earliest genos, using the word in a
sense to mean, the earliest element in our compound substance.

The Pelasgian creation myth is fundamental.  If the Pelasgians of
the Mediterranean linguistic substratum cannot be linked to the
idea of a dancing goddess who whirls up a wind and turns him into
a phallic snake and by him bears an egg and so forth, ending up
in the creation of humans from the serpent's teeth, then the true
ownership of the term "Pelasgian" is clouded.

But it began for us by being clouded anyway.  We might as well
go forward as back.

Regarding the Lesghianism of the Pelasgians and the Leleges,
there does seem to be a "le" at the root of these Aegean
ethnonyms, and a "Le" at the root of Lemnos and Lesbos as well.
I can almost hear it happening in English, that if a culture
straddled two islands beginning with "la", we'd call them the
"la-la-people."  It would be a clever name.  I wonder if "Leleges" is
a clever name.

There are also the Laz, if we have to go as far as the Caucasus.
They speak a Kartvellian language, one step closer to the Aegean.
What's the advantage of one over the other?


From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu  Fri May  4 03:11:35 2001
From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 22:11:35 -0500
Subject: Etruscan / Pelasgian
In-Reply-To: <002901c0d173$4c0ae300$a26063d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.221135.0500.>

Does this assumption about the Hittite writing for -nd- take into
consideration the fact that the script was cuneiform, borrowed from an Old
Babylonian scribal school in Syria, that Hittite use of the OBabyl. signs
for 'd' all came with a vowel attached? To use the Hittite data, there
needs to be a lot more argumentation.

Carol Justus

>> What language in the world aspirates /t/ only after /n/? None
>> that I ever heard of.

>        Answering my own rhetorcal question,  I note that some African
>languages do this thing which I had thought was impossible.  Furthermore,
>reflection reveals that proto-Britonic almost certainly did this too,
>resulting in the nasal mutations of /p-t-k/.  Nonetheless, the Hittite forms
>show variants in /nd/, which suggests that their pronunciation was more like
>modern English "seventy" with a /d/ in it, so my original assertion was
>probably (in implication) correct.
>        As for place-name formative being both Pelasgian and Anatolian,
>there is nothing wrong with this.  Derivational suffixes are often borrowed
>with words, as is seen in modern English "ize" from Greek and, more vaguely,
>the idea that it is somehow (poetically?) appropriate for country names to
>end in "ia".  If there were enough city names in /-nthos/ and /-ssos/ (I am
>not sure about the /a/) around, people could well have gotten the idea that
>there was some sort of appropriate and "high-class" city name suffix
>involved, and applied it to their own cities, thus yielding things like
>Tartessos.  (I have no idea what the frst part is.)

>Dr. David L. White


From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu  Fri May  4 03:26:12 2001
From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 22:26:12 -0500
Subject: Etruscan / Pelasgian
In-Reply-To: <002401c0d264$ed1df560$8d01703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.222612.0500.>

Within the cuneiform tradition of ancient Hattusa, it is often thought that
Luwian Tarhunta and Hittite Tarhun (stormgods) have a prototype in Hattic
Taru. This is based on bilingual texts between Hattic and Hittite, for
example.

The transmission of religious traditions during the 400-odd years of
attested Hittite texts is itself not exactly straightforward, but fun to
play with, as I did some years ago in an article in JIES (indexed on the
website by author and volume /date at the new URL

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/lrc/iedocctr/jies.html ).

The Hittites preserved Hattic rituals from pre-Hittite Hattusa and added
Hurrian rituals and a pantheon at least by the time that Hattusili III had
married Puduhepa, the Hurrian priestess from Kizzuwatna, at the behest of
the goddess Ishtar (Babylonian deity). In the Hittite-Hurrian pantheon,
Tesup replaced Taru / Tarhun as head stormgod.

The coincidence of similiar-sounding 'Tarquinia' is tempting, but how would
you fill in the historical and phonological blanks? At Hattusa we are
fortunate to have bilingual texts and changing traditions that can be
correlated with repercusions of events perhaps.

Carol Justus

[ moderator snip ]

>[Ed Selleslagh]

>I have several questions, some of which are based upon extremely speculative
>ideas (somebody has to stick out his neck):

>1. Is Tarhun(t) the root for the name Tarquinius?

>2. Is it unthinkable that the (Greek) names 'Pelasgoi' and 'Leleges' are based
>upon the name of the NE Caucasian Lesghians? The first one with some
>indigenous
>prefix (maybe indicating they're from the lowlands, not from the (Caucasian)
>mountains), the second one with Greek reduplication, because of the shortness
>of the name. If this could be substantiated, it might mean that the substrate
>is non-PIE, non-Anatolian, not even sister-of-Anatolian, or else, of course,
>that the Pelasgoi and the Leleges were misnamed or changed their language.
>Anyone versed in Lesghian language and ancient history?

>3. About -assos/-assa: In Basque there is a "complex" of suffixes composed of
>parts of -(a)tz(a/e).  The meanings can be pretty diverse, but an important
>one is something like 'place of (many/a lot of) ....' and the like (also: a
>plant, tree producing fruit xxx). It looks like if the core meaning was a
>'genitive', 'of', 'belonging to' (non existant in modern Basque case endings).
>I am not pretending that this is the origin of -assos/-assa, but rather
>wondering if the Basque form might have a common Mediterranean origin, with or
>without Greek or Iberian (or whatever) mediation. It could be an indication
>that this suffix was wandering around the Mediterranean at an early date.

>Don't kill me for this: I'm just wondering....

>Ed.


From jrader at Merriam-Webster.com  Thu May  3 14:38:25 2001
From: jrader at Merriam-Webster.com (Jim Rader)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 10:38:25 -0400
Subject: Etruscans
In-Reply-To: <002501c0d264$ed82aaa0$8d01703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.103825.0400.>

But Welsh <aber> doesn't only look Indo-European, it has a
generally accepted etymology, i.e., *ad-ber-, "place to which water
rushes/flows," paralleled in Goidelic by Old Irish <in(d)ber>, "river
mouth" (Inver- in Scottish place names), with different prefixation of
the same verbal root.  A base *ber- with other prefixes is well-
attested in Celtic.  Pokorny reconstructs *bher- "aufwallen (von
quellendem oder siedendem Wasser)," with a mass of somewhat
dubious comparanda, but on Celtic grounds an Indo-European
*bher- would be unimpeachable.

Jim Rader

[ moderator snip ]

> [Ed Selleslagh]

> The Tuscan hydronyms cited remind me of the (P-Celtic) Welsh 'aber' (river
> (mouth), estuary) and its probable derivatives in Holland and Belgium (from
> the Celtic Belgae, I suppose): Amel in Belgium (the French-Belgian river name
> is Amblhve), Amer in Holland and Belgium (the latter name having been
> transferred to the river banks of the lower Eikse Vliet). Indeed, they all
> contain A-L/R-B/M(/N), sometimes with metathesis.

> Of course, even though the word looks IE, this still leaves the possibility
> that the Celts picked it up from another people, somewhere, e.g between the
> mouth (in the Black Sea) and the springs (in S. Germany) of the Danube. Or
> else: some IE-ans (e.g. P-Italic Umbrians, ...) were living in Etruria before
> the arrival of the Etruscans; that would bring us back to the earlier idea
> that was based upon the name of the river Ombrone, rightly or wrongly.


From dlwhite at texas.net  Thu May  3 17:20:44 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 12:20:44 -0500
Subject: Etruscans
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.122044.0500.>

> David L. White (10 Apr 2001) wrote:

>> Yes.  I believe both descriptions might be applied to the civilization of
>> Troy, and I see nothing inherently contradictory or comical about this.
>> More to the point, any bearers of Eastern Mediterranean civilization,
>> however generic, would have been impressive to the people of Italy before
>> these began (with the Etruscans) to ascend to the same level.

> Fine. I don't claim that an areally modest civilization can't colonize and
> exert political control over a much larger region. But I'm afraid we may
> be losing track of the linguistic issues. What started this whole thread was
> my objection to the theory that the Etruscan _language_ came by sea from the
> East,

        Obviously colonizers, or exerters of control, will bring their
language along with them, having little choice in the matter.

> and the startlingly widespread willingness to misinterpret the Lemnian
> inscriptions as evidence for this theory.

        I agree that the Lemnian inscriptions are too late to have much to
do with anything, one way or another.  But we should be wary of falling into
the logical fallacy whereby the negation of a propostion is regarded as
proven if the original positive is unproven.  Unproven is not disproven, and
the burden of proof cannot be arbitrarily placed on one side or the other.

> If you think the Etruscan language came from Troy or its North Aegean allies,
> you should present more than hand-waving arguments about what High Culture
> can do.

        I fail to perceive any "hand-waving", beyond what is unavoidable
given that the material culture of Troy was not (somebody out there please
correct me if I am wrong) distinctive, and thus would leave no easily
discernable trace anywhere.  I can see how this might seem very convenient
(I would say "unfalsifiable", but that would be invoking a square wheel, now
wouldn't it?) to those having a prior committment to the nativist view, but
it is also, simply put, true.

>> There is evidence that the Trojans were a small bunch, in the fact that
>> their armies are described as being multi-lingual, whereas the Greeks were
>> pretty clearly multilingual.  (Now just where in the Iliad is that?)
>> Clearly they were not able to match the Greeks in putting fellow-speakers
>> (so to speak) in the field, and their forces were composed largely of the
>> tributary forces of other states, of other languages.  This does not suggest
>> that the native Trojans were ever a large group.  (Nor are they very
>> distinctive archeologically, as far as I know.)

> I'm not sure what you're getting at here. If the native Trojans constituted a
> small elite dominating a polyglot assortment of other peoples (which is
> perfectly plausible per se, given the opportunity for acquiring great wealth
> by controlling traffic on the Hellespont, and between Europe and Anatolia),
> and they or their descendants set up shop in Etruria, one would expect the
> linguistic result to be a Trojan superstrate in the native language, like the
> Norman element in English or the Doric in Latin (poena, machina, etc.).

        There is no firm expectation when an elite is of one language and
the mass of the population is not.   The case of the Turks in Anatolia seems
fairly well established by modern genetics:  they were a fairly small elite,
and the pre-Turkic population simply converted to Turkish over time.  (A lot
of time in this case, but Greek was a very "proud" language, as "Villanovan"
would not have been.)   I may note as well (again) the case of Latin
America, which has largely been Iberianized in language despite the
population being (with a few exceptions) largely Amerindian by genetic
descent.

> OTOH the claim that Etruscan originated as a creole between Trojan and the
> native speech, or as a Mischsprache based on tributary languages, can't be
> taken seriously.

        Which has something to do with why I have not made it.

> The bottom line is that whatever happened _politically_ in Etruria during
> 1200-700 BCE, the _linguistic_ community of Etruscan-speakers remained
> intact. Claims that the entire community immigrated en masse from the East
> run afoul of archaeology _and_ linguistics.

        En petite masse.  (My French is for reading knowledge only, so
please forgive me if I did not get that right.)   A large migration would
probably be logistically implausible, among other things.  I agree that the
native population was not expelled or exterminated, and that there is indeed
substantial archeoligical continuity.  But I thought we had agreed that such
a population, as it went over to Etruscan over a period of perhaps several
centuries (or perhaps less; stranger things have happened), would quite
probably leave no inscriptional trace.  Place names are another question,
but recent assertions that conquerors re-name places only when they have
bureaucrats along for the ride are clearly falsified by the case of
Anglo-Saxon England (among others, no doubt), where they conquerors surely
renamed a great many water-courses (whatever we think had happened to the
natives), despite not being notably well-supplied with bureaucrats.

>> I am not exactly the only person to say that Etruscan civilization did not
>> arise semi-miraculously in Tuscany as a result of Greek and Phonecian
>> contacts that can only be shown to have been significant in Campania.  Since
>> a date of 1200 is too early for real Etruscans in Italy, I would imagine
>> that most migrationists must posit an interlude somewhere in the northern
>> Aegean, or not far from it.

> By "real Etruscans" I presume you mean "bearers of Etruscan culture such
> as one finds in a coffee-table book". I don't deny the migration of
> substantial cultural elements from the NE Mediterranean to Etruria, without
> which the coffee-table books would be vastly different. But again we're
> losing sight of the linguistics.

        The linguistics does more harm than good to the nativist cause, as
/turs^/ (as in the "turshas", reputedly from Anatolias) is surely closer to
/turs-/ (as in "Tursenoi") than most of the Pelasgian phytonyms recently
noted are to each other.  And at least we can explain the small variation
seen, as Greek did not have /s^/.   No such luck (for the most part) with
Pelasgian phytonyms.
        While on the subject I may note that the existence of "coffee" vs.
"cafe", and "chocolate" vs. "cocoa" is not generally taken to "prove" the
existence of a vastly-spread sub-strate language wherever these words are
found.  Phytonyms can easily be wander-words, though I must admit I know
nothing about the uses (if any) of the various "Pelasgian" plants in
question.

> To a limited extent we can peel back the cultural superstrate by looking at
> the Etruscan pantheon, minus the obvious Hellenic figures (Aplu, Artumes,
> etc.) and Etruscanized Olympians (Tin, Turan, etc.). We are left with such
> deities as Aisu, Calu, Cautha, Cel, Leinth, Manth, Vanth, and Veltha.  Their
> names are evidently native Etruscan, and they were not (to any of our
> knowledge) imported from the Aegean, the Troad, or greater Anatolia.

        That is a good point, but not, I think, given the scanty nature of
the evidence, necesarily decisive.  What do we really know about Trojan, or
Turshan religion?   I would expect it to be a mix of native, Aegean, and
Anatolian elements.

> Having dismissed (correctly I hope) the Eastern sea-route,

        So now "one" is not only attorney but judge and jury too?  How nice,
to triumph so convincingly through simple fiat.  Maybe it works for you, but
when I, in my real job as house-husband, simply declare the dishes clean, my
wife tends to doubt that very much has truly been accomplished.

> one can still ask when and by which route the Etruscan-speaking community
> came to Etruria.

        Why bother?  Why can't they have arisen from the original
post-agricultural population of the area?  And what is gained by dismissing
one route as supportable only by "hand-waving", when all other possible
routes are even more mysterious?  Ignotium per ignotius indeed.  Such an
approach cries out for the creation of a term more vigorous than
"hand-waving". I do hereby officially suggest "hand-flapping."

Dr. David L. White


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Sat May  5 06:52:55 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Sat, 5 May 2001 06:52:55 -0000
Subject: Pelasgian/was Etruscans
Message-ID: <SAT.5.MAY.2001.065255.0000.>

Larry Trask (25 Apr 2001) wrote:

>The idea that Basque <berun> 'lead' is related to the Greek and Latin words
>has been around a long time.  But it is far from being the only proposal on
>the table.

>To begin with, looking for Latin etymologies on the Tiber, we need not
>appeal to a hypothetical Ligurian *<blum-> as a source.

>Now, there are two proposals for a native origin.  One idea is that the word
>is a derivative of <bera> 'soft', with an unidentifiable second element -- and
>lead is, of course, a soft metal.  The other sees the word as built on *<bel>
>'dark', again with an unidentifiable second element -- and lead is also dark.
>The item *<bel> is nowhere recorded as an independent word, but its former
>existence is assured by its presence in a number of derivatives, both as an
>initial and as a final element.

>Nevertheless, many scholars have wanted to relate <berun> to the Greek and
>Latin words in some way, though the proposals differ substantially in detail.

>These proposals are too numerous and too complicated to repeat here -- and
>they not infrequently involve even more far-flung words, such as German <Blei>
>'lead', Georgian <brp'eni> 'lead', Hebrew <bdi:l> 'lead', and a reported
>Berber <buldun> 'tin'.

Hebrew <b'dhiyl> means 'tin'; <!o:phereth> is 'lead'. These are contrasted
in the enumeration of metals (Num. 31:22). The former is probably derived
from <b-d-l> 'to separate'. For this connection to work in a relatively sane
way, one would have to assume that Punic used <b'dhiyl> vel sim. for 'lead'
instead of 'tin', and that the word diffused through Iberia to the Basque
Country undergoing peculiar phonetic changes. I certainly wouldn't endorse
this one.

Alessio argued from <brp'eni> that the ancestor of the Greek and Latin forms
was not improbably *brub-, but I don't buy that either. The Georgian term is
most likely unrelated to the others.

>Finally, to Douglas Kilday's proposal that <berun> derives from a possibly
>Ligurian word of the form *<blum->.  There are some serious phonological
>problems with this.

>First, as noted above, it seems likely that <beraun> is the more
>conservative form of the Basque word -- not helpful.

[more problems]

>So, the phonology is not right for a "Ligurian" *<blum-> yielding Basque
><ber(a)un>.  Of course, if the borrowing was very early, then Basque might
>have been employing different strategies at the time for resolving
>impermissible clusters, but there is no evidence for such a thing, and only
>special pleading is available.

Obviously I have some homework to do before attempting any more Basque
etymologies. I'm in no position to contest the formidable array of
phonologic facts presented.

>In sum, then, Douglas Kilday's proposal is not impossible, but it faces
>serious difficulties, and I cannot see that it should be preferred to any
>one of the several other proposals on the table.  At least all of those
>proposals but one must be wrong, and very likely they are all wrong.

Well, _my_ proposal was almost certainly wrong. Of the remainder, the
nativist derivation of <berun> 'lead' from <bera> 'soft' is most
straightforward and should probably be taken as the default etymology.

>  We cannot tell, because we lack adequate evidence.  This, I think, is what
>Joat Simeon was talking about.

Fine. But if this is a valid point, one should be able to make it without
rhetorical exaggeration. Joat Simeon's reference to "a couple of toponyms"
was irresponsible. The arbitrary dismissal of systematic evidence in favor
of substratal families, such as Pelasgian and Ligurian, is unscientific.
Slinging mud at legitimate investigation, using such sophomoric sophistry as
"unfalsifiability", is worse than unscientific. It amounts to "I'm right and
to hell with you" in erudite polysyllables.

DGK
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com


From petegray at btinternet.com  Thu May  3 19:01:09 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Thu, 3 May 2001 20:01:09 +0100
Subject: Yeshua (WAS: Peter) [off-topic]
Message-ID: <THU.3.MAY.2001.200109.0100.>

[ Moderator's note:
  This posting, and the following, are the last I will accept on this thread.
  Those who wish to continue the discussion should take it to private mail or
  to an appropriate mailing list.
  -- rma ]

> How exactly would a contemporary European pious
> Jewish family assist the tourists to part with their money?

I certainly meant no offence to anyone - I hadn't even thought of the
stereotype, and I should have done.  I would have avoided wording the
comment this way, if I had realised - so, I apologise to all of you.

I meant roughly what the moderator suggested, simply that tourism supplies a
part of the national income, and Belgians of any religious affiliation could
be involved in the tourist industry, and that this is often done through the
medium of English.

Despite my stupid wording, the polyglot character of life in the Low
Countries is still an interesting phenomenon, which may help us understand
potential parallels in other times and places.

Peter


From petegray at btinternet.com  Tue May  1 19:03:59 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 20:03:59 +0100
Subject: Yeshua (WAS: Peter)
Message-ID: <TUE.1.MAY.2001.200359.0100.>

[ Moderator's note:
  This posting, and the preceding, are the last I will accept on this thread.
  Those who wish to continue the discussion should take it to private mail or
  to an appropriate mailing list.
  -- rma ]

> the gospels ... are simply not historically tenable sources. Therefore to ...
> create a historical figure Yeshua is purely in the realm of hypothesis.

This is a debate which has been thrashed out thoroughly within historical
and theological circles through this century, and linguists are unwise to
enter it without a sound knowledge of what the historian/theologians have
achieved.

The consensus conclusion from them is that we cannot seriously doubt the
existence of a historical figure called Jesus;  we can, however, dispute
what that person did and said, and the field is wide open as to how to
interpret his alleged words and actions.

Might I , however, suggest that we return to linguistics?

Peter


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Tue May  8 20:14:45 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 8 May 2001 16:14:45 EDT
Subject: Fwd: Joseph Greenberg
Message-ID: <TUE.8.MAY.2001.161445.EDT.>

[ moderator edited ]

  From: Zylogy at aol.com
  Message-ID:
      <LYRIS-191-449-2001.05.08-15.25.36--x99Lynx#aol.com at list.vedavid.org>
  Date: Tue, 8 May 2001 15:25:16 EDT
  To: "MotherTongue List" <mothertongue at list.vedavid.org>

  I have just read (on Funknet) of the passing of Joseph Greenberg. Certainly a
  scholar of many talents, as well as a maverick in the field of linguistics
  during the repressive era which existed in the Cold War, Greenberg
  contributed to the birth of language typology as practiced currently and to
  the revitalization of interest in long range genetic relations. Roundly
  lauded for the first and often chided for the second of these efforts, his
  place is secure in the history of the field. He was open-minded enough to
  have done work on the above AND phonosemantics to boot! As such he provided a
  model for those who would not let intellectual blinders block their own
  wanderings. He will be missed.

  Jess Tauber
  zylogy at aol.com

  ---
  You are currently subscribed to mothertongue as: x99Lynx at aol.com
  To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-mothertongue-191K at list.vedavid.org


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun May  6 06:47:22 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 02:47:22 EDT
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.024722.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/5/01 9:06:24 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
sarima at friesen.net writes:


> True - though it does happen.  In fact the very French you mention is the
> result of one such occurrence.  A small minority of Romans managed to
> convert a much larger number of Gauls into speaking Latin.

-- it does happen, but Gaul may not be such a good example.  Recent
investigations indicate a much more dramatic settlement of Italian
Latin-speakers in the western provinces than previously thought.  Something
like 30% or more of the citizen population of Italy was resettled in the
provinces during the reign of Augustus alone -- and there had already been
hundreds of thousands before him.  This represented the migration of
something like 2-3 million Latin-speaking individuals.

Further, since they were settled as communities, they had the all-important
_local_ majority in areas of intensive colonization, even where the
represented minorities of the overall provincial populations.

Also, with the Roman state, there were institutions of Romanization (and
hence Latinization); the army, particularly, where people from many
linguistic backgrounds were taken away from home and submerged in a
Latin-speaking environment, and then released back into the civilian world
as veterans, with their families.  That would have been at least several
thousand familes in Gaul, every year -- and concentrated in the northern
districts where civilian colonization wasn't so heavy.

The Roman institution of mass slavery, with manumission, also tended to act
as a linguistic forcing-house.

Last but not least, some recent archaeological evidence indicates that Roman
conquest in the Imperial period in NW Europe was accompanied by wholesale
confiscation of farmland and the imposition of Roman settlers

> not to mention the "all roads lead to Rome" economic influence
> that Rome had in the empire.

-- this is a good point.  An imperial state-structure of Rome's enduring
kind, combined with a uniform literate elite culture make for a different
linguistic situation than the putative expansion of PIE in Neolithic times.
 A caste of bards does not act as the equivalent of a common schooling
system with a canon of written works, or the imposition of a administrative
command language which must be mastered by anyone seeking to rise socially.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun May  6 06:56:36 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 02:56:36 EDT
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.025636.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/5/01 10:00:41 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
eska at vtaix.cc.vt.edu writes:

> See Peter Schrijver, 'On the nature and origin of word-inital _h-_ in the
> Wuerzburg glosses', 'Eriu 48, 1997, 205-227, who makes an interesting case
> for the retention of PIE *p as h in some Early Irish forms.

-- it's interesting how rapid and brusque the restructuring of Insular Celtic
was, given the archaic state shown in the earliest sources (eg., the Ogham
inscriptions).


From dlwhite at texas.net  Sun May  6 14:09:41 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 09:09:41 -0500
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.090941.0500.>

> And also in spoken French
> singular @m plural z at m

>> [Ed Selleslagh]

>> Grammatically determined initial-consonant mutations (I think it's important
>> to be that explicit about it) occur in other, still existing, languages too:

        French liasion is abstractly similar to Celtic mutation, for both
might be described as the phonemicization of originally phonetic processes
occurring across boundaries.  I think there probably is a link, as other
suspiciously Celtic-seeming things occur in French, such as excessive (to my
mind) clefting.
        But be that as it may, mutations are actually fairly common,
according to my understanding,  in sub-standard dialects of Romance and
Greek.  An examples from Tuscan appears in the Encyclopedia Brittanica
(1973?) article on Celtic, and someone wrote a book on the subject a while
back.

Dr. David L. White


From dlwhite at texas.net  Sun May  6 14:21:11 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 09:21:11 -0500
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.092111.0500.>

----- Original Message -----
From: Ante Aikio <anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi>
Sent: Saturday, May 05, 2001 6:36 AM

> [I originally wrote:]

>> These claims would of course deserve no attention from the scientific
>> community, were it not that Kalevi Wiik has actively publicized them in
>> the Finnish media, and also quite succesfully managed to market them as
>> a "linguistic breakthrough" to some archeologists, geneticists and
>> historians. Thus, in the recent years Uralists have been forced to mount
>> an attack against the "Anti-Uralists", and this may deceptivily look like
>> a serious scientific debate to non-linguists. I sure hope the situation
>> with Celtic isn't as bad.

> Interestingly, just after I happened to mention Kalevi Wiik in the
> connection of the discussion on Proto-Celtic, it was pointed out to me in
> private correspondence that Wiik is currently also an active supporter of
> the "Celtic lingua franca" theory. The following passage is quoted from
> Wiik's abstract of his paper "On the Origins and History of the Celts",
> which will be read at the "International Colloquium on Early Contacts
> between English and the Celtic Languages" (University of Joensuu Research
> Station, Mekrij?rvi, Finland, 24-26 August, 2001):
>
>   "The first Celts, therefore, are the Basque-speaking hunters of western
> Europe who adopted agriculture and the IE language from the LBK culture
> and the Impressed Ware cultures. The area formed a chain of Celtic
> dialects: in the north (Rhine area) the dialects were based on the LBK
> (Central European) dialect of the IE language, while in the south (eastern
> Iberia and southern France), they were based on the Impressed Ware
> (Mediterranean) dialect of that language. In addition, the substrata of
> the non-IE languages were different along the chain of the Celtic
> dialects: the northern dialect had a Basque substratum, while the more
> southern dialects had a Basque, Iberian, or Tartessian substratum. The
> result was the following chain of Celtic dialects/languages: Lusitanian -
> Celtiberian - Gaul - Lepontic.
>   During the Bell Beaker period (c. 2800-1800 BC), the Celtic language was
> used as a lingua franca by the populations of Western Europe. It was the
> language of the ?lite of the Copper Age (Bronze Age). The centre of the
> Celtic world was in the ?n?tice culture in 1800-1500 BC, in the Urnfield
> culture in 1200-800 BC, in the Hallstatt culture in 800-500 BC, and in the
> La T?ne culture in 500-50 BC. The Celtic lingua franca was based on
> different Celtic dialects during the six different cultural periods
> mentioned."

        There is good evidence of something like Semitic influence,
sub-stratal or not, in Insular Celtic, and I suspected when I first read Dr.
Trask's initial posting that something like this woud lie behind the views
of the "No-Proto-Celtic" crowd.  The typological lurch of Insular Celtic
toward Semitic, illusory (in terms of actual Semites) or not, does indeed
make it difficult to construct a unified proto-language.  Difficult, but not
impossible.  Such questions as how and when Insular Celtic wound up
verb-initial and so on just have to be answered at some point.  They do no
make proto-Celtic unviable, or suggest any such scenario as just given
above.

> The complete version of Wiik's abstract can be read on the internet at
> http://www.joensuu.fi/fld/ecc/Wiikabstract.htm.

        Substituting "White" for "Wiik", the complete version of my abstract
can be read there as well.  I am not entirely pleased that my work should
find itself in such company, though I suppose I should strive to keep an
open mind.

Dr. David L. White


From jer at cphling.dk  Sun May  6 17:55:08 2001
From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 19:55:08 +0200
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <17026879.3197632756@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.195508.0200.>

On Mon, 30 Apr 2001, Larry Trask wrote:

> [...] The null hypothesis is this:

> The IE languages are not descended by divergence from a single common
> ancestor.

> This null hypothesis is spectacularly falsified by the data, by the
> extensive and elaborate systematic patterns linking all of the IE
> languages.  A convergence scenario predicts nothing more than shared
> elements and resemblances.  This is not what we find, and so the
> convergence scenario is falsified.
[..]

Hear, hear! A bit annoying that truths like this one have to be repeated
over and over again whenever some uninformed know-it-all comes riding in
and tries to shoot up the results of two centuries of steady scholarly
progress. All the nicer to see it done so soberly.

Jens


From sonno3 at hotmail.com  Sun May  6 18:25:37 2001
From: sonno3 at hotmail.com (Christopher Gwinn)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 14:25:37 -0400
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.142537.0400.>

> True - though it does happen.  In fact the very French you mention is the
> result of one such occurrence.  A small minority of Romans managed to
> convert a much larger number of Gauls into speaking Latin.

There were a lot more Romans in Gaul than you might think (even if many of
them were ethnically Gaulish from Northern Italy, they were still thoroughly
Romanized).

We are also dealing with a literate culture versus a non-literate culture as
well as a culture with a more advanced governmental system versus a culture
whose own disunited a simpler governments were in flux. Once the Gauls were
conquered and forced into a new government which demanded knowledge of Latin
and also the ability to write in Latin for its governmental officials (many
of which were eventually gathered up from the local nobility), you see
bilingualism spreading quickly.

On top of this, the process of Romanization in Southern Gaul began long
before Caesar's conquest - the Roman lifestyle was quite attractive to the
Gauls and many of them had already developed a taste for it, which helped to
further Romanization in Gaul after the conquest. Many Southern Gauls prior
to the conquest likely already knew some Latin for purposes of trade with
the Romans.

The real death of Gaulish, however, was in Roman attitudes towards it - the
Romans considered the language to be inferior and ugly - something to be
embarrassed of. You couldn't be a proper Romano-Gaul and still speak
Gaulish. The nail in the coffin came with the spread of Christianity - the
failure to have a Bible commissioned in Gaulish meant that Latin was to
remain the language of religion (alongside of the government and trade).

I do not think that this situation is relevant, however, to the spread of
Celtic languages in a strictly non-literate Northern Europe in the Bronze or
Iron Ages.

- Chris Gwinn


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Sun May  6 15:36:42 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 16:36:42 +0100
Subject: IE versus *PIE
In-Reply-To: <bb.e0a472a.28210242@aol.com>
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.163642.0100.>

--On Wednesday, May 2, 2001 2:25 am +0000 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

[LT]

>> Linguistic work in the last twenty years has demonstrated beyond dispute
>> that linguistic descent can be, and sometimes is, far more complicated
>> than our conventional family-tree model would suggest.

> -- quite true.

> Although one should point out that the family-tree model is overwhelmingly
> more _common_; and should therefore be regarded as the "default mode"
> absent evidence to the contrary.

Indeed.  I want to make it clear that I agree with this, since that's the
way the evidence points.

My old friend Bob Dixon has recently been trying to persuade us otherwise.
So far I am not persuaded, but I'm listening.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun May  6 08:45:17 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 04:45:17 EDT
Subject: Degrees of similarity and early IE.
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.044517.EDT.>

As the saying goes, once may be coincidence, twice may be happenstance, but
the third time, something is going on.

When considering broad questions of IE origins, it's helpful to step back and
take a look at the situation -- the relative similarity -- of the first
attested examples.

Eg., Mycenaean Greek, RV Sanskrit, early Avestan, Latin (particularly the
older pre-Classic) examples, what's attested of early Celtic, the early runic
Germanic, Tocharian, etc.

Then throw in the more secure of the first-generation reconstructed
protolanguages; Proto-Germanic, Proto-Slavic, and so forth.  Both the latter
seem to be products of the 1st millenium BCE; the basic characteristic PG
changes are fairly securely datable to the Iron Age and not earlier, and
Slavic somewhat later still.

No two single examples would be conclusive in estimating the time-depth;
after all, if you look at, say, modern Lithuanian in comparison to, say RV
Sanskrit, it makes you blink.  If Lithuanian didn't exist, and we discovered
it via a corpus of written texts buried in caves the way we did Tocharian,
you'd swear it was 2000 years old.  Nobody would dispute that there are
potentially very wide disparities in the speed with which individual
languages _can_ change, given special circumstances, or that the rate of
change can be "jerky" rather than smooth.

But overall, the earliest attested and the most securely reconstructable
early IE languages are of a really startling degree of similarity, and there
are so many of them across such a broad geographical expanse, three-quarters
of the whole width of Eurasia.

Anatolian slightly apart, they seem to be no more diversified than the
Romance languages today; and if you throw in French, Anatolian doesn't look
at that much more so.  In fact, Anatolian is less aberrant than English is
vs. a vs. the other Germanic languages, and we know that they were all
mutually comprehensible only a little over a millenium ago.

Given the extremely broad _geographical_ spread of the IE languages at their
earliest attestation -- from the Atlantic to Chinese Turkistan, which means
pretty well complete linguistic separation -- the high degree of uniformity
between so _many_ widely separated languages virtually forces, I should
think, the hypothesis of relatively recent origin and (by historical
standards) extremely rapid spread over an area previously occupied by many
different languages.

That's certainly the mechanism by which we see similar situations occurring
in historic times -- the spread of Latin and its diversification, the spread
of the (quite unified) Slavic in the early medieval period, the growth of the
Arabic-speaking area, the spread of Chinese, and the spread of English.  If,
every time we have records, Phenomenon A has Cause B, then we're on fairly
sure ground in attributing Cause B when we meet Phenomenon A.

This fits in very neatly with the other evidence -- eg., the technology
expressed in the PIE lexicon -- to bracket the late neolithic as the period
of PIE unity. (Or to be more precise, as the _end_ of the period of PIE
linguistic unity.)  Much earlier, and the degree of geographic spread should
logically and by comparison have resulted in much greater linguistic
diversity.  The hypothesis of recent (within two millenia) spread from a
relatively small area at the time when our first records emerge most
parsimoniously explains the data.

None of this, of course, delivers the degree of conclusivity provided by a
mathematical theorem -- or even the degree of certainty we can use to show
that Latin spread out from a small nuclear area in central Italy.  But it's
about as much certainty as we can expect, given the sparse evidence and huge
stretches of time involved.


From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi  Sun May  6 11:29:54 2001
From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 14:29:54 +0300
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs; credit where credit is due
In-Reply-To: <006401c0b57d$10301560$4b2363d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.142954.0300.>

[ moderator edited ]

[Just when you thought it was safe, the ugly spectre of minimal pairs
rears its head again.  I apologize for being so tardy in getting to this,
but since the end of last year I have not been able to keep up with the
list.  I still have not caught up with the past month's postings, but
about all I have found out from the rest of the year's postings is that
Larry Trask is really Larry the Etruscan. :)]

Over a year ago, on Thu, 30 Mar 2000 21:00:45 +0300 (EET DST) I posted a
message in which I cited the minimal pair 'thigh' / 'thy' and then said:

 Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] and [dh] in
 English on the basis of this minimal pair ...

I considered this a fairly unremarkable statement, since it is obvious,
even by the rules of classical phonology, that this is not a phonemic
contrast.  (I will post a couple of very long messages in the next few
days, replies to messages posted last November that will demonstrate
this.)

I was somewhat surprised, therefore, when this was met with a storm of
protest of the type "Of course [T] and [D] are phonemes in English" since
I had never said that they were not.

But then on Tue, 25 Apr 2000 John McLaughlin posted the following
concerning my original post:

 What got my goat in his first post was the comment that (not quoting
 directly), "No one doubts that Modern English [th] and [dh] represent
 allophones of the same phoneme."

Now I have known John for quite some time as a participant in various
lists, and he is not given to flights of fancy and does not often
misconstrue things (at least not that badly :>).  Since John's perception
of what I had said was nowhere close to what I had actually said, I began
to wonder how he could have gone so far astray.

So I searched through the archives for a possible explanation and found
the following message posted by Peter Gray (I quote the entire message
as found in the archives):


-----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Date:         Mon, 3 Apr 2000 20:42:55 +0100
  Reply-To:     Indo-European at xkl.com
  Sender:       The INDO-EUROPEAN mailing list <indo-european at xkl.com>
  From:         petegray <petegray at btinternet.com>
  Subject:      Re: minimal pairs (was: PIE e/o Ablaut)
  Comments: To: Indo-European at xkl.com
  Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

  >> Most people would not insist on phonemic status for both [th] and [dh] in
  >> English

  Isn't there another minimal pair in   ether :  either  (at least in some
  dialects)?

  Peter
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Now Peter did not refer to my posting in his message (in fact that seems
to be sort of a trademark of his), but I don't believe that anyone was
in any doubt about where the statement came from.  I didn't pay any
attention to the message at the time because it had nothing to do with
what I was talking about, but since the crucial qualification of my
original statement was eliminated without even an ellipsis (another
trademark of Peter's), it made it appear that I was claiming something
that I was not.  For those of you who do grammar, the lack of a comma
after "English" shows that what follows is restrictive, i.e., it is
essential to the meaning of the main clause, not merely a modifier.

Now Peter may or may not have misunderstood the intent of my original
posting; it really doesn't matter, because his truncated statement
surely misrepresented it.  If Peter wanted to discuss whether [T] and
[D] are phonemes in English that was fine with me, but it had nothing
to do with the point I was trying to make.

But this explained John's misperception of my statements as well as the
wild rash of postings offering to prove the phonemicity of [T] and [D]
and suggesting that anyone who didn't believe in it was a few bricks
short of a load, and I'm afraid that I replied to the misstatements of
fact in these in much the same vein.  Most of these were, however, based
on a misunderstanding of what my claim was and so there is no point in
pursuing them on that basis (although I may respond to some of them for
other points when I have time).  The misunderstanding was caused by a
careless quotation out of context that I did not notice or correct at
the time.

This misquotation was regrettable in that it completely obscured the
point that I was trying to make, and forced the discussion into a
completely unproductive direction.  Particularly, the little contretemps
with John was regrettable because he actually had evidence of exactly
the point that I was trying to make, but this got lost in the discussion
of points that ware not at issue (or shouldn't have been).

To make it clear what my statement was about:  My entire point was that
[T] and [D] do not contrast in initial position in English.  My
statement was not about whether [T] and [D] are phonemes in English or
not.  The two are not necessarily related ([T] and [D] can still be
phonemes even if they don't contrast in some environments).

As I said, I don't consider this statement to be particularly
remarkable.  I had rather thought it was common knowledge (silly me;
perhaps there is no such thing as common knowledge in linguistics, or at
least not in phonology).  A good summary of the situation can be had
from Edward Finegan, "English" in Bernard Comrie (ed.), _The World's
Major Languages_ (London & Sydney: Croom Helm 1987), 77-109:

  Several notable differences between the consonant systems of Old
  English ... and Modern English can be mentioned.  The members of the
  three Modern English voiced and voiceless fricative pairs (/f/-/v/,
  /<theta>/-/<edh>/, /s/-/z/) were allophones of single phonemes in Old
  English, the voiced phones occuring between other voiced sounds, the
  voiceless phones occurring initially, finally and in clusters with
  voiceless obstruents.  Relics of the Old English allophonic
  distribution remain in the morphophonemic alternants _wife/wives_,
  _breath/breathe_ and _house/houses_, where the second word in each
  pair, disyllabic in Old English, voiced the intervocalic fricative.
  Significantly, initial /<edh>/ in Modern English is limited to the
  function words _the_, _this_, _that_, _these_, _those_, _they_ and
  _them_, _there_ and _then_, _thus_, _thence_, _though_ and _thither_,
  with initial voiceless /<theta>/ in Old English later becoming voiced
  by assimilation when unstressed, as these words often are.  Similarly,
  /<theta>/ does not occur medially in any native words, though it can
  be found in borrowings.  During the Middle English period, with the
  baring of the voiced phones word-finally when the syncreted
  inflections disappeared, the allophones achieved phonemic status,
  contrasting in most environments; there may have also been some
  Anglo-Norman influence, though not so much as is sometimes claimed.
  (pp. 90-91)

I find this to be an adequate summary of the situation, although it
skips over the difficult bits (but in a general work like this with
limited space and restrictions on the technical level of the discussion
one has to).  In general, it is descriptively adequate but not
necessarily explanatorily adequate.  Finegan has left himself an out,
however, when he says "contrasting in most environments."  A little
thought will show that lack of contrasts can only refer to [T D] since
[s z] and [f v] clearly contrast in all environments (initial, medial,
and final).  Thus room is left for a lack of contrast of [T D] in
initial position.  But, again, considering the type of publication, I
would have thought that this information was common knowledge, not some
outpost of hocus-pocus linguistics.

A. Sommerstein (_Modern Phonology_, Theoretical Linguistics 2 [London
1977]), in doing a classical phonological analysis of English (as an
example), puts the situation this way:

  There is no doubt that /<theta>/ and /<edh>/ contrast phonemically;
  but one might nevertheless feel that such a statement conceals an
  important fact.  For /<edh>/ occurs in initial position only in
  _grammatical_ morphemes:  the archaic second person pronoun _thou_
  (_thee_, _thy_, _thine_), the definite article, the root of a
  demonstrative (_that_, _there_, _then_, etc.):  /<theta>/, on the
  other hand, occurs initially only in _lexical_ morphemes.  This is
  complementary distribution, but not of a kind that a classical
  phonemic analysis can recognize; nor could the regularity be stated in
  the morphophonemic rules, since no alternation is involved.  If the
  regularity is to be stated at all, it must be as part of a set of
  principles governing the phonemic makeup of morphemes.

There are two points where this statement is at variance with my
observations.  First, no one (else) on this list seems to feel that
a statement about the phonemicity of [T] and [D] hides any facts at all,
important or not.  Finegan (cited above) points out the distributional
peculiarities of English [T] and [D], but these seem to be generally
unknown or, if known, considered unimportant, while Finegan considers
them "significant" (but without committing himself to why).

The second point is that, while it is true that the distribution of
initial [T D] in English is dependent on the morphemic structure of the
words involved, it is quite possible to capture this generalization
using the rules of classical phonology, so long as morphological
conditions to the extent of morpheme boundaries are permitted as
phonological conditions.  It is actually quite easy by using a
morphemic analysis similar to that already done by Z. Harris, _Methods
in Structural Linguistics_ (Chicago 1951), 192-93 or G. Trager,
_Language and Languages_, (1972), 76-79, and I am mildly surprised that
it does not seem to be obvious.  As I threatened earlier, I will have
a long, tedious, and doubtless boring posting on this (um der Moderator
es willen) very soon.

I know this kind of thing takes the fun out of the list which functions
best with lightning banter on which no great thought is expended <joke>,
but I haven't had a chance to do anything for 5 months, so please bear
with me.

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun May  6 08:52:41 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 04:52:41 EDT
Subject: Retroflexion
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.045241.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/6/01 2:31:55 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
dlwhite at texas.net writes:

> I note (with some trepidation) that L&M assert that having "high-domed
> palates", which renders retroflex articulations unsually easy to make and
> distinctive in sound, is an Indian racial trait.  I find it difficult to
> believe that it is just a
> coincidence that the one IE language that went into India developed such
> sounds

-- that's intriguing; is there any support for this in recent work on
physical anthropology?  And which Indian populations are L&M referring to?
If we're going back to the period of composition of the RV, then we're
probably talking about only the Indus Valley-Punjab-western Ganges areas,
which is not particularly similar in physical-anthropology terms to, say,
Orissa, and still less so to the Dravidian-speaking areas of the southern
penninsula.


From rao.3 at osu.edu  Tue May  8 16:24:47 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Tue, 8 May 2001 12:24:47 -0400
Subject: Retroflexion
Message-ID: <TUE.8.MAY.2001.122447.0400.>

"David L. White" <dlwhite at texas.net>

> The idea that only developments that cannot be explained internally should be
> explained externally (which seems to be lurking here) is nicely dismissed in
> one of the earlier chapters of Thomason and Kaufman.

What then is to stop us from proposing external influence in every
single case (or bacteria/viruses from comets for biological
explanation)? For example, what is to stop me attributing the emergence
of front rounded vowels to substratum influence of pre-IE European
langauges, or the Great Vowel Shift of English to whatever?

If memeory serves me right, Thomason and Kaufman use retroflexion in IA
as a prop for this dismissal. Since the adequacy of substratum
explanation for that is precisely what we are discussing, it seems
circular to invoke them as authorities here. What we need are
>independent< criteria for comparing internal and external explanations
and testing the latter in the case of retroflexion.

For me, the criterion is simply which explains more and requires least
amount of special
pleading to explain >all< relevant data. Substratum explanations for
retroflexion simply ignore all the troublesome details about Prakrits.]

> > Turning now to substratum explanations:
>         What is the supposed origin of the contrast between palato-alveolar
> and aleopalatal sibilants in the first place?

Huh? The claim is that the distinction is rare to non-existent. If you
mean why laminal vs apical distinction should come about, the question
is badly phrased: ruki-s ( -> apical) and affricate (?) outcome of PIE
k' were distinct to begin with. The origin is the assibilization of k'
which lead to ruki-s becoming retroflex to maintain the distinction.

> I note (with some trepidation) that L&M assert that having "high-domed
> palates", which renders retroflex articulations unsually easy to make and
> distinctive in sound, is an Indian racial trait.

I missed who L&M are. And is this a statistical trait, or absolute
trait? [retroflexes are absolute trait of Indian languages, not limited
to individuals with high-domed palates.] And what about other
languages/dialects that have/had retroflex sounds?

BTW, there is another change that proponents of substratum influence for
retroflexion don't mention. The dentals seem to have moved forward.
Rk-Praati"sakhya calls the dentals "dantamu:li:ya". [I have heard this
attributed to Kashmiri pronunciation as well.] But today, the dentals
are pronounced as inter-dentals (tongue between the teeth or at the
bottom of the top teeth). Why not attribute this to substratum too? [And
what racial trait would this reflect?] The alternate, neutral
explanation is that Dravidian had the threefold distinction of dental vs
alveolar vs retroflex and the pronunciation tended to make for maximal
differences between them.

>         What is this thing " 's "?  A palatalized /s/ or just a typo?

It was meant to be what in TeX will be \'s: s with an accute mark over
it, the usual transliteration of the palatal (laminal) shibilant. Normal
convention for those using ASCII us "s, which I forgot.

> One of the more common ways of making a [s^] sound is effectively
> semi-retroflex.

But then you are reducing the distinction between "s and .s!

> "Language X" could well have died out in the interval, and would hardly be
> expected to reach out and exert any sort of influence from the grave.

What "Language X"? Till now substratum explanations have tended to
attribute retroflexion to Dravidian influence, with occassional nod
towards Munda. In borrowed words and syntactic matters, their influence
grows till Pali at any rate. Bringing in a "Language X" with unknown
phonology hardly explains anything. [Language X, Para-Munda etc are
posits as sources of words in I-Ir and IA with unexplainable etymology.
It is not even clear how many languages are
involved, much less what their structure was.]

> [...]  Indeed traditional Sanskrit grammar, if I have understood it
> correctly, regards the difference between /r/ and /l/ as being that
> /r/ is retroflex whereas /l/ is dental.

Strangely enough, that is not true. Assigning r to retroflex series is a
comparatively late development. The earliest phonological notices
consider r to be produced at the gum line (dantamu:li:ya) or as alveolar
(barsvya). [Norwegian r was not retroflex, I am told.]

> Again we, or at least I, must wonder, if this sort of thing is normal from
> internal causes alone, 1) why we do not see it more often, and 2) why it
> happened only in India, where the pre-IE population was probably both
> racially and linguistically pre-disposed to favor retroflexes.

Wasn't the whole point Hock's objections that retroflexes are not unique
to India, but are found elsewhere?

>         It would seem better to answer both questions than neither.
> One good question would be why the development was to /s^/ in Avestan and
> /.s/ in Sanskrit rather than the other way around.

Because, in Avestan, PIE k' went to /s/. So there was just one shibilant
(if we ignore the one from *rt).

Actually, once I pressed M. C. Vidal on this point in the Indology list
as to why we should not posit a retroflex shibilant to Proto-Iranian as
well. One can just get around it by making the various relevant changes
occur in a precise sequence (see
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9808&L=indology&P=R2172
). But that is not accepted by all. Beekes (JIES, late 1990s) ,for
example, attributes a retroflex shibilant to PI-Ir reflex of ruki-s.

> [...]  But please note that I am not questioning that the various
> retroflexes were phonemic in Sanskrit (after a time),

If you accept that real words count as do sandhi variants but not
accent, then u:dhas (udder) vs u:.dhas (<*wgh'tos) is a minimal pair of
unimpeccably IE words. I thought that even one pair is
enough.

> What I would guess is that in the few cases where a retroflex-conditioning
> environment went to zero, this was in part because very many speakers already
> possessed the ability to hear retroflexes as phonemic, so that for them, no
> new contrast was created.

Does this theory apply to every phoneme split? Are they all are due to
external influence? If not, what is special about retroflexion?

Note that retroflex stops from /rt/, ruki-s+t etc become phonemic in
Prakrits due to simplification of consonant clusters. Due to diglossia
that must go back to even Middle to Late Vedic, IA speakers would have
made this distinction anyway.

BTW, Proto-Dravidian /rt/ survives in (Formal) Tamil. Hock gives a map
of the fate of /rt/. It depends on geography, not on language family.
How do you reconcile this with substratum explanations?

Regards
Nath


From dlwhite at texas.net  Sun May  6 13:40:04 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 08:40:04 -0500
Subject: DLW's Error on Retroflexion
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.084004.0500.>

        The reference to "high-domed" palates among Indians that I referred
to is actually,upon examination, a reference to "deep" palates among the
Toda, so I am guilty of mis-remembering and rather massively
over-generalizing, though, since the Toda are generally (I think) considered
of South Indian racial type, finding the same sort fo thing elsewhere,
perhaps to a lesser degree, would not be surprising.

Dr. David L. White


From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu  Sun May  6 15:01:46 2001
From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 10:01:46 -0500
Subject: [Help] Phonetic transcription of an Old Irish text
In-Reply-To: <01e101c0d351$3a8859c0$d150f2c3@gundapc>
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.100146.0500.>

The book, An Introduction to Old Irish, by R.P.M. Lehmann & W. P. Lehmann
(1975, Modern Language Assoc. of America Press), begins with a phonetic
transcription of Mac Datho's pig and explains the system, in case you want
a precedent for comparison with what you are doing.

Carol Justus

>Hello everyone,
>
>[please note that English  is not my mother tongue]
>
>    I'm working on Old Irish phonetics and transcription rules, and would
>need some help : I'm trying to make a phonetic transcription of a text
>(from _Sc?l Mucci Mic Dath?_), but I cannot manage to figure out where
>some lenited consonants might be

[ moderator snip ]

>Vincent Ramos
>France


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun May  6 09:20:58 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 05:20:58 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.052058.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/6/01 3:02:02 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
mclasutt at brigham.net writes:

> The Persian Fallow Deer (Dama mesopotamica or Dama dama mesopotamica) did,
> indeed, exist (and was common) throughout Asia Minor before the modern era.
> It's butchered bones have been found as far west as Cyprus and the Aegean
> littoral.

-- thank you; that _is_ interesting.

It also reinforces the point that the PIE vocabulary lacks terms for the
fauna specific to the southern and middle "tier" of Eurasia -- the
mediterranean zone, Asia Minor, Iran, the Levant.

It _does_ have a fairly complete vocabulary for the _northern_ part of
Eurasia; the zone that stretches from the middle Urals into eastern Europe.
Bears, wolves, aurochs, red deer, elk, etc., yes;  lions, leopards,
tigers, chamois, fallow deer, no.

When you combine this with the existance of specifically PIE loans in
proto-Finno-Ugrian, which by pretty well universal consent had an urheimat
in the central and northern Urals...


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun May  6 09:41:35 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 05:41:35 EDT
Subject: Urheimat animals
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.054135.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/6/01 3:27:06 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
centrostudilaruna at libero.it writes:

> I think we could add to the sentence whales, beavers, elks, many kinds of
> birds and salmons too

-- I would certainly agree on "beaver" (PIE *bhebhrus).  Note that Avestan
retains a derivative with exactly the same meaning -- bawra, 'beaver',
bawraini, 'of the/pertaining to beavers'.

Now, in Old Indian/Sanskrit, there has been a semantic shift; there's a
cognate term, babhru, but it means 'mongoose'.

So the more northerly Indo-Iranian languages retained the original meaning,
while in the southerly one, moving into an area where beavers weren't
known, shifted the term to a roughly similar animal.  Similar in color, at
least; Sanskrit babhru also means 'red-brown', and the derivation from a
color term is obvious in PIE *babhrus.

The neolithic range of the beaver stopped well short of the mediterranean
and most of Anatolia.  Again, this reinforces the PIE lexicon for animals
as being specifically north-central Eurasian.

As for salmon, there's a very similar fish present in rivers draining into
the Pontic-Caspian area, and so PIE *loks could have referred either to
this, to the Atlantic salmon, or to both.  In my opinion, probably to both,
or it just meant something like "a big river fish with reddish meat".

Note that in Tocharian (which was spoken in an area with nothing resembling
a salmon) a cognate word has undergone semantic shift to mean just "fish"
in general.


From alderson+mail at panix.com  Mon May  7 17:46:09 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 13:46:09 -0400
Subject: Urheimat animals
In-Reply-To: <000401c0d3d3$ef033960$d4641597@minitorre>
 (centrostudilaruna@libero.it)
Message-ID: <MON.7.MAY.2001.134609.0400.>

On 3 May 2001, Alberto Lombardo wrote:

> I think we could add to the sentence whales, beavers, elks, many kinds of
> birds and salmons too (Thieme 1953). It brings to north in the search of the
> native homeland.

There has of course been a great deal of work since Thieme, much informed by
more recent developments in paleobotany and paleoclimatology.  Besides the work
on IE tree names (Friedrich, _Proto-Indo-European Trees_), there was a paper I
read in pre-print on the salmonid fishes of Europe and Asia which concluded
that the salmon of Thieme's work is not the only candidate for the referent of
the PIE etymon *lok'so-.  (I apologize for being sketchy on the details, but it
was 25 years ago, and being passed from hand to hand among a group of graduate
students.  If anyone can identify it, that would be very helpful.)

								Rich Alderson


From dlwhite at texas.net  Sun May  6 13:56:11 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 08:56:11 -0500
Subject: Normanization of England
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.085611.0500.>

> At 11:08 PM 4/29/01 -0400, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>> Even when people 'convert' to a new language, they have to learn it from
>> _somebody_; ie., native speakers.  Furthermore, there are more and less
>> likely was for this to happen; in a premodern context, small intrusive
>> minorities generally get absorbed by their linguistic surroundings rather
>> than vice versa, even if they're politically dominant. (Which is why this
>> conversation is not being conducted in Norman French.)  Learning a new
>> language is difficult for adults, and is seldom undertaken without very
>> strong motivation.

> True - though it does happen.  In fact the very French you mention is the
> result of one such occurrence.  A small minority of Romans managed to
> convert a much larger number of Gauls into speaking Latin.

> I wonder if part of the difference wasn't time.  The Norman French
> incursion into England was essentially a single pulse, after which there
> was little additional immigration - indeed the French crown quickly forced
> the Norman nobles in England to renounce their French lands, effectively
> separating the two groups.

        The situation with Norman, and the failure of Normanization in
England, is indeed a little more complex than mere numbers.  The
extraordinary successes of Philip Augustus not only cut off the English
Normans from their French lands but created feelings of rivalry between the
two groups, such as were later evidenced in the Hundred Years War.  If it
had been King John that was an extraordinary success, and Philip Augustus
who was an incompetent idiot, matters might have developed differently.
        But probably not, for another factor here is that the Normans took
themselves very seriously as kings of England, as opposed to overlords of
some wet green land, and never contemplated extirpating English
institutions, of which language was one.  Thus when it came time for
England, in the eyes of Henry II, to have a better legal code, English law
was used as the basis, though importing Norman law would have been possible.
I think if we could go back and ask them, they would express surprise at
those who express surprise that Norman did not become the language of
England.   Such a development was never contemplated.
        Digressing a bit, in the case of Mednyj Aleut it seems that about 30
Russians among about 300 Aleuts were enough to wholly transform the the
native language.  Actually, I dispute this interpretation, but what did not
happen was that the Russians were linguisticaly absorbed into the Aleuts.
Part of the reason for what happened seems to have been that Aleut verbal
morphology, being unusually complex, was unusually diffiucult for the
Russians to learn, so even such a nebulous concept as language difficulty
can be a factor in such situations.

Dr. David L. White


From dlwhite at texas.net  Sun May  6 14:00:44 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 09:00:44 -0500
Subject: Semivowels In Sanskrit
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.090044.0500.>

        What is interesting, I think, is that /vy-/ (or /wy-/) occurred
though /yv-/ (or /yw-) did not.  This suggest a sound annoyingly
intermediate (to our theoretical notions) between /v/ and /w/.  The same
syndrome occurs in Germanic, were we find things like the ancestor of modern
English "write", with no cases of /yr/.

Dr. David L. White


From petegray at btinternet.com  Tue May  8 19:23:32 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Tue, 8 May 2001 20:23:32 +0100
Subject: semivowels
Message-ID: <TUE.8.MAY.2001.202332.0100.>

> I doubt that krya or #rya occur.

I can't offer you krya or #rya-, but how about these for word internal
examples of -rya-?

The root ghr forms a causative in gha:ryate (alongside the more normal
gha:rayati).

The root gr/ja:gr "wake" forms ja:garyat.

The root gr "sing" forms the suffix -gi:rya.

The root kr "scatter" has an aorist ki:ryat, and a derived suffix -ki:rya.

The root kr "do" has ka:rya as a 'gerundive'.

You might also like to consider optatives in the parasmaipada, where -ya:-
is added to weak forms of the stem.

Peter


From stevegus at aye.net  Mon May  7 03:18:57 2001
From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 23:18:57 -0400
Subject: Umlaut in Crimean Gothic
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.231857.0400.>

David L. White wrote:

>         I suppose it should be noted, though it does not matter a great
> deal, that finding /i/-umlaut in Gothic (I have not been paying rapt
> attention, but I believe that was what was meant) is not terribly
> surprising.  At the time that Gothic is attested, none of the Germanic
> languages had /i/-umlaut (save possibly of /e/ to /i/?).  Its absence in
> Gothic is thus to be taken largely as an archaism, a matter of time, not
> space.

As Ed Selleslagh and Oliver Neukum pointed out, the spellings that looked
like they showed evidence of i-umlaut may have in fact been artifacts of a
Dutch spelling system that adds an 'e' to indicate a long vowel, so that the
'oe' of Busbecq's writing may have in fact represented /o:/ rather than /0/
or /oe/.

Another of Busbecq's spellings that took me aback was "schuuester."  What
would have been the value of 'sch' here?  Palatisation of the /s/ in
'swistar' to /sh/ seems unlikely in this environment, as does its conversion
to /sk/.   Might this be a German contamination?

--
What the world needs is another great war to kill off a generation of
overachievers.

Ceterum censeo sedem Romanam esse delendam.


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sun May  6 08:09:51 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 09:09:51 +0100
Subject: Stiff Voice/Slack Voice
Message-ID: <SUN.6.MAY.2001.090951.0100.>

> /DHEDH/ roots.  ... stiff voice ....  Either way, /DHET/ roots or /TEDH/
> roots, which do not occur (at least commonly), would be impossible, as
> neither an original stiff vowel nor an original slack vowel could lead to
> such a result.

Interestingly modern Panjabi now uses the aspirate as a tone marker.
Although the aspirate (or the letter h) is still written, there is no
aspiration at all, and before the vowel the consonant is also devoiced.
Before a vowel it indicates low tone, after it, high tone.  So DHEDH
syllables are now impossible.

Peter


From edsel at glo.be  Mon May  7 11:22:04 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 13:22:04 +0200
Subject: Flemish/Dutch dialectology
Message-ID: <MON.7.MAY.2001.132204.0200.>

[ Subject: changed by moderator ]

----- Original Message -----
From: "petegray" <petegray at btinternet.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2001 9:01 PM

> Despite my stupid wording, the polyglot character of life in the Low
> Countries is still an interesting phenomenon, which may help us understand
> potential parallels in other times and places.

> Peter

[Ed Selleslagh]
It sure is interesting, maybe even more than you seem to think:

You were considering the use of other European languages, but there is more:
the sometimes very divergent Flemish/Dutch dialects (Ingwaeonic/Frisian/West-
Flemish, Brabants, Hollands, Saxon, Limburgs...) can be as different among
themselves as Castilian, Catalan and Portuguese, possibly more. Their genesis -
and later partial convergence and mixing - may shed some light on the
mechanisms underlying differentiation of PIE.

Some of these dialects are e.g. strongly palatalizing, velarizing, or
diphtongation-prone, others are not or in a different way. Verb forms may
differ subastantially, e.g. absence of 'ge-' in Saxon participles, preservation
of verbs as 'strong' etc...And all that in an area like three times
Massachusetts (Flanders - 6 million out of 21 million native Dutch speakers -
is a bit smaller than that state).

I got the impression - rightly or wrongly - that most of the litterature on the
subject is largely descriptive, or concerned with the problems of bilingualism
(official Dutch-local dialect) or the emergence of the modern standard
language.

Ed.


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Mon May  7 16:23:04 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 11:23:04 -0500
Subject: Olives/was: Lactose Intolerance/Renfrew
Message-ID: <MON.7.MAY.2001.112304.0500.>

Dear Andrew and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: <Insouciant at aol.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2001 7:49 AM

[ moderator snip ]

> First, let's derive <oli:va>:

> *eleiwa: 'olive' > *oleiwa: (possibly due to the 'pinguis', i.e. velar,
> nature of a final l) > *oli:wa: (cf. di:co : deiknumi) > ol:iva

[ moderator snip ]

[PCR]
For whatever it may contribute to the discussion, I think there is a fair
possibility that *eleiwa: can be analyzed as consisting of *el-, 'brown' +
*eiwa:, 'yew', itself a composite of *ei-, 'red' + **we/o-, 'berry'. Please
notice the double asterisks for **we/o-; I am aware that it would be difficult
to prove this root from inside IE.

Pat

PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th
St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE:
http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ec
at ec hecc, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim
mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138)


From hwhatting at hotmail.com  Mon May  7 11:50:52 2001
From: hwhatting at hotmail.com (Hans-Werner Hatting)
Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 13:50:52 +0200
Subject: Pelasgian/was Etruscans
Message-ID: <MON.7.MAY.2001.135052.0200.>

On Sat, 05 May 2001 06:52:55 Douglas G Kilday wrote:

>> These proposals are too numerous and too complicated to repeat here -- and
>> they not infrequently involve even more far-flung words, such as German
>> <Blei> 'lead', Georgian <brp'eni> 'lead', Hebrew <bdi:l> 'lead', and a
>> reported Berber <buldun> 'tin'.

> Hebrew <b'dhiyl> means 'tin'; <!o:phereth> is 'lead'. These are contrasted
> in the enumeration of metals (Num. 31:22). The former is probably derived
> from <b-d-l> 'to separate'. For this connection to work in a relatively
> sane way, one would have to assume that Punic used <b'dhiyl> vel sim. for
> 'lead' instead of 'tin', and that the word diffused through Iberia to the
> Basque Country undergoing peculiar phonetic changes. I certainly wouldn't
> endorse this one.

This would not be the only case of "tin" and "lead" being mixed up in
cognate languages, e.g., Russian <olovo> means "tin", while the Polish
equivalent <olowo> (with barred <l>) means "lead". But as long  as we do not
know the Punic word for lead, this is speculation, and DGK seems right to be
cautious.

Best regards,
Hans-Werner Hatting


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Mon May  7 17:33:52 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 12:33:52 -0500
Subject: Pelasgian Place-names
In-Reply-To: <000701c0d2b0$60ddce80$466163d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <MON.7.MAY.2001.123352.0500.>

>> How old a god is Tarhun(d/t)?  Could he possibly be pre-Anatolian (ie.
>> Pelasgian on the theory that Pelasgian <> Anatolian)?

>        I do not know, but the form of the name is very close to Etruscan
>version of "Tarchun", as in various names that come down in Latin as
>"Tarquin-", which is a little suspicious.

	Would the source of Latin tarquin- /tarkwin, tar_qu_in/ & Etruscan
tarchun /tarkhun?, tarxun?/ be something like /tarhwin, tarxwin/ ?

	Early Latin had an /h/, and borrowed Greek /kh/ was usually
transcribed as <ch>, so I'm guessing the <qu-> had to come from something
else
	Or is it possible that Etrucan <chu-> was a conventional spelling
for /khw-/?

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


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Mon May  7 22:02:35 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 17:02:35 -0500
Subject: Three-Way Contrast of Secondary Articulations in PIE
Message-ID: <MON.7.MAY.2001.170235.0500.>

Dear Stanley and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stanley Friesen" <sarima at friesen.net>
Sent: Wednesday, May 02, 2001 9:58 PM

<snip>

[PCRp]
>> First, there are no infixes in IE.

[SF]
> I am not sure what else to call the nasal present formation.  It sure isn't
> a suffix!

[PCR]
That is exactly what I would call it: a suffix --- that has methasized.

[SF]
> Let's see, from the root *bheug you get the present *bhunegti. Looks like
> an infix to me.

[PCR]
The normal formation is from *bhu-n-g-ti or *bhu-n-kti. Yes, *bhunegti can be
reconstructed on the basis Old Indian bhun?kti but this is a fish swimming
against the stream.

[PCRp]
>> Second, for these 'roots' to be able to have maintained semantic integrity,
>> they must have been distinguishable in some fashion. The suffixes, etc.
>> (better root-extensions) are an attempt to continue distinctions that were
>> lost with the glides.

[SF]
> While I agree many of the roots probably originally were distinct, I do not
> think we yet have sufficient information to tell in what manner.  I
> certainly doubt there was a single cause for all of the mergers.

[PCR]
First, our agreement: there is rarely a single cause for anything.

But -- putting glides aside, how were they kept separate?

Glides is the most parsimonious explanation.

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 dlwhite at texas.net  Mon May  7 23:54:33 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 18:54:33 -0500
Subject: DLW's Renewed Absence
Message-ID: <MON.7.MAY.2001.185433.0500.>

        As my never-ending efforts to get a life, someday become a real boy,
etc., seem, however unaccountably, to be bearing some fruit, I am going to
have to vanish for two or three months, in order to prepare two conference
papers in that time (not to mention that the deadline on the other one,
which is still far from perfect, got extended, a mixed blessing indeed.)
Just a few notes before I check out.
        Apologies to DGK to mis-interpreting his "one" as a "we".  The same
process has been noted in colloquial French, so I suppose I am in good
company.  The answer to my question "Why bother?" is "Because of the Old
European place-names", which I admit I overlooked.  But I do not see that
substituting for 1) Herodotus, optatives and all, 2) the Aeneid and
associated legends, and 3) an archeologocailly unfalsifiable hypothesis
positing Proto-Etruscans in the northern Aegean, 1) nothing, 2) nothing, and
3) an archeologically unfalsifiable hypothesis positing proto-Etrucans
somewhere else, really helps very much.
        With regard to "mixed languages", I am of course aware of the
supposed examples in Thomason and Kaufmann.  I must however object to their
assertion that, in influence between languages, "anything goes".  There are
at least two things that do not go:  1) mixed finite verbal morphology, and
2) redundant suffixes from a primary language intruded, rather than added
to, verbal forms of a secondary language.  To illustrate the second, I note
that when Turkish sufiixes were added on to Greek verbs and suffixes in
(dying) Anatolian Greek, they were indeed added on, so that the order of
elements was Greek verb + Greek sufix + Turkish suffix.  Apparently things
like Greek verb + Turkish suffix + Greek suffix do not occur.  This is
perhaps not terribly surprising, but it is not what an assertion that
"anything goes" would suggest.   Mixed nominal morphology, by the way, does
occur, if I am right in remembering that the Rumanian feminine vocative os
from Bulgarian.
        Taking all these things together, plus the fact that finite verbs
are ordinarily "higher in the tree" than NPs, I suggest that the genetic
descent of a language can always (theoretically) be traced through finite
verbal morphology, where this exists.  This will never be mixed, and its
affixes will always be found closer to lexical verbs than are foreign
affixes, if the examples I am aware of are a reliable guide.  Using this
standard, Mednyj Aleut is Russian, Michif is Cree, and Ma'a is Bantu.  Each
is a rather bizarre and severely influenced version of its putative genetic
ancestor, but technically there is little reason to think that what Thomason
and Kaufmann call "normal transmission" of finite verbal morphology has in
fact been interrupted, for in each case it is there, unmixed and un-intruded
upon. To some extent it is a matter of what we call things rather than what
they are,  but in any event I thought it worthwhile to point out that the
somewhat wild claims of Thomason and Kaufmann are arguably exaggerated, as
there are restrictions 1) that they fail to note, and 2) that can at least
possibly be used to determine genetic descent, considerably reducing the
incidence of "linguo-genesis" and/or "mixed languages", perhaps to zero.  Be
all this as it may, I am sure Dr. Trask would not assert that any of the
extreme developments adduced by Thomason and Kaufmann have anything to do
with Proto-Celtic, so we are at least in agreement on that.  Not only is the
finite verbal morphology of Celtic clearly IE, so is the nominal morphology.
        My answer to Dr. Justus's question is that my source is Palmer's
("the Greek Language") transliteration into Roman characters, and I have no
idea what it is based on.

Dr. David L. White


From cjustus at mail.utexas.edu  Thu May 10 01:24:55 2001
From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus)
Date: Wed, 9 May 2001 20:24:55 -0500
Subject: University of Texas Indo-European website
Message-ID: <WED.9.MAY.2001.202455.0500.>

[ moderator edited ]

Our website has moved from

	www.dla.utexas.edu/depts/lrc

to

	www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/lrc

All the subparts, including the IE Documentation Center and the JIES index
have also moved. We are not longer on the 'dla' but on 'cola'. Everything
else should be the same.


From sarima at friesen.net  Thu May 10 05:51:14 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Wed, 9 May 2001 22:51:14 -0700
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <6d.1384ddc8.28264d7a@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.9.MAY.2001.225114.0700.>

At 02:47 AM 5/6/01 -0400, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>In a message dated 5/5/01 9:06:24 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
>sarima at friesen.net writes:

>> True - though it does happen.  In fact the very French you mention is the
>> result of one such occurrence.  A small minority of Romans managed to
>> convert a much larger number of Gauls into speaking Latin.

>-- it does happen, but Gaul may not be such a good example.  Recent
>investigations indicate a much more dramatic settlement of Italian
>Latin-speakers in the western provinces than previously thought.  Something
>like 30% or more of the citizen population of Italy was resettled in the
>provinces during the reign of Augustus alone -- and there had already been
>hundreds of thousands before him.  This represented the migration of
>something like 2-3 million Latin-speaking individuals.

1. They were spread over many provinces.
2. Gaul was quite populous on its own.

So, the result was still a minority of Italians in Gaul establishing the
Latin language.

>Further, since they were settled as communities, they had the all-important
>_local_ majority in areas of intensive colonization, even where they
>represented minorities of the overall provincial populations.

This may be a key factor in a minority converting a majority - local
"dense" colonies.

>Also, with the Roman state, there were institutions of Romanization (and
>hence Latinization); the army, particularly, where people from many
>linguistic backgrounds were taken away from home and submerged in a
>Latin-speaking environment, and then released back into the civilian world
>as veterans, with their families.  That would have been at least several
>thousand familes in Gaul, every year -- and concentrated in the northern
>districts where civilian colonization wasn't so heavy.

As I said - one factor was the continuing influx of Latin speakers over
several centuries.  It continually renewed the Latin base.

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


From lmfosse at online.no  Thu May 10 09:14:02 2001
From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 11:14:02 +0200
Subject: SV: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.111402.0200.>

David L. White [SMTP:dlwhite at texas.net] skrev 6. mai 2001 16:21:
>         There is good evidence of something like Semitic influence,
> sub-stratal or not, in Insular Celtic, and I suspected when I first read Dr.
> Trask's initial posting that something like this woud lie behind the views
> of the "No-Proto-Celtic" crowd.  The typological lurch of Insular Celtic
> toward Semitic, illusory (in terms of actual Semites) or not, does indeed
> make it difficult to construct a unified proto-language.  Difficult, but not
> impossible.  Such questions as how and when Insular Celtic wound up
> verb-initial and so on just have to be answered at some point.  They do no
> make proto-Celtic unviable, or suggest any such scenario as just given
> above.

As far as I know, Old Norse is also verb-initial. Should we assume Semitic
influence there too?

Would it be possible to get a list of features that point in the direction of
Semitic?

Best regards,

Lars Martin Fosse

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


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Thu May 10 19:31:44 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 14:31:44 -0500
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <004501c0d636$400632e0$b36063d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.143144.0500.>

	As a non-linguist, I'll have to take your word on that but could
someone explain the seeming complexity of mutations wrought by Irish
numbers on following consonants. As I remember some numbers don't cause
mutation, and there are two types of mutations caused by other numbers

>        French liasion is abstractly similar to Celtic mutation, for both
>might be described as the phonemicization of originally phonetic processes
>occurring across boundaries.  I think there probably is a link, as other
>suspiciously Celtic-seeming things occur in French, such as excessive (to my
>mind) clefting.
>        But be that as it may, mutations are actually fairly common,
>according to my understanding,  in sub-standard dialects of Romance and
>Greek.  An examples from Tuscan appears in the Encyclopedia Brittanica
>(1973?) article on Celtic, and someone wrote a book on the subject a while
>back.
>
>Dr. David L. White

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


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Thu May 10 19:34:13 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 14:34:13 -0500
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <004d01c0d637$cddc8320$b36063d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.143413.0500.>

	Besides Insular Celtic's VSO structure. Could you elaborate?

>        There is good evidence of something like Semitic influence,
>sub-stratal or not, in Insular Celtic, and I suspected when I first read Dr.
>Trask's initial posting that something like this woud lie behind the views
>of the "No-Proto-Celtic" crowd.  The typological lurch of Insular Celtic
>toward Semitic, illusory (in terms of actual Semites) or not, does indeed
>make it difficult to construct a unified proto-language.  Difficult, but not
>impossible.  Such questions as how and when Insular Celtic wound up
>verb-initial and so on just have to be answered at some point.  They do no
>make proto-Celtic unviable, or suggest any such scenario as just given
>above.

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


From colkitto at sprint.ca  Sat May 12 18:51:27 2001
From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr)
Date: Sat, 12 May 2001 14:51:27 -0400
Subject: IE versus *PIE
Message-ID: <SAT.12.MAY.2001.145127.0400.>

[ moderator edited ]

I think part of the problem is that family tree diagrams tend to be
oversimplified.  A close reading of the relevant passages of Dixon's book
shows that he seems to arguing for some sort of recognition  that family
tree diagrams should be far more complex than normally presented.

One analogy that we should consider is bushes which can sprout branches
which later can fuse again, or can fuse with branches from other bushes.  Of
course, it may be impossible to reduce such complexity to a page, and
linguists may have to discuss family trees in the same way that
cartographers discuss Mercator's Projection (even Peter's may not entirely
free of such problems.)

Robert Orr

>>> Linguistic work in the last twenty years has demonstrated beyond dispute
>>> That linguistic descent can be, and sometimes is, far more complicated
>>> Than our conventional family-tree model would suggest.

>> -- quite true.

>> Although one should point out that the family-tree model is overwhelmingly
>> more _common_ and should therefore be regarded as the "default mode" absent
>> evidence to the contrary.

>Indeed.  I want to make it clear that I agree with this, since that's the
>way the evidence points.

>My old friend Bob Dixon has recently been trying to persuade us otherwise.
>So far I am not persuaded, but I'm listening.

>Larry Trask


From dlwhite at texas.net  Thu May 10 14:41:24 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 09:41:24 -0500
Subject: Brief Note on OE
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.094124.0500.>

[ Moderator's note:
  The following qouted material is taken from a posting by JoatSimeon at aol.com
  dated 30 Apr 2001 00:01:04 EDT.
  -- rma ]

> English has a massive freight of lexical items from Latin and the Romance
> languages; in total (though not in frequency of use) almost as much as it
> derives from its Germanic parent.  And its syntax bears very little
> resemblance to Proto-Germanic or to Old English.

> This, however, affects the _genetic_ relationships involved not at all.
> English is a Germanic language, and if we had no record of Old English, we
> could reconstruct it (and the intervening stages) quite accurately from
> cognate languages and the modern speech.

        Not really.  There is no evidence of the so-called short diphthongs,
an essential part of OE as it is traditionally construed (but see Daunt
1939), in other Germanic or in later English, notwithstanding the somewhat
desparate and confused efforts of Kuhn and Quirk to show otherwise in their
response to Barritt and Stockwell.

Dr. David L. White


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu May 10 17:14:46 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 13:14:46 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.131446.EDT.>

In a message dated 4/30/2001 2:44:19 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com writes:
<< Likewise, PIE lacks a word for the fallow deer, common throughout southern
Europe, but has terms for 'elk' and 'red deer'.... The logical conclusion
would be that the IE languages were intrusive in areas which had... fallow
deer,... and native to an area with roe deer...>>

I believe all or most members of this list are motivated by a sincere
scholarly interest in the truth, no matter how it may turn out.  The
difficulty here is that the "anti-Anatolian" position is in such a majority
on this list that it's difficult to keep up with all assertions of the type
above.  So, this is why I am suggesting that, even if you agree with the
"anti-Anatolian" position, it might be worthwhile looking at statements like
the one above with a critical eye.  What I'm attempting to do is just point
out examples of problems that may not be obvious unless one takes a step back.

I think when one (even the most "anti-Anatolian") does take a step back and
looks at the statements above critically, if only for the moment, one becomes
more and more unhappy with their value as evidence.

Take the example of the fallow deer mentioned so often in the topic bars
recently.

Consider, for example, that when English speakers came to America, they
impliedly misppplied the very deer names mentioned above.  The American Elk
is in fact the same species as the European Red Deer.  The European Elk, on
the other hand, is the same species as the American Moose.  Anyone familiar
with these two types of deer, not just in appearance but also in terms of
what they output, will know how big a miscue this was.  What is striking here
is that IE speakers were giving animals they were supposedly already quite
familiar with completely opposite names.

Champlain and DeSoto also reported back the wide presence of "Dama" and
"Dain" (names for fallow deer) in America, when in fact there were no fallow
deer in America.  They probably saw small spotted whitetail fawns and that
would be a very easy mistake to make.  In fact, French Canadians continued to
use the fallow deer name for the American Whitetail Deer into the 20th
Century.   (And it should be pointed out that the fallow deer is most
definitely a deer.  It is probably in fact, in one of its many variations,
the famous white stag of legend.)

Someone, a relatively disinterested outsider, might take this alone to
undermine the idea that there was any necessary connection between the names
for elk, red deer and fallow deer and any particular types of deer.
Especially when IE speakers were faced with a much more difficult task than
the american colonists.  Retaining specific meanings as the language spread
from wherever over a very large geographic areas in the days before picture
books.  And over thousands of years.

And the problem here is not phonology or morphology or the comparative
method.  It simply is that the names just don't seem to stick to the objects
that reliably.
And it simply means that IE speakers could have used one name in one place
and another name in another place for the same deer or vice versa.

In fact, the very name used for the Red Deer, for example, suggests that it
wasn't a name for just the Red Deer initially.  Buck's universal "cervus" is
reconstructed in *PIE by many as *ker-wo-s, consisting of the root *ker,
meaning "horn," a nomimalizing suffix -wo-, and the nominative singular
inflection -s.  Wild goats, aurochs, roedeer all have horns.  Female red deer
never have horns and they make up the great majority of the actual red deer
population.  It's possible from this to suspect that *ker-wo-s did not mean
"red deer" in PIE.  There's no indication it ever meant red deer in Greek.
Like the word "deer" itself, perhaps it only came to mean a specific animal
after its original sense was lost, after IE speakers had traveled some
distance from home.

But there's something much weaker about this approach and I offer this not in
rancour but in the hopes that the logic problem can be looked at objectively
and unemotionally.

Pretend you are a disinterested obserser.  You are presented with evidence
that IE languages did not originate in Anatolia, but intruded there.  The
evidence is there is no common name for the fallow deer among IE languages.
The reasoning is that if IE languages originated in Anatolia there would have
been name for fallow deer in those languages.  Because the fallow deer was
present in Anatolia but not in most of Europe.  And since there is no common
name in IE, IE languages could not have originated in Anatolia.

Now, as a pretend outsider, you might ask the innocent question.  What if the
PIEers moved into non-fallow territory and simply forgot the name?  Since
there was no fallow deer in the north, why would they remember the name?
There'd be nothing to apply it to.

If some very early form of IE left Anatolia in say 6000BC, the people
speaking it who went to or were in Germany or Britain or Ireland might not
see a fallow deer for another 7000 years.  (The common date for the
introduction of the fallow deer into the British Isles is after the Norman
invasions.  Even if the Romans introduced it, the gap would be over 5000
years.)

So as an objective observer, you are being asked to accept the following:

If IE languages originated in Anatolia in 6000BC, Insular Celtic and Germanic
speakers would have had to have a name for the fallow deer, even though they
hadn't seen one for 6000+ years.

I think that stepping back and with a critical eye, even the most adamant
anti-Anatolian can see why an outsider might see this as a very poor
argument.  And I think the same applies to most of these animal arguments.
I'll try to get to those soon.  They simply do little or nothing for the
anti-Anatolian position, even if that position is true.

Let me repeat that and add something.  The "fallow deer" does little or
nothing for the anti-Anatolian position, no matter how correct that position
is.  In fact, I think, to someone who holds the anti-Anatolian, this whole
line of argument will create in the end nothing more than a credibility
problem.  That's just an impression.

Finally, there is the matter of the fallow deer itself.  It seems it may have
been introduced into southern Italy in Neolithic times.  There seems to have
been a native population in Bulgaria and Romania (darn close to the Ukraine)
from late neolithic times into the present (N. Spassov 2000) and in Greece.
The fallow deer and its names are actually an interesting example of how we
should not take the things behind the names for granted.  The dama (Gr. tame)
in "Dama Dama", it's formal scientific name, is appropriate.  The fallow deer
appears to have been a very early semi-domesticate, not just another furry
thing in the woods.  I hope to send a little more on this soon.

For those who've been kind enough to temporarily see the other side of this
issue, my appreciation.

Best Wishes,
Steve Long


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Thu May 10 19:22:37 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 14:22:37 -0500
Subject: Fallow Deer
In-Reply-To: <bd.e31fd96.2826717a@aol.com>
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.142237.0500.>

	There were tigers in the Caspian region until about 100 years ago.
How far to the north and west did they live in earlier times?

>It also reinforces the point that the PIE vocabulary lacks terms for the
>fauna specific to the southern and middle "tier" of Eurasia -- the
>mediterranean zone, Asia Minor, Iran, the Levant.

>It _does_ have a fairly complete vocabulary for the _northern_ part of
>Eurasia; the zone that stretches from the middle Urals into eastern Europe.
>Bears, wolves, aurochs, red deer, elk, etc., yes;  lions, leopards,
>tigers, chamois, fallow deer, no.

>When you combine this with the existance of specifically PIE loans in
>proto-Finno-Ugrian, which by pretty well universal consent had an urheimat
>in the central and northern Urals...

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


From sarima at friesen.net  Thu May 10 14:11:33 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 07:11:33 -0700
Subject: Three-Way Contrast of Secondary Articulations in PIE
In-Reply-To: <003d01c0d741$6d1df5e0$10464241@patrickr>
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.071133.0700.>

At 05:02 PM 5/7/01 -0500, proto-language wrote:
>Dear Stanley and IEists:
>[PCR]
>The normal formation is from *bhu-n-g-ti or *bhu-n-kti. Yes, *bhunegti can be
>reconstructed on the basis Old Indian bhun?kti but this is a fish swimming
>against the stream.

I was following the traditional reconstruction.  I cannot at this time
evaluate the relative likelihood of the various alternatives.

>> While I agree many of the roots probably originally were distinct, I do not
>> think we yet have sufficient information to tell in what manner.  I
>> certainly doubt there was a single cause for all of the mergers.

>[PCR]
>First, our agreement: there is rarely a single cause for anything.

>But -- putting glides aside, how were they kept separate?

My point is that in PIE per se, they weren't, except by formatives such as
the noun stem formatives.  That is, by the time of the reconstructed
language, the old conditioning factors were gone.

>Glides is the most parsimonious explanation.

I would tend to say, we do not know what the differentiating factors were
in the pre-stage preceding the reconstructed stage.

Also, I suspect that multiple factors kept them separate at that stage.

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


From hwhatting at hotmail.com  Fri May 11 13:57:27 2001
From: hwhatting at hotmail.com (Hans-Werner Hatting)
Date: Fri, 11 May 2001 15:57:27 +0200
Subject: Russian phonology (Was: Three-Way Contrast of Secondary
 Articulations in PIE)
Message-ID: <FRI.11.MAY.2001.155727.0200.>

On Tue, 10 Apr 2001 16:05:38 0500, David L. White wrote:

>the degree of velarization in "yeri" (henceforth "I"), is more than would
>be predicted from velarization of a preceding consonant alone, so that we
>must (or depending on theory might) conclude that /I/ is an independent
>target, i.e. a phoneme, probably picked up from Uralic.

I cannot follow you here. Do you want to say that, in Russian, <I> is a
phoneme separate from /i/? Since when is the degree of presence of a
phonetical feature in itself an indicator of phonemicity? I don't want to
restart last years' discussion on what constitutes a phoneme, but I think we
can agree on that we have to look at whether we have occurrences of distinct
sounds in phonologically identical environments concurring with distinctions
of meaning.
If we look at the Russian material, we have a phoneme /i/ with the
allophones <i> in anlaut position and after palatalised conconants, and <I>
after non-palatalised consonants. I do not know of a single case in Russian
where this rule would be violated. So there simply is no basis for
establishing a separate phoneme /I/.
If you want to say that <I> ought to be seen as the "basic" realisation of
the phoneme /i/, so that this phoneme ought to be called /I/, you are of
course free to do so, although the fact that <I> cannot appear in anlaut
position would in my opinion speak against such an assertion.
One point where /i/ is unique among vowel phonemes in Russian is the fact
that it is the only of them where the allophone occurring after palatalised
vowels is the one occurring in anlaut position, while for the other ones it
is the allophone occurring after non-palatalised vowels. But, from a
naturality viewpoint, it is exactly the phoneme where we would expect such a
deviation most.
This, of course, does not mean that the particular realisation of the
allophone <I> cannot have been an influence from Uralic, but I have to leave
this question to the Uralicists.

Best regards,
H. W. Hatting


From rao.3 at osu.edu  Thu May 10 16:48:09 2001
From: rao.3 at osu.edu (Vidhyanath Rao)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 12:48:09 -0400
Subject: Semivowels In Sanskrit
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.124809.0400.>

"David L. White" <dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

>         What is interesting, I think, is that /vy-/ (or /wy-/) occurred
> though /yv-/ (or /yw-) did not.  This suggest a sound annoyingly
> intermediate (to our theoretical notions) between /v/ and /w/.

Although people often seem to assume that Sanskrit v was labio-dental,
the evidence for that is mixed and late. Early evidence is discussed in
M. M. Deshpande, "The phonetics of v in Panini", Annals of Bhandarkar
Oriental Research Institute, 56(1975) 45--65. Rkpra:ti"sa:khya, for
example describes the both p-series and v as o.s.tya, "labial". Nor is
it usually described in terms
that would suggest a spirant.

Modern pronunciation varies: Post-consonantly, it is usually a bilabial
approximant. But, AFAIK, never a spirant (so some people don't like
transcribing an English v by Devanagari v, but use vh). Intervocalicaly,
it varies more, but in some mouths (including mine) it comes as bilabial
there too.


From petegray at btinternet.com  Fri May 11 19:25:18 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Fri, 11 May 2001 20:25:18 +0100
Subject: Semivowels In Sanskrit
Message-ID: <FRI.11.MAY.2001.202518.0100.>

>         What is interesting, I think, is that /vy-/ (or /wy-/) occurred
> though /yv-/ (or /yw-) did not.

Only marginally connected with the above -- I find it striking that we
have -va- < *-un.- in the 3 plural of a word like juhvati (and other such
words).   The rest of the active has weak stem juhu-, and there are a number
of -anti forms for the 3 plural.  So does the lack of a 3 pl. *juhunti tell
us something about Sanskrit analogical pressures, or something about
Sanskrit semivowels, and if so, what?

Peter


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Thu May 10 05:40:54 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 05:40:54 -0000
Subject: Pelasgian/was Etruscans
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.054054.0000.>

Rick Mc Callister (30 Apr 2001) wrote:

>	I've seen somewhere (in popular etymological books) that
>	cypressus and kuparissos are from Semitic
>	and are cognate to English gopher (wood) --which was used for
>Noah's Ark (if I remember correctly),
>	and also cognate to Cyprus "(is)land of conifers"
>	--and indirectly copper (metal from Cyprus).

>	It does sound a bit pat and the -ssos ending looks suspiciously
>pre-Greek substrate rather than Semitic but I plead ignorance

>	So, are cypressus and kuparissos from Semitic?
>	If gopher (wood) derived from Hebrew or just a variant form derived
>from cypressus or kuparissos?
>	Is there a link between Cyprus and cypress?

>	Or is this all someone's wishful thinking?

All three variants (Lat. cupressus, Gk. kuparissos, Heb. go:pher) are most
likely derived from pre-Greek substrate, which I have been calling
"Pelasgian", also known as "Aegean" or "Aegeo-Anatolian". The Latin spelling
with cypr- reflects a belief (probably mistaken) that the word was borrowed
from Greek.

The wood is resinous, and Davies-Mitchell consider <go:pher> akin to
<ko:pher> 'village, pitch, henna, ransom' which are all "coverings" derived
from <k-p-r> 'to cover', so in their view the dendronym is Semitic. This is
refuted IMHO by Gen. 6:14, which uses the two lexemes distinctly: <te:bhath
!'ac,ey-gho:pher> 'ark of gopher-wood' but <bakko:pher> 'with pitch' (lit.
'in the pitch') and <w'kha:pharta:> 'and thou shalt pitch'.

The simple word occurs only in Gen. 6:14, but the derivative <gophriyth>
'sulfur, brimstone' (presumably named after similarity to burning
tree-resin) is found 7 times in the OT. The usage of the simple word in the
compound suggests that <go:pher> actually means 'resin', perhaps a specific
(fragrant?) type. The Latin and Greek dendronyms carry the generic
denominative suffix of the substrate, so one can provisionally extract
"Pelasgian" *kupar- '(fragrant?) resin'.

I have no solid information on the origin of the name "Cyprus". It is not
recognizable in the OT with the possible exception of <?iy kaphtowr> 'isle
of Caphtor' (Jer. 47:4) which, as homeland of the Philistines, is more
likely a reference to Crete. Aramaic has the adjective <kwpryy> 'Cypriot',
but this is almost certainly borrowed from Greek.

DGK


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Fri May 11 04:11:47 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Fri, 11 May 2001 04:11:47 -0000
Subject: Etruscans
Message-ID: <FRI.11.MAY.2001.041147.0000.>

David L. White (3 May 2001) wrote:

>Obviously colonizers, or exerters of control, will bring their
>language along with them, having little choice in the matter.

Yes, but the outcome can vary greatly. The natives _may_ adopt the intrusive
language, or the colonists _may_ adopt the native language, or both
languages _may_ co-exist. Every case must be examined separately.

>I fail to perceive any "hand-waving", beyond what is unavoidable
>given that the material culture of Troy was not (somebody out there please
>correct me if I am wrong) distinctive, and thus would leave no easily
>discernable trace anywhere.  I can see how this might seem very convenient
>(I would say "unfalsifiable", but that would be invoking a square wheel, now
>wouldn't it?) to those having a prior committment to the nativist view, but
>it is also, simply put, true.

I don't have a "prior commitment" to the nativist view. Every case must be
examined separately, and there are plenty of situations in which the
migrationist view cannot be sanely disputed (such as IE-speakers in North
America). In the particular case of the Etruscan language, the theory of
intrusion from Anatolia or the Aegean raises more questions than it answers,
so the nativist view is just more plausible.

And I certainly wouldn't use the Un-F-word to describe your postings. That
would make my own responses worse than meaningless; they would be pointless.

>There is no firm expectation when an elite is of one language and the mass of
>the population is not.  The case of the Turks in Anatolia seems fairly well
>established by modern genetics:  they were a fairly small elite, and the
>pre-Turkic population simply converted to Turkish over time.  (A lot of time
>in this case, but Greek was a very "proud" language, as "Villanovan" would not
>have been.)  I may note as well (again) the case of Latin America, which has
>largely been Iberianized in language despite the population being (with a few
>exceptions) largely Amerindian by genetic descent.

How "simple" was the conversion to Turkish? Weren't there Greek communities
in Cappadocia and elsewhere in Anatolia until recently? I'm not sure this is
such a good example.

Likewise, most parts of Latin America retain indigenous languages, despite 4
or 5 centuries of political and economic dominance by IE-speakers.

What specific features of Villanovan exhibit lack of linguistic pride? Was
it an untidy language, with speakers failing to perform the house-husbandry
of sweeping out the Fremdwoerter every week? For that matter, if "proud"
languages generally clobber "humble" ones, why aren't we all speaking
Trojan?

>En petite masse.  (My French is for reading knowledge only, so
>please forgive me if I did not get that right.)   A large migration would
>probably be logistically implausible, among other things.  I agree that the
>native population was not expelled or exterminated, and that there is indeed
>substantial archeoligical continuity.  But I thought we had agreed that such
>a population, as it went over to Etruscan over a period of perhaps several
>centuries (or perhaps less; stranger things have happened), would quite
>probably leave no inscriptional trace.

It's hard to leave inscriptions without a writing system. But the
petite-masse explanation begs the question of what happened to the _rest_ of
the Trojans after the war. Presumably there was a diaspora, and presumably
other places (mostly nearer to Troy) were settled, and presumably the native
speakers, like the Villanovans, had "humble" languages or were bedazzled by
the High Culture. So, if your Trojo-Tyrrhenian theory is valid, where is the
evidence for Etruscoid speech in the non-Etrurian part of the Trojan
diaspora (since we agree that Lemnian is too late to matter)?

>Place names are another question,
>but recent assertions that conquerors re-name places only when they have
>bureaucrats along for the ride are clearly falsified by the case of
>Anglo-Saxon England (among others, no doubt), where they conquerors surely
>renamed a great many water-courses (whatever we think had happened to the
>natives), despite not being notably well-supplied with bureaucrats.

I didn't suggest that re-naming occurred _only_ when conquerors had
bureaucrats in tow. I was referring to the ability of new regimes to
obliterate the old names completely, which seems to be the case in much of
Texas. That requires either bureaucracy (and writing conventions and
materials) or genocide. Normally, dominant intruders re-name _some_ of the
landmarks, resulting in toponomastic stratification.

>The linguistics does more harm than good to the nativist cause, as
>/turs^/ (as in the "turshas", reputedly from Anatolias) is surely closer to
>/turs-/ (as in "Tursenoi") than most of the Pelasgian phytonyms recently
>noted are to each other.  And at least we can explain the small variation
>seen, as Greek did not have /s^/.   No such luck (for the most part) with
>Pelasgian phytonyms.

That's comparing apples with giraffes (actually just _one_ apple, since you
allege that only one lexeme is involved in your turs-words).

>While on the subject I may note that the existence of "coffee" vs.
>"cafe", and "chocolate" vs. "cocoa" is not generally taken to "prove" the
>existence of a vastly-spread sub-strate language wherever these words are
>found.  Phytonyms can easily be wander-words, though I must admit I know
>nothing about the uses (if any) of the various "Pelasgian" plants in
>question.

Yes, psychotropic substances can spread like wildfire, along with the words
which denote them: hence the difficulty in finding the linguistic source of
"wine" (not to mention "hemp"). But now we're talking potonyms (and
capnonyms), not phytonyms. I wouldn't know whether roses, violets, and
hyacinths contain abusable substances. (Where's Timothy Leary when you need
him?) Anyhow, if any of the phytonyms referred to substrate by Lejeune,
Palmer, Devoto, Alessio, etc. were comparable to coffee, chocolate, tobacco,
etc. (with consumption occurring far beyond the native areas of the plants,
and specialized producers, refiners, and merchants), then the words in
question would not be restricted in distribution to the "Pelasgian" area,
and would be either regarded as Wanderwoerter or indistinguishable from
ordinary IE wordstock.

>That is a good point, but not, I think, given the scanty nature of
>the evidence, necesarily decisive.  What do we really know about Trojan, or
>Turshan religion?   I would expect it to be a mix of native, Aegean, and
>Anatolian elements.

That begs the questions of how "native" Trojan/Turshan elements are to be
distinguished from regular Aegean or Anatolian ones, and where their
homeland was if not Aegeo-Anatolian. You have repeatedly emphasized the
non-distinct nature of Trojan material culture, if memory serves.

The lack of Anatolian features in Etruscan religion has been pointed out
before. If the Trojans had recently arrived from the West to take over the
Troad, they wouldn't have had much time to assimilate Anatolian cultural
features. This in itself is reasonable enough. But the most plausible
scenario is that the Trojans (or their ruling class) were Phrygians who came
from Thrace. The Trojo-Tyrrhenian theory has to face not only the silence of
classical authors, but the absence of Etruscan linguistic evidence in
Thrace. We could, of course, always postulate that the Trojans originated in
Etruria (supported by Dardanus allegedly coming from Cortona?) and then
returned after the war, but then they would hardly be introducing a _new_
language.

>So now "one" is not only attorney but judge and jury too?  How nice, to
>triumph so convincingly through simple fiat.  Maybe it works for you, but
>when I, in my real job as house-husband, simply declare the dishes clean,
>my wife tends to doubt that very much has truly been accomplished.

Obviously I should have used different wording. I wasn't trying to usurp the
roles of judge and jury. When I refer to "dismissing" Anatolian-Etruscan or
any theory, it should be clear that I speak only for myself. I don't expect
the whole world to jump aboard the bandwagon.

>Why bother?  Why can't they [Etruscans] have arisen from the original
>post-agricultural population of the area?  And what is gained by dismissing
>one route as supportable only by "hand-waving", when all other possible
>routes are even more mysterious?  Ignotium per ignotius indeed.  Such an
>approach cries out for the creation of a term more vigorous than
>"hand-waving". I do hereby officially suggest "hand-flapping."

Before long we'll have Khrushchevian shoe-banging, unless a pact against
metaphoric escalation is implemented. So let's _not_ categorically dismiss
_any_ sane theory (please note that I never called the Trojan theory
"insane"). One theory is indeed the ultra-nativist one that Etruscan
represents the speech of the first anatomically modern humans to inhabit
Etruria. At the other extreme, ultra-migrationists have the Etruscans fresh
off the boat from Lemnos in 700 BCE. In principle, one could also theorize
Proto-Etruscan coming in with the first farmers, the first metallurgists,
the Proto-Villanovans, or none of the above. The answer (if it has not been
irretrievably lost, as a prominent defeatist suggests for pre-Greek) is in
the toponyms, phytonyms, glosses, and such relics as we have in extant
Etruscan texts. But unless one is a dogmatic dualist, there is no _a priori_
reason for narrowing the field to two choices.

DGK


From mclasutt at brigham.net  Thu May 10 06:35:44 2001
From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 00:35:44 -0600
Subject: Normanization of England
In-Reply-To: <003701c0d634$5cbe6940$b36063d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.003544.0600.>

David White wrote:
        Digressing a bit, in the case of Mednyj Aleut it seems that about 30
Russians among about 300 Aleuts were enough to wholly transform the the
native language.  Actually, I dispute this interpretation, but what did not
happen was that the Russians were linguisticaly absorbed into the Aleuts.
Part of the reason for what happened seems to have been that Aleut verbal
morphology, being unusually complex, was unusually diffiucult for the
Russians to learn, so even such a nebulous concept as language difficulty
can be a factor in such situations.

Me:  The issue of language complexity has rarely been mentioned in my
experience, since, according to our axiomatic definition of "human
language", "all languages are equally complex" (in terms of considering the
language as a whole).  Yet we always talk about pidgins as "simplified"
languages which forego much morphology in favor of word order and lexicon.
There's something very powerful to be said for this.  On the Great Plains of
North America, the Pawnees held the central ground.  Much trade from the
South Plains to the North Plains passed through their hands, but Pawnee
never became a trade language or lingua franca.  The verbal morphology was
just too incredibly complex.  I've seen Pawnee verbs of 25 syllables.  The
incredibly simple nominal morphology (virtually zero) and pretty free word
order (most clauses are only one or two words long) doesn't outweigh the
highly complex verb structure.  Comanche, on the other hand, held an equally
important trade function on the South Plains and their language became a
lingua franca.  Comanche verb structure is not quite as simple as English
verb structure, but with little morphophonemic "mush", a fairly
uncomplicated sound system, and no tones, speakers of neighboring groups
with complex morphophonemics, verb morphology, tonal variation, etc. (Kiowa,
Wichita, Tonkawa, Plains Apache, etc.) frequently used Comanche in
intertribal communication.  It seems that, upon my very cursory examination
of similar situations, a simple morphological system and uncomplicated sound
system will always outweigh free word order and lexical flexibility in
language contact situations.

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 JoatSimeon at aol.com  Thu May 10 19:56:21 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 15:56:21 EDT
Subject: Normanization of England
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.155621.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/9/01 11:44:09 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
dlwhite at texas.net writes:

> But probably not, for another factor here is that the Normans took
> themselves very seriously as kings of England, as opposed to overlords of
> some wet green land, and never contemplated extirpating English
> institutions, of which language was one.

-- note that the Normans themselves were the descendants of a
Scandinavian-speaking intrusive group in Normandy -- which was assimilated
into a Romance-speaking population.  In fact, very few of the Viking-era
Scandinavian settlements abroad retained a Scandinavian language; only those
where there was no native population and the Scandinavians were in an
overwhelming majority. (Iceland, the Faeroes, etc.)

As for Norman respect for English, for two centuries or so after 1066, it was
a language for peasants.  The Court in London spoke French; for the first
couple of generations the _entire_ landowning aristocracy spoke French; and
most of their immediate retainers spoke French.  French was also the language
of administration, and the law courts -- and remained so down to Tudor times.
 The Angevin dynasty which replaced the Norman one was also emphatically
French and primarily oriented towards its Continental possessions.

In between William the Conqueror and the Black Prince no "English" monarch
spoke English as his first language, and it's doubtful if many of them even
learned it as a second, acquired tongue.

Post-1066 there was massive French influence on English, and in many personal
habits -- for example, French personal names largely replaced Germanic ones
with in a century or two of the conquest.  Besides the new aristocracy, many
Norman (and other French-speaking) merchants settled in the towns.

Which shows the extraordinary powers of endurance of a language spoken by a
solidly established peasant population.  It's very hard to change such a
linguistic bloc.


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri May 11 08:31:15 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 11 May 2001 09:31:15 +0100
Subject: DLW's Renewed Absence
In-Reply-To: <003b01c0d751$117b7400$496263d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <FRI.11.MAY.2001.093115.0100.>

--On Monday, May 7, 2001 6:54 pm -0500 "David L. White" <dlwhite at texas.net>
wrote:

>         With regard to "mixed languages", I am of course aware of the
> supposed examples in Thomason and Kaufmann.  I must however object to
> their assertion that, in influence between languages, "anything goes".

Hmmm.  May I know where in their book T and K assert that "anything goes"?
My reading of the book reveals only the more cautious claim that we cannot
know what happens in language contact until we look.

[snip]

>         Taking all these things together, plus the fact that finite verbs
> are ordinarily "higher in the tree" than NPs,

OK; I'm afraid I don't understand this.

I don't think it's *generally* true that syntactic theorists put verbs
higher in trees than NPs.  Verb-at-the-top is more a feature of
dependency-based approaches than of constituency-based approaches.  But
some contemporary dependency theorists put verbs and all argument NPs at
the same level in their trees.  Non-Chomskyan constituency theorists
typically put subject NPs higher than verbs.  Chomskyans change their
analysis regularly, but they typically put abstract elements highest in
their trees, not verbs.

> I suggest that the genetic
> descent of a language can always (theoretically) be traced through finite
> verbal morphology, where this exists.

This strikes me as a highly arbitrary proposal, though perhaps an
interesting one.  But it does have the immediate consequence that a
language with no verbal morphology has no ancestor -- unless the intention
is to supplement this proposal with one or more unstated back-up proposals.

> This will never be mixed,

Well, a bold claim.  I confess I can't falsify it off the top of my head.
But I wonder what a survey of, say, native American languages might turn up.

> and its
> affixes will always be found closer to lexical verbs than are foreign
> affixes, if the examples I am aware of are a reliable guide.  Using this
> standard, Mednyj Aleut is Russian, Michif is Cree, and Ma'a is Bantu.
> Each is a rather bizarre and severely influenced version of its putative
> genetic ancestor, but technically there is little reason to think that
> what Thomason and Kaufmann call "normal transmission" of finite verbal
> morphology has in fact been interrupted, for in each case it is there,
> unmixed and un-intruded upon. To some extent it is a matter of what we
> call things rather than what they are,

OK.  Very interesting.  Let me draw attention to two examples.

First, Anglo-Romani.  According to T and K, this consists of wholly Romani
lexis plus wholly English grammar.  According to David White's proposal,
then, Anglo-Romani is English, since it has English verbal morphology.  Is
this a satisfactory conclusion so far?

Now, consider how Anglo-Romani came into existence.  I assume it didn't
spring into being overnight, but must have evolved gradually.  So there are
broadly two possibilities.

First, Anglo-Romani started off as plain English, but was gradually
relexified from Romani until no English lexis was left.  According to
David's proposal, this *must* be what happened, since the alternative below
seems to be impossible.

Second, Anglo-Romani started off as Romani, but it gradually borrowed more
and more grammar from English, until there was no Romani grammar left.
Under David's proposal, this appears to be impossible, since the language,
in this scenario, has shifted from having Romani verbal morphology to
having English verbal morphology -- seemingly in conflict with the proposal
on the table, which sees verbal morphology as inviolate.  It also, of
course, has the peculiar consequence that Anglo-Romani has changed from
being Romani to being English -- an outcome surely more bizarre than
anything contemplated in T and K.

Assuming overnight creation can be excluded, then, David's scenario forces
us to conclude that the first interpretation *must* be right.  Well, this
is an empirical question.

My second case is the Austronesian language Takia.  As it is commonly
described, Takia has borrowed the *entire* grammatical system from the
Papuan language Waskia, so that every Takia sentence is now a
morpheme-by-morpheme calque of the corresponding Waskia sentence -- while
at the same time Takia has borrowed no morphemes at all from Waskia.

So, in Takia, the *patterns* of the verbal morphology are Waskia, while the
*morphemes* are Takia.  In David's scenario, then, which is decisive?  Is
Takia Austronesian, because it exhibits only Austronesian morphemes?  Or is
it Papuan, because it exhibits only Papuan morphological patterns?

A pretty little puzzle, don't you think?

> but in any event I thought it
> worthwhile to point out that the somewhat wild claims of Thomason and
> Kaufmann are arguably exaggerated, as there are restrictions 1) that they
> fail to note, and 2) that can at least possibly be used to determine
> genetic descent, considerably reducing the incidence of "linguo-genesis"
> and/or "mixed languages", perhaps to zero.

Again, I don't see T and K as making any wild claims.  They seem to me to
be doing no more than quoting Hamlet: "There are more things in heaven and
earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

> Be all this as it may, I am
> sure Dr. Trask would not assert that any of the extreme developments
> adduced by Thomason and Kaufmann have anything to do with Proto-Celtic,
> so we are at least in agreement on that.

Indeed we are.

[snip]


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 cjustus at mail.utexas.edu  Thu May 10 13:05:33 2001
From: cjustus at mail.utexas.edu (Carol F. Justus)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 08:05:33 -0500
Subject: Urheimat animals
In-Reply-To: <200105071746.NAA18621@panix2.panix.com>
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.080533.0500.>

>On 3 May 2001, Alberto Lombardo wrote:
Would you be referring to Richard Diebold's monograph 5 in JIES

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/lrc/jies/monographs/mono5.html (short
synopsis)

entitled: The Evolution of Indo-European Nomenclature for Salmonid Fish:
                                   The Case of `Huchen' (Hucho Spp.) ?

Carol Justus

[ moderator snip ]

>There has of course been a great deal of work since Thieme, much informed by
>more recent developments in paleobotany and paleoclimatology.  Besides the
>work on IE tree names (Friedrich, _Proto-Indo-European Trees_), there was a
>paper I read in pre-print on the salmonid fishes of Europe and Asia which
>concluded that the salmon of Thieme's work is not the only candidate for the
>referent of the PIE etymon *lok'so-.  (I apologize for being sketchy on the
>details, but it was 25 years ago, and being passed from hand to hand among a
>group of graduate students.  If anyone can identify it, that would be very
>helpful.)

>								Rich Alderson


From xavier.delamarre at free.fr  Thu May 10 17:04:12 2001
From: xavier.delamarre at free.fr (Xavier Delamarre)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 19:04:12 +0200
Subject: Urheimat animals
In-Reply-To: <200105071746.NAA18621@panix2.panix.com>
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.190412.0200.>

le 7/05/01 19:46, Rich Alderson ? alderson+mail at panix.com a ?crit?:

> there was a paper I read in pre-print on the salmonid fishes of Europe and
> Asia which concluded that the salmon of Thieme's work is not the only
> candidate for the referent of the PIE etymon *lok'so-.  (I apologize for
> being sketchy on the details, but it was 25 years ago, and being passed from
> hand to hand among a group of graduate students.  If anyone can identify it,
> that would be very helpful.)

> Rich Alderson

Some literature on the IE salmon (your ref. must be Diebold) :

- Thieme, P. : Der Lachs in Indien, KZ  69 (1951).
- Rudnicki, M. : Wartosc nazw drzewa bukowego, lososia i rdzenia lendh- dla
wyznaczenia prakolekbi (praojczyzny) indoeuropejskiej i slowianskiej, BPTJ
15 (1956), 127-137.
- Krogmann, W. : Das Lachsargument, KZ  76 (1960), 161-178.
- Krause, W. : Zum Namen des Lachses, Nachrichten der Akademie der
Wissenschaften  in G?ttingen, Phil.-hist. Klasse,  4 (1961), 83-98.
- Lane, G.S. : Toharian : I.E. and non-I.E. Relationships, in Cardona et
Alii (eds) Indo-European and Indo-Europeans, Philadelphie 1970, 82-83.
- Van Windekens, J.A. : L'origine directe et indirecte de tokharien B laks
'poisson', ZDMG  120 (1970), 305-307.
- M?ntyl?, K. : Lachs, Orbis  19 (1970), 172-174. [nom du saumon en i.e. et
en finno-ougrien].
- Diebold, A.R. : Contributions to the Indo-European Salmon Problem, in
Current Progress in Historical Linguistics  ed. William Christie Jr.,
Amsterdam-New York-Oxford, 1976, 341-388.
- Adams D.Q. : PIE. *loKso-  '(anadromous) brown trout' and *koKso-  'groin'
and their Descendents in Tocharian : A Coda to the Lachsargument, IF  90
(1985), 72-82.
- Diebold, A.R. : The Evolution of Indo-European Nomenclature for Salmonid
Fish : The Case of 'Huchen' , Washington 1985, (JIES  Monograph Series, 5).
- Stalmaszczyk, P. & Witczak, K.T. : Tocharica I-III. II. Kuchean laks
'fish', IF  98 (1993), 32-34.

    XD


From centrostudilaruna at libero.it  Sun May 13 20:52:33 2001
From: centrostudilaruna at libero.it (Alberto Lombardo)
Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 22:52:33 +0200
Subject: R: Urheimat animals
Message-ID: <SUN.13.MAY.2001.225233.0200.>

> There has of course been a great deal of work since Thieme, much informed by
> more recent developments in paleobotany and paleoclimatology.

I know, but the name of Thieme had just to mean a serie of studies in a same
direction, not only Thieme's work of 1953. Also the list of the animals was
uncomplete at all.

About the *laks problem, I don't think the objections I read in those years
to Thieme's central ideas were really convincing.

Best regards.


From centrostudilaruna at libero.it  Sun May 13 20:59:34 2001
From: centrostudilaruna at libero.it (Alberto Lombardo)
Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 22:59:34 +0200
Subject: R: Urheimat animals
Message-ID: <SUN.13.MAY.2001.225934.0200.>

-----Messaggio Originale-----
Da: <JoatSimeon at aol.com>
Data invio: domenica 6 maggio 2001 11.41

> In a message dated 5/6/01 3:27:06 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
> centrostudilaruna at libero.it writes:

>> I think we could add to the sentence whales, beavers, elks, many kinds
>> of birds and salmons too

> -- I would certainly agree on "beaver" (PIE *bhebhrus).  Note that Avestan
> retains a derivative with exactly the same meaning -- bawra, 'beaver',
> bawraini, 'of the/pertaining to beavers'.

> Now, in Old Indian/Sanskrit, there has been a semantic shift; there's a
> cognate term, babhru, but it means 'mongoose'.

> So the more northerly Indo-Iranian languages retained the original meaning,
> while in the southerly one, moving into an area where beavers weren't
> known, shifted the term to a roughly similar animal.  Similar in color, at
> least; Sanskrit babhru also means 'red-brown', and the derivation from a
> color term is obvious in PIE *babhrus.

> The neolithic range of the beaver stopped well short of the mediterranean
> and most of Anatolia.  Again, this reinforces the PIE lexicon for animals
> as being specifically north-central Eurasian.

fiber seems to find a correspondance in the gallic Bibr(acte) (a personal
name), in the high old german bibar (modern german Biber), in the lituan bebras
and in sanskrit babhru, which has two different meanings: as adjective it means
?brownred? and as male noun it's the name of the icneumon. Also
the greek phr?ne comes from the same theme, which is the i.e.
*bhebhru- (I take those informations from the Pokorny).


From edsel at glo.be  Thu May 10 14:16:34 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 16:16:34 +0200
Subject: Umlaut in Crimean Gothic
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.161634.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Gustafson" <stevegus at aye.net>
Sent: Monday, May 07, 2001 5:18 AM

[snip]

> As Ed Selleslagh and Oliver Neukum pointed out, the spellings that looked
> like they showed evidence of i-umlaut may have in fact been artifacts of a
> Dutch spelling system that adds an 'e' to indicate a long vowel, so that the
> 'oe' of Busbecq's writing may have in fact represented /o:/ rather than /0/
> or /oe/.

> Another of Busbecq's spellings that took me aback was "schuuester."  What
> would have been the value of 'sch' here?  Palatisation of the /s/ in
> 'swistar' to /sh/ seems unlikely in this environment, as does its conversion
> to /sk/.   Might this be a German contamination?

[Ed Selleslagh]

In Dutch, 'sch' normally stands for /sx/ (usually <sk, except when from Greek
sigma-chi); it is very common.

But in de Busbecq's 'schuuester' it is obviously not that, but rather the usual
(High)German value. As a matter of fact, 'uu' is a Latinist's representation of
'w' (double-u!!), so the word 'schuuester' is German 'schwester' (Dutch:
zuster, with u = u-umlaut)

Ed


From mich.driessen at planet.nl  Thu May 10 23:22:27 2001
From: mich.driessen at planet.nl (C. Michiel Driessen)
Date: Fri, 11 May 2001 01:22:27 +0200
Subject: Flemish/Dutch dialects
Message-ID: <FRI.11.MAY.2001.012227.0200.>

Michiel Driessen:

I would just like to briefly remark that Selleslagh is completely correct. The
Dutch dialectology is remarkably rich and indeed very interesting. To give an
amazing example: Most Dutch dialects (including the standard language) are
quite ordinary, typically European style vernaculars in the sense that they are
charcterised by a heavy stress accent (in the case of Dutch initial accent).
The dialects of South Limburg Limburg (both the Belgian and the Dutch parts)
are tone languages, however. They have two phonological tones, that can make a
semantic difference and a morphological difference (they create the singular
versus the plural in certain categories of nouns). Selleslagh is also correct,
when he assumes that Dutch dialoctology is mostly descriptive. Unfortunately,
Dutch dialectologists merely confine themselves to reporting phenomena (Of
couse this does have a positive side; Dutch now has an large amount of
excellent dialect descriptions and dialect dictionaries).


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu May 10 17:19:04 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 18:19:04 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.4.30.0105061426330.8965-100000@vesuri.Helsinki.FI>
Message-ID: <THU.10.MAY.2001.181904.0100.>

--On Sunday, May 6, 2001 2:29 pm +0300 Robert Whiting
<whiting at cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:

> To make it clear what my statement was about:  My entire point was that
> [T] and [D] do not contrast in initial position in English.  My
> statement was not about whether [T] and [D] are phonemes in English or
> not.  The two are not necessarily related ([T] and [D] can still be
> phonemes even if they don't contrast in some environments).

OK; I'll bite.  I will argue that [T] and [D] *do* contrast in initial
position in English.  It is merely that we happen to have no good minimal
pairs for /T/ and /D/ in the language at present -- a completely different
matter.

To begin with, 'thigh' and 'thy' are a perfect minimal pair, *if* we accept
that 'thy' is a word of modern English -- which you may not want to accept.

But there are a number of near-minimal pairs:

  this / thistle
  they / Thalia (also 'theta' in US accents)
  that / thatch
  these / thesis
  thus / thumb
  though / Thor

The absence of minimal pairs is a historical accident, no more.  I have
come across an actress with the first name 'Thandy'.  I see no reason to
suppose her friends would hesitate to call her 'Than', with /T/, producing
a perfect minimal pair with 'than' (strong form).

The point is not whether minimal pairs exist.  The point is whether the
distribution of [T] and [D] can be stated purely in terms of phonological
environments.  Since no such distributional rule exists, /T/ and /D/
contrast in word-initial position, in spite of the lack of minimal pairs.

The observation that initial [D] occurs only in "grammatical" words and
initial [T] only in "lexical" words is just that: an observation.  It is
not, so far as I can see, a rule of English phonology.  As an observation,
it is on a par with the observation that the diphthong /oi/ never occurs in
native English words, but only in borrowed words.

If we English-speakers had first encountered Greek a couple of millennia
later than we did, is there any reason to suppose that we would shrink from
calling a certain Greek letter 'thelta' -- with /D/ -- instead of 'delta'?
Or from extending this word to the mouth of a river?

By the way, is everybody happy that 'thus' is beyond question a grammatical
word, and not a lexical word?

Take another case.  It is extremely difficult to find minimal pairs for
[esh] and [ezh] in *any* position -- and all the pairs I can think of
involve involve either proper names of foreign origin or obscure Scrabble
words.  Would anybody therefore want to argue that [esh] and [ezh] are not
two distinct phonemes -- just because we have no good minimal pairs, or
just because the second occurs only in words of foreign origin?  If not,
why should theta and eth be treated differently?

Finally, I note that /n/ and [eng] *really* do not contrast in word-initial
position in English, even though they contrast elsewhere.  The case of
theta and eth does not appear to me to be similar.

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  Sun May 13 08:38:56 2001
From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting)
Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 11:38:56 +0300
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <01JWLZVSCQTMAM6KGL@LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU>
Message-ID: <SUN.13.MAY.2001.113856.0300.>

On Thu, 16 Nov 2000 CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU wrote:

>On Tuesday Robert Whiting responded at great length to my post

If you thought that was "great length," you ain't seen nothin' yet.

>on the English interdental fricatives, in which I attempted to
>draw some lessons from the German non-distinction between [x] and
>[c,] in _Kuchen_ 'cake' vs. _Kuhchen_ 'little cow', which I
>analyzed as /ku:x at n/ vs. /ku:+x at n/.  The gist of his argument
>seems to be that if it is fair to use phonological boundaries
>(which he identifies as always ultimately morphological
>boundaries), then it is also fair to use morphological and
>lexical information to account for the distribution of the
>intedental fricatives [T] and [D] in English.

A couple of points.  First, I am not trying to use morphological
and lexical information to account for the distribution of
interdental fricatives in English.  I am trying to use it to call
into question the evidence that is used for the distribution of
these sounds, particularly the alleged contrasts.  This is
admittedly a subtle point -- so subtle indeed, that many people
seem to have failed to grasp it.  My arguments are not aimed at
demonstrating that [T] and [D] are not separate phonemes in
English.  I have no particular reason to believe this.  Rather my
arguments are aimed at determining whether it is valid to accept
a contrast as being based on phonology when there may be another
basis for the contrast.  So whether or not [T] and [D] are
phonemes in English is not the issue.  The issue is whether
contrasts that can be shown to be based on some other feature
should be available for use as evidence of phonemic contrast.
Specifically it is about whether everything that looks like a
minimal pair (like [ku:c,en] and [ku:xen] should actually be
considered a minimal pair for purposes of determining phonemic
status.

Second, I do not question the importance of boundaries in
phonology.  I merely say that boundaries are not segmental
phonemes.  Nevertheless, they sometimes provide the only way
to distinguish meaning.  Pairs like 'that's tough' [D?ts't at f]
and 'that stuff' [D?t'st at f], or 'the Trojan's trumpet' and 'the
Trojan strumpet' (Walt Kelly [creator of Pogo] had a great one
once based on the near identity of 'a tax on frogs too' and
'attacks on frog stew'), if said in an offhand manner at normal
speed, can be difficult for a listener to distinguish.  A voice
spectograph, however, will pick up the differences.  While the
only difference in segmental sounds may be the [t'] in 'tough'
and the [t] in 'stuff', stress onset will register in the
spectograph (as a stronger [s] in 'stuff', and so on) showing
that [t'] and [t] are not phonemes.  In this case, juncture will
correlate with stress onset and one will not be distinguished
from the other phonetically.  So both juncture and stress onset
are phonologically important in English.  But I think that they
should be considered qualitatively different from segmental
phonemes (and from each other).  Boundaries can be considered
"transition phonemes" (after Trager) and stress (as well as
accent and tone) when significant are commonly considered
"suprasegmental phonemes."

Third, I consider your statement "... phonological boundaries
(which he identifies as always ultimately morphological
boundaries) ..." an unwarranted generalization.  We were talking
about juncture which is a specific type of boundary where two
morphemes come together and you have extended this to
phonological boundaries in general.  Syllable boundaries can be
phonological but not necessarily morphological (in fact,
phonological syllable boundaries frequently cut across
morphological boundaries, e.g., 'Halloween', 'formation',
'telepathy', etc.); utterance boundaries are inherently both
phonological and morphological conditions (although if one stops
speaking in the middle of a word, it is not necessarily a
morphological boundary).

So if you have examples of phonological juncture (but not of
other phonological boundaries) that are not ultimately based on
morpheme boundaries, bring it out and we will talk about it (and
to avoid having to have a pointless discussion let us exclude
words that have been folk etymologized or reanalyzed so that
there is now a perceptual morpheme boundary where one may or may
not have originally existed (e.g., furbelow, mangrove, mongoose,
woodchuck, outrage).  But if you don't, then I think it is an
unfair characterization to claim that I ultimately identify all
phonological boundaries as morphological boundaries.  I only
identify those phonological boundaries that depend on the
existence of a morpheme boundary (including word boundaries, real
or perceived) for their existence as ultimately based on
morphological boundaries.

>He overlooks a significant difference between morphological ->
>phonological boundaries and other types of morphological
>information: boundaries can be located precisely between
>morphemes.  It is therefore to show them in phonological
>representations, for their position (and type) seems to matter
>for the phonetic realization.

Not so much overlooks as doesn't give it much weight.  And I
would probably agree with your last sentence if I were sure what
the missing word after "therefore" is (possible?, necessary?,
useful?).  In any case, I agree that they seem to matter for the
phonetic realization (in some cases).  But phonetic realization is
not the same as phonemic analysis.  Phonetics deals with the
actual sounds of speech.  Phonemics deals with the relations of
these sounds, and particularly with the relations of these sounds
in the perception of the speakers.  Phones are realia (capturable
with a voice spectrograph); phonemes are abstractions determined
by an analysis of the distribution of the sounds.  A voice
spectrograph will record the difference between aspirated [t']
and unaspirated [t]; but it won't tell you whether they are
phonemes or not.  [t] and [t'] should appear the same on the
voice spectrogram whether they are phonemic in the speaker's
language (e.g., Chinese) or allophonic (e.g. English).

So I am willing to stipulate that anything that leaves a
footprint in a voice spectrogram is part of the phonetic
realization of the language.  This includes various kinds of
boundaries, which, as I said before, often affect things like
pitch, duration, and pause, as well as stress patterns.
But I am not willing to stipulate that everything that appears
in a voice spectrogram is a phoneme.  Otherwise, why bother with
looking for minimal pairs to make a phonemic analysis?  Just use
a voice spectrograph and it will tell you what the phonemes are.
It doesn't work that way.  What shows up in a voice spectrogram
is the phonetic realization ([...]).  The phonemic analysis of
this phonetic realization (/.../) doesn't show up there.

Which is why I remain a little skeptical of the dictum that
things that don't show up in the phonetic realization can't
affect phonemic analysis since things that do show up in the
phonetic realization don't ipso facto determine phonemicity.

As an example let us consider the effects of devoicing of final
stops in German.  Now there is no difference in the phonetic
realization of 'Rat' "parliament" and 'Rad' "wheel," both being
[ra:t].  Most speakers of German, however, will insist that there
is a difference between the [t] of 'Rat' and the [t] of 'Rad'.
The first is a "real" [t] while the second is a variety of /d/
(occurring before a word or syllable boundary).  One can either
accept the perception of the speakers and say that 'Rat' and
'Rad' are phonemically distinct even though they have identical
pronunciations and phonetic environments, and the first is /ra:t/
and the second is /ra:d/, or we can insist that the phonetic
reality is correct and that both are phonemically /ra:t/.  Here
we are dealing with two levels of phonology, a surface level and
an underlying level.  Phonetic realization (as in a voice
spectrogram) can only recognize the surface level, but this in
not necessarily the determiner of phonemicity.

>But information such as "native/foreign" or "content/function
>word" cannot be so located and cannot be described in any real
>sense as "morphological", but rather as lexical and (for the
>latter, at least) "syntactic".

All true.  Except, of course, that different people will see the
different categories differently depending on how many levels of
linguistic structure they organize language into and what the
relationship between morphology and syntax is in their particular
model (for many people, morphological rules are just a subset of
syntactic rules).  As for whether "content/function word" goes
under syntax or not depends on where one puts word classes (parts
of speech) since this is a higher level classification of word
classes (pronouns, conjunctions, and prepositions are generally
function words while nouns, verbs [excepting auxiliary verbs and
modals], and adjectives [excepting quantifiers] and adverbs
[excepting demonstratives and intensifiers] are generally content
words).  I will agree, though, that most people would put word
classes under syntax (although many others consider them "lexical
categories").  But no matter how you divide language up to study
and analyze it, it is still a completely integrated system.  The
various parts interact with each other and in so doing, influence
each other, especially as this interaction is mediated by human
behavior, which, despite man's being the rational animal (by his
own definition), is often irrational and unpredictable.

But even if what you say is true, it doesn't prove that such
information doesn't affect phonemics.  That is to say that even
"junctures" of the sort that are freely used in all phonemic
descriptions do not necessarily (or even generally) have uniquely
or precisely identifiable reflexes in the utterance.  Therefore,
the fact that information cannot be precisely located in the
phonetic representation does not prove that it does not have
phonemic significance.

>There is no inconsistency in saying that boundaries are
>phonologically relevant while other information is not.

I would agree, so long as "phonologically" refers to "phonetics"
(i.e., what you can see in a voice spectogram).  But if you
include phonemics in phonology (as most people do, one way or
another, some exclusively), then I'm not sure that one can be
apodictic about what is relevant and what isn't.  Since a voice
spectograph can't tell what is a phoneme and what isn't, it
doesn't necessarily follow that only information that can appear
in a voice spectogram can be relevant to what is a phoneme and
what isn't.

But there is a lot of other inconsistency in what you have said.
First, I object to the inconsistency of using essentially
identical evidence to both defend and refute the same
proposition.

You said "It is therefore unlikely, though possible, that German
could coin new words in which [x] and [c,] would (appear to)
contrast in some other environment, ..." and claimed that because
this contrast is "unlikely," then [c,] and [x] are not phonemes
in German.  By implication (if not directly stated), since
English speakers are "likely" to coin words contrasting [T] and
[D], then "... the two are searate phonemes, and have ben so for
some time" despite the fact that they have failed to do so.

But "likely" and "unlikely" are not part of the original
proposition.  The original proposition was that sounds that the
speakers of a language can distinguish and could use
contrastively are phonemes in that language.  This is purely
mechanistic, while injecting "likely/unlikely" introduces a
subjective element because "likely/unlikely" are not absolutes
but are the ends of a sliding scale.  According to the original
proposition, a language can have no allophones that speakers can
distinguish and could use contrastively.  All such sounds must be
phonemes whether they are actually used contrastively or not.
Therefore according to this proposition, [c,] and [x] must be
phonemes in German because the speakers of the language can
distinguish them and could use them contrastively.  "Likely" and
"unlikely" don't come into it in the original formulation.

Indeed, had the original formulation been "sounds that the
speakers of a language can distinguish and could use
contrastively are *likely* to be phonemes," there would have been
no objection.  This creates no categorical imperative.  Such
sounds are likely to be phonemes, but, as the case of German
[c, x] shows, need not be.

So you can't use the original proposition to show that [c,] and
[x] are allophones in German and also to show that [T] and [D]
are phonemes in English.  According to the original proposition,
both pairs must be phonemes.  The fact that [c,] and [x] are
demonstrably allophones with no evidence of contrastiveness in
German clearly disproves the original proposition (if the
original proposition has a test for falsification).  Otherwise,
it has to be claimed that in some dark recess of the
German-speaking mind, not yet discovered and investigated, [c,]
and [x] are considered phonemes by German speakers because they
can distinguish the sounds and could use them contrastively.

In your second piece of inconsistent treatment, you said "...
Kuchen : Kuhchen form a subminimal pair: the vowel of the latter
is clearly (but non-distinctively) longer than the former,
indicating that it was in root-final position, before suffix
-chen" and then you said "True, in my pronunciation, the stressed
vowel of _either_ is longer than that of _ether_ -- but this is
in line with vowel length before other voices vs. voiceless
consonants."  In these two statements you have treated two very
similar phonological cases in completely different ways.

In the first, you have attributed the lengthening of the vowel
entirely to the presence of the morpheme boundary, without making
any allowance for the articulatory fact that you may get a
lengthened vowel when a palatal consonant follows a back vowel
(after all, something has to be going on while the tongue is
repositioning itself for the palatal fricative, which it doesn't
have to do [or not so much] for the velar fricative).  In the
second, you have attributed the lengthening of the vowel entirely
to the normal, purely phonetic and fully automatic, lengthening
of vowels before voiced consonants, without making any allowance
for the presence of the morpheme boundary between the vowel and
the consonant.  And yes, there is a morpheme boundary in 'either'
(OE ?:ghw??er > ?:g?er > ME aither, either < *a+gi+hw??er),
although most speakers probably won't recognize it today because
so much phonological activity has taken place around this
boundary.  The 'gi-' in this word is the collective prefix that
also appears in English 'enough' (< OE geno:h; cf. German
'genug').  Now it is possible that you don't realize that this
boundary is there, in which case you can't be blamed for
intentionally failing to mention it, and if you don't realize
that it is there, one can hardly expect a naive native speaker
to.

But when you make the point that the difference between 'Kuchen'
and 'Kuhchen' is that the latter has a morpheme boundary and the
former doesn't and then ignore the fact that one of the
differences between 'ether' and 'either' is that the latter has
a morpheme boundary and the former doesn't, this is inconsistent.
Now, admittedly, the morpheme boundary in 'Kuhchen' is
transparent to speakers of German ('Kuhchen' is not likely to be
a separate lexical item in German, but will always be recognized
as noun + diminutive suffix) while the morpheme boundary in
'either' is not ('either' is a separate lexical item in English
and it is doubtful if a native speaker would realize that
'either' contains 'whether' [although it is still possible that
the '-ther' might be perceived as a morpheme]).

But this just raises the question of whether morpheme boundaries
are only phonological boundaries if the speakers realize that
they are present (i.e., only clearly productive morphology
produces phonemic boundaries whereas frozen or lexicalized
morphology does not).  Another way of posing this question is
whether we are justified in including a morphological boundary in
the phonological representation just because we know that there
is a morphological boundary there, or are we only justified in
including a morphological boundary when we think we can detect
one in the phonetic realization.  This last may be true, but I
don't think it can be taken for granted.  And if it is true, then
a lot of morphological boundaries would have to come out of
phonemic representations.

Besides, in much the same way as speakers might perceive the
'-ther' of words like 'mother', 'father', 'brother' and conclude
that it is a separate morpheme identifying family members, it is
not impossible that speakers could subconsciously recognize the
'-ther' of words like 'either', 'other', 'whether', and 'nether'
as a separate morpheme (which, in fact, it is) and conclude
(correctly) that there is a morpheme boundary in 'either' (even
though it is only perceptual, not productive).  The perceptions
of speakers do not necessarily correspond to linguistic reality.
This is the very essence of folk etymology.  The human brain
looks for patterns -- in fact, it is essentially a pattern
detecting device.  But the fact remains that 'ether' is
monomorphemic and 'either' is not (even if speakers don't realize
it consciously).

So I consider it inconsistent to say that [ku:x at n] and [ku:c, at n]
are subminimal pairs because [ku:c, at n] has a morphological
boundary in it (indicated by a slight lengthening of the vowel
before this boundary which may or may not be attributable to the
boundary) and hence can be analyzed as /ku:+x at n/ while claiming
that [i:T at r] and [i:D at r] are true minimal pairs even though
[i:D at r] has a morpheme boundary in it (with a slight lengthening
of the vowel precisely before this boundary) which, while not as
obvious as the morpheme boundary in /ku:+xen/, may still be
perceivable by speakers.  So if it is possible to analyze
'Kuchen' and 'Kuhchen' as /ku:x at n/ and /ku:+x at n/ then it is also
possible to analyze 'ether' and 'either' as /i:T at r/ and /i:+T at r/.

Finally, you said "And there's no difference in _thigh_ vs.
_thy_."  As you would say, "This is simply wrong." :)  'Thy' is
part of a paradigm; 'thigh' is not.  Let's look at part of the
*synchronic* English personal pronoun system (if we are going to
consider 'thy' as synchronically part of English as everyone has
been; after all, if it isn't, then there is no contrast (even if
only apparent) between initial [T] and [D] in modern English):

        1st person sing.           2nd person sing.

  nom.        I                         thou
  obj.        me                        thee
  pos. 1      my                        thy
  pos. 2      mine                      thine

  (pos. 1 and 2 were originally allomorphs of the same form; 1 is
  now used as a pronominal determiner while 2 is used as the
  possessive pronoun; 1 still has some pronominal functions,
  however)

Now if we look at the oblique forms we can see in all cases what
looks like a pronominal base ('m' in the 1st person, 'th' in the
2nd person) followed by a set of postbases that correspond to
case or, synchronically, function.  It hardly seems illegitimate
to analyze 'thy' as consisting of a monomorphemic, unisegmental
base [D] plus a postbase morpheme [ai] in the same way we could
analyze 'my' into a morpheme [m] plus a morpheme [ai].  The base
tells us the person and number, the postbase tells us the case or
function. That this is true of the English personal pronoun
system in general can be seen from looking at some other forms
where we also find a similar unisegmental base also followed by a
postbase:

             3.m.s.          2.pl.          3.pl.

  nom.         he             you            they
  obj.         him            you            them
  pos. 1       his            your           their
  pos. 2       his            yours          theirs
               hisn*          yourn*         theirn*

  (* substandard; originally by analogy to 1. and 2. singular)

Clearly then, the majority of the English personal pronouns can
be considered to have a firm pattern of a base that indicates
person and number and postbases that indicate case or function.
These pronoun bases could thus be considered as bound morphemes
that occur only in initial position.

Going back to 'thy' vs. 'thigh', 'thigh' is monomorphemic, while
'thy' clearly can be considered to be made up of two morphemes,
[D] and [ai].  Let us further say that the pronoun base 'th' is
always realized as [D] by native speakers.  If we now compare this
with the German pair 'Kuchen' and 'Kuhchen', we see again that
'Kuchen' is monomorphemic (although allowing for the possibility
that it may represent a stem 'kuche-' and  a noun formative 'n')
while 'Kuhchen' is clearly composed of two morphemes, 'Kuh'
"cow," also an independent word, and '-chen', a diminutive
suffix.  German speakers know that the diminutive suffix is
always realized with [c,] regardless of the environment of this
sound, and thus will not consider the [c,] of this suffix a
phoneme even when it appears to contrast with [x].  English
speakers may or may not know that the pronoun base 'th-' is
always realized as [D] and that therefore initial [D] is not
being used as a phoneme even when it appears to contrast with [T],
but it really is begging the question to claim that "there's no
difference in _thigh_ vs. _thy_."

The difference between 'Kuhchen' and 'Kuchen' is that there is a
morpheme boundary in 'Kuhchen' but not in 'Kuchen'.  The
difference between 'thy' and 'thigh' is that there is a
(perceivable if not actual) morpheme boundary in 'thy' but not in
'thigh'.  Now admittedly, the '-chen' morpheme is productive in
German and can be freely used to create new forms while the
morphemes in 'thy' or 'my' are not productive but exist in frozen
forms.  But I can't see that it would take much intuitive power
for an English speaker to look at the forms 'my' and 'thy' and
'me' and 'thee' and figure out, at least subconsciously, which
part of these words carries the pronominal information and which
the case or function information, especially if they know the
rest of the personal pronoun system.  There is reason to believe
then, that native speakers of English may be somehow aware of a
difference between the pronominal bases in [D] and other words in
English with initial [T].  So if it is possible to analyze
'Kuchen' and 'Kuhchen' as /ku:x at n/ and /ku:+x at n/ then it is also
possible to analyze 'thigh' and 'thy' as /Tai/ and /T+ai/.

Now a similar analysis could be done with the deictic base 'th-':

  far deixis 'th-'   near deixis 'h-'   relative 'wh-' (/hw/ > /w/)

      there               here              where
      then               *[OE henne]        when
      thence              hence             whence
      thither             hither            whither
      that                                  what

Again, there is a clear pattern of a unisegmental base carrying
the deictic information and a postbase carrying the function
information, and it is not stretching credulity to point out that
native speakers could notice, even if only subconsciously, this
pattern.  A similar pattern would have been strongly visible in
the early ME forms of 'the' (of which 'that' is simply the neuter
singular) when it was still declined for gender, number, and
case.

It doesn't take too much imagination to see how speakers of
English might make a connection of some kind, even if only
subconscious, between the nature of the pronoun bases and the
deictic bases.  Allowing for a possible case of analogy and one
of dissimilation to smooth up the rough edges, it is easy to see
how the speakers of English could very well consider the pronoun
bases in 'th-' and the deictic base in 'th-' as somehow, at least
functionally, related and qualitatively different from the
initial 'th-' in other words where it functions differently.  If
we want to follow the evidence, then it would seem that native
speakers of English consider that initial [D] is reserved for
these bases (in much the same way as German speakers realize that
the 'ch' of '-chen' is always [c,] even when following a back
vowel) and only [T] should appear in initial position in other
words that do not contain one of these bases.  In short, just
as German speakers realize that [c,] after a back vowel belongs
to the morpheme '-chen', so English speakers realize that initial
[D] belongs to the morpheme(s) 'th-'.

This is not to claim that this analysis represents linguistic
reality or that this is how these words should in fact be
analyzed (linguistically it would be better to analyze the
vocalic nucleus as the pronoun/deictic base and treat the 'th-',
etc. as prebases; this would account for 0 prebases in some forms
like 'I', 'us', 'it' rather than having to claim a 0 pronoun
base).  These apparent morphemes may just be chimeras (although
the very fact that initial [D] predicts meaning already suggests
strongly that it is a morpheme) and since the pronoun system is a
relic from an earlier stage of the language, speakers don't have
to deal with the forms on any productive level.  But the
potential for speakers to perceive them in this way is clearly
there.  Perceptions of reality can't change reality.  But
perceptions of reality can affect reactions to reality.  If
everyone believes that the earth is flat, it still isn't possible
to walk to the edge and jump off.  But if everyone believes that
the earth is flat, it may make people cautious about the
possibility of getting too close to the edge, and a good con man,
or even a well-intentioned do-gooder, could probably raise money
to put up a guard rail around the edge.

In short, the morpheme boundary of /ku:+x at n/ is productive while
the morpheme boundary of /T+ai/ is only perceptual.  But as
Sommerstein says (Modern Phonology, p. 100):

   ... both productive and perceptual factors are capable of
   being used by speakers to make intuitive generalizations, and
   of determining or conditioning linguistic change.

How, or even when, this perception may have come about, I'm not
sure; I am only saying that the evidence indicates that this is a
possible *synchronic* explanation of how initial [T] and [D] are
used by native speakers of English and, if this is so, that is
why there are no new coinings in which [T] and [D] contrast in
initial position.  The sound [D] is restricted to the pronoun
and deictic bases and these bases are not productive (in the
sense that they are not used to create new forms, but then there
are seldom new coinings of function words) in English.  The
contrast between initial [T] and [D] is simply frozen in the
contrast between the pronoun/deictic bases and other words with
initial [T] and hence any new coining in English will have
initial [T] unless it happens to be a pronoun or deictic word
because the [D] in these forms is a morpheme.  It seems to me
that this perception must be at least partially involved in the
observation that 'the' has invariant [D], where it presumably
exists because it is a lenition of [T] in a usually unstressed
form, while 'theology', which invariably has an unstressed [T],
has only [T].

As Herb Stahlke pointed out on 21 Apr 2000, the explanation of
initial [D] as lenition of [T] in function words is less than
satisfying because:

  ... there was no initial contrast until the function words,
  largely deictics and largely unstressed, laxed the initial /th/
  to /dh/.  However, there was a sizable set of content words,
  like "theology" that had initial unstressed syllables beginning
  with /th/, and none of these voiced.

This is unsatisfying because the main difference between function
words like 'the' and content words like 'theology' is that the
former are much more heavily used than the latter ('the' is the
most common lemma in the English language with 6,187,267 tokens
in the 200 million word BNC while 'theology' slips in at 5237
with 1098 tokens).  One must thus rely on frequency of use to
account for the lenition of one and not the other.  But if the
distinction is based, not on function words per se, but on the
perception of a 'th-' morpheme in some words (which because of
the nature of the 'th-' morpheme(s) just happen to be function
words), then this difficulty disappears.  One can then express
the shift of initial [T] to [D] with the rule

    [T] > [D] / # ___ +

which, since # (word boundary) and + (morpheme or formative
boundary) are (as we all agree) phonological (even if not always
phonetic) conditions, does not violate anybody's phonological
rules.  In this case, frequency of use can be used as a
motivation for the rule, but the trigger comes from the morpheme
(or formative) boundary.  Objections that the morpheme boundary
may not be real or that it doesn't show up in the phonetic
representation are groundless if phonology is based on the
perceptions of the speakers of a language and not mechanistically
on the phonetic realization.

If the relationship between initial [T] and [D] is as expressed
in this rule, it turns out that it is not based specifically on a
difference between function words and content words (once again
demonstrating that correlation does not prove causality) which
accounts for the fact that 'through', which is frequently used as
a function word, does not have initial [D].  What it lacks (at
least in the perception of speakers) is the deictic morpheme
'th-'.  The fact that the lenition is not a specific property of
function words also accounts for the fact that function words
like 'for' (rank 11 in the BNC) and 'so' (rank 58) do not show
initial voicing in English.  Finally, since the laxing of [T] in
these words is only motivated by frequency of use, not triggered
by it, the extension of [D] to stressed forms of these words does
not have to be accounted for by analogy.

This analysis also can be used as a basis for explaining the
anomaly that Herb Stahlke discussed in his posting as follows:

   An oddity is that the function word "thither", which is rare
   in contemporary ModE, has initial /th/ for all AmE speakers
   I've consulted.  American dictionaries regularly show /dh-/ as
   a second pronunciation, and British dictionaries I've checked
   either give only /dh-/ or give /th-/ as a second choice.
   Apparently Americans who know the word generally don't treat
   it as a function word.

Again, if the analysis of the distribution if initial [T] and [D]
in English given above is correct, the difference between
American [TID at r] and British [DID at r] is not based on the
perception of 'thither' as a function word in one dialect and not
as one in  the other.  Nor does the word lack the 'th-' deictic
morpheme since it is clearly part of the deixis pattern (thither,
hither, whither).  All that is needed to account for the pattern
is a rule in one dialect that blocks the shift of [T] to [D] if
the word already contains a [D].  Of course, it might also be a
dissimilation rule in the other dialect that operates after the
shift.  [Incidentally, my pronunciation is the American one, but
the word to me is archaic (to the point of obsolescence) and only
used by me in fixed expressions like 'hither and thither' or
'hither, thither and yon', and I only use these when I'm feeling
archaic, generally replacing them in everyday speech with 'here
and there' or 'here, there and everywhere'.  Typically, however,
I still use the compound 'hitherto' productively (i.e., as part
of my speech production).]

Once again, let me stress that this is not the same thing as
saying that [T] and [D] are not phonemes in English.  They simply
aren't contrastive in initial position.  The shift rule has been
presented as a historical rule.  If [T] and [D] are not phonemes
(or even possibly if they are) then it is also a synchronic rule.
That is all it takes to eliminate contrast between initial [T] and
[D] in English.  While [T] and [D] may well be phonemes in English,
what I am saying is that in the same way that [ku:c,en] and [ku:xen]
should not be considered a minimal pair in German, so [Tai] and
[Dai] should not be considered as evidence of the phonemicity of [T]
and [D] in English.  In other words, one should not insist on the
phonemicity of [T] and [D] on the basis of 'thigh' and 'thy'.  That
is what I have said from the start.  The distribution of initial [T]
and [D] in English can be accounted for by (phonological!) rule.

Now there are those who say that if you just consider this a
phonemic distinction, then you don't have to do all this analysis
and this evidence can safely be ignored.  They also say that some
patterns don't need explanations, that they are just there and
that trying to find explanations for patterns just complicates an
analysis that would be much simpler if the patterns were ignored.
But then they can't account for the distribution of initial [D]
and [T] between pronouns/deictics and other words and they can't
account for the lack of new coinings with initial [D] except by
saying that it is just a statistical anomaly.  So all in all, I
think it is better to account for the evidence rather than just
sweep it under the carpet.  I must say that I was surprised to
see you buy into the "any sounds that the speakers of a language
can distinguish are phonemes" bit, but I am glad to see that you
haven't jumped on the "ignore the contradictory evidence"
bandwagon so far.  At least you are presenting facts and
interpreting evidence as you see it.

It is of course possible to claim convincingly that there is no
phonetic difference between 'thy' and 'thigh' except for [T] and
[D], but it can be claimed equally convincingly that there is a
considerable difference between their function and internal
structure.  Now when it can be shown that the words that have
this same internal structure all have [D] to the exclusion of
[T] (that is, if one of these words has an initial dental
fricative it will always be [D], not [T]), it is possible that
the perception of the speakers about the distribution of initial
[T] and [D] is based on something other than phonemic
distinction.  Now there is no doubt that 'thy' and 'thigh' are
different words, just as there is no doubt that 'Kuhchen' and
'Kuchen' or 'Tauchen' and 'tauchen' are different words.  But
speakers of German do not distinguish 'Kuhchen' from 'Kuchen' or
'Tauchen' from 'tauchen' on the basis of a phonemic contrast
between [c,] and [x] but on the perception of a different
morpheme, '-chen' (diminutive; always with [c,]) in one word but
not in the other.  In the same way, in my view, the speakers of
English do not distinguish 'thy' from 'thigh' on the basis of a
phonemic distinction, but on the perception of a different
morpheme 'th-' (pronoun base; always with [D]) in one word but
not in the other.

My point is that this perception is not necessarily based solely
on phonetics.  The perceptions of speakers can sometimes be
perverse:  sometimes speakers will insist that two quite distinct
sounds are the same sound to them (e.g., German [c, x]); at other
times they will insist that two phonetically identical sounds are
different in their perception (e.g. German [t] in 'Rat' and
'Rad'; even more compelling was Sapir's example from Athapaskan).
As far as I know, there is no mechanistic way to determine the
phonemes of a language.  Determination of phonemes has to be done
by linguistic analysis based on what sounds contrast and under
what circumstances.  Different analysts may arrive at different
conclusions about which sounds are phonemes and which not.
Phonemes are psychological entities and their identification is
often subjective, depending on how much weight different analysts
give to which parts of the evidence.

>(I do not mean to imply that boundaries are *always* relevant
>while other information *never* is, only that there is no
>inconsistency in treating them differently.)

A wise precaution, since there always seem to be borderline cases
in which a clear distinction is not possible from the data, even
if, in the vast majority of cases, it is ("All grammars leak").
But, as I say, the inconsistency lies not in treating boundaries
differently from other morphological information, but in treating
some morphological boundaries differently from other
morphological boundaries.  If you only introduce morphological
boundaries into the phonology when you want two sounds not to be
phonemes, but ignore syntactically justifiable morphological
boundaries when you want two sounds to be phonemes, you run the
risk of being inconsistent.

>A few other points: How did _thy_ and _thigh_ differ before the
>former developed a voiced fricative?  Easy: the Old English forms
>were _thi:n_ and _the:oh_, where the final -h represented a velar
>fricative.  The loss of the final consonants in these words seems
>to be much later than the initial voicing.

Here we have a major difference of opinion.  To my knowledge (not
to my sure and certain knowledge, but from what I have gathered
about it), the voicing of initial [T] did not take place before
the 16th century, possibly even later (although, as far as I
know, there is nothing that prevents it from having happened
earlier).

Second, the loss of final [n] in 'thi:n' is not the normal
erosion of final [n] affixes that took place later in, for
example, the verbal infinitive, but rather was a morphological
shift whereby the forms with and without [n] became allomorphs,
with the former being used before words beginning with vowels and
the latter being used before other words.  This use is exactly
paralleled by the use of the forms 'a/an' and 'my/mine'.
Although the 'a/an' usage persists, 'thy/thine' and 'my/mine'
eventually split into two distinct forms, one becoming the
possessive pronoun and the other becoming a possessive pronominal
determiner.  The earlier usage is still found, however, in some
frozen forms (e.g., 'mine host') or in poetic language (e.g.,
'mine eyes have seen ...'). The forms without [n] are already
attested in very early Middle English, thus clearly antedating
the normal erosion of final inflectional [n].

Finally, the loss of the velar fricative was presumably complete
in the London dialect by the time of Chaucer since he rhymes
'high' (written <hye>) with both 'pie' (written <pye>) and 'fly'
(<flye>) and also rhymes 'light' (written <lite>; this, like
'the:oh' also had the form 'le:oht' in Old English;) with
'mite'(<myte>).  In 'thigh', there are writings as early as 1200
that indicate the loss of the velar in this word (<the>, <thee>,
in contrast with <thi> 'thy').  Of course, all of these words
would have been pronounced with [i:] at that time rather than
with [ai] as today after the great vowel shift and
diphthongization of long vowels, but they still all had the same
final sound.

So we can comfortably say that the forms [Ti:] and [Ti:n] were in
use by early ME (11th-12th century) and that 'thigh' would have
had the pronunciation [Ti:] at least by the end of the 14th
century (or possibly as early as 1200).  In order for what you
say to be true ("The loss of the final consonants in these words
seems to be much later than the initial voicing") then this
voicing had to have taken place well before the end of the 14th
century (and possibly before the end of the 12th century).  As I
say, I don't have a firm date for this event, but it has always
seemed to me that it was later rather than earlier (although I
can think of several good reasons why it may have been earlier,
but, even so, I can't put it much before about 1300).  Herb
Stahlke, in his posting of 21 April 2000, said that it didn't
happen until the 18th century, but this seems much too late to
me.  If anyone has solid information, based on evidence, perhaps
we can resolve at least this particular side issue.

>As the possibility of a three-way /ph : p : b/ contrast:  While
>I agree that English speakers tend to hear unaspirated [p] as /b/
>(at least, if the stop has a lenis pronunciation; the fortis
>stops of the Romance languages are normally perceived as /p/),
>systems with this contrast are by no means rare.  It was found in
>ancient Greek and a variety of modern languages.  It could not
>*on typological grounds* be ruled out for some future version of
>English.

I think my point was that it would be difficult to make this
three-way distinction with English /b/ as we presently know it.
The lax unaspirated [p] of English /spin/ is virtually
indistinguishable from the partially voiced /b/ of English /bin/
(that is, if you taped an English speaker saying /spin/ and
saying /bin/ and then erased the part of the tape with the /s/ on
it and ran both through a voice spectograph the two sequences
would appear much the same).  The relevant feature is voicing
onset, which is not an n-ary distinction, but is a continuum.
Thus what distinguishes [b p ph] is where voicing begins with
respect to the releasing of the stop.  If voicing begins before
the stop is released you have [b].  If voicing onset corresponds
to the release of the stop you have unaspirated [p].  If the
beginning of voicing is delayed after the release of the stop,
you have [ph].  The amount of delay determines whether you have a
weakly aspirated stop or a more strongly aspirated one.

Typologically such three-way contrasts do exist, but they have to
be based on stronger distinctions than presently exist among the
current English sounds.  In English, the voicing of [b] starts
very close to the release of the stop making it difficult to
distinguish from lax unaspirated [p].  It is only the phonotactics
of the language that prevents confusion between the two.
Furthermore, even when so based, such contrasts seem to be
unstable, with a tendency for one or more of them to shift out of
the matrix.  Look at what has happened in Greek:  both /ph/ and
/b/ have shifted away from the phonetic center (bilabial stop) of
the matrix to become fricatives.

So, I too would not rule out such a three-way distinction for
some future version of English, but I don't think it could happen
with the English sounds as they are presently realized.

>And finally, I have read Chomsky & Halle.

I rather thought you had.

>Seems to me they thought that had proved we didn't need phonemes
>to do phonology. and that various problems (of the type to which
>the thy thigh controversy belongs) could be resolved if we
>accepted "minor rules".  Well, that's very nice, but that's not
>the framework in which we have been arguing, so I don't see why
>you invoked them.

I invoked them (sounds rather like a pagan ritual :>) because
you said with reference to orthography "... we ignore all sorts
of other distinctions, and it doesn't bother us."  The part that
I was suggesting that you read (but I didn't have the specific
reference at hand) or re-read is on p. 49 where they say:

  The fundamental principle of orthography is that phonetic
  variation is not indicated where it is predictable by general
  rule.  Thus stress placement and regular vowel and consonant
  alternations are generally not reflected.  Orthography is a
  system designed for readers who know the language, who
  understand sentences and know the surface structure of
  sentences.  Such readers can produce the correct phonetic
  forms, given the orthographic representation and the surface
  structure, by means of the rules that they employ in producing
  and interpreting speech.  It would be quite pointless for the
  orthography to indicate these predictable variants.

I'm not sure that they believe that you don't need phonemes to do
phonology (well, I guess they do).  What they don't believe is that
there is a "phonemic" level of abstraction between the abstract
underlying (lexical) representation and the surface
representation that represents any "psychological reality."  What
they proved is that they don't like to talk about phonemes.  But
what they call phonological representations usually look
suspiciously like what others would call phonemic transcriptions
with the morphophonemics thrown in.  It is rather that they like
to lump phonemes and morphophonemes together without referring to
either one and account for morphophonemic alternations by what
they call "readjustment rules" in the difference between what
they call surface phonology and deep phonological structure.  But
they certainly don't deny that there must be some abstract phonic
structure beneath the surface phonetic level, whatever it may be
called.  But even if one does not subscribe to their concept of
phonology, I believe that there are still truths to be found
among their pages.

I brought them up because you mentioned some of the orthographic
peculiarities of English that they make less "peculiar" through
some of their "minor rules" (or "readjustment rules").  Although
I agree that much of what they say is overstated, especially as
they steadfastly refuse to discuss 'details that they consider
irrelevant', as ad hoc explanations for the peculiarities of
English orthography, they make it easier to systematize.  As they
state, again on p. 49, but it is a recurring theme throughout,
"... English orthography, despite its often cited
inconsistencies, comes remarkably close to being an optimal
orthographic system for English."  Despite its rather sweeping
nature, I don't think this is overstated (well, not much anyway;
"not really all that bad" might be better than "close to being
optimal").  Their real contribution, however, lies in
demonstrating that it is possible to evaluate intrinsic
complexity through the concept of markedness.

And incidentally, we don't really need phonemes to do phonology.
If one leaves mentalism (i.e., the perception of the speakers)
out of it, phonemic analysis is an abstraction used by linguists
to make talking about morphemes from the phonetic point of view
easier.  G?bor S?ndi has stated (26 Apr 2000) that "the main
purpose of phonemic analysis is to provide for an unambiguous way
to describe the pronunciation of every utterance in a language."
This is rather the opposite of what phonemic analysis is
(although, actually I only object to one word of this
definition).  Phonemic analysis is in this way a reductionist
strategy that linguists use so that they can talk about the
morphemes of a language without getting bogged down in the actual
pronunciation of words and other morphemes.  Whether phonemes
have any "psychological reality" or not is still a matter of
discussion (although one, or at least this one, tends to think
that they do).  But since phonemes are an abstraction, if you do
your abstraction in a different way, then you don't need
phonemes.  The trick is to find a different abstraction that is
consistent across all the levels of language that phonology
affects and still can claim some degree of "psychological
reality."

What phonemic analysis provides us is a unique way to represent
every utterance in a language without worrying about its actual
pronunciation.  In this view, phonemic transcription represents
the limit of how broad a phonetic transcription can be without
violating any of the functional distinctions made by the
language.  Here, phonemic analysis just collects those similar
sounds that don't contrast in a language into a single entity
called a phoneme.  The phoneme then can be used to stand for any
(or all) of its members (allophones) in discussions.  Phonemic
transcription is used to free us from the cumbersome restrictions
of narrow phonetic transcription.  Phonemic transcription in this
sense is just another type of phonetic transcription from which
all the predictable, redundant, non-contrastive elements have
been stripped mechanically.

But a phonemic transcription doesn't describe the pronunciation
of words unambiguously.  It may describe the words unambiguously
because of the property of contrastiveness which all phonemes
must have regardless of whose definition you use, but not their
pronunciation.  One can determine the actual pronunciation of
words from a phonemic transcription only if one has a key that
gives both the rules for the distribution of the allophones of
the phonemes in the transcription and the speech habits of the
speakers of the language.  For example the phonemic transcription
of English /spin/ doesn't tell you that the /p/ here is lax and
unaspirated.  A description of how the word in question is
actually pronounced (a narrow phonetic transcription) would be
more like [sbIn] (allowing for the limitations of the 7-bit
ASCII character set).  An even better example was provided by
G?bor S?ndi himself when he said "[Japanese] /huzimori/ is
pronounced [phujimori]."  Clearly, a phonemic transcription is
fairly useless for pronunciation purposes without the key.

The point of this longish digression in an already overly longish
message is not really that we don't need phonemes to do
phonology.  It may be true, but I am not arguing in favor of it.
Yes we could do phonology with phones plus a hideous mess of
morphophonemic and allophonic rules, or with a different kind of
abstraction, in much the same way as we don't need arabic
numerals (or place value notation in general) to do arithmetic,
but could use roman numerals (sign value notation) instead.  But
using phonemes in linguistics and arabic numerals (place value
notation) in arithmetic just makes things a hell of a lot easier.
But the real point of this is actually about the relationship
between phones and phonemes and the relationship between phones,
phonemes, and orthography.

If we look at phonemic transcriptions, we will find that they are
often fairly close to the normal orthography (at least for
English [if we except the vowels and throw in some
morphophonemics], which is principally what we are talking
about).  By comparison, phonetic transcriptions will usually be
widely divergent from the orthography (especially if one gets
beyond a 7-bit ASCII medium).  This is because alphabetic scripts
are based on essentially the same principle as phonemic analysis.
Those who introduced alphabets to language must have used a very
similar analysis, providing a symbol for each non-predictable
(contrastive) sound and leaving the non-contrastive (predictable)
sounds to be sorted out by the speakers (readers).  Alphabetic
systems then will tend to have one symbol (or sequence of
symbols) for each phoneme.  Indeed, the fact that those who
introduced alphabets to writing language used a phonemic-type
analysis is one of the things that indicates that phonemes are
such a linguistically useful concept and may have some
"psychological reality" apart from a mere linguistic abstraction.

So, with this in mind, let's take another look at what you said
about English orthography:

On Sun, 05 Nov 2000 CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU wrote:

>>... we ignore all sorts of other distinctions, and it doesn't
>>bother us.  <s> stands for /s z S Z/ (the latter two as in
>>_pressure_ and _pleasure_ -- in fact, we don't evan have an
>>official way to spell /Z/, though <zh> would seem obvious.  And
>>don't even ask about the vowels: treating <y w> as doublets of
>><i u>, we have effective five vowel symbols for a very large
>>phonemic inventory.  I'd be glad to see ,dh. in use, but it
>>really has nothing to do with whether [T D] are separate
>>phonemes.

You said that "<s> stands for /s z S Z/" but these are all
(except /s/ most of the time) morphophonemic spellings or
allophonic variations.  <s> only represents /S Z/ before a
palatal.  Therefore, I would not expect <s> to represent /S/ or
/Z/ except before a palatal <u> or before the sequence <ion> or
<ial>.  Whether it represents /S/ or /Z/ in these environments
will depend on the form of the basic, underlying word.  Thus the
realization of <s> will be predictable (with, as usual, a very
small number of exceptions).  When the distinction is phonemic
(i.e., not predictable; e.g., 'sea':'she', 'sell':'shell/,
'sore':'shore'/) you can't use <s> for /S/.  Similarly, we can
always write the plural morpheme /s/ with <s> and a native
speaker will know automatically when it is to be pronounced [s]
and when [z], but we can't write /zip/ with <s> because here it
constrasts with [s] in /sip/.  So it is not that "we ignore all
sorts of other distinctions, and it doesn't bother us"; rather we
ignore *predictable* distinctions and it doesn't bother us.

The fact that <s> can be used for /z S Z/ just tells us that
there must be some rule by which English speakers derive /z/,
/S/, or /Z/ from an underlying /s/ whenever this orthography is
used.

You said "in fact, we don't evan have an official way to spell
/Z/, though <zh> would seem obvious."  Part of this stems from
the fact that /Z/ became phonemic after the orthographic rules
were established.  But I can't think of any other way to spell
foreign names like 'Zhukov' or 'Zhdanov' or loanwords like
'muzhik' -- do you have an alternative suggestion?  As with <s>
and <z> and <sh>, when the distinction isn't predictable, you
have to be explicit in the spelling.

I agree that one shouldn't even ask about the vowels.  As far as
I know, English vowels are still shifting on a continuing basis.
I doubt that the writing system has any chance to catch up until
this stops.  Certainly there is precious little phonetic
predictability in English vowel orthography.  On the other hand,
there is a great deal of morpheme identity encoded in English
vowel orthography (e.g., 'pair', 'pare', 'pear'; 'die', 'dye';
'meat', 'meet', etc., etc.).  If these homophonous vowel sounds
were replaced with standardized orthographies, this information
would be lost.  Basically, English vowel orthography has traded
off phonetically specific information for morphologically or
lexically specific information through its myriad variant
orthographies for identical phonetic sequences.  But there are
still regular vowel alternations that are not explicit in the
orthography but are still predictable from the grammatical rules
(divine/divinity, extreme/extremity, etc., etc.).  Finally,
English vowel orthography has advantages in a situation with
continually shifting vowels or numerous dialects with varying
vowel realizations.  'Caught' and 'cot' are still
orthographically recognizable whether they have the same vowel
sound or not.

And to your last statement about the fact that [D T] are always
written only with <th> having nothing to do with whether they are
separate phonemes or not, I still say "maybe not."  But
personally, I think it has a lot to do with it.  But it certainly
has a great deal to do with the contrastive load of [D T] in the
language.  If one accepts the idea that only distinctions that
are not predictable from the rules of grammar need to be marked
in the orthography, then I don't see how the fact that the
difference between [T] and [D] is never marked in the orthography
can indicate anything other than the existence of rules that
predict the presence of [T] or [D] (with the usual small number
of exceptions).  In short, the contrastive load of [D T] is very
nearly zero.  I suppose it depends on whether one considers
phonemes to be just different sounds in a language or whether one
considers them to be sounds that can't be derived from some other
phoneme by a grammatical rule.

Since, in your view, the fact that [D T] are always written
indiscriminately with <th> says nothing about whether they are
phonemes or not, then you should be able to come up with lots of
examples of phonetic (alphabetic or syllabic) writing systems
from around the world where two distinct phonemes are invariably
written with the same symbol (not occasionally, but invariably).
I'll be waiting to see this list (note: logographic and
logo-syllabic systems are excluded since, in general, they don't
represent phonemes directly).

But if the fact that [D T] are always written with <th> says
nothing about whether they are phonemes or not, then so also does
the fact that German [c, x] are always written with <ch> have
nothing to do with whether they are separate phonemes or not.
But guess what? -- they aren't.  The basic principle of
alphabetic systems remains:  one symbol (or fixed sequence of
symbols) per phoneme.  Allophonic or morphophonemic alternations
don't have to be expressed in writing because they are
predictable to native speakers (just as allophonic alternations
don't have to be expressed in phonemic transcription).  In fact,
anything that can be predicted by native speakers from context
(like the vowels in most Semitic langugages or the many English
words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently)
doesn't have to be expressed in writing.  But when you have
contrastive sounds that can't be predicted from context
(phonetic, grammatical, or semantic), the writing system has to
differentiate them or else it fails.

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi


From evenstar at mail.utexas.edu  Mon May 14 03:52:21 2001
From: evenstar at mail.utexas.edu (Shilpi Misty Bhadra)
Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 22:52:21 -0500
Subject: Bactria Margiana Archaeology Complex
Message-ID: <SUN.13.MAY.2001.225221.0500.>

[ moderator edited ]

Most of you probably have already read the article, but if you haven't, it
might be interesting to read. It was on the headliners for the NY Times, now it
is under the science section ... There may the possibility of early writing in
this ca. 2000 BCE culture in Central Asia. Seals were found. Some try to
connect the BMAC with the movements of Indo-Iranians from the steppe.

Bactria Margiana Archaeology Complex
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/13/world/13LOST.html

BMAC is also briefly discussed in pp. 72-74 in Mallory and Adams'
Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture under BMAC

Shilpi Misty Bhadra
University of Texas at Austin
Ancient History, Classics, and Humanities (focus: Indo-European Studies)
senior undergraduate
evenstar at mail.utexas.edu
512-320-0229 (ph)
512-476-3367 (fax)


From edsel at glo.be  Mon May 14 10:12:51 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 12:12:51 +0200
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.121251.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lars Martin Fosse" <lmfosse at online.no>
Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2001 11:14 AM

> David L. White [SMTP:dlwhite at texas.net] skrev 6. mai 2001 16:21:

>> There is good evidence of something like Semitic influence, sub-stratal or
>> not, in Insular Celtic, and I suspected when I first read Dr. Trask's
>> initial posting that something like this woud lie behind the views of the
>> "No-Proto-Celtic" crowd.  The typological lurch of Insular Celtic toward
>> Semitic, illusory (in terms of actual Semites) or not, does indeed make it
>> difficult to construct a unified proto-language.  Difficult, but not
>> impossible.  Such questions as how and when Insular Celtic wound up
>> verb-initial and so on just have to be answered at some point.  They do no
>> make proto-Celtic unviable, or suggest any such scenario as just given
>> above.

> As far as I know, Old Norse is also verb-initial. Should we assume Semitic
> influence there too?

> Would it be possible to get a list of features that point in the direction of
> Semitic?

> Best regards,
> Lars Martin Fosse

[Ed  Selleslagh]

As a non-linguist I wonder if the personal endings of verbs (the person
marker), which are basically remnants of suffixed pronouns, cannot be viewed as
an indication that PIE was actually verb-initial (verb-[suffixed]S-O), at least
with pronouns as subject?

Ed.


From dlwhite at texas.net  Mon May 14 12:42:47 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 07:42:47 -0500
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.074247.0500.>

[ Moderator's note:
  The following quoted material is taken from a post by Rick Mc Callister
  dated 10 May 2001.
  --rma ]

> As a non-linguist, I'll have to take your word on that but could
> someone explain the seeming complexity of mutations wrought by Irish
> numbers on following consonants. As I remember some numbers don't cause
> mutation, and there are two types of mutations caused by other numbers

>>        French liasion is abstractly similar to Celtic mutation, for both
>> might be described as the phonemicization of originally phonetic processes
>> occurring across boundaries.

        It's not too difficult.  Words or types of words that used to end in
a vowel cause lenition, and words that used to end in a nasal cause
"eclipsis" or the nasal mutation.  Thus the sequence of IE numbers that used
to end in /-m/ (7-9?) cause the nasal mutation, with a little bit of
analogical exetnsion somewhere.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon May 14 07:49:41 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 03:49:41 EDT
Subject: IE versus *PIE
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.034941.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/13/01 10:12:32 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
colkitto at sprint.ca writes:

> and linguists may have to discuss family trees in the same way that
> cartographers discuss Mercator's Projection (even Peter's may not entirely
> free of such problems.

-- this is, I think, a good analogy.

It would also be useful to think of language (as indeed culture in general)
as following a Lamarkian rather than Darwinian model of genetic descent.
That is, acquired cultural traits can be "inherited".

Any widespread language is always full of incipient daughter languages, as
dialects spontaneously form and then merge back into the main stem in most
cases; in fact, some quite divergent forms can be re-assimilated, as in the
case of Gullah or Lallans, both of which in their different ways had
almost, but not quite, reached the status of full-blown daughter languages.
 If Scotland had continued to be an independent political entity with its
own standard 'court' form, today it might well be as distinct from Standard
English as Norwegian is from Danish.

For that matter, without modern communications, English would probably be
in the process of splitting into a language-family analagous to Romance
right now, given the very broad geographical spread over the past 500 years
and the existance of numerous, and quite sharply distinct, dialects.


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon May 14 08:25:26 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 09:25:26 +0100
Subject: IE versus *PIE
In-Reply-To: <006c01c0db14$8ddeed80$bd946395@roborr.uottawa.ca>
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.092526.0100.>

--On Saturday, May 12, 2001 2:51 pm -0400, Robert Orr,
<colkitto at sprint.ca>, wrote:

> I think part of the problem is that family tree diagrams tend to be
> oversimplified.  A close reading of the relevant passages of Dixon's book
> shows that he seems to arguing for some sort of recognition  that family
> tree diagrams should be far more complex than normally presented.

In a manner of speaking, yes.  But Dixon's central point is that *apparent*
language families can arise by long-term convergence, by the steady
diffusion of features across language boundaries.  He argues that family
trees of the familiar type only come about in exceptional circumstances --
what he calls 'punctuations'.

> One analogy that we should consider is bushes which can sprout branches
> which later can fuse again, or can fuse with branches from other bushes.

And exactly this has been proposed by Malcolm Ross.  See especially this:

  M. Ross. 1997. 'Speech networks and kinds of speech-community event'. In
  Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs (eds), Archaeology and Language I:
  Theoretical and Methodological Orientations, London: Routledge, pp.
  209-261.

> Of course, it may be impossible to reduce such complexity to a page, and
> linguists may have to discuss family trees in the same way that
> cartographers discuss Mercator's Projection (even Peter's may not entirely
> free of such problems.)

In fact, there has been quite a bit of lively discussion of alternatives to
the traditional family-tree model in the last few years.  I've put together
a little talk on the subject, which I hope to write up for publication one
day.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)


From dlwhite at texas.net  Mon May 14 13:30:40 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 08:30:40 -0500
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.083040.0500.>

[ Moderator's note:
  The following quoted material is taken from a post by Larry Trask dated
  11 May 2001.
  -- rma ]

> Hmmm.  May I know where in their book T and K assert that "anything goes"?
> My reading of the book reveals only the more cautious claim that we cannot
> know what happens in language contact until we look.

        Somewhere in the intro.  Hasty perusal has not revealed where. Do
they say anything does not go?

>>         Taking all these things together, plus the fact that finite verbs
>> are ordinarily "higher in the tree" than NPs,

> OK; I'm afraid I don't understand this.

> I don't think it's *generally* true that syntactic theorists put verbs
> higher in trees than NPs.  Verb-at-the-top is more a feature of
> dependency-based approaches than of constituency-based approaches.  But
> some contemporary dependency theorists put verbs and all argument NPs at
> the same level in their trees.  Non-Chomskyan constituency theorists
> typically put subject NPs higher than verbs.  Chomskyans change their
> analysis regularly, but they typically put abstract elements highest in
> their trees, not verbs.

        I think the "verbal side" is right about subjects, but be that as it
may, many NPS are not subjects, and these are almost all "under" verbs.

>> I suggest that the genetic
>> descent of a language can always (theoretically) be traced through
>> finite verbal morphology, where this exists.

> This strikes me as a highly arbitrary proposal, though perhaps an
> interesting one.  But it does have the immediate consequence that a
> language with no verbal morphology has no ancestor -- unless the intention
> is to supplement this proposal with one or more unstated back-up proposals.

       The back-up proposal is to use basic vocabulary, in the traditional
manner.  And even "isolating" languages usually do habitually associate some
items with the verb.  In Vietnamese there is a word "se" meaning future, for
example.

>> This will never be mixed,

> Well, a bold claim.  I confess I can't falsify it off the top of my head.

        That's the idea.  My only source is TK, but the examples they give
do not falsify it either.

> But I wonder what a survey of, say, native American languages might turn up.

>> and its
>> affixes will always be found closer to lexical verbs than are foreign
>> affixes, if the examples I am aware of are a reliable guide.  Using this
>> standard, Mednyj Aleut is Russian, Michif is Cree, and Ma'a is Bantu.
>> Each is a rather bizarre and severely influenced version of its putative
>> genetic ancestor, but technically there is little reason to think that
>> what Thomason and Kaufmann call "normal transmission" of finite verbal
>> morphology has in fact been interrupted, for in each case it is there,
>> unmixed and un-intruded upon. To some extent it is a matter of what we
>> call things rather than what they are,

> OK.  Very interesting.  Let me draw attention to two examples.

> First, Anglo-Romani.  According to T and K, this consists of wholly Romani
> lexis plus wholly English grammar.  According to David White's proposal,
> then, Anglo-Romani is English, since it has English verbal morphology.  Is
> this a satisfactory conclusion so far?

    Yes.

> Now, consider how Anglo-Romani came into existence.  I assume it didn't
> spring into being overnight, but must have evolved gradually.  So there are
> broadly two possibilities.

> First, Anglo-Romani started off as plain English, but was gradually
> relexified from Romani until no English lexis was left.  According to
> David's proposal, this *must* be what happened, since the alternative below
> seems to be impossible.

        Yes.

> Second, Anglo-Romani started off as Romani, but it gradually borrowed more
> and more grammar from English, until there was no Romani grammar left.
> Under David's proposal, this appears to be impossible, since the language,
> in this scenario, has shifted from having Romani verbal morphology to
> having English verbal morphology -- seemingly in conflict with the proposal
> on the table, which sees verbal morphology as inviolate.  It also, of
> course, has the peculiar consequence that Anglo-Romani has changed from
> being Romani to being English -- an outcome surely more bizarre than
> anything contemplated in T and K.

        Yes, that is why I favor the first.

> Assuming overnight creation can be excluded, then, David's scenario forces
> us to conclude that the first interpretation *must* be right.  Well, this
> is an empirical question.

        Is it?

> My second case is the Austronesian language Takia.  As it is commonly
> described, Takia has borrowed the *entire* grammatical system from the
> Papuan language Waskia, so that every Takia sentence is now a
> morpheme-by-morpheme calque of the corresponding Waskia sentence -- while
> at the same time Takia has borrowed no morphemes at all from Waskia.

> So, in Takia, the *patterns* of the verbal morphology are Waskia, while the
> *morphemes* are Takia.  In David's scenario, then, which is decisive?  Is
> Takia Austronesian, because it exhibits only Austronesian morphemes?  Or is
> it Papuan, because it exhibits only Papuan morphological patterns?

> A pretty little puzzle, don't you think?

        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.

>> but in any event I thought it
>> worthwhile to point out that the somewhat wild claims of Thomason and
>> Kaufmann are arguably exaggerated, as there are restrictions 1) that they
>> fail to note, and 2) that can at least possibly be used to determine
>> genetic descent, considerably reducing the incidence of "linguo-genesis"
>> and/or "mixed languages", perhaps to zero.

> Again, I don't see T and K as making any wild claims.  They seem to me to
> be doing no more than quoting Hamlet: "There are more things in heaven and
> earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

           I have "dreamt" of many things, but _seen_ none of the wilder
ones that TKs "philosophy" would seem to permit.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon May 14 07:52:29 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 03:52:29 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.035229.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/13/01 11:00:09 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> Someone, a relatively disinterested outsider, might take this alone to
> undermine the idea that there was any necessary connection between the names
> for elk, red deer and fallow deer and any particular types of deer.

-- any _single_ instance is not conclusive.  The probabilities become
conclusive for all practical purposes when you add together _all_ the
instances.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon May 14 08:12:59 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 04:12:59 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.041259.EDT.>

[ Moderator's note:
  The following quoted material is from a post by Steve Long dated 10 May 2001.
  -- rma ]

> Because the fallow deer was present in Anatolia but not in most of Europe.
> And since there is no common name in IE, IE languages could not have
> originated in Anatolia.

> Now, as a pretend outsider, you might ask the innocent question.  What if the
> PIEers moved into non-fallow territory and simply forgot the name?  Since
> there was no fallow deer in the north, why would they remember the name?
> There'd be nothing to apply it to.

-- you're missing the point entirely.  The lack of a term for fallow deer in
IE languages _outside_ the prehistoric range of the fallow deer has _nothing
to do_ with the argument.

Fallow deer _are_ present in Anatolia, and they _are_ present in Greece, and
they _are_ present in Italy, and they _are_ present in the Iranian plateau
from extremely early times.  Along with many other animals mentioned in this
context.

All of these areas have IE languages, and all of which, _according to the
Anatolian hypothesis_, would have been Indo-Europeanized from Anatolia.

But the Indo-European languages _of those areas_ lack cognate terms for
fallow deer; and for other animals _common to those areas_.  (Eg., the
chamois, etc.)

That is, Italic, Greek, Anatolian, and Indo-Iranian lack such terms.  And if
those languages had spread from a center _in Anatolia_, then a term for
"fallow deer", which would have been in continuous use, should be
reconstructable to PIE.  It should show up in Anatolian IE, Italic, Greek,
and Indo-Iranian, which would be more than enough for inclusion in the IE
lexicon.

And it doesn't.

Whereas terms for red deer, etc. _are_ reconstructable to PIE.

Of course, you could claim that the IE languages in question first looped up
into northern Eurasian, lost the animal terms, and then looped back down into
their historic positions and picked up local loan-words and/or invented
separate new ones.

This is known as "unnecessary complication of the hypothesis"; now you'd be
invoking migrations and counter-migrations and counter-counter-migrations,
like Renfrew's rather sad attempt in a recent issue of JIES; it's covered
with blobs and arrows moving hither and yon like a tactical rendition of
multiple blitzkreigs.

Which, when you consider that the whole Anatolian mess was originated to try
and _avoid_ positing archaeologically unattested migrations...  rather sad,
as I said.

> If some very early form of IE left Anatolia in say 6000BC, the people
> speaking it who went to or were in Germany or Britain or Ireland might not
> see a fallow deer for another 7000 years.

-- but the people in Anatolia and Greece and Italy and Iran WOULD be seeing
fallow deer, all the time.  Why don't they have cognate lexica for these
animals?

> I think that stepping back and with a critical eye, even the most adamant
> anti-Anatolian can see why an outsider might see this as a very poor
> argument.

-- see above.

> Let me repeat that and add something.  The "fallow deer" does little or
> nothing for the anti-Anatolian position, no matter how correct that position
> is.

-- see above.  As I said, you missed the point completely.


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Mon May 14 14:24:11 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 09:24:11 -0500
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
In-Reply-To: <32.14ac0dd0.282c2686@aol.com>
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.092411.0500.>

	Is there a known etymology for <dama> and Greek <tame>?

>Finally, there is the matter of the fallow deer itself.  It seems it may have
>been introduced into southern Italy in Neolithic times.  There seems to have
>been a native population in Bulgaria and Romania (darn close to the Ukraine)
>from late neolithic times into the present (N. Spassov 2000) and in Greece.
>The fallow deer and its names are actually an interesting example of how we
>should not take the things behind the names for granted.  The dama (Gr. tame)
>in "Dama Dama", it's formal scientific name, is appropriate.  The fallow deer
>appears to have been a very early semi-domesticate, not just another furry
>thing in the woods.  I hope to send a little more on this soon.

>For those who've been kind enough to temporarily see the other side of this
>issue, my appreciation.

>Best Wishes,
>Steve Long

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


From philjennings at juno.com  Mon May 14 23:07:05 2001
From: philjennings at juno.com (philjennings at juno.com)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 18:07:05 -0500
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.180705.0500.>

I have read Steve Long's reasoned and temperate remarks on the "urheimat
animals" issue and I'd be interested in his take, or anyone else's, regarding
the work of Dr. Martin Richards as reported in the NY Times 11/14/2000 under
the title "The Origin of the Europeans."  Since Dr. Renfrew is quoted in this
article, I take it that the Anatolian-originists have grown comfortable with
Richards' findings:  To summarize, 6 percent of Europeans are descended from
the Aurignacian wave of settlement, about 80 percent are descended from the
second Gravettian wave (20k to 30k years ago), and 10 percent are descended
from Middle Eastern farmers (in this context, "Anatolians.")

I assume from my reading of Renfrew that the Anatolian-wave-of-advance
theorists would have preferred the ratios to have been otherwise, ie. 6-10-80,
not 6-80-10.  Is it thought that there was a transfer of farming technology and
language to a group of Europe's indigenous post-Gravettians who blossomed and
constituted the wave-of-advance?

Once this concession is made (if it is made) how does one argue intelligently
that the language transferred completely?  If there are no evidences of PIE
ever being a creole, as some people say they can demonstrate, doesn't that make
it likely that PIE was the language of the indigenous post-Gravettians, rather
than the language they learned from their agricultural tutors?  Part-time
hunters living in isolated Balkan family homesteads did not, after all, make
the total life-style conversion to farming villages/pueblos.  These same
scattered living arrangements must have made it difficult to learn a new
language well or completely.

Already I have exposed my own partiality.  I wonder if there were creoles, and
if proto-Etruscan was one of them, with an essentially PIE grammar and a
largely exotic vocabulary.  But I suppose the same techniques that can detect
that PIE was never a creole, could also detect that Etruscan did not develop
from a creole, however long in the past.

(If my use of the word "creole" here is poorly chosen or offensive, I'm sorry.
I hope you all know what I mean.)


From petegray at btinternet.com  Mon May 14 19:13:52 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 20:13:52 +0100
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.201352.0100.>

> << Likewise, PIE lacks a word for the fallow deer, common throughout southern
>> Europe, but has terms for 'elk' and 'red deer'.... The logical conclusion
>> would be that the IE languages were intrusive in areas which had...
>>fallow deer,... and native to an area with roe deer...>>

> it might be worthwhile looking at statements like
> the one above with a critical eye.

I've been keeping out of this discussion, since I know little about it (not
that that always stops me!), but we would do well to remember the fate of
similar arguments based on the PIE words for Salmon and Birch/beech.  It was
shown way back a long time ago, that the actual semantic content of the
words was not stable, but changed according to the physical context of the
speakers.   We should therefore be very suspicious of arguments that depend
on something as fine as what kind of deer was involved.

I therefore have no choice but to applaud the note of caution sounded above.

Peter


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Mon May 14 08:15:04 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 04:15:04 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.041504.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/13/01 11:22:57 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes:

> There were tigers in the Caspian region until about 100 years ago.
> How far to the north and west did they live in earlier times?

-- far to the north in eastern Siberia, but as far as I know not as far west
as western Siberia.  There were tigers in the deltas of the rivers feeding
into the Aral Sea, and as you mention, in the Caspian region... not in the
Caucasus, though, IIRC


From mclasutt at brigham.net  Mon May 14 13:40:30 2001
From: mclasutt at brigham.net (Dr. John E. McLaughlin)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 07:40:30 -0600
Subject: Fallow Deer
In-Reply-To: <l03130307b7209a313410@[209.147.211.33]>
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.074030.0600.>

Rick Mc Callister:
	There were tigers in the Caspian region until about 100 years ago.
How far to the north and west did they live in earlier times?

Me:
	According to the sixth edition of Walker's Mammals of the World (1999,
Johns Hopkins, Vol 1, pg. 828), "P. t. virgata (Caspian tiger) occurred in
modern times from eastern Turkey and the Caucasus to the mountains of
Kazakhstan and Sinkiang, in the Middle Ages may have reached Ukraine, also
one report from northern Iraq in 1892, a few individuals still present in
Turkey in the 1970s, now probably extinct."

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 alderson+mail at panix.com  Tue May 15 01:34:32 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 21:34:32 -0400
Subject: Urheimat animals
In-Reply-To: <B7209460.C80%xavier.delamarre@free.fr> (message from Xavier
 Delamarre on Thu, 10 May 2001 19:04:12 +0200)
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.213432.0400.>

On 10 May 2001, Xavier Delamarre wrote in answer to my query:

> Some literature on the IE salmon (your ref. must be Diebold) :

> - Diebold, A.R. : Contributions to the Indo-European Salmon Problem, in
> Current Progress in Historical Linguistics  ed. William Christie Jr.,
> Amsterdam-New York-Oxford, 1976, 341-388.

This is almost certainly the article I had in mind.  The date is certainly in
the right period.

> - Diebold, A.R. : The Evolution of Indo-European Nomenclature for Salmonid
> Fish : The Case of 'Huchen' , Washington 1985, (JIES  Monograph Series, 5).

Carol Justus, in another message, asked whether this might be the article I was
thinking of.  It may have grown out of the earlier article, but is much too
late to be the one I had read in pre-print.

Thanks to you both.

								Rich Alderson


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Wed May 16 01:49:27 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 15 May 2001 21:49:27 EDT
Subject: A Note on Beavers
Message-ID: <TUE.15.MAY.2001.214927.EDT.>

<JoatSimeon at aol.com> (domenica 6 maggio 2001 11.41) writes:
<<...The neolithic range of the beaver stopped well short of the
mediterranean and most of Anatolia.  Again, this reinforces the PIE lexicon
for animals as being specifically north-central Eurasian...>>

The Beaver definitely appears to be a native of Anatolia.  So the beaver is
just another example of an animal that apparently could support an Anatolian
origin for IE languages.

In fact, it appears the beaver could support a origin of the IE languages on
the Eurprates. See: Legge, A. J. and P.A. Rowley-Conwy, "The Beaver (Castor
fiber L.) in the Tigris-Euphrates Basin." Journal of Archaeological Science
13:469-476 (1986).  References to the beaver being absent from "the
mediterranean zone" is to a narrow climate zone, not a location.  The beaver
lived in the south.

<JoatSimeon at aol.com> (domenica 6 maggio 2001 11.41) also writes:
<<-- I would certainly agree on "beaver" (PIE *bhebhrus) .... and the
derivation from a color term is obvious in PIE *babhrus.>>

Boy, beaver just doesn't seem to be a good candidate for a PIE word.
Especially if it's supposed to come from something like "reddish-brown".
You'd have to carry a Pantone color ring around in the woods with you to tell
reddish-brown animals apart.  And what was unique about the beaver or the
beaver's fur was not it's color, which is variable.

There seems to be an extremely transparent meaning in Greek that would be
hard to miss if it wasn't assumed the word was PIE.  <brucho:> and <bruko>
means to chew, to gnaw, to grind, to eat noisily.  <bruchetos> is chattering
of teeth.  <bruche:>, gnashing of teeth.  <diabro:sis>, eating through,
chewing, erosion.  <diabro:ma>, that which is eaten through.

<bibro:sko:> means to eat up, chew up; in its passive forms, e.g.,
<bebro:oetai>,  <bebro:menoi>, something that is eaten, gnawed or chewed up.
<rhiza bebro:menoi> is, e.g., "worm-eaten."  (The <bi-/be-> prefix might also
be considered causal  - e.g., bibazo:, bebaioo: < baino:.)  Also related are
<bebro:thois>, chew up; <brugde:n>, with clenched teeth.  <bruchiao:> is
chatter or some related defect of speech.

If there's anything about a beaver in living form, it's them mighty incisors
and the work they do.

Although the beaver's teeth would be obvious even to city folk who saw a pelt
with the head still in place, country folk would know to identify the beaver
from their work.  They leave plenty of chewed-up things behind - "bebro:-".
The beaver-gnawed tree or fence post is distinctive.  There are plenty of
papers on the beaver's role in ancient land clearance and creating
tree-dammed ponds.  Where there's beaver, there's gnawing.

But the Greek words above don't come from the beaver.  They might come from
just eating. (<bora>, post-Homeric for food.)  Or they might come from
references to the noise -- by gnashing (or gnoshing), chattering or even
roaring --coming from the mouth or throat.  So that <bruche:>, above, is not
only a "gnashing of teeth," but also "bellowing" (in L&S, connected to
bruchaomai).  (See also, bruch?don, bruche:thmos, bruche:ma,
bruche:te:r and maybe bruchios.) Possibly as collateral extensions, there's
<brochizo:>, hang, strangle.  And post-Homeric <brochthos>, throat, throatful
(as in vomited).  But the connection of the word with beavers I believe comes
later.

Based on a quick look at the texts and glossaries, it appears that the Greeks
did not use a bruch-/bibro- word for the beaver.  But they used it in
connection with animals often.  <bebro:ko:s boos> in Homer is a cow chewed up
by a lion.   And horses chomp the bit, <hippi ie: bruke>.  I think in
Antigone, <bebro:tes> is used to refer to scavenger birds.  A kind of smelt
was called <bebrada>, maybe because it was a chum or cut bait fish. And then
there is the <babuko:s>, the pelican. (If you've ever fed a pelican, you'll
think there was some connection), etc.

Based on all the above, I think that one might guess that the application of
the bebr- word to the beaver is late.  One also might guess that the word
traveled along the trade routes as a common name from the source of the pelt
(later than for the castors) - "the gnawer."

<<Now, in Old Indian/Sanskrit, there has been a semantic shift; there's a
cognate term, babhru, but it means 'mongoose'....>>

I don't know how a mongoose eats or what it leaves behind or if it has musk
glands.  My suspicion would be that this is a fur trade word.  If the pelts
have some similarity.  On the other hand, it may also be that this was by
some analogy to the badger - a closer animal I think - as a harvested animal
and the demand for its glands in the marketplace.  (See, e.g., Joshua T.
Katz, The Curious Case of the Hittite Mustelid, Abstract, Abstracts of
Communications of the 208th Annual Meeting, American Oriental Society, re the
connection of the name for the badger with the testicular gland in northern
IE and the connection to castor.)


In a message dated 5/14/2001 1:45:39 PM, centrostudilaruna at libero.it writes:
<<fiber seems to find a correspondence in the gallic Bibr(acte) (a personal

name), ...>>

<fiber> is probably a reference to the beaver's castors which must be removed
from inside its groin and are attached by ligament-like membranes.  <fibra>
is the older word meaning any "filament" in a plant or animal, generally
identified for some practical purpose, e.g., wicker-making, and it comes to
mean intestines.

<<...in the high old german bibar (modern german Biber), in the lituan bebras
and in sanskrit babhru, which has two different meanings: as adjective it
means ?brownred?...>>

Color words logically need to start as a reference to something and then that
word also becomes the name of the color.  "Turquoise" becomes something to
generalize to other objects of similar color.  "Babhru" would therefore
possibly originally refer to a fur, then to furs of similar color, and travel
across languages where fur was traded.

<<Also the greek "phrxne" comes from the same theme, which is the i.e.
*bhebhru- (I take those informations from the Pokorny).>>

Can't find that Greek word.  Is this a reconstr using <phrugo:>, to roast?

Finally this word of caution about what is a beaver and what is not, from
Honore de Balzac:

"Cheapness, monsieur. In the first place, very handsome silk hats can be
built for fifteen francs, which kills our business; for in Paris no one ever
has fifteen francs in his pocket to spend on a hat. If a beaver hat costs
thirty, it is still the same thing-- When I say beaver, I ought to state that
there are not ten pounds of beaver skins in France. That article is worth
three hundred and fifty francs a pound, and it takes an ounce for a hat.
Besides, a beaver hat isn't really worth anything; the skin takes a wretched
dye; gets rusty in ten minutes under the sun, and heat puts it out of shape
as well. What we call 'beaver' in the trade is neither more nor less than
hare's-skin. The best qualities are made from the back of the animal, the
second from the sides, the third from the belly.  I confide to you these
trade secrets because you are men of honor...."

Regards,
Steve Long


From stevegus at aye.net  Mon May 14 20:45:09 2001
From: stevegus at aye.net (Steve Gustafson)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 16:45:09 -0400
Subject: Flemish/Dutch dialects
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.164509.0400.>

C. Michiel Driessen wrote:

> The dialects of South Limburg Limburg (both the Belgian and the Dutch parts)
> are tone languages, however. They have two phonological tones, that can make
> a semantic difference and a morphological difference (they create the
> singular versus the plural in certain categories of nouns).

Many Scandinavian dialects, at least those outside of Denmark, have tone
phonemes that seem similar.  There are minimal pairs allowing the
distinguishing of different words, and some also are involved in the
distinguishing of singular and plural, especially in some dialects that
drop final -r's.


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Mon May 14 19:23:11 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 14:23:11 -0500
Subject: Three-Way Contrast of Secondary Articulations in PIE
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.142311.0500.>

[ moderator edited ]

Dear Stanley and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stanley Friesen" <sarima at friesen.net>
Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2001 9:11 AM

[SFp]
>>> While I agree many of the roots probably originally were distinct, I do not
>>> think we yet have sufficient information to tell in what manner.  I
>>> certainly doubt there was a single cause for all of the mergers.

>>[PCRp]
>> First, our agreement: there is rarely a single cause for anything.

>> But -- putting glides aside, how were they kept separate?

[SF]
> My point is that in PIE per se, they weren't, except by formatives such as
> the noun stem formatives.  That is, by the time of the reconstructed
> language, the old conditioning factors were gone.

<snip>

[PCR]
Surely this needs a rethink. This might work if CVC-roots had only ONE
root-extension but your scenario means that an IE-speaker would have to
abstract CVC from a CVCC root in order to add other root-extensions. Frankly, I
don't think so.

Pat

PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE at email.msn.com (501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th
St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE:
http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/ and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html "Veit ec
at ec hecc, vindg? mei?i a netr allar n?o, geiri vnda?r . . . a ?eim
mei?i, er mangi veit, hvers hann af r?tom renn." (H?vam?l 138)


From petegray at btinternet.com  Mon May 14 19:18:47 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 20:18:47 +0100
Subject: Semivowels In Sanskrit
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.201847.0100.>

>(so some people don't like
> transcribing an English v by Devanagari v, but use vh).

Thank you, Nath!   That explains David Beckham's odd tattoo.  For those of
you who didn't read about this (and why should you) he had his wife's name
tattooed in Devanagari on his arm, then found the papers laughed at it when
he returned, since it read "Vhictoria".

Nice to know there's a reason!

peter


From pausyl at AOL.COM  Tue May 15 02:21:14 2001
From: pausyl at AOL.COM (pausyl at AOL.COM)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 22:21:14 -0400
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.222114.0400.>

On Thu, 10 May 2001 18:19:04 +0100, Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
wrote:

>--On Sunday, May 6, 2001 2:29 pm +0300 Robert Whiting
><whiting at cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:

>> To make it clear what my statement was about:  My entire point was that
>> [T] and [D] do not contrast in initial position in English.  My
>> statement was not about whether [T] and [D] are phonemes in English or
>> not.  The two are not necessarily related ([T] and [D] can still be
>> phonemes even if they don't contrast in some environments).

>OK; I'll bite.  I will argue that [T] and [D] *do* contrast in initial
>position in English.  It is merely that we happen to have no good minimal
>pairs for /T/ and /D/ in the language at present -- a completely different
>matter.

>To begin with, 'thigh' and 'thy' are a perfect minimal pair, *if* we accept
>that 'thy' is a word of modern English -- which you may not want to accept.

>But there are a number of near-minimal pairs:

[ moderator snip ]

>By the way, is everybody happy that 'thus' is beyond question a grammatical
>word, and not a lexical word?

I'm actually on Larry Trask's side (for the most part) in this discussion,
but I assume that the argument from Robert Whiting's side would be best
stated in terms of "closed-class" vs. "open-class" words; _thus_ would seem
to be in the closed class.  _thy_ is surely English (think of the "Lord's
Prayer"), but it's also a closed-class item.  And I would judge the
Traskian point above about /oi/ never occurring in native English words,
even if true, to be irrelevant to the discussion:  It seems to me that no
amount of introspection would help an intelligent (but linguistically
untrained) native speaker of English to decide that _boy_ (the etymology of
which is disputed) is a loanword; however, it seems plausible that that
same speaker could uncover the fact that all words beginning with /D/
are "closed-class" or the like.  Whether all this is relevant to the
phonemicity of /D/ vs. /T/ is a completely different argument, however.  If
we take that same "intelligent (but linguistically untrained) native
speaker of English" as our judge again, it's clear that a minimal pair
like "either" vs. "ether" would establish the phonemic distinction.

>Take another case.  It is extremely difficult to find minimal pairs for
>[esh] and [ezh] in *any* position -- and all the pairs I can think of
>involve involve either proper names of foreign origin or obscure Scrabble
>words.

The best pair I could come up with is _Confucian_ (with [esh]) vs.
_confusion_ (with [ezh]).

Paul S. Cohen


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue May 15 09:04:13 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 15 May 2001 10:04:13 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.4.30.0105131029200.1015-100000@vesuri.Helsinki.FI>
Message-ID: <TUE.15.MAY.2001.100413.0100.>

--On Sunday, May 13, 2001 11:38 am +0300 Robert Whiting
<whiting at cc.helsinki.fi> wrote [in his recent PhD thesis ;-) ]

> But the fact remains that 'ether' is
> monomorphemic and 'either' is not (even if speakers don't realize
> it consciously).

Aw, come on, Bob.  I emphatically deny that 'either' is bimorphemic in
contemporary English, any more than 'feather' is.  It is *historically*
bimorphemic, of course, but that observation is neither here nor there.
Anyway, if we're looking at history, 'ether' is not monomorphemic either:
it's a transparent derivative of the Greek verbal root <aith-> 'burn'.
This root gave rise to a number of derivatives in Greek, including the one
leading to our word 'Ethiopia'.

By what right can you invoke one etymology but not another, when neither is
known to native speakers?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)


From g_sandi at hotmail.com  Tue May 15 21:50:36 2001
From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi)
Date: Tue, 15 May 2001 21:50:36 -0000
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <TUE.15.MAY.2001.215036.0000.>

An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
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From edsel at glo.be  Mon May 14 10:50:30 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 12:50:30 +0200
Subject: Pelasgian/was Etruscans
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.125030.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas G Kilday" <acnasvers at hotmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2001 7:40 AM

[Ed Selleslagh]

Thank you for this interesting contribution.

> The simple word occurs only in Gen. 6:14, but the derivative <gophriyth>
> 'sulfur, brimstone' (presumably named after similarity to burning
> tree-resin) is found 7 times in the OT. The usage of the simple word in the
> compound suggests that <go:pher> actually means 'resin', perhaps a specific
> (fragrant?) type.
> DGK

[Ed]

Note that when yellow sulphur is heated it turns into a black thick and sticky
stuff, very similar to pitch. Yellow powder is the stable form at room
temperature, but the pitch form is extremely slow in reverting to the more
stable form when cooled down.

What about the idea that <go:pher> (or its Pelasgian or whatever parent)
originally meant "glue", "sticky stuff" or even "goo" ?  After all, already in
the Neolithic, resin vel sim. was used to stick flint points to arrows etc...


From r.piva at swissonline.ch  Tue May 15 22:16:31 2001
From: r.piva at swissonline.ch (Renato Piva)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 00:16:31 +0200
Subject: Pelasgian/was Etruscans
Message-ID: <WED.16.MAY.2001.001631.0200.>

Hebr. go:pher may well mean cypressus, but also any other resinous tree, while
gr. kyparissos needs no further definition. Besides that, if a solution within
IE is possible, then one should prefer this reconstructed solution to any
hypothesis of substrate or borrowing. We therefore should consider the fact
that -issos may be reconstructed as from *-iskos, with no substrate involved.

All of these words have been analysed by R. Lanszweert, Papyros: ein
mykenisches Schimpfwort?. Indogermanica et Caucasica. Festschrift K.H.Schmidt,
ed. R.  Bielmeier and R. Stempel, Berlin and N. York 1994, 77-96. On p. 82, R.
Lanszweert reconstructs IE *pk'u-perih2 "Schafspiess" (i.e. "spit for
sheep-meat") for Greek kypeiron, kyperos, kypairos "Name einer Wiesenpflanze
mit aromatischer Wurzel, 'Zyperngras, Cyperus longus rotundus'". From prehist.
Greek *ku-parjo, the name of the tree kyparissos, developed through analogy of
shape:  a tree looking like a spit or a spear.

Lanszweert doesn't say anything about the name of the island, but I think that
Cyprus was named after the copper mines and bronze production (as far as I
remember, copper bars were pike-shaped, but I may be wrong). For details see
Lanszweert.

R. Piva

Douglas G Kilday wrote:

[ moderator snip ]

> All three variants (Lat. cupressus, Gk. kuparissos, Heb. go:pher) are most
> likely derived from pre-Greek substrate, which I have been calling
> "Pelasgian", also known as "Aegean" or "Aegeo-Anatolian". The Latin spelling
> with cypr- reflects a belief (probably mistaken) that the word was borrowed
> from Greek.

[ moderator snip ]


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Mon May 14 17:35:17 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 12:35:17 -0500
Subject: Etruscans
Message-ID: <MON.14.MAY.2001.123517.0500.>

Dear Douglas and IEists:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas G Kilday" <acnasvers at hotmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2001 11:11 PM

<snip>

> Yes, psychotropic substances can spread like wildfire, along with the words
> which denote them: hence the difficulty in finding the linguistic source of
> "wine" (not to mention "hemp").

<snip>

[PCR]
I have heard the idea that *wei-no- is not native IE but it has always puzzled
me to know why this view is held.

To my way of thinking, it obviously means simply 'vine'.

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 larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Wed May 16 12:38:03 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 13:38:03 +0100
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <004e01c0dc65$7701fb00$3a05703e@edsel>
Message-ID: <WED.16.MAY.2001.133803.0100.>

--On Monday, May 14, 2001 12:12 pm +0200 Eduard Selleslagh <edsel at glo.be>
wrote:

> As a non-linguist I wonder if the personal endings of verbs (the person
> marker), which are basically remnants of suffixed pronouns, cannot be
> viewed as an indication that PIE was actually verb-initial
> (verb-[suffixed]S-O), at least with pronouns as subject?

Most of you will be acquainted with W. P. Lehmann's book arguing that PIE
must have been an SOV language with typical SOV syntax.  After that book
appeared, someone -- I think it was Paul Friedrich, but I'm not sure, and I
apologize if I've got this wrong -- wrote a riposte, in which he argued
that PIE must have been VSO.  This article was mischievous in tone, and the
author made it clear that he was writing only as a devil's advocate, in
order to show that a plausible case could be made for VSO order, if anybody
wanted to do that.  I think the article was in Lingua, but I can't remember
that either.  Gad -- why have I forgotten so much stuff?

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  Wed May 16 06:26:40 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 06:26:40 -0000
Subject: Olives/was: Lactose Intolerance/Renfrew
Message-ID: <WED.16.MAY.2001.062640.0000.>

Patrick C. Ryan (7 May 2001) wrote:

>For whatever it may contribute to the discussion, I think there is a fair
>possibility that *eleiwa: can be analyzed as consisting of *el-, 'brown' +
>*eiwa:, 'yew', itself a composite of *ei-, 'red' + **we/o-, 'berry'. Please
>notice the double asterisks for **we/o-; I am aware that it would be difficult
>to prove this root from inside IE.

Two difficulties: First, the Greek forms have -ai-, not -ei-. The latter is
attested in the Etruscan form, but that is almost certainly borrowed from
Greek. The same diphthongal shift is found in Etr. Eivas 'Ajax' from Gk.
Aiwas, Eita 'Hades' from Aide:s, Creice 'Greek' from *Graikos (Lat.
Graecus), etc.

Second, reflexes of *eiw- in the sense 'yew' are restricted to Germanic (OE
i:w, OHG i:wa, NHG Eibe), Celtic (OIr e:o, Welsh yw, Corn. hiuin, Bret.
ivin), Late Latin glosses (ivu, ivum) presumed of Celtic origin, and
Gallo-Romance (e.g. Fr. top. Les Ifs 'The Yews'). Greek has (s)mi:lax, Latin
taxus. This usage of *eiw- was apparently "coined" when North European
IE-speakers moved west into yew-country, so it's hard to envision it being
the base of *elaiw- 'olive'. As for the etymology, I don't rule out a
compound such as *ei-we/o-, but it seems equally plausible to regard PIE
*eiw- as meaning simply 'berry' or 'berry-tree', with the o-grade *oiw-
behind Lat. u:va 'grape'.

The distribution of the yew (Taxus baccata) has some bearing on the IE
homeland problem. The variety of yew-names in IE languages indicates that
the plant was unknown to PIE-speakers. According to the map at
www.conifers.org, the yew is not found between the Carpathians and the
Urals, with the exception of Ciscaucasia, Crimea, and lowlands NW of Crimea.
Hence we don't want to put the homeland _too_ close to the Black Sea or the
Caucasus; it should be further north.

DGK


From bmscott at stratos.net  Wed May 16 06:38:00 2001
From: bmscott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 02:38:00 -0400
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
In-Reply-To: <l0313030eb7259ac713f2@[209.147.211.33]>
Message-ID: <WED.16.MAY.2001.023800.0400.>

On 14 May 2001, at 9:24, Rick Mc Callister wrote:

>  Is there a known etymology for <dama> and Greek <tame>?

For <tame>, Gk. <dama:n> 'to tame', and Lat. <doma:re>
'to tame, subdue' Watkins (2000) gives PIE *demH2-.

Brian M. Scott


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu May 17 03:46:39 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 23:46:39 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <WED.16.MAY.2001.234639.EDT.>

<< In a message dated 5/13/01 11:00:09 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:
> Someone, a relatively disinterested outsider, might take this alone to
> undermine the idea that there was any necessary connection between the names
> for elk, red deer and fallow deer and any particular types of deer.

In a message dated 5/16/2001 12:00:14 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com writes:
<<-- any _single_ instance is not conclusive.  The probabilities become
conclusive for all practical purposes when you add together _all_ the
instances. >>

I appreciate that point-of-view.  But understand that I cannot address ALL
the probabilities all at once.  Unfortunately, these statements about animals
can be asserted in one sentence.  But it wouldn't be productive to examine
them critically all in one sentence.  There wouldn't be much point in saying,
no, they don't.

Imagine how you'd feel if I wrote that a computer analysis of 45 plant words,
taken all together, have just pretty much proven that IE originated in the
Levant.  I'm sure you would want to look into the details before you bought
anything.

It seems to me that the fundamental flaw in most of these animal names is the
assumption that they held a single meaning for as much as 3000 years among
peoples who had no writing, no picture books, no schools, no biology
departments and no encyclopedias.   And once their meaning shifted, they're
usefulness in telling us about local fauna loses a lot of weight.  Because if
they shifted once they could have shifted a dozen times.  And because, given
thousands of years, these speakers may have been using the same phonetics,
but talking about something completely different, time and time again.

I know you don't agree with that, but all I ask is that you consider how
someone else might see this as a weakness in the proposition.

Regards,
Steve Long


From colkitto at sprint.ca  Wed May 16 12:54:07 2001
From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 08:54:07 -0400
Subject: Fallow Deer - it gets worse
Message-ID: <WED.16.MAY.2001.085407.0400.>

Steve Long:

>>> Consider, for example, that when English speakers came to America, they
>>> impliedly misppplied the very deer names mentioned above ......  Anyone
>>> familiar with these two types of deer, not just in appearance but also in
>>> terms of what they output, will know how big a miscue this was.  What is
>>> striking here is that IE speakers were giving animals they were supposedly
>>> already quite familiar with completely opposite names.

There's a more recent, and illustrative, example from settlement in
Australia.  The Tasmanian Wolf and the mysterious Queensland marsupial tger
are less closely related to wolves and tigers than humans are (and one might
note that the earliest settlers probably only knew wolves from fairy tales,
rather than as a real animal, let alone the tigers)

Cf. the folksong (all of which I do not remember)

"... wolves and tigers upon Van Diemen's land"

Robert Orr


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu May 17 03:54:21 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 23:54:21 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer/ The Original *Kerwos?
Message-ID: <WED.16.MAY.2001.235421.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/16/2001 12:24:09 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com writes:

<< -- you're missing the point entirely.  The lack of a term for fallow deer in
I.E. languages _outside_ the prehistoric range of the fallow deer has _nothing
to do_ with the argument.... Fallow deer _are_ present in Anatolia, and they
_are_ present in Greece, and they _are_ present in Italy, and they _are_
present in the Iranian plateau from extremely early times...  But the
Indo-European languages _of those areas_ lack cognate terms for fallow deer;...
That is, Italic, Greek, Anatolian, and Indo-Iranian lack such terms.  And if
those languages had spread from a center _in Anatolia_, then a term for "fallow
deer", which would have been in continuous use, should be reconstructible to
PIE.  It should show up in Anatolian I.E., Italic, Greek, and Indo-Iranian,
which would be more than enough for inclusion in the I.E.  lexicon.  And it
doesn't.

Whereas terms for red deer, etc. _are_ reconstructible to PIE.>>

Heartfelt convictions sometimes make us avoid seeing the real issues.

The real issue here is that the reconstructible PIE words for red deer may
have in fact originally also referred to the fallow deer.  Or may even have
started as words for the fallow deer.

Hittite, "kurala", may have referred to a fallow deer.  I have nothing that
indicates otherwise.  Ivanov has it that another possible "I.E. deer word",
"hartagga", in Hittite referred specifically to a bear.  CD Buck says that
the word used especially for a deer in Sanskrit was "mr:ga", which looks a
lot like the horse word "marka".  (BTW, in Slavic, deer is "jelen" (cf.,
Pol.,"zielony", green, definitely not red; cf, Greek, "chalkeios") which
might connect it to the "yellow deer" which is what the fallow is called in
Iran.  "Fallow" might even suggest the same color connection.)

The Greeks don't seem to have a word for specifically the red deer or fallow
deer.  Xenophon in "On Hunting" and Aristotle in "On Animals" make no
distinction between kinds of deer, except male and female and fawn.
(Aristotle does seem to describe the Moose/European Elk, calling it
"hippelaphus", another horse name, which now stands for a subspecies of
cervus elaphus.)

I saw a while ago that there is a Turkish University (I think) on the web
that uses "the Hittite symbol" for deer as its emblem.  The symbol is in the
form of an "h" and the backward seraph absolutely looks just like the rack on
a mature fallow stag or a moose, certainly not a red deer.  If that was what
the original Anatolian speakers called a deer, than the deer words in I.E.
may have started with a fallow deer.

As to where the fallow deer "is" or rather was:  there is evidence that it
was imported into Sardinia and Sicily in the late neolithic.  The evidence
for it being in Europe otherwise is arguable, but Spassov writes that finding
the Romanian/Bulgarian herd settles whether there really was a native fallow
population in Europe since the ice age, showing that was otherwise not clear.
 The problem with the animal is the problem with the more modern word for the
animal.  The fallow may have been introduced into Greece as it apparently was
into northern Italy and the rest of Europe, as a semi-domesticate.  A number
of archaeologists in southeastern Europe have reported finding the remains of
"fallow roe deer" and "small, young elk antlers" in Greece and the Ukraine,
which doesn't help matters.  Mature moose and fallow both have palmated
antlers; red, roe and axis deer do not.

An objective observer might find it possible from all this that the name for
the fallow deer may not in fact be absent in I.E. languages.  That it might
in fact be the name for deer in I.E. languages, later specifically given to
the red deer in areas where the fallow was no longer found.

Since Indo-Iranian doesn't have the I.E. deer names, that doesn't help with
any deer name.  Italian doesn't count, apparently no native fallow.  And
Greek and Hittite don't seem to distinguish between fallow and red deer.  So,
yes, words for the fallow deer may be reconstructible back to PIE.  One of
them might be *ker-wo-s - if that word didn't refer to horned or antlered
animals in general.  The issue here is meaning, not phonology.

Now, stepping back, what can all that prove or disprove about Anatolia as the
origin of I.E. languages?  The fallow deer may look like it supports a
non-Anatolian origin.  But again, once we make ourselves get past the initial
glitter of the unsupported statement, once we look into the matter with some
care, the idea doesn't really carry that much substance.

Regards,
Steve Long


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Wed May 16 19:36:20 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 14:36:20 -0500
Subject: A Note on Beavers
In-Reply-To: <a7.e756a06.283336a7@aol.com>
Message-ID: <WED.16.MAY.2001.143620.0500.>

Here are some other possibilities along a similar semantic line in Spanish.

broca "embroidery hoop, type of nail, etc."
	1350 "sharp object, barbed object" [Corominas 1980]
	< Catalan broca [Corominas 1980]
	see Portuguese broca "drill, drill bit"
	< ? Celtic [Corominas 1980]
	< Latin < Celtic word for "pointed tool or weapon head"
	[Partridge 1958: 60]
	see Medieval Latin broc?re "to prick" < Celtic [Partridge 1958: 56]
	see Celtic br?ko < *bruk-, *brak-, *brek- "to break"
	[Partridge 1958: 59]

broche "brooch", "stuck-up, aloof with equals & sycophantic to superiors
	(Costa Rica)"
	1633 [Corominas 1980]
	< French broche "jewel" [Corominas 1980]
	see Portuguese broche "brooch, clasp, stud"
	see broca "reel, drill" [Corominas 1980]
	< ? Celtic [Corominas 1980]
	see Vulgar Latin *brocca "spike, horn, tap" [Random House 1973: 171]
	see Medieval Latin broca [Random House 1973: 171]
	see Latin brocchus, broccus "bucktooth" [Random House 1973: 171]

brocheta "skewer"
	see French brochet "pike" [MacBain]
	see French broche "cooking spit" < Gaulish [wde 188-89]
	see Gaelic broc, Irish, early Irish brocc; Welsh, Cornish, broch;
	Breton broc'h "a badger" [MacBain]
	< Celtic *brokko-s; *bork-ko- "grey one" [MacBain]
	< Indo-European *bherk, *bhork "bright" [MacBain]
	see Greek phork?s "grey", Lithuanian berszti, English bright [MacBain]
	see French broche < Latin *brocca, "a spike, a spit"
	< Latin broccus "bucktooth, bucktoothed" [MacBain]
	see English broach, brooch [MacBain]
	see Greek br?k? "bite" [MacBain]
	Gaelic broc originally "biter, gripper" [MacBain]
	see Russian bars?ku, Turkish porsuk, Magyar borz; or *brokko-s,
	< *bhrod-ko-s, Sanskrit bradhn? "dun" [Bezzenberger cit. MacBain]
	see Latin broccus, brocchus "buckteeth" [Ernout & Meillet 118]
	< ? [Ernout & Meillet 118]
	see Roman surnames Brocchil?, Broccus, Brocchius, Broccgi?nus,
	 Brocch?na, Brocchilla [Ernout & Meillet 118]

bronco "rough, rude, harsh. hoarse"
	1490 "piece, cut branch", "knot in wood" [Corominas 1980]
	see Portuguese bronco "coarse, stupid, dull"
	< Latin vulgar *bruncus [Corominas 1980]
	< broccus "sharp" + truncus "log" [Corominas 1980]
	see English branch [rmcc]

	perhaps from IE *bhrei, *bhri: "to cut, break" [Watkins (AMH IE
Roots) 1985: 9]
	BUT, of course IE /bh/ is supposed to go to Greek /ph/
	Any chance the Greek forms are loanwords from another IE language?

>Boy, beaver just doesn't seem to be a good candidate for a PIE word.
>Especially if it's supposed to come from something like "reddish-brown".
>You'd have to carry a Pantone color ring around in the woods with you to tell
>reddish-brown animals apart.  And what was unique about the beaver or the
>beaver's fur was not it's color, which is variable.

>There seems to be an extremely transparent meaning in Greek that would be
>hard to miss if it wasn't assumed the word was PIE.  <brucho:> and <bruko>
>means to chew, to gnaw, to grind, to eat noisily.  <bruchetos> is chattering
>of teeth.  <bruche:>, gnashing of teeth.  <diabro:sis>, eating through,
>chewing, erosion.  <diabro:ma>, that which is eaten through.

><bibro:sko:> means to eat up, chew up; in its passive forms, e.g.,
><bebro:oetai>,  <bebro:menoi>, something that is eaten, gnawed or chewed up.
><rhiza bebro:menoi> is, e.g., "worm-eaten."  (The <bi-/be-> prefix might also
>be considered causal  - e.g., bibazo:, bebaioo: < baino:.)  Also related are
><bebro:thois>, chew up; <brugde:n>, with clenched teeth.  <bruchiao:> is
>chatter or some related defect of speech.

>If there's anything about a beaver in living form, it's them mighty incisors
>and the work they do.

[snip]

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


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Thu May 17 07:04:39 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 03:04:39 EDT
Subject: A Note on Beavers
Message-ID: <THU.17.MAY.2001.030439.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/16/01 2:25:15 AM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com
writes:

> The Beaver definitely appears to be a native of Anatolia.

-- not of, as I said, most of Anatolia.

> Boy, beaver just doesn't seem to be a good candidate for a PIE word.

-- it's generally accepted.  If you have any evidence to the contrary, please
state.

> Especially if it's supposed to come from something like "reddish-brown".

-- our word for "bear" comes from a term meaning "the brown one".  That
doesn't make it any less a word for "bear".  That is elementary linguistics.

> There seems to be an extremely transparent meaning in Greek that would be
> hard to miss if it wasn't assumed the word was PIE.

-- proven, not assumed.

> But the Greek words above don't come from the beaver.

-- the PIE word for "beaver" was *bhebhrus.

>From which Galish "bebru", Avestan "bawra, Lithuanian "bebras", etc.

> Based on all the above, I think that one might guess that the application of
> the bebr- word to the beaver is late.

-- no.  Securely placeable in PIE and with cognates in Celtic, Germanic,
Italic, and Indo-Iranian.


From hwhatting at hotmail.com  Wed May 16 12:57:42 2001
From: hwhatting at hotmail.com (Hans-Werner Hatting)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 14:57:42 +0200
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <WED.16.MAY.2001.145742.0200.>

Original message:

>From: "David L. White" <dlwhite at texas.net>
>Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 08:30:40 -0500

(snip)

>> First, Anglo-Romani.  According to T and K, this consists of wholly Romani
>> lexis plus wholly English grammar.  According to David White's proposal,
>> then, Anglo-Romani is English, since it has English verbal morphology.  Is
>> this a satisfactory conclusion so far?

>     Yes.

>> Now, consider how Anglo-Romani came into existence.  I assume it didn't
>> spring into being overnight, but must have evolved gradually.  So there are
>> broadly two possibilities.

>> First, Anglo-Romani started off as plain English, but was gradually
>> relexified from Romani until no English lexis was left.  According to
>> David's proposal, this *must* be what happened, since the alternative below
>> seems to be impossible.

>         Yes.

>> Second, Anglo-Romani started off as Romani, but it gradually borrowed more
>> and more grammar from English, until there was no Romani grammar left.
>> Under David's proposal, this appears to be impossible, since the language,
>> in this scenario, has shifted from having Romani verbal morphology to having
>> English verbal morphology -- seemingly in conflict with the proposal on the
>> table, which sees verbal morphology as inviolate.  It also, of course, has
>> the peculiar consequence that Anglo-Romani has changed from being Romani to
>> being English -- an outcome surely more bizarre than anything contemplated
>> in T and K.

>         Yes, that is why I favor the first.

(snip)

Let me put in some information I recollect from a seminary on Romani I
attended way back at university:

1. English gypsies were speaking a version of Romani with *Romani* grammar
when they immigrated into England;

2. Gradually, they started to use English among themselves, and English also
became the language taught to children;

3. Nowadays, English Romani (with Romani lexicon and English morphology) is
a "secret" group languages into which speakers - who have English as first
language - are initiated by older speakers.

If this information is correct, English Romani is indeed basically English
relexified with Romani vocabulary. We have a case of language change where
the lexicon of the old language is preserved for special purposes. English
Romani goes farther than most other secret languages (like German
"Rotwelsch" or Russsian "blat", in which the basic function words (pronouns,
conjunctions, auxiliaries etc.) are normally from the "base" language which
provides the morphology), but essentially the same principle is at work - a
secret language is formed by relexifying a "base language" from other
sources.

Best regards,
H. W. Hatting


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Fri May 18 06:50:40 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 18 May 2001 02:50:40 EDT
Subject: European Genetics/IE
Message-ID: <FRI.18.MAY.2001.025040.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/16/2001 1:12:27 AM, philjennings at juno.com writes:
<< I have read Steve Long's reasoned and temperate remarks on the "urheimat
animals" issue and I'd be interested in his take, or anyone else's, regarding
the work of Dr. Martin Richards as reported in the NY Times 11/14/2000 under
the title "The Origin of the Europeans."  Since Dr. Renfrew is quoted in this
article, I take it that the Anatolian-originists have grown comfortable with
Richards' findings:... I assume from my reading of Renfrew that the
Anatolian-wave-of-advance theorists would have preferred the ratios to have
been otherwise,...

A couple of things to be aware of:
1. Back in 1987, Renfrew was coming off of Ammerman & Cavalli-Sforza (1984)
"The Neolithic Transition and the Genetics of Populations in Europe."  In
that work, Cavalli-Sforza proposed that the European genetic population
structure was determined mainly by population dispersal in the Neolithic, by
a process called in that book "Neolithic demic diffusion."

The mass migration of agriculturalists described by Cavalli-Sforza and
adopted by Renfrew does not seem to fit the picture anymore.  Not that the
coming of the neolithic and Near Eastern practices did not completely revamp
every aspect of life for Europeans during that time (including possibly
language.)  It's just that it is looking like neolithization was mainly a
"conversion," not a migration.

Renfrew has repeatedly said that his ideas work either way and I suppose so.
More importantly, at least that means he's not out of sync with many of the
archaeologists (e.g., Zwelbil, Bogucki) who have there hands in the dirt - as
Renfrew once did - who are finding strong evidence that large mesolithic
populations adopted agriculture, sometimes slowly, well after
agriculturalists showed up.  And that those converting agriculturalists may
often have been natives themselves.

Good updates are "Europe's First Farmers", ed by T. Douglas Price, (Cambridge
UP 2000) and "The Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eu
rasia", ed by D. Harris (Smithsonian 1996).  There is some big news that just
broke about an LBK settlement found out of the way in northern Germany, which
seems to confirm that vigorous mesolithic cultures came around only after a
period of direct exposure.

Interestingly, there is a lot of evidence that these mesolithic peoples
adopted neolithic styles and rituals before they actually started herding
domesticated animals and raising domesticated plants.  In Britain, they
appear to be honoring cattle and grains and building neolithic-style houses,
but still living on wild game and fish.  This jives with Sheratt's suggestion
that conversion to the Near Eastern style may have less to do with economic
productivity and more to do with the introduction of beer and such.

2. Aside from Richards, there is an important report to be aware of and that
is "The Genetic Legacy of Paleolithic Homo sapiens sapiens in Extant
Europeans: A Y Chromosome Perspective",  Semino, Passarino, Oefner, Lin,
Arbuzova, Beckman, Benedictis, Francalacci, Kouvatsi, Limborska, Marciki,
Mika,  Primorac, Santachiara-Benerecetti, Cavalli-Sforza, Underhill,
published in SCIENCE (November 10, 2000).  I have a PDF of this report if
anyone would like to see it.

In that report, the Y chromosome approach appears to produce a slightly
larger ancient heritage from the Near East among modern Europeans.  There is
also a small window left open for the Kurgan hypothesis due to a more recent
gene variant.  The report states:

"Haplotype Eu19 has been also observed at substantial frequency in northern
India and Pakistan as well as in Central Asia. Its spread may have been
magnified by the expansion of the Yamnaia culture from the 'Kurgan culture'
area (present-day southern Ukraine) into Europe and eastward, resulting in
the spread of the Indo-European language. An alternative hypothesis of a
Middle Eastern origin of Indo-European languages was proposed on the basis of
archaeological data." (citing Mallory and Renfrew).

It SHOULD be noted though that this 'Kurgan' gene moving west practically
stops dead in Poland and Hungary and as the reports says, "is virtually
non-existent in Western Europe" as well as rare in Greece.

Also, Cavalli-Sforza has not been very good at archaeological data and is
apparently unaware of strong evidence of the massive Scythian incursions into
eastern Europe starting about 600BC that practically wipe out Halstatt east
of the Tisza River and in most of Poland and create a virtual no-man's land
in that area for a few centuries.  Obviously no genes can be carried in empty
territory and that would suggest that Eu19 reflects later "Indo-Iranian"
migrations (e.g., Scythian and Sarmatian) into eastern Europe as well as it
does anything to do with Yama (which of course is also "archaeological data"
and currently seems to be dating no earlier than 2000BC.)

3. In, "Genetics and the population history of Europe,"  PNAS January 2, 2001,
Barbujani and Bertorelle argue that Richards data actually supports the mass
migration of neolithic agriculturalists as the main origin of the modern
European population.  They argue that variations attributed to the
paleolithic are actually more recent development and due to local founder
effect.  I also have a PDF of this paper.

4. In the archives of this list you'll find a theory, best articulated by
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal, that pre-dates Renfrew's, and that originates the
earlier ancestor of IE languages in Anatolia, but I believe places PIE or
*PIE on the Danube in connection with Tripolye culture.  Renfrew, who did
brilliant work many decades ago, does not always seem to be up-to-date on
many of these issues, either genetic, linguistic or archaeological.  What
seems to drive the Anatolian theory is not any particular theorist or
spokesperson, but rather it seems the continuous accumulation of evidence
from various sources that seem to support it, whether or not those sources
are aware of it.

philjennings at juno.com also writes:
<<Once this concession is made (if it is made) how does one argue
intelligently that the language transferred completely?  If there are no
evidences of PIE ever being a creole, as some people say they can
demonstrate, doesn't that make it likely that PIE was the language of the
indigenous post-Gravettians, rather than the language they learned from their
agricultural tutors?  Part-time hunters living in isolated Balkan family
homesteads did not, after all, make the total life-style conversion to
farming villages/pueblos.  These same scattered living arrangements must have
made it difficult to learn a new language well or completely.>>

Remember that with the Anatolian hypothesis, you are talking about 3500 years
between the IE's expansion across Europe and the first written evidence of an
IE language in Europe.  That would be, at 5 generations per hundred years,
about 700 generations for the language family to win someone over in the
family.  Another factor is the unifying effect of neolithization.  No other
single event in European cultural pre-history covered anywhere close to so
much of Europe and created trade networks anything like it.  Paleolithic
migrations arguably did not end up bringing people from a core source into
Europe and mesolithic cultures were relatively localized.  Finally, scattered
living arrangements don't seem to be the rule.  It seems that close
settlements along rivers and other trade routes were true for the great
majority of the population in mesolithic and neolithic times.

hope this helps

Regards,
Steve Long


From sarima at friesen.net  Wed May 16 13:51:20 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 06:51:20 -0700
Subject: Three-Way Contrast of Secondary Articulations in PIE
In-Reply-To: <00ed01c0dcab$567c9f20$06474241@patrickr>
Message-ID: <WED.16.MAY.2001.065120.0700.>

At 02:23 PM 5/14/01 -0500, proto-language wrote:

>[PCR]
>Surely this needs a rethink. This might work if CVC-roots had only ONE
>root-extension but your scenario means that an IE-speaker would have to
>abstract CVC from a CVCC root in order to add other root-extensions.
>Frankly, I don't think so.

I am not quite sure what you are getting at here.  Why do you keep going
back to root-extensions when I do not ever mention them?

I see no reason to postulate an *active* process of root extension in PIE -
or at least not a common process of that sort.  Most variant root
extensions could either be inherited from the pre-PIE stage (from *older*
suffixes), or be due to individual development in the various separate
languages.  (For instance variations of the -k/-g sort look to me like
inter-dialect borrowings from *after* the breakup of the proto-language).

For those CVC roots that only occur with various extensions, I am not even
sure there is any evidence that the PIE speakers were aware of them as
such.  I would tend to treat them as effectively separate roots unless
there is some evidence of PIE phase awareness of the base.  But either way,
the extensions by themselves are sufficient to establish differentiation,
so no further means is necessary. A CVC root with extensions is no longer
truly homophonous with another such root with different extensions.

The sorts of suffixes I see as being productive in PIE were the *stem*
formatives and verbal suffixes of the *-ske- sort, rather than the extensions.

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


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Wed May 16 09:28:16 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 09:28:16 -0000
Subject: Etruscan / Pelasgian
Message-ID: <WED.16.MAY.2001.092816.0000.>

philjennings at juno.com (27 Apr 2001) wrote:

>Dr. White also explains the wide dispersion of -assos names (like Tartessos)
>as possibly due to later Greek mediation.  It is in fact extreme to think of
>early Pelasgians in Spain.  But the name Tarhuntassa came and went before the
>Greeks came snooping very far into Asia Minor.  Some kind of pre-Greek
>dispersion really did happen.

Yes, this would be an extreme view. Tarte:ssos can hardly be of Pelasgian
origin. The suffix (if it is that) was probably reworked by Greeks to
conform to familiar toponyms like Hume:ssos.

>I am friendly to the idea of a dispersion of an originally unified linguistic
>community into Italy, Greece and Asia Minor.  I can see why those focused on
>Asia Minor might talk of Anatolians, and those focused on Greece might talk of
>Pelasgians.  I'm sure the people directly involved would have been surprised
>to hear themselves described by either term.

>Anatolian is sometimes held to be so early that it is on sister-sister terms
>with the entire remainder of IE.  Perhaps Pelasgian can have the distinct
>qualities Kilday gives it, if it is acknowledged as a third sister, close
>enough to Anatolian to be joined at the hip.  (Er, "joined at the assos?")

Well, I find the "three sisters" more appealing than the "right fork".
Presumably all three (Narrow PIE, Proto-Hittite, and Proto-Pelasgian)
originated somewhere north of the Black Sea. Pelasgians (sensu lato) were
the first to migrate SW around the Black Sea, leaving toponyms on the Danube
and phytonyms in pre-Dacian, then spreading west into south-central Europe
and east into coastal Anatolia and beyond.  Narrow IE-speakers expanded west
into central Europe and east into central Asia. Proto-Hittites must have
stayed put until the late 3rd mill. BCE, when they too came SW around the
Black Sea into Anatolia. (One thing missing from the debate on this list is
what speakers of "Anatolian IE" were doing before they intruded into
Anatolia, if indeed they did so.)

Linguistically, it should be noted that "Pelasgian" is much further removed
from "Narrow PIE" than "Anatolian IE" is. The failure of the "IE
Pelasgianists" (Georgiev, van Windekens, et al.) to convince anyone but
themselves is a strong reason _not_ to regard "Pelasgian" as a branch of IE.
Nevertheless, out of several hundred proposed "IE Pelasgian" etymologies,
about a dozen look like genuine cognates.

OTOH Etruscan is so far removed from anything looking like IE that I see no
hope of regarding it as a "fourth sister". As for the proposal that
Proto-Etruscan was a creole with non-IE lexicon and PIE grammar, how do we
explain the fact that Etruscan grammar is thoroughly non-IE?

DGK


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Fri May 18 15:19:27 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Fri, 18 May 2001 15:19:27 -0000
Subject: Pelasgian/was Etruscans
Message-ID: <FRI.18.MAY.2001.151927.0000.>

Renato Piva (16 May 2001) wrote:

>Hebr. go:pher may well mean cypressus, but also any other resinous tree, while
>gr. kyparissos needs no further definition. Besides that, if a solution within
>IE is possible, then one should prefer this reconstructed solution to any
>hypothesis of substrate or borrowing.

If you give me enough elbow-room, I'll give you IE etymologies of Hanukkah,
moccasin, and boomerang. A solution within IE is always possible. It isn't
necessarily the most plausible. In my opinion, what "one should prefer" is
the solution with the fewest special assumptions. If we look at Gk.
<leirion> ~ Lat. <li:lium>, Gk. <peirins> ~ Lat. <pi:lentum>, Gk. <kedros> ~
Lat. <citrus>, etc. we can make one assumption and derive the words from
substrate, or we can make a set of assumptions to rationalize irregular
development from PIE or peculiar borrowing between branches of IE. My guess
is that most IEists, who take pride in regular sound-correspondences, would
rather invoke substrate than postulate a bunch of funny stuff happening to a
group of words within IE.

>We therefore should consider the fact that -issos may be reconstructed as from
>*-iskos, with no substrate involved.

Then why are there still Greek words in -iskos?

>All of these words have been analysed by R. Lanszweert, Papyros: ein
>mykenisches Schimpfwort?. Indogermanica et Caucasica. Festschrift K.H.Schmidt,
>ed. R. Bielmeier and R. Stempel, Berlin and N. York 1994, 77-96. On p. 82, R.
>Lanszweert reconstructs IE *pk'u-perih2 "Schafspiess" (i.e. "spit for
>sheep-meat") for Greek kypeiron, kyperos, kypairos "Name einer Wiesenpflanze
>mit aromatischer Wurzel, 'Zyperngras, Cyperus longus rotundus'". From prehist.
>Greek *ku-parjo, the name of the tree kyparissos, developed through analogy of
>shape:  a tree looking like a spit or a spear.

Very ingenious, but does anyone besides R. Lanszweert take R. Lanszweert
seriously? Can he pronounce his own reconstructions? How common is the
typology of ejectives with laryngeals? Perhaps this paper should have been
subtitled "Woerterschimpf". And if <kupeiron> and <kuparissos> are related
as implied here, why is resemblance to a sheep-spit a more plausible
connection than aromaticity? For that matter, how distinctive is a
sheep-spit compared to a goat-spit, hog-spit, or (most aptly) bull-spit?

>Lanszweert doesn't say anything about the name of the island, but I think that
>Cyprus was named after the copper mines and bronze production (as far as I
>remember, copper bars were pike-shaped, but I may be wrong). For details see
>Lanszweert.

So copper got its name from the shape of the bars, which reminded speakers
of pikes, which in turn reminded them of spit-shaped trees, etc., etc.
Somehow, substratal derivation just got a lot more palatable.

DGK


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Sat May 19 16:21:19 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 16:21:19 -0000
Subject: Pelasgian Place-names
Message-ID: <SAT.19.MAY.2001.162119.0000.>

Rick Mc Callister (7 May 2001) wrote:

>	Would the source of Latin tarquin- /tarkwin, tar_qu_in/ & Etruscan
>tarchun /tarkhun?, tarxun?/ be something like /tarhwin, tarxwin/ ?

I would guess something like [tarkhun.-] where [n.] had the quantity of a
short syllable and sounded like /in/ to Latin-speakers. Etruscan gentilicia
based on this stem never have <i> written before <n>, nor <v> in place of
<u>. The reduction of [u] to [w] must have occurred in the Latin form,
[tarkwin-] from *[tarkuin-].

Similarly Etr. Armne must have been something like [arm.n.e] (cf. Lat.
Ariminum). Rasna must have had a "long" nasal, [rasn:a] (Gk. Rasenna).
Length of nasals was evidently allophonic in Etruscan, whose orthography
does not distinguish [n:] and [n.] from initial/final [n].

>	Early Latin had an /h/, and borrowed Greek /kh/ was usually
>transcribed as <ch>, so I'm guessing the <qu-> had to come from something
>else

Early Latin /h/ was probably closer to [x] or (unvoiced) [W] than to the
simple aspiration [h]. Archaic texts don't show aspirated stops (triumpe,
Bacanal, etc.); the aspiration was generally dropped in pre-classical
borrowings. The names Tarchunie and Thanchvil entered Latin in the 6th cent.
BCE, so the forms Tarquinius and Tanaquil lack any written indication of
aspiration. OTOH the classical poets heard and represented aspiration, so
Etr. Tarchu became Lat. Tarcho(n).

>	Or is it possible that Etrucan <chu-> was a conventional spelling
>for /khw-/?

Not likely, since Etruscan orthography _usually_ distinguishes the semivowel
(written F, transcribed <w>) from the vowel (written V, transcribed <u>).
Some inscriptions (mostly from marginal areas) use the vowel-sign for both,
as Latin does. Hence Lat. Quintus usually becomes Etr. Cvinte, but sometimes
is written Cuinte. Anyhow, there are plenty of examples of <-chv-> for
/-khw-/ in epitaphs of women named Thanchvil.

DGK


From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi  Thu May 17 11:17:07 2001
From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting)
Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 14:17:07 +0300
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <69681205.3198507544@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <THU.17.MAY.2001.141707.0300.>

On Thu, 10 May 2001, Larry Trask wrote:

> --On Sunday, May 6, 2001 2:29 pm +0300 Robert Whiting
> <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:

>> To make it clear what my statement was about:  My entire point was that
>> [T] and [D] do not contrast in initial position in English.  My
>> statement was not about whether [T] and [D] are phonemes in English or
>> not.  The two are not necessarily related ([T] and [D] can still be
>> phonemes even if they don't contrast in some environments).

> OK; I'll bite.  I will argue that [T] and [D] *do* contrast in initial
> position in English.  It is merely that we happen to have no good minimal
> pairs for /T/ and /D/ in the language at present -- a completely different
> matter.

> To begin with, 'thigh' and 'thy' are a perfect minimal pair, *if* we accept
> that 'thy' is a word of modern English -- which you may not want to accept.

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 'tauchen'.  If [T] and [D] contrast in 'thigh' and 'thy',
then so do [c,] and [x] in German.

> But there are a number of near-minimal pairs:

>   this / thistle
>   they / Thalia (also 'theta' in US accents)
>   that / thatch
>   these / thesis
>   thus / thumb
>   though / Thor

> The absence of minimal pairs is a historical accident, no more.  I have
> come across an actress with the first name 'Thandy'.  I see no reason to
> suppose her friends would hesitate to call her 'Than', with /T/, producing
> a perfect minimal pair with 'than' (strong form).

It is not a minimal pair as long as there is a morpheme boundary involved.
Unless, of course, you claim that morpheme boundaries are not phonological
conditions.  And every one of your near minimal pairs involves a morpheme
boundary after [D].

> The point is not whether minimal pairs exist.  The point is whether the
> distribution of [T] and [D] can be stated purely in terms of phonological
> environments.  Since no such distributional rule exists, /T/ and /D/
> contrast in word-initial position, in spite of the lack of minimal pairs.

You stick by your contention that morpheme boundaries are not phonological
conditions then?

> The observation that initial [D] occurs only in "grammatical" words and
> initial [T] only in "lexical" words is just that: an observation.

Quite true.  But the observation that morphemes are units of meaning is,
I think, more than an observation.  It is a basic principle of how human
language works.  Duality of patterning says that morphemes are made up of
phonemes and that morphemes have meaning (iconically, indexically, or
symbolically) but that phonemes do not have any inherent meaning.  Initial
[D] in English is a morpheme because it has meaning associated with it.
Admittedly, it is grammatical meaning rather than lexical meaning, but
meaning nonetheless.

> It is not, so far as I can see, a rule of English phonology.

No, the fact that these are all function words is not particularly
phonologically significant.  The fact that they all begin with a
functional morpheme is.

> As an observation, it is on a par with the observation that the
> diphthong /oi/ never occurs in native English words, but only in
> borrowed words.

But is the diphthong /oi/ a morpheme?  What morphemic function do you
claim it has?

> If we English-speakers had first encountered Greek a couple of millennia
> later than we did, is there any reason to suppose that we would shrink from
> calling a certain Greek letter 'thelta' -- with /D/ -- instead of 'delta'?
> Or from extending this word to the mouth of a river?

If I had a brother, would he like mayonnaise?  If the universe didn't work
the way it does, would it work some other way?  Are questions about the
way things might be applicable to the way things are?

What you need to establish your point is not answers to questions like
"What would the world be like if Napoleon had conquered Russia?" but an
example of an initial [D] in English that is not a deictic or a pronoun
(i.e., does not begin with the pronominal/deictic morpheme).  It doesn't
even have to contrast with a word with initial [T].  Any word that begins
with [D] in which the [D] is not a morpheme would be sufficient to justify
your claim that the fact that all words in English that begin with [D] are
pronouns or deictics is mere coincidence and that the distribution of
initial [T] and [D] is not predictable by any phonological rule.

> By the way, is everybody happy that 'thus' is beyond question a grammatical
> word, and not a lexical word?

I have no problem with 'thus'.  It is as much a grammatical word as
'hence' or 'so', and it is clearly a deictic.  I have more problem with
'though' as a deictic, which I think is a borderline case.

> Take another case.  It is extremely difficult to find minimal pairs for
> [esh] and [ezh] in *any* position -- and all the pairs I can think of
> involve involve either proper names of foreign origin or obscure Scrabble
> words.  Would anybody therefore want to argue that [esh] and [ezh] are not
> two distinct phonemes -- just because we have no good minimal pairs, or
> just because the second occurs only in words of foreign origin?  If not,
> why should theta and eth be treated differently?

But whether [T] and [D] are separate phonemes is not the issue.  I thought
I had at least made that much clear.  Have you not had your second cup of
coffee yet?  Since you quoted my statement to this effect at the opening
of your posting, I don't see how else you could have missed it.  So any
arguments about whether lack of contrasts proves lack of phonemicity will
not be entertained because in the long run, there is no such thing as
"proof" that two sounds are not phonemes any more than there is "proof"
that two languages are not related.  One can only say that the evidence
that they are is inadequate.  So arguments about the lack of contrasts of
[S] and [Z] and whether this affects their phonemic status are completely
irrelevant to whether initial [T] and [D] contrast in English.

> Finally, I note that /n/ and [eng] *really* do not contrast in word-initial
> position in English, even though they contrast elsewhere.  The case of
> theta and eth does not appear to me to be similar.

No, it is not similar at all.  [eng] is prohibited phonotactically from
appearing in initial position in English (except in loan words; we've done
this before).  In this instance, [eng] behaves like a cluster rather than
a single segment.

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi


From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi  Thu May 17 12:02:54 2001
From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting)
Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 15:02:54 +0300
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <200105161023.f4GANGn16321@no-spam.it.helsinki.fi>
Message-ID: <THU.17.MAY.2001.150254.0300.>

On Mon, 14 May 2001 pausyl at AOL.COM wrote:

> On Thu, 10 May 2001 18:19:04 +0100, Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
> wrote:

>> --On Sunday, May 6, 2001 2:29 pm +0300 Robert Whiting
>> <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:

>>> To make it clear what my statement was about:  My entire point was that
>>> [T] and [D] do not contrast in initial position in English.  My
>>> statement was not about whether [T] and [D] are phonemes in English or
>>> not.  The two are not necessarily related ([T] and [D] can still be
>>> phonemes even if they don't contrast in some environments).

>> OK; I'll bite.  I will argue that [T] and [D] *do* contrast in initial
>> position in English.  It is merely that we happen to have no good minimal
>> pairs for /T/ and /D/ in the language at present -- a completely different
>> matter.

>> To begin with, 'thigh' and 'thy' are a perfect minimal pair, *if* we accept
>> that 'thy' is a word of modern English -- which you may not want to accept.

<snip>

> I'm actually on Larry Trask's side (for the most part) in this
> discussion, but I assume that the argument from Robert Whiting's side
> would be best stated in terms of "closed-class" vs. "open-class"
> words; _thus_ would seem to be in the closed class.  _thy_ is surely
> English (think of the "Lord's Prayer"), but it's also a closed-class
> item.

Closed-class is part of the definition of function or grammatical words.
See Fowler, _Understanding Language_ (1974), 199.

> And I would judge the Traskian point above about /oi/ never occurring
> in native English words, even if true, to be irrelevant to the
> discussion:

Entirely.

> It seems to me that no amount of introspection would help an
> intelligent (but linguistically untrained) native speaker of English
> to decide that _boy_ (the etymology of which is disputed) is a
> loanword; however, it seems plausible that that same speaker could
> uncover the fact that all words beginning with /D/ are "closed-class"
> or the like.

This is also irrelevant.  The fact that initial [D] occurs only in
function or grammatical (or closed-class) words is not what keeps initial
[T] and [D] from contrasting in English.  What keeps them from contrasting
is the fact that initial [D] in English is always a morpheme.

> Whether all this is relevant to the phonemicity of /D/ vs. /T/ is a
> completely different argument, however.

Thank you.  At least on person understands the issue.

> If we take that same "intelligent (but linguistically untrained)
> native speaker of English" as our judge again, it's clear that a
> minimal pair like "either" vs. "ether" would establish the phonemic
> distinction.

Only in some dialects.  But it is agreed that 'either' and 'ether' are
harder to dispose of.  But this is also irrelevant to whether initial
[T] and [D] contrast in English.

>> Take another case.  It is extremely difficult to find minimal pairs for
>> [esh] and [ezh] in *any* position -- and all the pairs I can think of
>> involve involve either proper names of foreign origin or obscure Scrabble
>> words.

> The best pair I could come up with is _Confucian_ (with [esh]) vs.
> _confusion_ (with [ezh]).

My favorite is 'assure', 'azure', and 'adjure'.  This only works for one
pronunciation of 'azure' however, rather like 'either' and 'ether'.  The
deciding thing for the phonemicity of /Z/ is that it appears to be an
allophone of both /z/ and /j/ (j with hachek) and there is a classical
phonological rule that says that allophones can only belong to one
phoneme.  Since an allophone can't belong to two different phonemes
without violating the bi-uniqueness rules, /Z/ must be a phoneme, at
least by classical phonological rules.

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Fri May 18 10:47:43 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Fri, 18 May 2001 11:47:43 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <E14zyWC-0004Ql-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <FRI.18.MAY.2001.114743.0100.>

--On Monday, May 14, 2001 10:21 pm -0400 pausyl at AOL.COM wrote:

[on the 'thigh'/'thy' question]

> I'm actually on Larry Trask's side (for the most part) in this discussion,
> but I assume that the argument from Robert Whiting's side would be best
> stated in terms of "closed-class" vs. "open-class" words; _thus_ would
> seem to be in the closed class.  _thy_ is surely English (think of the
> "Lord's Prayer"), but it's also a closed-class item.  And I would judge
> the Traskian point above about /oi/ never occurring in native English
> words, even if true, to be irrelevant to the discussion:  It seems to me
> that no amount of introspection would help an intelligent (but
> linguistically untrained) native speaker of English to decide that _boy_
> (the etymology of which is disputed) is a loanword; however, it seems
> plausible that that same speaker could uncover the fact that all words
> beginning with /D/ are "closed-class" or the like.

A very interesting point, but I wonder.  Naive native speakers of English
seem to have few if any intuitions about word classes.  Is there really any
evidence that such naive speakers are aware, or can readily become aware
without coaching, of the contrast between open and closed classes?

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  Wed May 16 14:26:16 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 09:26:16 -0500
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <WED.16.MAY.2001.092616.0500.>

Gabor Sandi wrote many sensible things, which I have omitted here.  I
can only make a few remarks, as a Germanist, confirming them.

1. Kuchen [ku.x at n] vs. Kuhchen [ku:?@n] is not a minimal pair.  I've
said this before, but it bears repeating: there is a difference not only
in the medial fricative, but also in the length of the stressed vowel,
which must be attributed to the presence or absence of a morpheme
boundary.  So it tells us nothing about the status of [x ?], which could
perfect well be one phoneme, except that

2. They have now come to contrast in initial position, at least before
/a/, albeit only in loan words, and only for certain speakers.  I have
noticed this for some time, and am pleased that a Duden author has too.
This strongly favors the analysis as separate phonemes.

3. Separate analysis is also favored by the incontestable fact that
German speakers can, and easily do, hear the difference between them,
which is not typical of allophones.

4. In Rhenish dialects, [?] has split from [x] and merged with /s^/.
This muddies the waters too.

5. Swiss dialects have only [x], never [?].  More mud.

More discussion now?  German makes "thy thigh" look easy!

Leo Connolly


From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi  Thu May 17 12:58:29 2001
From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting)
Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 15:58:29 +0300
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <93893860.3198909853@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <THU.17.MAY.2001.155829.0300.>

On Tue, 15 May 2001, Larry Trask wrote:

> --On Sunday, May 13, 2001 11:38 am +0300 Robert Whiting
> <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi> wrote [in his recent PhD thesis ;-) ]

>> But the fact remains that 'ether' is
>> monomorphemic and 'either' is not (even if speakers don't realize
>> it consciously).

> Aw, come on, Bob.  I emphatically deny that 'either' is bimorphemic in
> contemporary English, any more than 'feather' is.  It is *historically*
> bimorphemic, of course, but that observation is neither here nor there.
> Anyway, if we're looking at history, 'ether' is not monomorphemic either:
> it's a transparent derivative of the Greek verbal root <aith-> 'burn'.
> This root gave rise to a number of derivatives in Greek, including the one
> leading to our word 'Ethiopia'.

> By what right can you invoke one etymology but not another, when neither is
> known to native speakers?

But I'm not invoking etymology (except to show that the morpheme boundary
really is there), I'm invoking perceptual categories.  Certainly there is
no productive morpheme boundary in either of these words, and if you read
the posting, then you know that I said as much.  I don't expect naive
native speakers to know about the morpheme boundary in 'either' in the
same way that they know about the morpheme boundary in 'running'.
Similarly, I wouldn't expect your average NNS to know that there is a
morpheme boundary in 'both' or that the 'th' of this word is the same
morpheme as in 'the'.

But whenever there is similarity in meaning, it is possible for speakers
to perceive a morphemic relationship, correct or not.  Thus I would expect
most NNS's to perceive the "-rage" of 'outrage' as the same morpheme as
'rage' (even though it isn't).  Similarly, I would expect them to connect
the "ful-" of 'fulsome' with the morpheme 'full' rather than 'foul'.  And
I wouldn't expect the NNS to connect the "lis-" of 'lissome' with 'lithe'
even if they might be able to connect 'bliss' with 'blithe'.

Try putting it to NNS's like this:

   Which of these words does not belong with the others:

      a) either
      b) other
      c) whether
      d) feather

and see what kind of response you get.  I'd do it myself, but I don't
have access to enough native speakers.  You could even slip it into an
exam and then ask "why?".  I would expect that most speakers would see a-c
as a unit, although it might be a long time before anyone says that they
form a group that all refer to "one thing of two."  Now I certainly
wouldn't expect NNS's to know that the -ther in these words is a reflex of
a PIE comparative suffix.  And, despite the similarity of meanings, I
wouldn't even expect them to know that 'other' and 'hetero-' are not just
anagrams but are cognates.  But I would expect them to be able to
recognize 'either', other', and 'whether' as belonging to the same class
and having a similar meaning.  And when you see similar meanings you tend
to perceive the common element in the words with similar meanings as a
morpheme.

So the answer to your question is that I don't expect them to know the
etymology of either word, but I do expect them to know that 'either'
belongs to a class of words that have similar meanings and share a "-ther"
element and that 'ether' does not belong to this group.  Whether that is
sufficient or not to claim that 'either' and 'ether' is not a minimal
contrast between [T] and [D] or not, I don't know, but this is essentially
beside the point.  The point is that the 'either' : 'ether' contrast has
too many ambivalencies to be unequivocal.  So just pick another example
to establish the contrast of intervocalic [T] and [D].

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi


From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi  Thu May 17 09:31:14 2001
From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting)
Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 12:31:14 +0300
Subject: thy thigh etc. (external sandhi in English)
In-Reply-To: <F66IIhs6hdn1KVHYS8Y0000118e@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <THU.17.MAY.2001.123114.0300.>

On Tue, 21 Nov 2000 Douglas G Kilday <acnasvers at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Leo A. Connolly (16 Nov 2000) writes:

<snip>

>> A few other points: How did _thy_ and _thigh_ differ before the
>> former developed a voiced fricative?  Easy: the Old English forms
>> were _thi:n_ and _the:oh_, where the final -h represented a velar
>> fricative.  The loss of the final consonants in these words seems
>> to be much later than the initial voicing.

> The loss of final consonants probably is later than the
> establishment of initial [T:D] distinction,

Not unless this distinction was firmly in place well before the
time of Chaucer.  The 'thy/thine' (and 'my/mine') allomorphic
distinction is already in evidence in very early ME, and final
[x] > 0 was accomplished by the time of Chaucer as shown by his
rhymes and spellings.  Indeed, one begins to get spellings of
'thigh' as early as 1200 which show the loss of [x] in this word.
So unless you can place the initial [T:D] distinction before
1200, this statement is unlikely to be true.

> but one should not assume that this distinction arose by the
> selective voicing of initial [T] to [D] in what Whiting loosely
> labels "function words".

First, the concept of "function words" is not a Whiting loose
label.  "Function word" and "content word" are technical terms
in grammatical theory, and hardly my invention.  You may, as you
claim, be unaware of the difference, but that does not mean that
there isn't one.  Any grammatical handbook or discussion of
grammar will explain the terms to you.  If you don't have one, a
dictionary will do.  Here are the definitions from Webster's
Collegiate Dictionary 10th edition (2000):

   function word n (1940) : a word (as a preposition, auxilliary
   verb, or conjunction) expressing primarily grammatical
   relationship

   content word n (1940) : a word that primarily expresses
   lexical meaning -- compare FUNCTION WORD

Interestingly, Webster's Encylopedic Unabridged Dictionary (1994)
has a longer definition of "function word":

   function word, a word, as a pronoun or preposition, that is
   used in a language as a substitute for another or as a marker
   of syntactic relationship; a member of a small, closed form
   class whose membership is relatively fixed.  Cf. empty word,
   full word.

but has no definition of "content word" using instead the term
"full word":

   full word, (esp. in Chinese grammar) a word that has lexical
   meaning rather than grammatical meaning; a word or morpheme
   that functions grammatically as a contentive. Cf. empty word.

I don't particularly like this last part since, although
"contentive" fairly obviously means "content word" (rather than
something that makes Mr Borden's cows give milk), the dictionary
nowhere defines either contentive or content word.

But, all things considered, "function word" and "content word"
are well-established categories that distinguish words that have
purely predictable grammatical function from words that have
(from the point of view of sentence structure) unpredictable
content.  In general, content words provide the new information
(content) in an utterance and function words tie this information
together in a particular way.  For example, simple sentence
structures can be used as a way of introducing new content words
in teaching situations by using a fill-in-the-blank approach:

   This              is              a              ___________.
   function word     function word   function word  blank for any
   demonstrative     copula          indefinite     content noun
   pronoun                           determiner     or NP

The blank can then be filled in with any noun or noun phrase:
e.g., 'house', 'screwdriver', 'mastadon', 'very sorry-looking
piece of equipment', 'cuneiform tablet written in Sumerian in
2012 BC by a scribe named Ur-Suena'.  This approach is frequently
used in phrase books for foreign languages where a functional
sentence skeleton is provided, followed by a list of content
words that can be used to fill out the sentence in various
situations.

It should be obvious from this that function words are among the
most commonly used words in a language because they are used over
and over again whenever the grammatical function they serve is
invoked in speech or writing while content words only appear when
their content needs expressing.  Any corpus analysis will confirm
this.  In fact there is a sort of Zipf's Law for this because
function words are relatively few in number but are used very
frequently while the number of content words is huge (and growing
constantly) but the individual words are much rarer in use.  This
(the presence of initial [D] in many function words) accounts for
the fact that [D] is one of the most common consonants in English
speech (ranking 6th) while its contrastive partner [T] is one of
the rarest (only more common than [Z]) despite the fact that
there are many more English words with [T] than with [D].

Basicly, content words tell what is being talked about and
function words tell what is being said about it.  You can see
this by taking a simple sentence and stripping out the functional
elements leaving the content words:

  I saw the book on a shelf in the room.
    see     book      shelf        room

A simple check on this can be had by looking at the opening lines
of Lewis Carroll's celebrated (by linguists) poem "Jabberwocky":

    'Twas brilling and the slithy toves
    Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
    All mimsy were the borogoves,
    And the mome raths outgrabe.

One could hardly ask for a better illustration of the difference
between function words and content words.  It can immediately be
seen that there is nothing grammatically incorrect or even
inconsistent in the passage.  This is because all the function
words and other functional elements have been left intact.  The
content words, on the other hand, are all semantically empty.
Although they are all phonotactically acceptable English words
they have no meaning in the lexicon.  The result is that we know
exactly what is being said, but we have no idea what is being
talked about.  One could further note that if the function words
were removed or replaced with semantically empty expressions, the
result would be completely unintelligible gibberish.

Words can be both function words and content words depending on
how they are used, and sometimes a content word becomes a
function word (grammaticalization) through usage (e.g., French
'pas' "step" ==> "no, not"), but the concept of function words
and content words remains clear.

So people do not assume that there was a selective voicing of
[T] to [D] on the basis of any loose labels.  They assume it on
the basis of the evidence.  A succinct summary is provided by
Edward Finegan in "English" in Bernard Comrie (ed.), _The World's
Major Languages_ (London & Sydney: Croom Helm 1987), p. 91

   Significantly, initial /<edh>/ in Modern English is limited to
   the function words _the_, _this_, _that_, _these_, _those_,
   _they_ and _them_, _there_ and _then_, _thus_, _thence_,
   _though_ and _thither_, with initial voiceless /<theta>/ in
   Old English later becoming voiced by assimilation when
   unstressed, as these words often are.

This is not just an appeal to authority (although expert
authority does have its appeal).  This is to show that this is
the generally accepted position, not something that I have made
up to entertain the list.

But this was published some 13-14 years ago.  Perhaps it is no
longer the mainstream opinion.  Perhaps I missed your review of
this work where you pointed out to the misinformed multitudes
that "what [these words] share is definiteness, not some murky
'functionality'."  If so, please tell me where it is published so
that I can see what evidence you base this assertion on.

Besides, function words wasn't my label to start with.  I
originally referred to them as deictic words and pronouns.
Somebody else introduced the term function words, presumably
because this is how they are usually referred to in the
literature, and I just let it ride because, well, they *are* all
function words, and function words is easier to write than
pronouns and deictic words.  But in the final analysis, I don't
think that the voicing of initial [T] in these words relies
specifically on the fact that they are function words.

> (It escapes me how <thy> has any more "function" or less
> "content" than <through>.

No doubt.  But pronouns are quintessential function words.
Pronouns (particularly personal pronouns) have very general
reference and little inherent meaning and essentially carry only
grammatical information (person, number, gender, case).  Their
specific referents come from their immediate surroundings.

'Through' is also often a function word, although not invariably
since it is also used as an adverb and an adjective.
Furthermore, it has a lexicalized stressed variant 'thorough'
(always an adjective), something that is characteristic of
function words.  I suspect that what keeps 'through' out of the
group of function words with initial [D] is that it doesn't
appear to be a word with a pronominal/deictic 'th-' base as the
other members of the group do.

> What English words with initial [D] share is definiteness, not
> some murky "functionality".)

Definiteness is a functional (grammatical) category.  But where
is the definiteness in 'though'?  As a conjunction, 'though' is a
function word, but is no more definite than 'but' (with which it
is sometimes synonymous).  It can be adversative, disjunctive, or
conditional, but not definite.  But, even though it lacks any
overt "definiteness," it can still be considered a deictic or a
demonstrative.  While modern 'though' is a Scandinavian loan, it
replaced an OE word that was homonymous with part of the 'the'
demonstrative family, and was probably perceived as part of this
family despite lacking definiteness.  Finally, in some northern
dialects of British English it is pronounced with [T], clearly
indicating that it is a borderline case.

But I will agree partially with your premise.  These words *are*
all function words, but the fact that they have initial [D] is
not specifically because they are function words, but because
they share some other feature.  So you were on the right track;
you have just taken a disastrously wrong turn.

> Old English clearly did not consider [T:D], [f:v], and [s:z]
> to be phonemic oppositions.

Good.  Then we can dispense with the notion that any sounds that
the speakers of a language can distinguish are phonemes.

> The characters "thorn" and "edh" are used indiscriminately in
> the manuscripts, and no special signs for "v" or "z" are found.

The writing of [v] in foreign words (like 'fers/vers' "verse")
was done with the <u/v> graph, as later.  You will find both
spellings (<f> and <u/v>) in OE sources (although writings with
<f> are more common).  You will also find writings like
<Uespatianus>, <Uenus>, <Uesoges>, <Nouembris>, and, of course,
<Eue> (Adams bryd).  But you won't find *<Fespatianus>, etc.  In
native words, you will find 'over' written both <ofer>
(historical spelling) and <ouer> (pronunciation spelling) already
in OE.

The writing of [z] is found almost exclusively in foreign names,
particularly in the Bible:  <Azariah>, <Baldazar> (for later
Balshazzar or Balthazar, etc.), <Zabulon>, and so forth.
According to the grammar, z (named zede) was used for writing
Greek words.  Hence <zodiacus> and <zefferus>.

The Anglo-Saxon latin alphabet consisted of the 23 letters of the
then current latin alphabet (lacking j, v [u and v were simply
graphic variants at this time and counted as a single letter],
and w) plus two necessary signs left over from the runic alphabet
(thorn and wen or wyn) and one unnecessary sign (eth or edh)
added by the Irish monks who introduced the latin alphabet to
England.  There were also vowel ligatures notably <?> (ae) that
represented sounds that had had signs in the runic alphabet but
these were not counted as separate letters although this sign had
a name ("ash") inherited from the name of the runic character.

So it is not true that "no special signs for 'v' or 'z' are
found" in OE.  They are there, but they aren't used frequently
and generally only in foreign words (except that 'u' is sometimes
substituted for wen or for <f> in intervocalic position in native
words).  What you can say without fear of contradiction is that
they are not used to indicate contrasts between [f] and [v] or
[s] and [z] because there aren't any in OE.

> In the usual treatment the OE fricatives are regarded as unvoiced
> when doubled, when adjacent to unvoiced stops, and when occurring
> initially or finally in words or compound-elements. The first two
> conditions are solidly established, but the third may be doubted:
> did morphemic boundaries in OE necessarily make adjacent
> fricatives unvoiced in connected speech?

Probably.  Otherwise words like 'nothing' (OE na:thing < na:n +
thing) and 'anything' (< ?:nig + thing) would doubtless have [D]
rather than [T] since these compounds came into existence in OE.
Since the environments around the boundaries in these words are
invariant, surely the sandhi-type rule that you propose below
would have been more likely to operate here than in the more
variable environments of the boundaries between words.  I can't
see any alternative:  if there was a sandhi rule operating across
morpheme boundaries it would have fixed 'nothing' and 'anything'
with [D] already in OE.  Similarly, compounds like 'within' and
'without' would have been fixed with [D] at an early date by such
a rule.  Since none of this happened, it speaks against the
existence of such a rule.

> Some light is shed on the problem by the "Cuckoo Song"
> manuscript of circa 1240, which contains an Early Middle English
> folk-song in parallel with a Medieval Latin hymn. The English of
> the song shows no significant influence from Norman French or
> Latin. The scribe uses typical ML orthography with "u" and "v"
> indiscriminately representing both the vowel [u] and the voiced
> fricative [v], which creates no ambiguity in practice. For the
> English text, the scribe requires "w" and "thorn" to convey the
> non-ML sounds. More importantly, he carries the ML graphemic
> distinction "f:u/v" into his English transcription. We find "f"
> in <after>, but "u" in <nauer>, <calue>, and most significantly
> <bucke uerteth> '(the) buck farts'. Here the scribe has preserved
> initial [v], conditioned by a final vowel in the previous word.
> This verb appears in later ME as <farten>; it is unattested in OE
> but is a transparent cognate of Greek <perdomai> and Sanskrit
> <pardate>.

By your own description, the scribe has not "preserved" initial
[v] in this word but has shifted initial [f] to [v] since the
cognates clearly show that the sound is etymologically [f] (<
PIE *p per Grimm's law).  The [v] can have been "preserved" here
only if there was some kind of sandhi rule in operation for which
this writing then becomes the only evidence.  Using the word
"preserved" to describe this writing is begging the question.  It
is building what you are trying to prove into the argument

> The manuscript does not distinguish [s:z] and [T:D] because
> these oppositions are unknown in Medieval Latin.

A contrast between [s] and [z] may not have existed in Medieval
Latin, but there were Medieval Latin words that historically had
inherent [z] (e.g., 'zodiacus') borrowed from Greek.  In fact,
the letter <z> was added to the latin alphabet specifically to
write the large influx of Greek loan words after the Roman
conquest of Greece.  That's why it's tucked in at the end of the
alphabet.

There certainly was no contrast between [T] and [D] in Latin (of
any stripe) since [D], certainly, and [T], probably (although
possibly in late periods), never existed in Latin.  Graphic <th>
in classical Latin represents [th] (aspirated rather than
spirantized) and was not native to Latin, but entered through
Greek influence both from loanwords (e.g., 'bibliotheca') and
from the prestige of Greek literature and learning which caused
aspirated pronunciations (and eventually spellings) to be
introduced into native Latin words after the conquest of Greece.
Before that time Greek words with [th] were borrowed into Latin
with [t].

A similar phenomenon occurred in English.  When the <th> was
restored in words like 'throne' (ME 'trone') and 'authentic' (ME
'autentik' based on the prestige of classical literature and
learning, there was probably a "knock-on" effect so that <th>
found its way into some words of classical origin that had never
had theta, such as 'anthem' and 'author/authority'.

> In my opinion the Early ME dialect recorded here most likely
> made no phonemic distinction between voiced and unvoiced
> fricatives, but maintained an allophonic contrast on the basis of
> adjacent sounds regardless of morphemic boundaries, and this
> scheme was probably inherited from OE. For the composer of the
> "Cuckoo Song" the words <thin> and <thih> would have begun with
> [T] or [D] according to the unvoiced or voiced nature of the
> preceding sound.

"Composer" or "copyist"?  Do you have proof that these sounds
were in the original, or only that they are in this particular
copy?  Since, as far as I know, there is only one manuscript, the
question is rhetorical.  But the thing about folk songs is that
they often (perhaps even usually) don't have a composer.  That's
what makes them folk songs.

Sounds like the writer/copyist was Irish or Welsh.  I must say
that I have never heard of this sandhi rule for OE.  Can you give
me a reference to a publication of it so I can see if there is
any other evidence besides the _hapax phenomenon_ <bucke
uerteth>?  Surely if such a sandhi rule could be proved for OE,
those who claim massive Celtic influence on English would be all
over it like a shot even though it is only similar, not identical,
to Celtic lenition (mutation).

But if <bucke uerteth> is the only evidence, this is certainly
too flimsy a foundation on which to build such an elaborate
structure.  There are simply too many other ways to account for
this single piece of evidence.  For example:

  a) The writer/copyist might have been a speaker of a language
     that had a similar rule (e.g., Irish or Welsh), which
     influenced his writing.

  b) The dialect of the writer/copyist might have shifted (or
     been in the process of shifting) initial [f] to [v].  Some
     English dialects did do this.  In fact the only native
     (inherited) modern English words with initial [v] ('vat'
     [cf. G 'Fa?'], 'vixen' [cf. G 'F?chsin'], 'vane' [cf. G
     'Fahne']) are borrowings into the standard dialect from just
     such a dialect.

  c) The distinction between [f] and [v] was not considered
     phonemic by the writer/copyist and, although he had
     different signs available to make the distinction, he felt
     no compulsion to indicate it consistently in the writing of
     English (in much the same way as thorn and edh and <s> and
     <z> were used).

  d) The use of the voiced member of a voiced/voiceless allophone
     pair may have been sound-symbolic, used perhaps as a jeu
     d'esprit in a word where the writer/copyist considered a
     voiced sound more appropriate to the meaning.

Other explanations are also possible (like the simplest one that
the writer/copyist meant to write <f> and wrote <u> instead; this
is usually called "scribal error").

And all this assumes that the writing <uerteth> actually
represents the verb 'fart', which is not universally accepted.
Admittedly, OED takes it this way, but others have taken it as a
form of a verb based on _vert_ 'green' (Cambridge History of
American and English Literature).  More convincing in my view is
a loan based on Latin _vertere_, French _vertir_ 'turn'.  There
are quite a number of borrowed English compounds based on this
root ('avert', 'divert', 'convert', 'revert', 'pervert', invert,
etc.), but the bare root seems unknown as a verb (although common
in other words:  'version', 'vertigo', 'vertex', 'verse',
'versus', etc.).  The native cognate is found in the suffix
'-ward(s)'.  Perhaps this hapax legomenon is a borrowing that
never became established or even an aphetic form of some compound
used to preserve the meter (this is, after all, a song).

Although there is nothing philologically unsound about a
derivation from 'fart', it seems out of place in the context of
the song.  No one has ever been able to explain to me why a
farting buck is a transparent metaphor of spring (from eating all
the newly sprouted greenery?).  Admittedly, I have lost touch
with 13th century England, and it is possible that in early
spring the air was redolent with buck farts, and your average
churl or thane took a deep breath and said "Ah, spring -- the
buck is farting."  Or perhaps the metaphor is auditory rather
than olofactory and buck farts were so sonorant that in spring
they resounded from every hillside and could be heard for miles
around, and your average ch. or th. said "Hark, sumer is icumen
in -- the buck farteth."  But I have a hard time seeing it this
way.  In keeping with with the rest of the song and the
parallelism within this couplet, some more visible physical
activity rather than an auditory or olofactory one would be more
appropriate.  Thus "the bullock starts, the buck turns/twists
(about)" is better suited to the context and the structure of the
song.  The main advantage to translating "the bullock starts, the
buck farts" is that it preserves the rhyme and scan of the
original (bulloc sterteth/bucke verteth).

As I say, this is just my own impression, based on a solid urban
tradition.  So if some of our more bucolic colleagues have
knowledge of why there may be more to this metaphor than meets
the eye (ear, nose), and why a farting buck heralds the coming of
spring/summer, please share it.

But in the absence of corroborating evidence, calling <bucke
uerteth> unequivocal evidence for a sandhi rule involving
voiced/voiceless fricatives in OE and ME (when in fact it is
neither the most likely nor the most plausible explanation) and
then using this rule to account for the present distribution of
these sounds in modern English (when in fact it doesn't) seems a
bit on the fanciful side.

As you say, this is your opinion, but in my opinion, statements
like "most likely ... maintained an allophonic contrast on the
basis of adjacent sounds regardless of morphemic boundaries, and
this scheme was probably inherited from OE", are considerably
stronger than the evidence warrants.  "May have" rather than
"most likely" and "could have been" rather than "was probably"
are more appropriate to a theory built on a single piece of
evidence without corroboration, especially in the face of
conflicting evidence.

> Turning now to Chaucer we find the "f:v" distinction
> consistently made, initially and medially, even in native words
> like <yeven> 'to give' from OE <giefan>. The character "z" is
> used only in foreign words, mostly from French and Arabic:
> <zeles>, <zodiak>, <azimut>, etc. Chaucer retains "s" for medial
> [z] in native words: <hasel>, <hasard>, <bosard>, etc. Printed
> editions give no information about the dental fricatives, using
> "th" everywhere.

The history of the orthography of the English fricatives, given
both here and below, is quite correct (except that ME 'give' is
generally considered a Scandinavian borrowing rather than derived
from OE 'giefan', 'gifan' and except for the loose labelling of
<zeles>, <zodiak>, and <azimut> as "from French and Arabic"; all
of these words come into English from French or Late Latin; all
are borrowings into French (or Latin), the first two from Greek,
the last from Arabic; the one word that comes into French (or
Late Latin) from Arabic (via Spanish) is actually based on a
Latin borrowing into Arabic), but basically it just shows what I
have been saying all along:  there is no need to distinguish
sounds in writing until they are used phonemically.  As long as
the distinction is allophonic or morphophonemic or
non-contrastive, there is no need for a graphic distinction.

But the picture given here, while factually correct, implies
quite a bit more regularity than is actually found in Chaucer's
spelling.  While he does use <z> only in foreign words (as was
done in OE), he also uses <s> for [z] in foreign words (as was
also done in OE) and he also frequently writes <z> for the plural
morpheme in foreign words (but this could be a borrowing from
French).

For example in two consecutive sections (Astrol. I 19-20) he
spells 'azimuths' as

    Azymuthz
    A3imutz (3 for yogh; probably a miswritten or miscopied <z>)
    azymutz
    azimutes

Furthermore in these same sections he writes 'zenith' as both
<senyth> and <cenyth>, but not with <z>; he also writes 'horizon'
as both <Orisonte> and <orizonte>.  So his spelling is pretty
much all over the place as far as indicating [z] with both <s>
and <z>, in foreign words.

> Chaucer's language has a large component of recent loanwords
> in <v-> sometimes forming minimal pairs with older words in <f->:
> <vailen> 'to have value' ~ <failen> 'to fail', <vers> 'verse' ~
> <fers> 'chess-queen'.

The thing is, all four of these words are foreign to English.
And _fers_ 'chess-queen' is not older in English than 'verse'
which occurs already in OE (written both <uers> and <fers> but
without any indication of a sandhi rule governing which is used;
they are simply in free variation).  There were plenty of loan
words with initial [v] as well as with intervocalic [f] (e.g.,
'coffer') in English before the 14th century.  It is just that
before this time English speakers didn't consider [f] and [v]
different sounds.  So long as they didn't contrast this was
possible.

Now, while it is true that there was an earlier borrowing of
'verse' in OE with a variable initial <f>/<u/v>, there is no
indication of a sandhi rule affecting which way it is written.
Since <f/uers> was neuter in OE, it is often preceded by <thaet>
as the correct form of the definite article, and one finds both
<thaet fers> and <thaet uers> -- simply free variation.  This is
not to deny that some speakers may have had such a rule.  There
is just no indication that it was the norm.  Similarly, there is
no rule involved in the OE variation in the writing of <ofer> and
<ouer>.  This last word was always pronounced with [v] in OE,
just as <f/vers> was probably always pronounced with [v] despite
the fact that it was much more frequently written as <fers>.  In
OE there was no contrast between [f] and [v] and hence no
consistency in the way they were written was required, although
speakers could probably tell the difference between the sounds.

One could legitimately question the extent to which OE written
materials actually reflect the spoken language of the time and
to what extent written OE was influenced by Latin with its
[f]/[v] contrast.  Most people who knew how to write OE (mostly
monks and/or bureaucrats) were familiar with, if not fluent in,
Latin.  Did OE monks and bureaucrats know Latin?  Well, does the
Pope know Latin?  Did the writer/copyist of the Cuckoo Song know
Latin?  The answer is right there in the manuscript.  Your saying
that "The English of the song shows no significant influence from
Norman French or Latin" is again begging the question.  These
things being so (as Caesar was wont to say), it is difficult to
ascribe <f>/<u/v> orthographic variants in OE or even in early ME
to the single cause of a sandhi rule that voiced initial
voiceless fricatives in a voiced environment across morpheme
boundaries (especially when such a rule is not in evidence in
recent compounds).

> It appears that this large influx of words beginning with [v]
> which does not alternate allophonically with [f] has forced the
> older words beginning with [f/v] to abandon the voiced allophone
> and become words beginning with invariant [f].  That is, this
> influx of loanwords has created a new phonemic distinction /f:v/
> in initial position which the orthography of Chaucer's time (late
> 14th cent.) regards as fully established.

Rather, it was the French (Latin) contrast between [f] and [v]
that was imported in pairs like 'failen' and 'vailen' and
'coffer' and 'cover' or 'coffin' and 'coven'.  English now had to
deal with words with inherent [f] and inherent [v] in contrastive
positions.  'Vers' "verse" probably was reborrowed from French in
ME along with 'fers' "chess-queen".  But this time there is an
[f]/[v] contrast so the two sounds can't be treated as variants.
Furthermore, the fact that OE <f/uers> was not fixed with initial
[f] but with initial [v] runs counter to your assertion.  So the
[f]/[v] contrast was just imported along with the words.

But this is true whether there was a sandhi rule operating or
not.  Speakers now have to take account of words beginning with
inherent initial [v] (borrowed) as well as with inherent initial
[f] (native or borrowed) as well as words with inherent
intervocalic [f] and inherent intervocalic [v].  If there are a
lot of borrowed words with initial [v], especially when some of
them contrast with words with initial [f], either borrowed or
native, and there are a lot of borrowed words with intervocalic
[f] then speakers either have to nativize the borrowed words
with initial [v] to [f] and nativize the borrowed words with
intervocalic [f] to [v] (and lose the contrast in both cases) or
they have to accept the [f]/[v] contrast as phonemic.  Obviously
they did the latter.  But this certainly doesn't require a sandhi
rule for its implementation.

In fact, the observation that native words were fixed with
invariant [f] rather speaks against such a sandhi rule.
Otherwise, one might have expected at least some native words to
have been fixed with initial [v].  After all, if what you say is
true, English no longer had words with inherent initial [f], but
only a sandhi-governed initial [f]/[v] alternation.  Since you
claim that this situation had existed since OE, native speakers
could have had no memory of words with inherent initial [f] by
the 14th century.  Unless, of course, you want to argue that
'vat', 'vane', and 'vixen' are not borrowings from the southern
dialects, but are in actuality such words.  But then you have to
account for the distribution of [v] in these particular words:
e.g., why in 'vixen' but not in 'fox'?

If definiteness is the criterion, then surely we would expect
'four' and 'five' to be written *<vour> and *<vive>.  While 'for'
and 'fore' might have flopped back and vorth between initial [f]
and [v] for centuries, surely invariable compounds like 'before'
and 'afore' would have been fixed as *<bevore> and *<avore>
within a week if there was a sandhi rule operating that voiced
fricatives in a voiced environment across morpheme boundaries.
So phonemicization of [v] doesn't require a sandhi rule for its
implementation.  In fact, it is easier to explain without one.
Otherwise you have to say that native words in initial [f] and
borrowed words in initial [v] is just another huge statistical
anomaly.

This is a choice that is faced whenever there is a massive influx
of loanwords that use a segment in a position where it doesn't
occur in the borrowing language.  Speakers will either nativize
the segment or leave it as it is.  In the latter case, if it
doesn't contrast (or at least not heavily) with native segments
then it may simply be retained as a foreign phone(me) and will
ever be a marker of a foreign word (e.g. [z] in Latin words of
Greek origin).  If it does contrast heavily, or even if speakers
just happen to like the sound, it will become a new phoneme, and
will eventually find its way into new environments and contrasts
and new (native) words, perhaps even ousting some native phoneme
in certain words.

> For initial [s:z] Chaucer has only the sub-minimal pair <zeles>
> 'zeals' ~ <seled> 'sealed', and since "z" is otherwise used to
> denote loanwords this provides no direct evidence for a phonemic
> opposition.

Hallelujah -- alhamdulillah -- barak hashem.  At last someone who
realizes (and is willing to admit) that distinctions that can
have other explanations do not necessarily provide evidence of
phonemic contrast.

> The status of initial [T:D] in Chaucer is equivocal.
> Contractions like <artow> 'art thou' and <seistow> 'sayest thou'
> suggest that <thou> already had invariant [D], since the old rule
> would require [T] here and [tT] usually contracts to [T], which
> would yield *<arthow> etc. However, this argument is extremely
> weak. Statistical analysis of Chaucer's alliterations in "th"
> might resolve the issue, but I am not aware of such a study.

Extremely weak is perhaps an understatement.  Actually, in
addition to contractions, <t> in 'thou' (and the other cases of
this pronoun) is often found after [s], [t], and [d].  Thus you
find things like 'bi-hold tou'.  Any conclusions about whether
initial <th> in these words was voiced, either invariantly or
environmentally are very iffy.  But I will agree that the
possiblility that it was already voiced is not excluded.

> At any rate it is clear that the English /f:v/ distinction
> resulted from loanwords and was well established by Chaucer's
> time. The /s:z/ distinction, if not already made by Chaucer,
> followed shortly. It can be attributed partly to loanwords,
> partly to the earlier establishment of /f:v/ as phonemic.

There are other factors, which you seem anxious to ignore,
involved in the phonemicization of the voiced fricatives as well.
One of these is the collapse of the English short vowel system
and the loss of final inflectional '-n' followed by loss of final
[@] (schwa).  This uncovered some of the former intervocalically
voiced fricatives (particularly in infinitives) and left them
bare at the ends of words, which removed the phonetic
conditioning environment that both created and maintained the
identity of the allophones.  Since they couldn't remain
allophones without the conditioning environment, something had to
happen to the voiced fricatives that were now in word final
position.

Another factor was the loss of intervocalic long fricatives
[ff TT ss] which were simplified into [f T s] producing
intervocalic unvoiced fricatives which could contrast with the
intervocalic voiced fricatives [v D z] which had previously
been simply allophones of [f T s] in intervocalic position.
Since it was no longer possible to predict [f T s] or [v D z]
based on intervocalic position, something had to happen to the
intervocalic voiceless/voiced fricatives that were no longer
predictable from their environment.  For instance, modern 'since'
comes from a contraction of ME 'sithens' (with adverbial genitive
-s) which in turn came from OE 'siththan' (itself a compound of
'si:th' "after" and 'tham' or 'thon' [dative or instrumental of
"that"]).

So the loss of the conditioning environments that identified the
voiced fricatives as allophones of the voiceless fricatives may
have had as much (or more) effect on phonemicization of voiced
fricatives as the massive influx of French loanwords in the
13-14th century.  Certainly the two events reinforced each other.
And the large number of loans with inherent initial [v] and the
smaller number with inherent [z] quickly established these two
sounds as phonemes in English.  New coinings with /z/ and
contrasts between /s/ and /z/ follow very soon (e.g., 'fuss',
'fuzz', 'buzz') because of the suitability of [z] for expressive
and imitative words.  Now that /z/ is a phoneme instead of just a
sound in the language it is possible to have words with inherent
[z] in them in any position (so long as phonotactic constraints
are observed).

But [T] and [D] did not have any such crutches to aid in their
phonemicization.  English was not in contact with any languages
with a [T]/[D] phonemic opposition.  In fact, ME did not have any
source of words with [D] at all (except Celtic where it existed
only as a lenition of [d]) and [T] was only available through the
medium of classical Greek or Latin (or more rarely, through
Celtic).  Even French had lost the [T] pronunciation and hence a
number of words borrowed from French lacked <th> (e.g., ME
'trone' "throne").  As a result, the same thing that happened
with the [f]/[v] and the [s]/[z] oppositions just did not happen
with [T]/[D].  There simply was no massive import of words with
[D] or with a [T]/[D] contrast to make it happen.

> The [T:D] opposition was left as an orphaned allophonic pair,
> very difficult for speakers to maintain, especially in initial
> position. They would have been obliged to enunciate some words
> with invariant initial [f], [v], [s], [z] and others with
> variable [T] or [D] according to the preceding sound. Under these
> circumstances any mechanism tending to fix [T] or [D] in
> particular words would have operated rather strongly.

Now it's my turn to say that I don't see why.  According to you
this sandhi rule had been operating for over 500 years and now,
with the loss of two of the allophone pairs to which it applied,
speakers are suddenly anxious to get rid of it.  One of the
principles of sound change rules is that they operate until they
no longer have anything to operate on and then they disappear.
It should have been no more difficult to maintain this alleged
sandhi rule for [T]/[D] than it was to maintain it for the other
fricatives in the face of other fixed voiceless/voiced
oppositions (as in the stops).

But I must say that you paint a vivid picture of the difficulties
faced by 14-15th century speakers of English.  One can almost see
the churls and thanes tossing and turning on their straw pallets
or feather beds, driven to sleeplessness by the difficulty of
maintaining the allophonic alternation of initial [T] and [D] now
that [f] and [v] and [s] and [z] have become phonemic contrasts.
Much of the energy of the English-speaking peoples during this
time must have gone into finding a solution to this problem.  It
is easy to see now that the Hundred Years' War wasn't about
English territorial claims in France, but was just a fit of pique
because the French hadn't fixed initial [T] and [D] with their
loanwords at the same time that they fixed [f]/[v] and [s]/[z].
And Richard III wasn't pleading for a "horse" at Bosworth Field,
but for a "source" (obviously for fixing the runaway allophonic
variation of initial [T] and [D]).  Shakespeare just got it
wrong -- but what can you expect from someone who was secure with
his invariant initial [T] and [D] and who never gave a thought to
the struggles that his forebears went through to bring him that
security.

> In my opinion this probably began with the statistics of
> utterances: demonstratives like <the> and <this> commonly follow
> prepositions, which in a majority of cases end in voiced sounds.

And you call functionality murky.  Do you have any other examples
of syntactically conditioned phonetic change?  I have seen a lot
of ontological ingenuity expended by classical phonologists to
devise a purely phonetic environment for some obviously necessary
sound change, but this is a new one.

If the shift to [D] is syntactically statistical in nature (i.e.,
it occurs when a variable sound is pronounced more often one way
than the other), why shouldn't it have affected all nouns
beginning with [T].  After all, nouns are commonly preceded by an
article, either definite or indefinite and these always end in a
voiced sound.  I rather suspect that nouns are preceded by
articles more often than demonstratives are preceded by
prepositions (especially prepositions that end precisely in
voiced sounds).  About the only thing that would make this
scenario play is the fact that demonstratives, being function
words, occur very frequently in spoken language -- much more
frequently than nouns, which are content words.  So why not say
that function words, which are used much more heavily than
content words, were subject to this effect?  Oops, I almost
forgot -- you can't say this because you don't know what function
words are.  It escapes you how 'the' has any more "function" or
less "content" than 'theology'.

Or, if the shift to [D] is syntactically statistical in nature,
why shouldn't it have affected the verb 'think' which is among
the most common lexical verbs in English (rank 64 in the BNC with
153,881 tokens, right behind the deictic 'then' at 63).  After
all, this verb, which requires an animate subject, is most often
preceded by a personal pronoun, all of which (except for the
neuter, which can't properly be a subject of this verb) end in a
voiced sound.  And when it isn't preceded by a pronoun it is most
often preceded by either a modal verb or an adverb ending in a
voiced sound.  If it is because 'think' is not a demonstrative,
then your environment for the sound change is still semantically
or syntactically conditioned, not phonetically conditioned.

Or, if the shift to [D] is syntactically statistical in nature,
why shouldn't it have happened already in OE where, before the
loss of final inflectional n and the eventual loss of all final
short vowels, many more words ended in vocalic sounds than in ME.

> Once the invariant [D] was fixed in the most common
> demonstratives, it would have spread by analogy to the other
> "th"-words of pronominal origin which carry definiteness.

Are there any "th"- pronouns that are indefinite?

Besides, this doesn't account for the spread of this feature to
the conjunction 'though' which does not have any of the
characteristics you deem necessary for this change; i.e., it
lacks definiteness, it never follows a preposition (or even an
article).

This is one reason why the mainstream theory that [D] in these
words is a lenition of [T] in unstressed forms of function words
is easier to believe.  Rather than basing the distinction on
"definiteness," categorizing these words as function words
accounts for all of them (which "definiteness doesn't do [cf.
'though']).  Besides, 'that' is not infrequently used in an
indefinite sense ('That's just the way it is').  So if you want a
"one size fits all" covering term for all the English words with
initial [D] it has to be "function word" not "definiteness,"
despite the fact that definiteness is the most obvious
characteristic of things like the definite article.  Ultimately,
though, I don't think that the phenomenon can be completely
ascribed to the fact that these are all function words.

Lenition in function words is a normal development because
function words are usually unstressed.  It is content words that
tend to be stressed because, well, they carry the content of an
utterance.  Function words are mostly predictable from the
grammatical structure.  I realize that this all sounds like
mumbo-jumbo if you don't know the difference between function
words and content words, but I suppose that at some point you
will just have to learn.

Function words often have stressed and unstressed forms.
Sometimes these are even lexicalized ('of' and 'off', 'through'
and 'thorough', and although not (yet) lexicalized, any native
speaker will know the difference between 'please' and
'puh-leeze', which have similar but quite distinct meanings [one
indicates a polite request, the other is a warning]).  Lenition
of pronominal forms would also be a natural thing, as is shown by
the fact that all the "h"-pronouns have a lenited form without
the "h" ('e, 'er, 'im, 'is, 'ers).  In fact, we even have a
nursery rhyme to imprint on young minds the fact that unstressed
'beside her' rhymes with 'spider'.

These lenited forms of the "h"-pronouns are obviously very old,
because, despite the fact that the third person plural pronouns
with "th" in English are Scandinavian loans, there is still a
native lenited form ('em) from the old "h"-pronoun plurals used
as an unstressed form of 'them' ('Give 'em hell, Harry', 'stick
'em up').  So the lenition of the "th"-pronouns would have been
a completely natural event considering the example of the
"h"-pronouns, which must have already existed before the
replacement of the "h"-pronoun plurals with "th"-pronoun plurals.
The structural similarity of the "th" pronouns and the "th"
deictics provides a strong basis for similar phonetic treatment,
whereas other words with initial [T] lack this structure and are
not affected.  The fact that these lenitions occur in pronouns
may also be significant because other very frequent function
words like 'for' and 'so' do not show any tendency for lenition.

> The situation would then have resembled the pre-Chaucerian stage
> of ME in which one class (recent loanwords) had invariant initial
> [v] and another class (older words) had variable initial [f/v].
> In that case the older class was forced to fix its initial sound
> as [f], establishing /f:v/ as a phonemic distinction. In the case
> under discussion the non-pronominal, non-definite words beginning
> with [T/D] were forced to fix their initial sounds as [T], which
> yielded the fixed opposition in initial [T:D] that is found
> today. I would guess that the process was complete (in East
> Midland at least) by 1500, if indeed it was not by Chaucer's
> time.

An entertaining story, and every bit as plausible as how the
elephant got its trunk or how the camel got its hump, but I'm
afraid that that's all that it is.  It depends on too many
suppositions that are not borne out, and even contradicted, by
the evidence.  In summary, it specifically requires:

   a) That there was a sandhi rule that voiced initial unvoiced
      fricatives in voiced environments across morpheme
      boundaries.  This is a sine qua non for your theory.  The
      only evidence for this is <bucke uerteth> in the Cuckoo
      Song and that requires accepting this interpretation out of
      a wide range of other possible interpretations.  Opposing
      this is the fact that compounds created in OE do not show
      any evidence of this sandhi rule and that OE writes loans
      with initial [v] with either <f> or <u/v> but such
      variation is not with regard to such a sandhi rule but
      simply free variation.

   b) That the importation of loans with initial [v] forced the
      abandonment of the alleged sandhi rule by requiring words
      with variable initial [f]/[v] to be fixed with [f].  This
      process is not illustrated by any of the evidence that you
      have provided.  In fact, the importation of 'verse' with
      initial [v] caused the earlier loan of the same word with
      variable initial <f>/<v> to be fixed as [v].  Rather, the
      evidence suggests that the [f]/[v] distinction has been
      imported along with the words since all the contrastive
      pairs that you have advanced are loan words.

   c) That by analogy to this unproved (and contradicted) fixing
      of words with initial [f]/[v] alternation with initial [f],
      words with "definiteness" with an alleged initial [T]/[D]
      alternation were fixed with initial [D] because
      "demonstratives like <the> and <this> commonly follow
      prepositions, which in a majority of cases end in voiced
      sounds."  No evidence is provided that this is what
      happened, or even that this can happen; this is simply
      presented as a "just-so story."  Since this contrasts with
      the currently accepted theory, surely some evidence is
      needed.  The mainstream view is that the words with initial
      [D] in English are unstressed forms of function words with
      a lenited initial consonant.  Lenition arises not from a
      sandhi rule but because the unstressed form facilitates
      assimilation of the initial consonant to the vocalic
      nucleus.  The mainstream view is supported by the facts
      that:  The forms with initial [D] are all function words;
      function words frequently have stressed and unstressed
      forms; lenition of initial consonants is found in
      unstressed forms of some function words.  The only counter
      to this that you offer is that you don't know what function
      words are or you can't understand how function words work.

   d) That this fixing of initial [D] spread from common
      demonstratives that "commonly follow prepositions, which in
      a majority of cases end in voiced sounds" to certain other
      words with [T], the criterion for the spread being
      "definiteness."  This ignores the fact that words that lack
      "definiteness" have this feature ('though') while words
      that have "definiteness" ('three', 'thirty', 'thirteen',
      'thrice') lack it.

   e) That the fixing of words with "definiteness" with initial
      [D] forced all other words in the language with an initial
      dental fricative to be fixed with [T].  The only evidence
      for this is that all the other words that don't fall into
      this small group with initial [D] do have initial [T].  But
      they might always have had invariant initial [T] and the
      situation would be exactly the same.  [BEEP - BEEP - BEEP
      -- Warning, Occam's Razor violation -- two entities
      proposed (sandhi rule, fixing rule) where only one
      (lenition rule) is required.]

   f) That because this process of fixing initial [T] and [D] is
      analogous to the alleged fixing of initial [f] and [v] and
      of initial [s] and [z] and since these last pairs are now
      phonemic distinctions, the contrast between [T] and [D] is
      also a phonemic distinction.  This ignores the fact that
      there is no predictable difference in meaning between words
      like 'fers' and 'vers' that can be based on the fact that
      one has initial [f] and the other has initial [v], whereas,
      in sharp contrast, all words with initial [D] share,
      according to you, a feature called "definiteness" (however
      you may want to define this so that it covers all these
      words, as long as the definition is independent of the
      sound [D]) and words with initial [T] lack this
      "definiteness."

      In other words, according to your scenario initial [D] in
      English is a marker of "definiteness" and initial [T] is a
      marker of "non-definiteness."  Thus the occurrence of
      initial [T] or initial [D] in a word can be predicted on
      the basis of some inherent semantic or lexical quality of
      the word and vice versa.  So, if what you say about words
      with initial [D] sharing "definiteness" is true, then the
      distinction between initial [T] and [D] is not phonemic
      because the occurrence of one or the other predicts
      something about the meaning of the word in which it occurs.
      Phonemes are units of sound, not of meaning.  Morphemes are
      units of meaning.  If a sound predicts meaning, then it is
      not (just) a phoneme.  If the only contrast that you have
      involves a prediction of meaning, then you can't use that
      contrast to prove a phonemic distinction.

> Hence one should not say that <thy> or its antecedent
> "developed" a voiced fricative. What happened, one way or
> another, is that the pronunciation with the unvoiced fricative,
> occurring after unvoiced sounds, was lost in this word.

Or, it was lost when the (comparatively rare) stressed forms of
these words were pronounced with [D] by analogy to the unstressed
forms.

> So is the initial [T:D] distinction phonemic in present-day
> English? Absolutely; it can and should be written /T:D/.

This is one of the problems that one often encounters with
hypotheses that are based on different interpretations of the
same evidence.  Even when the interpretation is put forward with
due diffidence and properly qualified with appropriate
conditionals (although, admittedly, this was not done in this
case), by the time the conclusions are reached, they are
absolute.  The hypothesizer seems to forget that other
interpretations are possible and the conditionals and modals have
disappeared.  There is a gradual promotion of "possible" (p > 0)
to "probable" (p > .5) culminating in conclusions that are
"absolute" (p = 1).

This is not the dispute the truth value of your conclusion.  It
may very well be true.  All I say is that it doesn't follow
necessarily from the argument presented.  It is possible to have
a false premise and an invalid argument and still reach a valid
conclusion.

> It was phonemic as soon as the process of fixing invariant [T]
> and [D] on particular words was completed, even though minimal
> pairs for these phones probably did not exist at that time.

But the "fixing" of invariant [T] and [D] on particular words is
just a supposition, and an unnecessary one at that, based almost
entirely on the highly questionable <bucke uerteth> as an
indication that there was a systematic allophonic variation in
initial fricatives in English.  Without this alleged variation,
there is no "fixing."  The problem here is that, even if the
supposition is correct, there is still a conditioning environment
involved in the "fixing" of initial [D].  According to the
scenario, only words with "definiteness" have initial [D].  Since
initial [D] has meaning associated with it, it can't be
considered a phoneme on the basis of a contrast with another word
that doesn't have "definiteness".  Phonemes are not units of
meaning.  Initial [D] is a unit of meaning, even in your
scenario.  If you start with salami, no matter how you slice it,
it's still salami.

> Minimal pairs are luxury items. They are nice to have, but one
> can (and in many situations must) establish phonemic oppositions
> without them.

Quite true.  But the availability of minimal pairs is still more
often the rule rather than the exception.  A lack of minimal
pairs is often an indication of fairly recent phonemicization.
It is also a measure of the functional load of the contrast in
the language.  If [T] and [D] are phonemes, then their functional
load in English is very nearly zero.  Obviously all (or even
most) of the phonemes of a language cannot have a nearly zero
functional load, so minimal pairs for phonemes will be much more
common than not.  But then I have never said anything different.
What I have said is that even an apparent (purely phonetic)
minimal pair (like German [ku:c,en] and [ku:xen], or Comanche
[papi] and [pavi], or even English [Tai] and [Dai]) should not be
accepted uncritically as evidence of phonemicity.  There is no
mechanistic way to determine phonemes, and that includes minimal
pairs taken in isolation.

But my point is not different from yours.  If [T] and [D] are to
be established as phonemes, it must be done without using the
opposition of 'thigh' and 'thy' as evidence.

> When distinct phones occur in contrastive distribution in
> corresponding morphemic positions, they are either allophones of
> one phoneme or represent distinct phonemes.

Sometimes they are both, although not in the same situation.
Consider the [T] in 'path'.  Now consider the plural and the
possessive singular of this word.  The first has [Dz] and the
second has [Ts].  Is the [D] of the plural a different phoneme
from the [T] of the possessive singular?  If it is, then the
plural form is a suppletion while the possessive singular is not.
But suppletions are completely unpredictable (i.e., the
suppletive form cannot be derived from the base form by any kind
of generalized rule: e.g., 'am', 'be', 'was'; 'fero', 'tuli,
'latus'), whereas the [D] of the plural is predictable from a
final spirant voicing rule that operates in the environment
[PLURAL].  Now consider the [T] in 'faith'.  The plural of this
word has [T].  Is the [T] of 'faith' the same phoneme as the [T]
of 'path'?  There is no reason to say that they are not.  Is the
[T] of 'faiths' the same phoneme as the [D] of 'paths'?
Classical phonology says that they can't be. Now consider the [T]
in 'bath'.  This word has both forms of the plural, with [Ts] and
with [Dz] (i.e., a speaker can use either one, and the hearer,
even if he has the other pronunciation, will not take the
received form as a different word).  Is the [T] of one
pronunciation a different phoneme from the [D] of the other? If
they are, then the two forms of the plural must be different
words.  But instead, the two forms are simply variants of the
same word, so the two sounds are in free variation.

Similarly, in the morphemes of the plural, possessive, and third
person singular of the verb, the variations of the
(morpho)phoneme //s// ([s z Iz]) are predictable from the
phonetic environment.  But final [s] and [z] are also phonemes
('fuss':'fuzz').  Thus /s/ and /z/ are contrastive in 'fuss' and
'fuzz' but are distributed allophonically in the plural morpheme.
To avoid the confusion and complication of conflicting
definitions resulting from this situation we use a reductionist
strategy known as "once a phoneme, always a phoneme" so that we
don't have to deal the complications of sounds that are sometimes
allophones or morphophonemic alternations of one another and
sometimes phonemes.

While phonemes/allophones may a mutually exclusive
relationship in a particular situation, it is not mutually
exclusive across the entire language.  Thus [k]:[s] in
'kill':'sill' or 'cat':'sat' is phonemic while [k]~[s] in
'public' ~ 'publicity' ~ 'publication' ~ 'publicize' is
allophonic or morphophonemic.  We simply make it mutually
exclusive across the entire language with the axiomatic dictum
"once a phoneme, always a phoneme."  This is another way of
saying that just because two sounds can be shown to be
allophonically distributed in some situation does not mean that
they are not phonemes if their phonemicity can be demonstrated
elsewhere.

If sounds exhibit only non-contrastive (complementary,
predictable, or free variation) distribution across the language
we label them allophones, but if they exhibit contrastive
(non-predictable) distribution somewhere in the language we label
them phonemes.  The problem arises when they exhibit contrastive
but predictable distribution.  Then we can't call them allophones
because they contrast.  But we shouldn't call them phonemes
because they are predictable.  If the prediction is made on the
basis of a grammatical environment, they are usually called
morphophonemes, and if they can be otherwise shown to be
phonemes, then we can invoke "once a phoneme ..."  But in order
to invoke "once a phoneme ..." you have to have that "once a
phoneme."  If you don't have it, you shouldn't use the
morphophonemic alternation to establish phonemicity, because it's
not the same thing.  Phonemic contrasts are arbitrary.
Morphophonemic alternations are based on some predictable
difference in meaning, function, or phonetic environment.
Phonemic contrasts should tell you nothing about the meaning of a
word except that it is different from some other word with
different phonemes.  Phonemes effect meaning; they don't affect
it.

This is where [T] and [D] are now.  They should be phonemes
because [f]/[v] and [s]/[z] are phonemes and the [T]/[D]
alternation was created at the same time, by the same historical
change.  If the others have become phonemes, then so should [T]
and [D] have become phonemes.  But as you have gone to lengths to
point out, [D] did not have the same driving force for
phonemicization behind it that [v] and [z] did, lacking the
massive influx of Romance and classical loanwords that were so
instrumental in the phonemicization of especially [v] and to a
lesser extent [z].

Another reason why [T] and [D] should be phonemes is because
otherwise there is a hole in the pattern, since the distinction
between [T]/[D] is voiceless/voiced which is normally phonemic in
English.  But there are other holes in the pattern of English
phonemes as there are holes in the phonemic patterns of many, if
not most, languages (in fact, Hockett considered "gaps,
asymmetries and 'configurational pressures'" to be a universal of
phonological systems), so this is not sufficient, by itself, to
declare these sounds phonemes.

But in any case you shouldn't use a contrast where [D] indicates
that a word has "definiteness" (in your view) or is a pronoun or
deictic (in my view) and [T] indicates that a word lacks these
qualities as evidence of phonemicity.  Even though we expect [T]
and [D] to be phonemes we shouldn't accept questionable evidence
just because it confirms our expectations.  Once we have evidence
that [T] and [D] are phonemes, then we can consider 'thigh' and
'thy' as a phonemic contrast (even though it isn't) because of
"once a phoneme ...".  But you can't establish the phonemicity of
[T] and [D] on the basis of such a contrast because it really
isn't phonemic.

> Allophones are regularly distributed according to phonologic
> environment.

Yes, but phonologic != (does not equal) phonetic.  While the
greatest part of phonology does involve phonetics, it is not the
only factor that affects phonology.  Phonetics is about speech
sounds.  Phonetics studies speech sounds independently from the
rest of language.  It treats speech sounds as if they have no
other purpose but to be speech sounds.  But linguistically,
speech sounds do not exist to be speech sounds; they exist to
convey semantic information (meaning) between speakers of a
language.  Phonemics is about the relations among the speech
sounds of a particular language.  These relations are
abstractions and exist in the perception of the speakers of the
language.  They are not necessarily detectable from a phonetic
transcription of the spoken language.  The fact that phonemes
cannot be deduced from a phonetic transcription implies that
there are factors other than purely phonetic ones that affect
phonemicity.

> No conceivable phonologic rule could predict the distribution of
> [T] versus [D] in modern English words.

Fine.  Show me a nice fat (or even a thin) content noun or verb
or adjective in English with initial [D] and I will believe it.
It doesn't even have to contrast with a word with initial [T].
The existence of an English word that begins with [D] that isn't
a pronoun or deictic (or that doesn't have "definiteness") would
be sufficient to show that you can't predict which modern English
words begin with [D] and which with [T].  Just one.  So where is
it?

And don't say that phonologic == phonetic.  Phonologic refers to
the relations of the speech sounds of a language in the
perception of its speakers.  Saying that phonologic is the same
as phonetic implies that speakers know nothing about their
language except its speech sounds.  In order to say that "No
conceivable phonologic rule could predict the distribution of
[T] versus [D] in modern English words," you have to equate
phonologic with phonetic.  So if you mean phonetic, say phonetic.
The distribution of initial [T] and [D] is quite predictable in
English.  I can quite easily conceive of a phonologic rule that
predicts their distribution.  Saying that there isn't one is like
putting on a blindfold and then saying "I can't see."

Your claim that classical phonology can't predict the distribution
of initial [T] and [D] in English is simply a limitation of
classical phonology, not a reason for denying the obvious truth
of the predictability of initial [T] and [D] in English.

> They are indeed distinct phonemes.

This may be true, but it isn't established by your argument.

Even if everything you say is true, the difference between words
with initial [D] and initial [T] in English is not arbitrary but
is based on "definiteness."  This is not the basis of a phonemic
distinction.  It's still salami, just sliced differently.
Besides, whether [T] and [D] are distinct phonemes or not is not
the issue.

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi


From leo at easynet.fr  Sun May 20 03:25:29 2001
From: leo at easynet.fr (Lionel Bonnetier)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 05:25:29 +0200
Subject: mobile pronouns (was: No Proto-Celtic?)
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.052529.0200.>

Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

> As a non-linguist I wonder if the personal endings of verbs (the person
> marker), which are basically remnants of suffixed pronouns, cannot be viewed
> as an indication that PIE was actually verb-initial (verb-[suffixed]S-O), at
> least with pronouns as subject?

There's a trend in many languages to put shorter words/phrases
nearer to their grammatical head:

  Tell /us/ your story
  (instead of Tell your story to us)

  Tell /it/ to the clan
  (instead of *Tell the clan it)

In a SOV language, when S is a short pronoun, and you feel S is
linked to V rather than O, you might switch to OSV or OVS, the
latter being preferred if the OV group is felt as a strong
cluster.

That's another non-linguist's opinion...

(Hello everybody, I'm new on the list. I've always been
interested in linguistics, but I work in technical programming,
though I'm trying to get to natural language processing and
semantics. Etymology is a constant source of inspiration for
me to shed light on how ideas interconnect.)


From xavier.delamarre at free.fr  Sun May 20 19:58:12 2001
From: xavier.delamarre at free.fr (Xavier Delamarre)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 21:58:12 +0200
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <99867835.3199009083@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.215812.0200.>

le 16/05/01 14:38, Larry Trask ? larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk a ?crit?:

> Most of you will be acquainted with W. P. Lehmann's book arguing that PIE
> must have been an SOV language with typical SOV syntax.  After that book
> appeared, someone -- I think it was Paul Friedrich, but I'm not sure, and I
> apologize if I've got this wrong -- wrote a riposte, in which he argued
> that PIE must have been VSO.  This article was mischievous in tone, and the
> author made it clear that he was writing only as a devil's advocate, in
> order to show that a plausible case could be made for VSO order, if anybody
> wanted to do that.  I think the article was in Lingua, but I can't remember
> that either.  Gad -- why have I forgotten so much stuff?

    And Calvert Warkins answered that both were probably wrong (his article
on syntax reprinted in his "Selected Writings", IBS), PIE being a flexional
language, with free word order (every student in Latin knows this) where the
SOV / VSO controversy has no relevance.

    XD


From blf10 at cus.cam.ac.uk  Mon May 21 13:50:43 2001
From: blf10 at cus.cam.ac.uk (bruce fraser)
Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 14:50:43 +0100
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <MON.21.MAY.2001.145043.0100.>

 I believe Prof. Trask refers to Friedrich's chapter 'The Devil's Case...',
in the 1976 Festschrift 'Linguistic Studies Offered to Joesph Greenberg...',
which is rather difficult to track down. The basis of the argument appears
in Friedrich's 'PIE Syntax: the order of meaningful elements' (1975), and he
also discusses it in JIES 4, (1976).

Bruce Fraser

----------
>From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
>Date: Wed, 16 May, 2001, 1:38 PM

> Most of you will be acquainted with W. P. Lehmann's book arguing that PIE
> must have been an SOV language with typical SOV syntax.  After that book
> appeared, someone -- I think it was Paul Friedrich, but I'm not sure, and I
> apologize if I've got this wrong -- wrote a riposte, in which he argued
> that PIE must have been VSO.  This article was mischievous in tone, and the
> author made it clear that he was writing only as a devil's advocate, in
> order to show that a plausible case could be made for VSO order, if anybody
> wanted to do that.  I think the article was in Lingua, but I can't remember
> that either.  Gad -- why have I forgotten so much stuff?


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun May 20 04:32:55 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 00:32:55 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.003255.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/19/01 9:51:53 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com
writes:

> It seems to me that the fundamental flaw in most of these animal names is the
> assumption that they held a single meaning for as much as 3000 years among
> peoples who had no writing, no picture books, no schools, no biology
> departments and no encyclopedias.

-- why not, when they're supposedly in the same place observing the same
animals?

When you consider that PIE-speakers used their *uksen (oxen), under a *yukom
(yoke) to pull their *weghom (waggon) home from the ceremony where they
*hwedh (wed) their brides, it isn't surprising at all.  Those are all around
5000 years old as of now.

Our first recorded Anatolian, Greek and Indo-Iranian sources are themselves
around 3000 years old and 3000 years nearer the ur-language; if these
languages started in Anatolia and spread east and west, they existed in an
environment with many common faunal elements.

One would expect cognate terms for that fauna in those languages.  Not for
all of them, but for many of the principle ones.

Why would Anatolian, Greek, and Indo-Iranian, etc., all have different,
non-cognate terms for "fallow deer" and "lion", etc., if they all
continuously (and from the origins of PIE) existed in an environment where
these animals were common?  As they were, in Anatolia, Greece, the Balkans,
and the Iranian plateau?

We have unambiguous PIE terms for "horse", "cow", "wolf", and so forth.
Vocabulary loss for large mammals in the early IE languages is quite slow --
particularly for non-predators.

Therefore it's a good rough check to see which areas have animals which don't
produce PIE cognates.

Those which don't are _consistently_ those which describe southern,
Mediterranean species.

If the IE languages started in the Anatolia-Mediterranean area, and spread
north, they should _have_ a set of cognates for southern fauna and _lack_ a
set of cognates for northern fauna -- that is, the separate IE languages in
the north should have come up with separate, new words for the northern
animals as they came into contact with them.

Instead, we have exactly the reverse:  the IE languages have a _common_
lexicon for the northern fauna, and the IE languages of the Mediterranean and
Asia have _separate_ terms for the southern fauna -- while sharing the terms
for animals common to both zones.  Celts and Iranians had cognate terms for
"wolf": but Iranians and Anatolians had different, non-cognate words for
"lion".

This is precisely what one would expect if the PIE-speakers lived in an
environment _with_ wolves and _without_ lions.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun May 20 05:56:17 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 01:56:17 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer/ The Original *Kerwos?
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.015617.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/19/01 10:46:41 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> The real issue here is that the reconstructible PIE words for red deer may
> have in fact originally also referred to the fallow deer.  Or may even have
> started as words for the fallow deer.

- Then why aren't there cognates of this term used in Anatolian or Indo-Iranian
for "fallow deer"?

There are reflexes of this word in:

Baltic -- Lith. 'ellenis' (red deer)
Slavic -- OCS 'jeleni (red deer)
Greek -- Mycenaean e-ra-pi-ja ('pertaining to deer'), and classical Greek
(red deer)
Armenian -- eln (hind, female deer)
Tocharian -- yal (gazelle)

etc.

Not one single one of them means "fallow deer".

Since there aren't _any_ instances of this word meaning "fallow deer", you
might as well claim that *h(1)elh(1)en was the PIE word  word for "tortoise",
or "giraffe".

There are specific PIE terms for "red deer/elk" and "roedeer".  None for
"fallow deer", nor is there _any_ indication that the term for red deer may
have meant fallow deer.

You are putting forward the hypothesis that there was a word for "fallow
deer" which survived ONLY in places with no fallow deer, where it underwent
semantic tranferral to another animal -- the _same_ animal in every case.

Except in Greece, where, despite there being fallow deer around, it was
_also_ transferred to red deer.

That, to be frank, is grotesque.

> The Greeks don't seem to have a word for specifically the red deer or fallow
> deer.

-- actually, they did.  And it's from *h(1)elh(1)en, via pre-Greek
*h(1)elh(1)nbhos, specifically referring to "red deer", _cervus elaphus_.

And, of course, a reflex of *iorks, "roedeer".

> Since Indo-Iranian doesn't have the I.E. deer names, that doesn't help with
> any deer name.

-- well, yes, it does.  Again, we see that Greek, Anatolian, and Iranian have
no common lexical items for "fallow deer".

Or, as I seem to need to keep reminding you, for the other southern faunal
items.  Once can be coincidence.


From bmscott at stratos.net  Tue May 22 07:30:45 2001
From: bmscott at stratos.net (Brian M. Scott)
Date: Tue, 22 May 2001 03:30:45 -0400
Subject: Fallow Deer/ The Original *Kerwos?
In-Reply-To: <8a.6b81141.2834a56d@aol.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.22.MAY.2001.033045.0400.>

On 16 May 2001, at 23:54, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

>  (BTW, in Slavic, deer is "jelen" (cf., Pol.,"zielony", green,
> definitely not red; cf, Greek, "chalkeios") which might connect it
> to the "yellow deer" which is what the fallow is called in Iran.
> "Fallow" might even suggest the same color connection.)

Aren't <jel-> and <ziel-> here just the expected reflexes of PIE *el-
and *g^hel- resp.?  And if so, how is Pol. <zielony> relevant?

Brian M. Scott


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon May 21 10:38:47 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 11:38:47 +0100
Subject: Genetic Descent
In-Reply-To: <000f01c0dc7a$21f689e0$1a2a63d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <MON.21.MAY.2001.113847.0100.>

--On Monday, May 14, 2001 8:30 am -0500 "David L. White"
<dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

[LT on Thomason and Kaufman]

>> Hmmm.  May I know where in their book T and K assert that "anything
>> goes"? My reading of the book reveals only the more cautious claim that
>> we cannot know what happens in language contact until we look.

>         Somewhere in the intro.  Hasty perusal has not revealed where.

I'm afraid I still can't find any such statement.

> Do they say anything does not go?

Not that I know of, but it's been years since I read the book.

[A small intervention. I am grateful to Hans-Werner Hatting for his
information on Anglo-Romani, which concludes by observing that Anglo-Romani
is indeed a variety of English.  As it happens, this conclusion is endorsed
by Sarah Thomason in her new book Language Contact: An Introduction,
(Edinburgh UP, 2001).  I'll be citing this book further below.]

[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.

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?

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"?

Anyway, I now want to talk about another language, discussed by Thomason in
her new book.  That language is Laha, spoken in the Moluccas, where the
locally dominant language is a variety of Malay, which is distantly, but
not closely, related to Laha.  The principal investigator here is James T.
Collins:

  J. T. Collins. 1980. 'Laha, a language of the central Moluccas'. Indonesia
  Circle 23: 3-19.

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."

But now consider the following.  The Laha are reportedly regarded by
themselves, and by others, as a distinct ethnic group with a distinct
language.  All Laha-speakers are also fluent in Malay, but other speakers
of Malay do not speak Laha.  The conclusion of Collins, and of Thomason, is
that Laha has developed as follows: it started out as a language entirely
distinct from Malay, but, under enormous pressure from Malay, it has
gradually, in piecemeal fashion, absorbed more and more Malay grammar,
until today the grammar is almost entirely Malay, and only a few bits of
Laha grammar survive -- for the moment, since it is possible that these few
fragments will also give way to Malay grammar in the future.

Therefore, using David White's criterion, Laha has changed from being a
language entirely distinct from Malay to a mere variety of Malay.  Is this
reasonable?  Earlier, David rejected a similar scenario for another
language as impossible in principle.

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.

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

Thomason expressly endorses position (2), as does Collins.  Native speakers
of Laha also take position (2).  Apparently Moluccans who don't speak Laha
also accept position (2).

David, what's your view?

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sun May 20 06:41:28 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 02:41:28 EDT
Subject: European Genetics/IE
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.024128.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/20/01 12:15:07 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:


> Remember that with the Anatolian hypothesis, you are talking about 3500 years
> between the IE's expansion across Europe and the first written evidence of
> an IE language in Europe.

-- which is, of course, itself absurd, given the interrelationships of the IE
languages and the degree of differentiation in the earliest attested examples.


From r.piva at swissonline.ch  Sun May 20 19:36:28 2001
From: r.piva at swissonline.ch (Renato Piva)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 21:36:28 +0200
Subject: Pelasgian/was Etruscans
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.213628.0200.>

Douglas G Kilday wrote:

> If you give me enough elbow-room, I'll give you IE etymologies of Hanukkah,
> moccasin, and boomerang. A solution within IE is always possible.

I have no doubt on this. Some people would do anything for glory ...
Serious: Because we know their story, we can take for granted that these words
aren't of IE origin, so nobody expects you to even try to find another
derivation.  But if we ignored completely where Hanukkah, mocassin, and
boomerang had been used before they came into moderrn languages, IE would be
one of many possible hypothesis to be verified or falsified. The fact is that
'kypeiron is a word found in ancient Greek, and Greek is an IE language.

> It isn't necessarily the most plausible. In my opinion, what "one should
> prefer" is the solution with the fewest special assumptions.

The easiest way may not always be the best. It only depends on what you mean by
<special>.

> If we look at Gk. <leirion> ~ Lat. <li:lium>, Gk. <peirins> ~ Lat.
> <pi:lentum>, Gk. <kedros> ~ Lat. <citrus>, etc. we can make one assumption
> and derive the words from substrate, or we can make a set of assumptions to
> rationalize irregular development from PIE or peculiar borrowing between
> branches of IE.

Or, you can assume Etruscan intermediation for li:lium (with dissimilation l_r
> l_l) and citrus. IMHO, in lack of further material the best and most honest
solution would be a <non liquet>.  For pi:lentum, one should be even more
prudent. The meaning is not the same as in Greek: *peirins, -inthos (the Nom.
is not attested!) is a "wicker basket tied upon the cart", while Lat. pi:lentum
means more specifically "voiture de gala ? quatre roues, qui servait au
transport des matrones dans les c?r?monies publiques" according to
Ernout-Meillet. Besides that, the word is not attested before classical time
(Verg., Hor.), and Porphyrius says it is a Gaul word (cf. carpentum).

What you call "one assumption" is in fact also a set of assumptions, some of
which are implicit: You assume 1. that kyparissos is the same as Hebr. go:pher
(which is an unknown tree translated in numerous ways in the Septuagint; o.k.,
one of them is kyparissos, but that may be due to phonetical association; the
name of the cypress in Hebrew is bro:s' or bro:t); 2. that there is no
borrowing in either way, because both words come from a common "Pelasgian"
source; 3. that -issos is not Greek; 4.  that the suffixation had no function
(otherwise, it could have remained *kyper, *kypar, *go:pher or the like).

> My guess is that most IEists, who take pride in regular
> sound-correspondences, would rather invoke substrate than postulate a bunch
> of funny stuff happening to a group of words within IE.

In R. Lanszweert's reconstruction there is nothing weard about regular
sound-correspondences, and the semantic analogy involved is not just <funny
stuff>.  Assumptions such as the ones suggested have to be discussed seriously.
Whether you agree or not. It is very easy to hide behind a wall of <subtrate>,
but it may lead only to deviating attempts such as those one can read in the
works of such omnicomparatists as Trombetti, van Windekens, Furn?e, etc.. IE
languages were able to form compounds, so in my view there was only a limited
need of loans. Just look at what German or Modern Greek are doing. But beware:
I'm not saying there were no loans at all. We only need to be careful with what
we call <substrate>: <substrate> risks to become a waste-basket for anything
difficult to analyse. Many of the words for which we do invoke subtrate may
only be obscured compounds waiting to be rediscovered. Such Greek words do not
occur in other IE languages, as they were specific of the Greek contest. But
the same may apply to any single IE language, of course.

> Then why are there still Greek words in -iskos?

Because -iskos and -issos differ in expressivity: -issos can be the mycenaean
expressive variation of -iskos (through *-iskjos). Exactly as there are both
'polemos and 'ptolemos < *pjolemos, 'polis and 'ptolis < *pjolis, 'skyla and
'syla < *ssyla < *skjyla, etc. Expressivity is a reality in every language - or
shall we say that 'ptolemos, 'ptolis ans 'syla are substrate words?

> Very ingenious, but does anyone besides R. Lanszweert take R. Lanszweert
> seriously? Can he pronounce his own reconstructions?

I don't see any difficulty in pronouncing *pk'u-perih2. Can you pronounce all
of the reconstructed words? If you don't believe that such "complicated" words
may exist, take a look at the Kartvelian languages, or simply try to pronounce
Georg.  vprtskvnis, a regular verb form meaning "they let us pay for it". Of
course, the initial cluster in *pk'u-perih2 was quite instable, thus it was
simplified very soon to k- in Gk and c- in Lat., while it led to fs'- in Av.
and ks.- in AI.

> How common is the typology of ejectives with laryngeals?

I think this question doesn't apply here, or am I misunderstanding you?

> Perhaps this paper should have been subtitled "Woerterschimpf".

Have you read it?

> And if <kupeiron> and <kuparissos> are related as implied here, why is
> resemblance to a sheep-spit a more plausible connection than aromaticity?

Ask the ancient Greeks. Why is resemblance to a beetle a more plausible
connection than to the typical, hideous hum of the engine in the case of a
famous car?

> For that matter, how distinctive is a
> sheep-spit compared to a goat-spit, hog-spit, or (most aptly) bull-spit?

Ask the Indoeuropeans, but *pek'u- may also mean cattle. In any case, Lat.
cuspis comes from *pk'u-spid, see P. Thieme, Radices postnominales, in; Akten
d. VII.  Fachtagung etc., Wiesbaden 1985.

>> Lanszweert doesn't say anything about the name of the island, but I think
>> that Cyprus was named after the copper mines and bronze production (as far
>> as I remember, copper bars were pike-shaped, but I may be wrong).

> So copper got its name from the shape of the bars, which reminded speakers
> of pikes, which in turn reminded them of spit-shaped trees, etc., etc.
> Somehow, substratal derivation just got a lot more palatable.

I think I was wrong in what the name of the Island is concerned, but I guess
you wouldn't be right, either. I probably mixed it up with Gk. 'obeloi "spits
used as money" (in Plutarch and elsewhere according to LSJ). I'd like to
correct myself: It seems that the name of the metal is secundary to the name of
the Island. In turn, the Island seems to be named after the colour (henna) won
from the plant called kypros - which by chance is also the colour of the metal.
This word is of Semitic origin (Hebr. kopher), as already stated by E. Masson
and others. Gk. 'kypeiron and ky'parissos have probably nothing to do with
kypros or Cyprus (or copper). If you still wonder, how a spit can be the origin
of the name of a tree, see Ovidius, Met.  10, 106: metas imitata cupressus "the
cypress looking like the obelisk" (obelisk is diminutive of obelos "spit").

RP

[ Moderator's note:
  I have included the following correction, originally received in a separate
  message, for the sake of brevity.
  --rma ]

Message-ID: <3B091422.457549F8 at swissonline.ch>
Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 15:12:02 +0200
References: <F216JXDvCeqTPcaWC1Q00001ff8 at hotmail.com>

In my last posting I wrote:

        li:lium (with dissimilation l_r > l_l)

It should be assimilation, of course.

Sorry.

RP


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Tue May 22 03:02:35 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 23:02:35 EDT
Subject: About the Yew1
Message-ID: <MON.21.MAY.2001.230235.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/19/2001 10:00:49 PM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<<The distribution of the yew (Taxus baccata) has some bearing on the IE
homeland problem. The variety of yew-names in IE languages indicates that the
plant was unknown to PIE-speakers. According to the map at www.conifers.org,
the yew is not found between the Carpathians and the Urals, with the
exception of Ciscaucasia, Crimea, and lowlands NW of Crimea. Hence we don't
want to put the homeland _too_ close to the Black Sea or the Caucasus; it
should be further north.>>

The same map, of course -- at www.conifers.org -- shows that the yew is also
currently NOT "found" in all of northern Anatolia or along the lower Danube
in a region that looks like it may reach Hungary.

So one may also want to put that old homeland a bit farther east or a bit
farther south.  At least based on where the yew is said to be now.

It's a different question where the yew was 5500 - 7500 years ago.  The
conifers web site itself cites "Hartzell, The Yew Tree, 1991" for the
statement: "Some palynological evidence suggests that the yew was
substantially more abundant in Europe during the late Pleistocene (10,000
years ago)."   This is a little off the current data.  But relevant perhaps
to the Anatolian hypothesis, where the yew may have been even less "abundant."

Actually there have been dramatic changes in tree populations and
distributions over the last 8,000 years in Europe.  Perhaps the most
surprising - discovered by the first British C-14  analyzers - was the almost
complete and dramatically quick wipe-out of the elm about 3500BC.  At first
attributed to neolithic farmers, it is now considered to have been the result
of climatic changes -- observable also in the range of other species --
causing perhaps a sudden susceptibility to disease.  A pretty good,
relatively recent web site for information about the sometimes drastic
changes in tree distribution and ranges during the Holocene can be found at
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nercEUROPE.html.

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.)

Also on the web site is some info on the transition that the forests went
through, the effects of climatic change, human deforestation and the Black
sea flood during the 5000-2000BC period.  There are some maps showing the
expansion of the steppes climate in both the Ukraine and Anatolia.

On another note, a good example of how drastic the changes could be on a
local basis is the Aran Islands: "Those familiar with the treeless topography
of the Aran Islands might be surprised to know that only a few thousand years
ago, Inishere was covered with trees, particularly oak, pine, elm, hazel,
alder, birch and willow and then, later on, yew.... Most of the pollen
recovered during the first half of the Holocene was from trees....  The top
two metres of sediment includes rye pollen, an indication of early farming on
Inishere and a crop grown to this day."

The sometimes late appearance of yew again suggests that the distribution of
yew was not and is not a matter of nature acting alone.

Most modern yew forests seem to be relicts or matters of human cultivation.
Killarney National Park brags that it has one of only three surviving yew
woods in Europe.  The largest concentration of yew in Europe are currently
found in the Carpathians, totaling 20,000 hectares.  This may be attributed
perhaps to the foresight of Polish Kings in the 1400's who banned the cutting
of yew and other trees that were being depleted, across southern Poland and
the then-Polish province of the Ukraine.

In Bulgaria, the government acted to give total protection to the yew and
other "relict" trees in 1989.  At that time, it was observed that the region
may not have had many such trees "in ancient times."  On the other hand, the
Crimean yews may date back to a time when the yew was more widespread in the
Ukraine, even in neolithic times.  Or they may have even been introduced by
trade with hypothetical PIEists.  See Dickson, J.H., The Yew tree (Taxus
baccata L.) in Scotland - native or early introduction or both? (PNN 1994).

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."

With regard to the Ukraine I have: "The territory of Ukraine is mostly a
level, treeless plain, called "steppe". There are the Crimean Mountains in
the Crimean peninsula and the Carpathians in the west, but they are not very
high. Mixed forests of pine and fir-trees, beeches, limes, oaks and elms
cover the mountains, but the thickest woods can still be found in the
northern part of the republic, in Volyn.  Kiev and Cherkassy lie in the midst
of Ukrainian southernmost pine forest."

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.

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.

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 try to get to all that in my next post.

Regards,
Steve Long


From sarima at friesen.net  Sun May 20 18:30:48 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 11:30:48 -0700
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.4.30.0105171503330.7929-100000@vesuri.Helsinki.FI>
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.113048.0700.>

At 03:58 PM 5/17/01 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote:
>Try putting it to NNS's like this:
>
>    Which of these words does not belong with the others:
>
>       a) either
>       b) other
>       c) whether
>       d) feather
>
>and see what kind of response you get.  I'd do it myself, but I don't
>have access to enough native speakers.  You could even slip it into an
>exam and then ask "why?".  I would expect that most speakers would see a-c
>as a unit, ...

Of course they would!  "Feather" is the only *concrete* word in the
list!  None of the others refers to a physical object.  That alone is
enough to make a speaker split it out as not belonging.

To make this a valid test you would have to make the third word something
abstract - something that has no concrete referent.

[P.S. in my dialect at least all four have a [D]].

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


From ERobert52 at aol.com  Sun May 20 20:28:45 2001
From: ERobert52 at aol.com (ERobert52 at aol.com)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 16:28:45 EDT
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.162845.EDT.>

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]

> 2. They have now come to contrast in initial position, at least before
> /a/, albeit only in loan words, and only for certain speakers.  I have
> noticed this for some time, and am pleased that a Duden author has too.
> This strongly favors the analysis as separate phonemes.

On the other hand, maybe the distinction in 'Cha-' words is phonotactically
conditioned - isn't it always [c,] in words beginning 'Chal-' and 'Char-' and
always [x] in 'Cha-' followed by anything else? (Excluding of course where it
is [k], [S] or [tS]). And it can't be borrowing that causes this distinction
- 'Charkow' has /x/ (usually realised as [x]) in the source language but [c,]
in German.

Ed. Robertson


From connolly at memphis.edu  Mon May 21 05:45:56 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 00:45:56 -0500
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <MON.21.MAY.2001.004556.0500.>

Robert Whiting wrote, concerning the endless thy thigh debate::

> But I'm not invoking etymology (except to show that the morpheme boundary
> really is there), I'm invoking perceptual categories.  Certainly there is
> no productive morpheme boundary in either of these words, and if you read
> the posting, then you know that I said as much.  I don't expect naive
> native speakers to know about the morpheme boundary in 'either' in the
> same way that they know about the morpheme boundary in 'running'.
> Similarly, I wouldn't expect your average NNS to know that there is a
> morpheme boundary in 'both' or that the 'th' of this word is the same
> morpheme as in 'the'.

If the speakers do not "know" of a supposed morpheme boundary in
_either_, you have a *big* problem.  If you through [T] and [D] into one
phoneme, and if the speakers must have access to a rule voicing /T/ in
certain morphological-phonetic environments (else they could not produce
the correct output), and if the morpheme boundary somehow explains why
_either_ has [D] while _ether_ does not, then how do they know to let
the rule operate?  Historical morpheme boundaries cannot form the
environment for a synchronic rule unless they are also, and still,
synchronic boundaries, which is what you have in effect just denied.

Leo Connolly


From pausyl at AOL.COM  Mon May 21 05:43:42 2001
From: pausyl at AOL.COM (Paul S. Cohen)
Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 01:43:42 -0400
Subject: thy thigh etc. (external sandhi in English)
Message-ID: <MON.21.MAY.2001.014342.0400.>

On Thu, 17 May 2001 12:31:14 +0300, Robert Whiting <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
wrote:

[snip]
>'Through' is also often a function word, although not invariably
>since it is also used as an adverb and an adjective.
>Furthermore, it has a lexicalized stressed variant 'thorough'
>(always an adjective), something that is characteristic of
>function words.  I suspect that what keeps 'through' out of the
>group of function words with initial [D] is that it doesn't
>appear to be a word with a pronominal/deictic 'th-' base as the
>other members of the group do.
[snip]

I submit that what keeps _through_ out of all this is that, unlike the
other closed-class/function words, what follows the initial fricative is
not a vowel. That is, the word does not (and did not) afford the correct
phonetic environment.  In fact, I would posit that word-initial (and
syllable-initial) voiced fricative + /r/ (or /l/) are phonotactically un-
English.


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Mon May 21 14:50:01 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 14:50:01 -0000
Subject: thy thigh etc. (external sandhi in English)
Message-ID: <MON.21.MAY.2001.145001.0000.>

Robert Whiting (17 May 2001) wrote:

>On Tue, 21 Nov 2000 Douglas G Kilday <acnasvers at hotmail.com> wrote:

>> but one should not assume that this distinction arose by the
>> selective voicing of initial [T] to [D] in what Whiting loosely
>> labels "function words".

>First, the concept of "function words" is not a Whiting loose label.
>"Function word" and "content word" are technical terms in grammatical theory,
>and hardly my invention.

>Interestingly, Webster's Encylopedic Unabridged Dictionary (1994) has a longer
>definition of "function word":

>    function word, a word, as a pronoun or preposition, that is
>    used in a language as a substitute for another or as a marker
>    of syntactic relationship; a member of a small, closed form
>    class whose membership is relatively fixed.  Cf. empty word,
>    full word.

>but has no definition of "content word" using instead the term "full word":

>    full word, (esp. in Chinese grammar) a word that has lexical
>    meaning rather than grammatical meaning; a word or morpheme
>    that functions grammatically as a contentive. Cf. empty word.

>I don't particularly like this last part since, although "contentive" fairly
>obviously means "content word" (rather than something that makes Mr Borden's
>cows give milk), the dictionary nowhere defines either contentive or content
>word.

I thought it was Mr. Carnation's cows who were contented. Anyhow, I'm not
going to dispute the fact that "function word" and "content word" are
well-established labels. What I don't like about the above is the twisted
oxymoron "functions as a contentive" when contentives and "function words"
are allegedly mutually exclusive. This is a dysfunctional family of
definitions. Contentives are no less functional in language than
non-contentives. Since the latter govern contentives, I propose replacing
the bonehead term "function word" with "gubernative".

>In fact there is a sort of Zipf's Law for this because function words are
>relatively few in number but are used very frequently while the number of
>content words is huge (and growing constantly) but the individual words are
>much rarer in use.

Excuse my skepticism, but I can't believe the _net_ number of contentives in
a given language is growing constantly. As new contentives enter a language,
others exit. Lexica don't have rubber walls.

>Basicly, content words tell what is being talked about and function words tell
>what is being said about it.  You can see this by taking a simple sentence and
>stripping out the functional elements leaving the content words:

>   I saw the book on a shelf in the room.
>     see     book      shelf        room

Let's try this (admittedly archaistic) variant:

    I saw thee on a shelf in the room.
      see           shelf        room

According to your analysis elsewhere, pronouns (particularly those with
[D-]) are "function words" which according to the above do _not_ tell what
is being talked about. So I was _not_ talking about "thee", and in fact it's
impossible to talk about "thee". Something's still murky.

>But this [Finegan ap. Comrie] was published some 13-14 years ago.  Perhaps it
>is no longer the mainstream opinion.  Perhaps I missed your review of this
>work where you pointed out to the misinformed multitudes that "what [these
>words] share is definiteness, not some murky 'functionality'."  If so, please
>tell me where it is published so that I can see what evidence you base this
>assertion on.

The assertion is based on the intuition of a semi-naive native speaker
(myself).

>Besides, function words wasn't my label to start with.  I originally referred
>to them as deictic words and pronouns.  Somebody else introduced the term
>function words, presumably because this is how they are usually referred to in
>the literature, and I just let it ride because, well, they *are* all function
>words, and function words is easier to write than pronouns and deictic words.

Obviously I failed to follow the thread back into the archive. I would have
had no objection to "deictic words and pronouns".

>'Through' is also often a function word, although not invariably since it is
>also used as an adverb and an adjective.  Furthermore, it has a lexicalized
>stressed variant 'thorough' (always an adjective), something that is
>characteristic of function words.  I suspect that what keeps 'through' out of
>the group of function words with initial [D] is that it doesn't appear to be a
>word with a pronominal/deictic 'th-' base as the other members of the group
>do.

If memory serves, both are from OE <thurh>, so it is "through" which is the
partially grammaticalized unstressed variant of "thorough", not vice versa.
I suspect the fact that it is _not_ derived from a pronominal or deictic
base, but is akin to Lat. <trans> 'across', <intrare> 'to cross in, enter',
Skt. <tarati> 'he crosses over', etc. has a lot to do with its lack of
definiteness and lack of [D-].

>Definiteness is a functional (grammatical) category.  But where is the
>definiteness in 'though'?  As a conjunction, 'though' is a function word, but
>is no more definite than 'but' (with which it is sometimes synonymous).  It
>can be adversative, disjunctive, or conditional, but not definite.  But, even
>though it lacks any overt "definiteness," it can still be considered a deictic
>or a demonstrative.

That is how I was considering it. If you "point out" or "demonstrate"
something, it acquires definiteness. As a conjunction, "though" means
"despite the fact that" and "the fact" is definite. As an adverb, "though"
means "nevertheless", which specifies a definite degree of difference
(nothing). I'd like to see a sentence in which "but" and "though" are
interchangeable.

>But I will agree partially with your premise.  These words *are* all function
>words, but the fact that they have initial [D] is not specifically because
>they are function words, but because they share some other feature.  So you
>were on the right track; you have just taken a disastrously wrong turn.

Thanks (I think).

>So it is not true that "no special signs for 'v' or 'z' are found" in OE.
>They are there, but they aren't used frequently and generally only in foreign
>words (except that 'u' is sometimes substituted for wen or for <f> in
>intervocalic position in native words).  What you can say without fear of
>contradiction is that they are not used to indicate contrasts between [f] and
>[v] or [s] and [z] because there aren't any in OE.

I stand corrected.

>> [Did] morphemic boundaries in OE necessarily make adjacent
>> fricatives unvoiced in connected speech?

>Probably.  Otherwise words like 'nothing' (OE na:thing < na:n + thing) and
>'anything' (< f:nig + thing) would doubtless have [D] rather than [T] since
>these compounds came into existence in OE.  Since the environments around the
>boundaries in these words are invariant, surely the sandhi-type rule that you
>propose below would have been more likely to operate here than in the more
>variable environments of the boundaries between words.  I can't see any
>alternative:  if there was a sandhi rule operating across morpheme boundaries
>it would have fixed 'nothing' and 'anything' with [D] already in OE.
>Similarly, compounds like 'within' and 'without' would have been fixed with
>[D] at an early date by such a rule.  Since none of this happened, it speaks
>against the existence of such a rule.

Obviously, had I thought of these examples, I could have spared myself some
embarrassment.

>Sounds like the writer/copyist [of the "Cuckoo Song"] was Irish or Welsh.  I
>must say that I have never heard of this sandhi rule for OE.  Can you give me
>a reference to a publication of it so I can see if there is any other evidence
>besides the _hapax phenomenon_ <bucke uerteth>?  Surely if such a sandhi rule
>could be proved for OE, those who claim massive Celtic influence on English
>would be all over it like a shot even though it is only similar, not
>identical, to Celtic lenition (mutation).

>But if <bucke uerteth> is the only evidence, this is certainly too flimsy a
>foundation on which to build such an elaborate structure.  There are simply
>too many other ways to account for this single piece of evidence.

Yes, I now see that it was incredibly foolish to erect such a structure on
the flimsy foundation of a single letter. Of course, that was back in the
last millennium. I'm a lot older and wiser now.

>And all this assumes that the writing <uerteth> actually represents the verb
>'fart', which is not universally accepted.  Admittedly, OED takes it this way,
>but others have taken it as a form of a verb based on _vert_ 'green'
>(Cambridge History of American and English Literature).  More convincing in my
>view is a loan based on Latin _vertere_, French _vertir_ 'turn'.  There are
>quite a number of borrowed English compounds based on this root ('avert',
>'divert', 'convert', 'revert', 'pervert', invert, etc.), but the bare root
>seems unknown as a verb (although common in other words:  'version',
>'vertigo', 'vertex', 'verse', 'versus', etc.).  The native cognate is found in
>the suffix '-ward(s)'.  Perhaps this hapax legomenon is a borrowing that never
>became established or even an aphetic form of some compound used to preserve
>the meter (this is, after all, a song).

I sincerely doubt that <uerteth> represents a borrowing from Latin or
Romance, given the bucolic nature of the song and the absence of other
non-AS vocabulary.

>Although there is nothing philologically unsound about a derivation from
>'fart', it seems out of place in the context of the song.  No one has ever
>been able to explain to me why a farting buck is a transparent metaphor of
>spring (from eating all the newly sprouted greenery?).

That was precisely the explanation given to me years ago by a professor of
English literature, and in this case authority has appeal. Consuming large
quantities of fresh vegetation produces flatulence.

>In keeping with with the rest of the song and the parallelism within this
>couplet, some more visible physical activity rather than an auditory or
>olofactory one would be more appropriate.  Thus "the bullock starts, the buck
>turns/twists (about)" is better suited to the context and the structure of the
>song.  The main advantage to translating "the bullock starts, the buck farts"
>is that it preserves the rhyme and scan of the original (bulloc sterteth/bucke
>verteth).

Since the previous couplet has the clear auditory parallel of a bleating ewe
and lowing cow, your argument has some weight. It is less clear that the
growing seed, blowing (fermenting?) mead, and springing wood are intended as
a visual parallel. At any rate, the song is too short to allow any firm
stylistic conclusions to be drawn. I would guess that here, as in folk-songs
generally, the anonymous author was more concerned with phonetic parallelism
(i.e. rhyming and scansion) than with higher-level parallelism.

>> It appears that this large influx of words beginning with [v]
>> which does not alternate allophonically with [f] has forced the
>> older words beginning with [f/v] to abandon the voiced allophone
>> and become words beginning with invariant [f].  That is, this
>> influx of loanwords has created a new phonemic distinction /f:v/
>> in initial position which the orthography of Chaucer's time (late
>> 14th cent.) regards as fully established.

>Rather, it was the French (Latin) contrast between [f] and [v] that was
>imported in pairs like 'failen' and 'vailen' and 'coffer' and 'cover' or
>'coffin' and 'coven'.  English now had to deal with words with inherent [f]
>and inherent [v] in contrastive positions.  'Vers' "verse" probably was
>reborrowed from French in ME along with 'fers' "chess-queen".  But this time
>there is an [f]/[v] contrast so the two sounds can't be treated as variants.
>Furthermore, the fact that OE <f/uers> was not fixed with initial [f] but with
>initial [v] runs counter to your assertion.  So the [f]/[v] contrast was just
>imported along with the words.

Yes, I see your point. ME swallowed the contrast whole. The model I proposed
introduced unnecessary complexity.

>If there are a lot of borrowed words with initial [v], especially when some of
>them contrast with words with initial [f], either borrowed or native, and
>there are a lot of borrowed words with intervocalic [f] then speakers either
>have to nativize the borrowed words with initial [v] to [f] and nativize the
>borrowed words with intervocalic [f] to [v] (and lose the contrast in both
>cases) or they have to accept the [f]/[v] contrast as phonemic.  Obviously
>they did the latter.  But this certainly doesn't require a sandhi rule for its
>implementation.

Agreed.

>While 'for' and 'fore' might have flopped back and vorth between initial [f]
>and [v] for centuries, surely invariable compounds like 'before' and 'afore'
>would have been fixed as *<bevore> and *<avore> within a week if there was a
>sandhi rule operating that voiced fricatives in a voiced environment across
>morpheme boundaries.  So phonemicization of [v] doesn't require a sandhi rule
>for its implementation.  In fact, it is easier to explain without one.
>Otherwise you have to say that native words in initial [f] and borrowed words
>in initial [v] is just another huge statistical anomaly.

Yes, unless one argues that unvoiced fricatives were regular in OE and early
ME in utterance-initial position (including words uttered in isolation). But
then "before" and "afore" could only be explained by special pleading
(restorative rules, different categories of morphemic boundaries) and that
would just create a bigger mess. It seems better just to abandon my
proposal.

>> The status of initial [T:D] in Chaucer is equivocal.
>> Contractions like <artow> 'art thou' and <seistow> 'sayest thou'
>> suggest that <thou> already had invariant [D], since the old rule
>> would require [T] here and [tT] usually contracts to [T], which
>> would yield *<arthow> etc. However, this argument is extremely
>> weak. Statistical analysis of Chaucer's alliterations in "th"
>> might resolve the issue, but I am not aware of such a study.

>Extremely weak is perhaps an understatement.  Actually, in addition to
>contractions, <t> in 'thou' (and the other cases of this pronoun) is often
>found after [s], [t], and [d].  Thus you find things like 'bi-hold tou'.  Any
>conclusions about whether initial <th> in these words was voiced, either
>invariantly or environmentally are very iffy.  But I will agree that the
>possiblility that it was already voiced is not excluded.

What we need then is the study of Chaucerian alliterations. Perhaps someone
did this for a master's thesis, and the result is gathering dust in the
basement of an obscure college.

>> At any rate it is clear that the English /f:v/ distinction
>> resulted from loanwords and was well established by Chaucer's
>> time. The /s:z/ distinction, if not already made by Chaucer,
>> followed shortly. It can be attributed partly to loanwords,
>> partly to the earlier establishment of /f:v/ as phonemic.

>There are other factors, which you seem anxious to ignore, involved in the
>phonemicization of the voiced fricatives as well.  One of these is the
>collapse of the English short vowel system and the loss of final inflectional
>'-n' followed by loss of final [@] (schwa).

>Another factor was the loss of intervocalic long fricatives [ff TT ss] which
>were simplified into [f T s] producing intervocalic unvoiced fricatives which
>could contrast with the intervocalic voiced fricatives [v D z] which had
>previously been simply allophones of [f T s] in intervocalic position.  Since
>it was no longer possible to predict [f T s] or [v D z] based on intervocalic
>position, something had to happen to the intervocalic voiceless/voiced
>fricatives that were no longer predictable from their environment.  For
>instance, modern 'since' comes from a contraction of ME 'sithens' (with
>adverbial genitive -s) which in turn came from OE 'siththan' (itself a
>compound of 'si:th' "after" and 'tham' or 'thon' [dative or instrumental of
>"that"]).

I wasn't "anxious to ignore" these factors, but dealing with them would have
doubled the length of my posting (OK, for you that's not a valid
consideration).

>> The [T:D] opposition was left as an orphaned allophonic pair,
>> very difficult for speakers to maintain, especially in initial
>> position. They would have been obliged to enunciate some words
>> with invariant initial [f], [v], [s], [z] and others with
>> variable [T] or [D] according to the preceding sound. Under these
>> circumstances any mechanism tending to fix [T] or [D] in
>> particular words would have operated rather strongly.

>Now it's my turn to say that I don't see why.  According to you this sandhi
>rule had been operating for over 500 years and now, with the loss of two of
>the allophone pairs to which it applied, speakers are suddenly anxious to get
>rid of it.  One of the principles of sound change rules is that they operate
>until they no longer have anything to operate on and then they disappear.  It
>should have been no more difficult to maintain this alleged sandhi rule for
>[T]/[D] than it was to maintain it for the other fricatives in the face of
>other fixed voiceless/voiced oppositions (as in the stops).

The sandhi rule, by hypothesis, only applied to three pairs of allophones in
the first place. You have succeeded in convincing me that the initial /f:v/
and /s:z/ oppositions were acquired directly from contrasting loanwords,
with the assistance of the loss of conditioning factors in other positions.
But with the sandhi rule superseded for two of the three pairs, what's so
outlandish about proposing that speakers would have trouble maintaining this
otherwise obsolete rule for the one remaining pair, given its phonetic _and_
phonologic similarity to the other two? Or do you generativists simply deny
that this sort of analogical process can happen?

>But I must say that you paint a vivid picture of the difficulties faced by
>14-15th century speakers of English.  One can almost see the churls and thanes
>tossing and turning on their straw pallets or feather beds, driven to
>sleeplessness by the difficulty of maintaining the allophonic alternation of
>initial [T] and [D] now that [f] and [v] and [s] and [z] have become phonemic
>contrasts.

Yes, I think I'll turn to painting, since I don't seem to have much of a
future as a grammarian.

>> In my opinion this probably began with the statistics of
>> utterances: demonstratives like <the> and <this> commonly follow
>> prepositions, which in a majority of cases end in voiced sounds.

>And you call functionality murky.  Do you have any other examples of
>syntactically conditioned phonetic change?  I have seen a lot of ontological
>ingenuity expended by classical phonologists to devise a purely phonetic
>environment for some obviously necessary sound change, but this is a new one.

This proposal does not involve "syntactically conditioned" phonetic change.
The conditioning itself is purely phonetic.

>> Once the invariant [D] was fixed in the most common
>> demonstratives, it would have spread by analogy to the other
>> "th"-words of pronominal origin which carry definiteness.

>Are there any "th"- pronouns that are indefinite?

I forgot you "do grammar". There should have been a comma, between "origin"
and "which". (BTW, since commas carry meaning, does this mean they can't be
phonemes, suprasegmental or otherwise?)

>Besides, this doesn't account for the spread of this feature to the
>conjunction 'though' which does not have any of the characteristics you deem
>necessary for this change; i.e., it lacks definiteness, it never follows a
>preposition (or even an article).

I don't agree about the definiteness, but the other objection holds, so this
feature must have been spread by analogy.

>This is one reason why the mainstream theory that [D] in these words is a
>lenition of [T] in unstressed forms of function words is easier to believe.
>Rather than basing the distinction on "definiteness," categorizing these words
>as function words accounts for all of them (which "definiteness doesn't do
>[cf.  'though']).  Besides, 'that' is not infrequently used in an indefinite
>sense ('That's just the way it is').

That's _not_ an indefinite sense of "that"; it's a definite sense without
explicit antecedent. The definiteness is definitively proved by the fact
that "that" is equated with "_the_ way it is" (note the _definite_ article).

I concede that lenition is easier to swallow than my statistical proposal.
But it does _not_ account for all the words, since some of them ("though",
"thus", and the 2nd-sg. pronouns) seldom or never have unstressed forms
comparable to "the". Whatever model we use to start the process must be
augmented by analogical spread.

>Function words often have stressed and unstressed forms.  In fact, we even
>have a nursery rhyme to imprint on young minds the fact that unstressed
>'beside her' rhymes with 'spider'.

This isn't a "fact" in my dialect, where "spider" has the schwa-like nucleus
and "beside her" does not. The rhyme only works in my dialect with an
unnatural pronunciation of "spider".

>       [...summary of defects of DGK's posting...]
>
>       This [model of fixing [D]] ignores the fact that words that lack
>       "definiteness" have this feature ('though') while words
>       that have "definiteness" ('three', 'thirty', 'thirteen',
>       'thrice') lack it.

Numerals are non-definite. I can say "Three dogs pooped on the porch"
(indef.) or "Those three dogs etc." (def.). OTOH numeral adverbs like
"thrice" are indefinite. If I want to be definite, I must use an analytic
form: "those three times".

>       In other words, according to your scenario initial [D] in
>       English is a marker of "definiteness" and initial [T] is a
>       marker of "non-definiteness."  Thus the occurrence of
>       initial [T] or initial [D] in a word can be predicted on
>       the basis of some inherent semantic or lexical quality of
>       the word and vice versa.  So, if what you say about words
>       with initial [D] sharing "definiteness" is true, then the
>       distinction between initial [T] and [D] is not phonemic
>       because the occurrence of one or the other predicts
>       something about the meaning of the word in which it occurs.
>       Phonemes are units of sound, not of meaning.  Morphemes are
>       units of meaning.  If a sound predicts meaning, then it is
>       not (just) a phoneme.  If the only contrast that you have
>       involves a prediction of meaning, then you can't use that
>       contrast to prove a phonemic distinction.

I don't believe I stated or implied that initial [T] was a marker of
anything. Most English words in [T-] are non-definite (neither inherently
definite nor indefinite) but some proper nouns acquire definiteness by
context or agreement.

I must say I agree with the argument in your other postings that [D-] is
morphemic in ModE. But I do _not_ agree that this precludes initial [T:D]
from being phonemic. If your argument above is valid, then not only is that
contrast not phonemic, but the contrast of initial [D] with _any_ other
phoneme is not phonemic. For example, "that" contrasts with "cat", but the
[D-] of "that" is morphemic, while the [k-] of "cat" is not. According to
your analysis, initial [D] and [k] are _not_ distinct phonemes. So is [D] an
allophone of [k] in this position, or is [D] something other than a phoneme?
Maybe just a plain phone? (A geologist once told me "That's not a rock; it's
a vein-filling"...)

>The distribution of initial [T] and [D] is quite predictable in English.  I
>can quite easily conceive of a phonologic rule that predicts their
>distribution.  Saying that there isn't one is like putting on a blindfold and
>then saying "I can't see."

>Your claim that classical phonology can't predict the distribution of initial
>[T] and [D] in English is simply a limitation of classical phonology, not a
>reason for denying the obvious truth of the predictability of initial [T] and
>[D] in English.

If I prefer classical phonology to hard-rock, new-wave, punk-rap (or
whatever your phonology is) it's a matter of taste. I'm not trying to deny
any truths, obvious or otherwise. Your phonology may be ideal for reducing
synchronic languages to compendia of generative rules. My interests are
primarily diachronic and historical (and I am grateful for being set
straight on these matters of ME phonetics). In my opinion, description with
your phonology runs the risk of creating synchronic "rules" which serve only
to neutralize historical events or processes, and this obscures what I
attempt to study.

DGK


From douglas at nb.net  Sun May 20 10:11:17 2001
From: douglas at nb.net (Douglas G. Wilson)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 06:11:17 -0400
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.4.30.0105171423280.7929-100000@vesuri.Helsinki.FI>
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.061117.0400.>

Just a footnote, not intended to invalidate the point about initial /D/.

Are there "non-grammatical" English words beginning with /D/?

I will take as a working definition of "English word": "any word which
appears in a conventional English-language dictionary, excluding proper
names". I also exclude pronunciations which are designated as foreign, if
an alternative "English" pronunciation is given.

I find two:

"dhal" /Dal/ (an Arabic letter);

"duinhewassel" /DIn at was@l/ (a Scots designation of minor nobility, variant
of "duniewassal").

Marginal examples, true ... slightly better perhaps than the imaginary
river dhelta.

Probably there are a few more?

-- Doug Wilson


From edsel at glo.be  Sun May 20 11:10:16 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 13:10:16 +0200
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.131016.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Whiting" <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2001 1:17 PM

[snip]
> What you need to establish your point is not answers to questions like
> "What would the world be like if Napoleon had conquered Russia?" but an
> example of an initial [D] in English that is not a deictic or a pronoun
> (i.e., does not begin with the pronominal/deictic morpheme).  It doesn't
> even have to contrast with a word with initial [T].  Any word that begins
> with [D] in which the [D] is not a morpheme would be sufficient to justify
> your claim that the fact that all words in English that begin with [D] are
> pronouns or deictics is mere coincidence and that the distribution of
> initial [T] and [D] is not predictable by any phonological rule.

>> By the way, is everybody happy that 'thus' is beyond question a grammatical
>> word, and not a lexical word?

> I have no problem with 'thus'.  It is as much a grammatical word as
> 'hence' or 'so', and it is clearly a deictic.  I have more problem with
> 'though' as a deictic, which I think is a borderline case.

[snip]

[Ed Selleslagh]

I totally agree with you. But I don't think you have to distinguish deictics
and pronouns beginning with the morpheme (not phoneme) [D]: the pronouns
involved have or had a deictic meaning, just like the definite article.

Note that in Dutch, probably the closest relative of English, all these words
begin with [d] (< IE /t/) (Dutch doesn't have interdental fricatives). That
includes 'though', Du. cognate: 'doch' [dox] (meaning something like 'but',
'nonetheless' in slightly elevated style). Ditto for 'thus', Du. '(al)dus'. But
Dutch also has preserved 'toch' [tox], meaning something like 'nonetheless'
(normal and colloquial): bizarre, isn't it?

In Latin, the corresponding deictic morpheme is [t], like in 'tantum', 'talis'
etc...(Interrogative <qu>, Eng. <wh>, also a morpheme in both languages).

The American confusion about the initial consonant of 'thither' is most likely
due to a lack of familiarity with the old bases (archaic usages) of the
language. It is just as deictic as 'there', an extremely common word, about
which there is no doubt at all in the mind of any English speaker, even
non-native.

Virtually all of this is common knowledge, but I thought it was a useful
reminder that there is nothing mysterious about this deictic morpheme, as
opposed to the theta of lexical words, which is just a consonant (with possibly
postion-determined allophonic pronunciations) belonging to the root or one of
the roots in compounds, or to another, non-deictic, morpheme like the -th in
e.g. 'length', Du. 'lengte'. Note the t in Dutch.

Ed.


From pausyl at AOL.COM  Sun May 20 17:58:56 2001
From: pausyl at AOL.COM (Paul S. Cohen)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 13:58:56 -0400
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.135856.0400.>

On Thu, 17 May 2001 14:17:07 +0300, Robert Whiting <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
wrote:

>On Thu, 10 May 2001, Larry Trask wrote:

[ moderator snip ]

>> Finally, I note that /n/ and [eng] *really* do not contrast in word-initial
>> position in English, even though they contrast elsewhere.  The case of
>> theta and eth does not appear to me to be similar.

>No, it is not similar at all.  [eng] is prohibited phonotactically from
>appearing in initial position in English (except in loan words; we've done
>this before).  In this instance, [eng] behaves like a cluster rather than
>a single segment.

Actually, there's another possible view of this situation that's completely
consistent with classical phonemics:  since [[eng]] and [h] are in
complementary distribution in English (yes, I know about the Trager&Smith
tradition of talking about [h] and [[schwa]] being allophones), and since
they are, in some sense, phonetically similar (they comprise a class that
can be characterized as "the back, continuant consonants"), why not put
them together as allophones of /[eng]/ or /h/ (whichever you like)?
Occam's Razor would seem to demand doing so.  This, I would hope, shows off
some off the inadequacies of classical phonemics.

Bob Whiting wants to allow morpheme boundaries as part of the allowable
phonological conditioners in deciding whether it's "one phoneme or two",
and I'm in full agreement.  In the American school of phonemics, this
position goes back at least to Kenneth Pike in the 1940's, despite the fear
of "mixing levels" in that school.  It's clear that perspicuous analysis of
phonological systems often requires it.  In fact, I would go a step
farther:  There are times when perspicuous phonemic/phonological analysis
requires the use of other phonetic, morphological, and syntactic
characterizations as well.  One may choose to draw the line in various
places in deciding phonemicity, but being too restrictive will often
eliminate generalizations--even some that naive speakers are making--
whether consciously or unconsciously.  An example that I am very familiar
with concerns the tensing and raising of [ae] (that is "ash") in the New
York City area.  In broad outline (and I'll omit irrelevant details) [ae]
is tensed and raised in front of voiced stops, /m/, /n/, and fricatives
when these are followed by an obstruent or a major morpheme boundary, so
that, e.g., the stressed vowel of _adder_ 'snake' is not tensed and raised,
but that of _adder_ 'adding machine; one who or that which adds' is.  If
morpheme boundaries are not allowed, we have to posit two phonemes.  Not a
very satisfying solution.  But wait; there's more.  _I can fish._ (with
emphatic or contrastive stress on _can_) has no tensing and raising of the
[ae] if it means 'I am able to fish', but has tensing and raising if it
means 'I work in a fish cannery'.  Pretty straightforward then:  must be a
phonemic split.  Not so fast:  It turns out that all words that can have
[schwa] as their only vowel, *always* have untensed and unraised [ae] in
their stressed form, at least in one major subdialect.  (This list, which I
have termed "weak words", includes _am, as, can, had, has, have, than_.)
Wait, I hear you say; why not talk about "function words" or "closed-class
words"?  Because, _can't_ *is* always tensed and raised.  What sets it
apart is that it can never have [schwa] as its only vowel--i.e., it is
never completely unstressed.

Anyhow, one phoneme or two?  You be the judge.

Paul S. Cohen


From sarima at friesen.net  Sun May 20 18:22:34 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 11:22:34 -0700
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.4.30.0105171232040.7929-100000@vesuri.Helsinki.FI>
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.112234.0700.>

At 02:17 PM 5/17/01 +0300, Robert Whiting wrote:

>On Thu, 10 May 2001, Larry Trask wrote:

>>   this / thistle
>>   they / Thalia (also 'theta' in US accents)
>>   that / thatch
>>   these / thesis
>>   thus / thumb
>>   though / Thor
>> ...

>It is not a minimal pair as long as there is a morpheme boundary involved.
>Unless, of course, you claim that morpheme boundaries are not phonological
>conditions.  And every one of your near minimal pairs involves a morpheme
>boundary after [D].

Huh?  I see no morpheme boundaries *after* [D] in any of the above
words!  The words 'this', 'they', 'that', 'these', 'thus', and *especially*
'though' are mono-morphemic in my dialect.

Oh, in *Old* English all of them except 'thurh' could have been analyzed as
multi-morphemic, but that has nothing to do with the current state of affairs

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


From pausyl at AOL.COM  Sun May 20 20:44:45 2001
From: pausyl at AOL.COM (Paul S. Cohen)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 16:44:45 -0400
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <SUN.20.MAY.2001.164445.0400.>

On Thu, 17 May 2001 15:02:54 +0300, Robert Whiting <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
wrote:

>On Mon, 14 May 2001 pausyl at AOL.COM wrote:

[ moderator snip ]

>> I'm actually on Larry Trask's side (for the most part) in this
>> discussion, but I assume that the argument from Robert Whiting's side
>> would be best stated in terms of "closed-class" vs. "open-class"
>> words; _thus_ would seem to be in the closed class.  _thy_ is surely
>> English (think of the "Lord's Prayer"), but it's also a closed-class
>> item.

>Closed-class is part of the definition of function or grammatical words.
>See Fowler, _Understanding Language_ (1974), 199.

I have no real disagreement with Bob Whiting on this point.  I chose to
insert the term "closed-class" to obviate having to argue about whether
words like _thus_ have too much lexical meaning to be "function words".
I'll settle for "function words".

>> And I would judge the Traskian point above about /oi/ never occurring
>> in native English words, even if true, to be irrelevant to the
>> discussion:

>Entirely.

>> It seems to me that no amount of introspection would help an
>> intelligent (but linguistically untrained) native speaker of English
>> to decide that _boy_ (the etymology of which is disputed) is a
>> loanword; however, it seems plausible that that same speaker could
>> uncover the fact that all words beginning with /D/ are "closed-class"
>> or the like.

>This is also irrelevant.  The fact that initial [D] occurs only in
>function or grammatical (or closed-class) words is not what keeps initial
>[T] and [D] from contrasting in English.  What keeps them from contrasting
>is the fact that initial [D] in English is always a morpheme.

Here I'm not so sure.  There's something to be said for trying to model
what's going on in the naive native speaker's sprachgefuehl, as opposed to
trying to make the simplest descriptively adequate grammar.  It's not clear
to me that initial /D/ constitutes a morpheme in (Modern) English, any more
than initial /sn/ 'nose' or /sl/ 'smooth movement' does (i.e., what used to
be known as phonesthemes).  What is clear is that /D/ starts all and
only "th" closed-class (or function, if you like) words, at least for the
highly-educated.  One datum relevant to this last point is the fact that
many speakers have /T/ as the first sound in _thither_ (for most people,
surely a word they rarely if ever hear), apparently indicating that either
they don't see it as a member of the class in question or that for them
there *is* a (marginal?) /D/~/T/ contrast initially.  The situation is not
100% clear, and that's the key point:  We need to be careful to describe
the data accurately, and to worry less if our grammars leak a bit around
their doctrinaire edges.


From connolly at memphis.edu  Mon May 21 05:36:33 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 00:36:33 -0500
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <MON.21.MAY.2001.003633.0500.>

On May 17 Robert Whiting wrote, among other things, concering the
thy:thigh question:

>   The fact that initial [D] occurs only in
> function or grammatical (or closed-class) words is not what keeps initial
> [T] and [D] from contrasting in English.  What keeps them from contrasting
> is the fact that initial [D] in English is always a morpheme.

I beg your pardon?  If [D-] is a morpheme, then _thy_, _this_, _then_
etc. must consist of at least two morphemes each.  If _thy_ matches
_thou_ and _thee_, or _then_ matches _when?_, what does _though_ match?
How could _though_, or _thus_, have more than one morpheme?

Leo Connolly


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Mon May 21 08:41:58 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 09:41:58 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.4.30.0105171232040.7929-100000@vesuri.Helsinki.FI>
Message-ID: <MON.21.MAY.2001.094158.0100.>

--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 'tauchen'.  If [T] and [D] contrast in 'thigh' and 'thy',
> then so do [c,] and [x] in German.

No.  The German contrast depends crucially on the presence of a morpheme
boundary.  The English one does not.

[on my minimal pair 'Than' (for 'Thandy') and 'than']

> It is not a minimal pair as long as there is a morpheme boundary involved.

But there isn't.

> Unless, of course, you claim that morpheme boundaries are not phonological
> conditions.

I do not.

[on my list of near-minimal pairs like 'this' / 'thistle']

> And every one of your near minimal pairs involves a morpheme
> boundary after [D].

Certainly not.

> You stick by your contention that morpheme boundaries are not phonological
> conditions then?

No.  I never said any such thing.  It is beyond dispute that morpheme
boundaries can have phonological consequences.  Accordingly, it seems to be
in order for our theories of phonology to take morpheme boundaries into
account.

[LT]

>> The observation that initial [D] occurs only in "grammatical" words and
>> initial [T] only in "lexical" words is just that: an observation.

> Quite true.  But the observation that morphemes are units of meaning is,
> I think, more than an observation.  It is a basic principle of how human
> language works.  Duality of patterning says that morphemes are made up of
> phonemes and that morphemes have meaning (iconically, indexically, or
> symbolically) but that phonemes do not have any inherent meaning.  Initial
> [D] in English is a morpheme because it has meaning associated with it.
> Admittedly, it is grammatical meaning rather than lexical meaning, but
> meaning nonetheless.

I'm sorry, but I must disagree flatly.  I have no problem with grammatical
morphemes, or even with semantically and functionally empty morphemes.  But
I cannot see that word-initial [D] is ever a morpheme at all.

First, word-initial [D] has no recognizable meaning or function.

Second, if we segment it away as a morpheme, then we are left with all
those unanalyzed residues like <-is>, <-en>, <-ere> and <-e>.  These must
now also be analyzed as morphemes, or as sequences of morphemes, and the
position is impossible.  Remember, a morpheme boundary has to have a
morpheme on each side of it -- not just on one side.

It is reasonable to take initial [D] as a *marker* of closed-class
membership, perhaps.  But it is not reasonable to take it as a morpheme.

> No, the fact that these are all function words is not particularly
> phonologically significant.  The fact that they all begin with a
> functional morpheme is.

I've just denied this.

[on my /oi/ example]

> But is the diphthong /oi/ a morpheme?  What morphemic function do you
> claim it has?

It is not a morpheme.  It is merely a marker -- in this case, a marker of
non-native origin, as is the consonant [ezh].

[on my hypothetical example of a Greek 'dhelta']

> If I had a brother, would he like mayonnaise?  If the universe didn't work
> the way it does, would it work some other way?  Are questions about the
> way things might be applicable to the way things are?

> What you need to establish your point is not answers to questions like
> "What would the world be like if Napoleon had conquered Russia?" but an
> example of an initial [D] in English that is not a deictic or a pronoun
> (i.e., does not begin with the pronominal/deictic morpheme).  It doesn't
> even have to contrast with a word with initial [T].  Any word that begins
> with [D] in which the [D] is not a morpheme would be sufficient to justify
> your claim that the fact that all words in English that begin with [D] are
> pronouns or deictics is mere coincidence and that the distribution of
> initial [T] and [D] is not predictable by any phonological rule.

Indeed.  Let me clarify my point.

Word-initial [eng] is prohibited by English phonology and is wholly
unpronounceable by most English-speakers.  When we borrow foreign words or
names containing initial [eng], it is always eliminated in one way or
another.

But initial [D] is not unpronounceable in English at all, and I cannot see
that it is prohibited by English phonology.  So, what we need as a test
case is a noun or a name with initial [D] borrowed into English from a
language that permits it.

Unfortunately, there appear to be few such languages, and English seldom
borrows anything from most of them.  But I've pinned my hopes on Greek, the
one contemporary language which both permits initial [D] and lends words
into English.  But Greek is not ideal, because of our long-standing
tradition of converting Greek words and names into English by conventions
which are more appropriate to classical Greek than to the modern language.
The chief exception is food and drink, in which modern Greek pronunciations
are usually the basis of the English form, as with 'souvlaki' and
'tzatziki'.  So, what we need is for the Greeks to come up with a prince of
a dish which we English-speakers will delightedly take up -- and which has
a name starting with [D].  Sadly, Greek chefs have not so far obliged us on
this matter -- at least as far as I can think.  C'mon, Greek chefs: we need
you! ;-)

[on my example of no good minimal pairs for [esh] and [ezh]]

> But whether [T] and [D] are separate phonemes is not the issue.  I thought
> I had at least made that much clear.  Have you not had your second cup of
> coffee yet?  Since you quoted my statement to this effect at the opening
> of your posting, I don't see how else you could have missed it.  So any
> arguments about whether lack of contrasts proves lack of phonemicity will
> not be entertained because in the long run, there is no such thing as
> "proof" that two sounds are not phonemes any more than there is "proof"
> that two languages are not related.  One can only say that the evidence
> that they are is inadequate.  So arguments about the lack of contrasts of
> [S] and [Z] and whether this affects their phonemic status are completely
> irrelevant to whether initial [T] and [D] contrast in English.

I did not miss your point, and I was not suggesting that [T] and [D] do not
contrast at all.  I was merely making the quite different point that an
absence of minimal pairs is not at all the same thing as an absence of
contrast.

Let me close with another example.  English freely permits the cluster /ts/
in certain positions, notably finally, as in 'wits' and 'cats'.  But,
traditionally, it does not permit this cluster initially.  However, lots of
other languages do, and we have borrowed a number of words which have
initial /ts/ (cluster or affricate) in the source language.  What happens?

In my experience, educated speakers have little difficulty pronouncing
initial /ts/ in words like 'tsunami', 'Zeitgeist' and 'tsar'.  But most
uneducated speakers either do not use these words or do not pronounce them
with /ts/, which they find difficult.  I well recall the agonized struggles
of a pub quizmaster who was trying to read the word 'tsunami' off his
question sheet. He simply couldn't do it, and his attempts were so
disastrous that we, the contestants, couldn't even guess what word he was
trying to say.

On the other hand, 'tsetse fly' seems to be very widely pronounced with
initial /ts/ by Americans -- though not by Brits, who invariably call the
creature a 'tetsy fly'.  The American word 'tsuris' seems to offer no
difficulty to those speakers who use it -- though not all do.  And
everybody I know pronounces 'tzatziki' with initial /ts/ -- though my
British dictionaries assure me that initial /t/ is also very common in
Britain, even in educated speech.  (I've never heard it.)

I conclude, therefore, that initial /ts/ is still not firmly a part of
English phonology, but that it is beginning to penetrate our phonology.
Interestingly, the word that seems to be most widely used with initial /ts/
is 'tzatziki' -- the name of an item of Greek cuisine.  Well done, those
Greek chefs!  (All right, I know the name is really of Turkish origin, but
it was the Greeks who passed it on to us.)

So, we need one or two comparable test cases with initial [D].  I'm waiting.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Mon May 21 16:41:40 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 11:41:40 -0500
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.4.30.0105171232040.7929-100000@vesuri.Helsinki.FI>
Message-ID: <MON.21.MAY.2001.114140.0500.>

	I've always heard <Thalia> pronounced
/Taely@/ (same vowel as <Sally>
or /Ta:ly@/ --like the news anchor Thalia Assuras
never as /Teyly@/

[snip]
>> But there are a number of near-minimal pairs:

<snip>
>>   they / Thalia (also 'theta' in US accents)
[snip]

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


From Enrikay1 at aol.com  Wed May 23 06:04:39 2001
From: Enrikay1 at aol.com (Enrikay1 at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 02:04:39 EDT
Subject: PIE
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.020439.EDT.>

I do hate to waste any of your time for something so trivial, but I feel a
need to quench my curiosity.  Let me state right now that I am not a
linguist, but rather a mere undergraduate student of W. European languages at
Indiana University with a great desire to move my studies easterward within
the IE language family.  I'm sure that there are no TY, Berlitz or Pimsleur
courses for the study of PIE, but are there any books that teach the
best-we-can-at-this-time-construct PIE?  Is there some authoritative book(s),
which would help me understand PIE and consequently the development of the IE
languages as seen today?  If any one of you would be so kind as to point me
in the right direction, it would be much appreciated.  I'm very excited about
receiving more of your e-mails!

With much gratitude,
Eric

[ Moderator's comment:
  I'd like to collect the refined responses to Eric's query into a boilerplate
  response I can send out when such questions come in from time to time.  (I've
  already recommended Sihler and Meillet in a private response, thereby showing
  my prejudices.)  I will post the proposed canned response for discussion when
  I think there is some concensus.
  -- rma ]


From dwanders at socrates.Berkeley.EDU  Fri May 25 14:51:36 2001
From: dwanders at socrates.Berkeley.EDU (dwanders at socrates.Berkeley.EDU)
Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 07:51:36 -0700
Subject: UCLA Indo-European Studies Bulletin 9.2
Message-ID: <FRI.25.MAY.2001.075136.0700.>

A new issue of the Indo-European Studies Bulletin (formally affiliated
with UCLA) is now available. Subscription information is found at the
bottom of this message.

Contents of IES Bulletin, Vol. 9, No. 2, January/February 2001 (published
April 2001); 60 pp.
ISSN:1533-9769

Articles:
"Celtoscepticism: Some Intellectual Sources and Ideological Implications" by
John Koch
"The Petroglyphs of Central Asia from the Viewpoint of the Indo-Iranian
Hypothesis by Andrzej Rozwadowski

Notes and Brief Communications:
Short Necrologies: Edgar Polome (Drinka) and Erich Neu (Melchert)

Conference Reports:
Late Prehistoric Exploitation of the Eurasian Steppe, McDonald Inst.,
Cambridge, England, January 12-16, 2000 (Jones-Bley/Hanks)
Colloquium: Greater Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite Language Family,
Univ. of Richmond, March 17-19, 2000 (Melchert)
Sixth Germanic Linguistics Annual Confesrence, Univ. of Wisconsin at
Milwaukee, April 28-30, 2000 (Pierce)
Eleventh International Mycenological Colloquium, Univ. of Texas at Austin,
May 7-13, 2000 (Garcia-Ramon)
Long-Range Linguistic Comparison: Prospects on the Eve of the Third
Millennium, Moscow, May 28-June 2, 2000 (Yakubovich)
Horses and Humans: The evolution of human/equine relations symposium,
Powdermill Nature Reserve, Penn., Oct. 17-21 (Jones-Bley)

Book Reviews:
Albanianischen Etymologien by Bardhyl Demiraj (reviewed by Martin Huld)
Albanian Etymological Dictionary by Vladimir Orel (reviewed by Martin Huld)
Historische Laut- und Formenlehre der lateinischen Sprache by Gerhard
Meiser (reviewed by Joshua Katz)
Beitrge zu altpersischen Inschriften by Rdiger Schmitt (reviewed by
Hanns-Peter Schmidt)
Proceedings of the Third European Conference of Iranian Studies. Part
1: Old and Middle Iranian Studies edited by Nicholas Sims-Williams
(reviewed by Hanns-Peter Schmidt)

Electronic Resources
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To purchase the IES Bulletin:
Contribution levels (which pay for this bi-annual bulletin and support IE
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Studies.

For a listing of the contents from previous issues, please go
to: http://www.indo-european.org/page3.html
and, for earlier issues, http://www.indo-european.org/page6.html.

Please direct any inquiries to: Deborah Anderson at
dwanders at socrates.berkeley.edu
or: FAIES, 2143 Kelton Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90025.


From sarima at friesen.net  Wed May 23 03:17:48 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Tue, 22 May 2001 20:17:48 -0700
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <B72DEE74.D10%xavier.delamarre@free.fr>
Message-ID: <TUE.22.MAY.2001.201748.0700.>

At 09:58 PM 5/20/01 +0200, Xavier Delamarre wrote:
>     And Calvert Warkins answered that both were probably wrong (his article
>on syntax reprinted in his "Selected Writings", IBS), PIE being a flexional
>language, with free word order (every student in Latin knows this) where the
>SOV / VSO controversy has no relevance.

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.

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


From colkitto at sprint.ca  Wed May 23 04:04:19 2001
From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 00:04:19 -0400
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.000419.0400.>

[ moderator edited ]

> Although Watkins did suggest that SOV was the most likely order.

Robert Orr

> >And Calvert Warkins answered that both were probably wrong (his article
> on syntax reprinted in his "Selected Writings", IBS), PIE being a
> flexional language, with free word order (every student in Latin knows this)
> where the SOV / VSO controversy has no relevance.

>    XD


From edsel at glo.be  Wed May 23 11:25:29 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 13:25:29 +0200
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.132529.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Xavier Delamarre" <xavier.delamarre at free.fr>
Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2001 9:58 PM

[ moderator snip ]

>     And Calvert Warkins answered that both were probably wrong (his article
> on syntax reprinted in his "Selected Writings", IBS), PIE being a flexional
> language, with free word order (every student in Latin knows this) where the
> SOV / VSO controversy has no relevance.

[Ed]

It seems to me that this 'free word order' in Latin belongs rather to poetic
license or special uses (e.g. emphasis) than to normal speech, which seems to
have been rather strictly SOV. But there are indeed exceptions to this general
statement ("sunt mihi mitia poma"). Of course it is true that flexion allows a
lot of freedom since it decouples word function from its place in a sentence,
up to a point.

Besides, similar exceptions also occur in Latin languages (normally SVO), e.g.
in (rather archaic or colloquial) Spanish: "Vendese esta casa" (this house is
for sale, cette maison se vend), "Vino un hombre" (a man came, un homme est
venu, il est venu un homme).

Ed Selleslagh


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Thu May 24 17:16:12 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 13:16:12 -0400
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <B72DEE74.D10%xavier.delamarre@free.fr>
Message-ID: <THU.24.MAY.2001.131612.0400.>

i may regret bringing this up, but here goes anyway  (note that i havent
read Watkins' article yet).  'free word order language' as it is usally
used to describe languages like Latin doesn't mean that any order goes in
any situation, it just means that there's a lot of flexibility and a large
group of possible orders that can be used, each under the proper discourse
situations.  so while SOV, VSO and OSV might all be possible word orders
in Latin, for example, they aren't all equally possible, and they wouldn't
all be used in the same situation.  different orders are used to focus or
topicalize different elements in the clause, so e.g. if you were asked
who Brutus murdered, you might answer with an OSV or OVS sentence, but if
you were asked who murdered Caesar, you might use SOV or SVO.  this sort
of correlation between word orders and discourse contexts has been shown
to exist in `free word order' languages like Finnish and Russian, and i
expect Latin was no different.  crucially, in these languages there is a
clear sort of default word order that tends to be used in neutral
circumstances.  e.g. in Finnish the relative ordering of subject and
object is largely determined by whether the items referred to are old or
new to the discourse.  that is, a person or thing that was mentioned in
the previous sentence will tend to occur early in the sentence, while
something being mentioned for the first time that day will tend to occur
at the end.  so when the subject is old and the object is new, you get
SVO, and when the subject is new and the object is old, you get OVS.  but
what about when both are old or both are new?  this is one of those
neutral circumstances, and here we get SVO.  OVS sounds extremely odd in
such a situation.  so in spite of the great deal of variation in Finnish
word order (other orderings are also possible under other circumstances),
it makes a lot of sense to say that Finnish is basically SVO, but can have
other orders if the circumstances demand it.  so it's not the case at all
that the SOV/VSO controversy has no relevance for Latin.  in addition to
the possibility of all sorts of crazy word orders, every student of Latin
also knows that the 'typical' word order is SOV.  every intro. textbook of
Latin has a brief section on word order where SOV is given as 'typical' or
'normal' or something like that, followed by an explanation of how
commonly we find something deviating from the norm.  good textbooks
will go on to note that this isn't haphazzard, but that there are reasons
for different word orders to show up, like which word is considered most
important for some reason, which word a sentence is 'about' etc.  in fact,
i think studies have been done of word order patterns in the Latin texts
that show they do have discourse motivations.  i'll try to find info on
them when i get a chance.

>     And Calvert Warkins answered that both were probably wrong (his article
> on syntax reprinted in his "Selected Writings", IBS), PIE being a flexional
> language, with free word order (every student in Latin knows this) where the
> SOV / VSO controversy has no relevance.

>     XD


From tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu  Thu May 24 17:37:17 2001
From: tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu (Thomas McFadden)
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 13:37:17 -0400
Subject: mobile pronouns (was: No Proto-Celtic?)
In-Reply-To: <005401c0e0dc$ef994480$7f22b4d4@leo>
Message-ID: <THU.24.MAY.2001.133717.0400.>

a point that should be brought up here is that languages seem to prefer
suffixes to prefixes in general, but it is not the case that languages
prefer VS order.  in fact it's strongly dispreferred.  and clitic pronouns
generally appear closer to the beginning of the sentence than full noun
phrases do, so positing a proto-language that was SV with full NP
subjects but VS with pronoun subjects would strike me as very odd (do such
languages exist?).  so i don't think we can argue based on agreement
suffixes alone that a language was VS at some point in its history.

On Sun, 20 May 2001, Lionel Bonnetier wrote:

[ moderator snip ]

> In a SOV language, when S is a short pronoun, and you feel S is
> linked to V rather than O, you might switch to OSV or OVS, the
> latter being preferred if the OV group is felt as a strong
> cluster.

> That's another non-linguist's opinion...

> (Hello everybody, I'm new on the list. I've always been
> interested in linguistics, but I work in technical programming,
> though I'm trying to get to natural language processing and
> semantics. Etymology is a constant source of inspiration for
> me to shed light on how ideas interconnect.)


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Wed May 23 07:11:04 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 03:11:04 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.031104.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/22/2001 10:34:16 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com writes:
<< When you consider that PIE-speakers used their *uksen (oxen), under a *yukom
(yoke) to pull their *weghom (waggon) home from the ceremony where they *hwedh
(wed) their brides, it isn't surprising at all.  >>

Nor would it be surprising if bride and groom sat down afterwards and enjoyed
a celebratory dinner of fallow deer, which they would have called *kerwos -
what PIE speakers may have called it in Anatolia.

And it would have been a "gay" affair.  No, not that kind of "gay."  Words
never changed meaning back then, like they do now.  PIEians weren't like the
rest of us humans.

Regards,
SLong


From hwhatting at hotmail.com  Wed May 23 09:10:16 2001
From: hwhatting at hotmail.com (Hans-Werner Hatting)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 11:10:16 +0200
Subject: Fallow Deer/ The Original *Kerwos?
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.111016.0200.>

On Wed, 16 May 2001 23:54:21 EDT Steve Long wrote:
>(BTW, in Slavic, deer is "jelen" (cf.,Pol.,"zielony", green, definitely not
>red; cf, Greek, "chalkeios")

Slavic "jelen'" is not connected to Polish "zielony". "jelen'" is originally
an n-stem formation (Proto-Slavic *el-en-) of the root PIE *el- (whither
"elm" and "elk"), which Watkins (AHD of IE roots s.v. el2-) quotes with an
original meaning "red, brown", while "zielony" goes back to a Slavic
"zelenu0-" ("u0" is to denote the back yer) belonging to the PIE root
*g'hel- "green, yellow".

Best regards,
Hans-Werner Hatting


From edsel at glo.be  Wed May 23 11:42:35 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 13:42:35 +0200
Subject: About the Yew1
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.134235.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: <X99Lynx at aol.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2001 5:02 AM

[snip]
> Actually there have been dramatic changes in tree populations and
> distributions over the last 8,000 years in Europe.  Perhaps the most
> surprising - discovered by the first British C-14  analyzers - was the almost
> complete and dramatically quick wipe-out of the elm about 3500BC.  At first
> attributed to neolithic farmers, it is now considered to have been the result
> of climatic changes -- observable also in the range of other species --
> causing perhaps a sudden susceptibility to disease.
[snip]
> Regards,
> Steve Long

[Ed Selleslagh]
In Belgium, most elms are disease-ridden (actually by a parasite) and in danger
of disappearance.

Ed.


From philjennings at juno.com  Thu May 24 00:04:49 2001
From: philjennings at juno.com (philjennings at juno.com)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 19:04:49 -0500
Subject: European Genetics/IE
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.190449.0500.>

On Fri, 18 May 2001 02:50:40 EDT, Steve Long responded to my earlier email
under the topic Fallow Deer/A Closer Look, which mentioned a study by Dr.
Martin Richards reported in the NY Times, a study that on its face might seem
discouraging to advocates of IE's Anatolian origins.

Part of Steve Long's answer was an argument that even if Richards was right,
and the great IE wave-of-advance through central-northern Europe was an advance
of indigenous Europeans converted to the neolithic lifestyle, the central
tenets of the IE-Anatolian-originists are still plausible.

Another part of his answer indicated that Richards might not be right.

There may be reasons why the IE-Anatolianists should hope that Richards is
wrong, because otherwise they need to explain why mesolithic-to-neolithic
Europeans changed languages, and did so without leaving evidence.

However, I have been reminded that the extreme Kurganists are far more
vulnerable both to the genetics argument and to questions of language-change
motivation:  It seems that the IE-Kurganites forcibly converted western Europe
to their language, fighting uphill against a population gradient of established
farmers, and then vanished to a genetic zero except in Greece, minus an
archeological residue of pillaged settlements and oppressive castles (again,
except in Greece).  And all this happened not so long before written history
began.  Where are the half-finished jobs, the creoles?  There is a Folkish
substrate in proto-Germanic, and suspicions about proto-Celtic, but mostly the
language conversion swept clean over a vast area.

This extreme Kurgan position is unbelieveable.  I fuss over the
Anatolian-origins theory because it is worth considering, despite the fact that
here too, people talk of language-conversion, and not the creolized conversion
of my Norwegian grandparents in North Dakota, but the school-advantaged
conversions of modern Internet users, a complete shift minus evidence of what
they spoke before.

Why do both sides make extreme conversion claims?  Because if IE stemmed from a
creole, even one buried a long time in its past, that fact would be detected.
Is this really true?  If we can detect that an ancient proto-language came from
a creole or an amalgam of many sources, how many such proto-languages have been
shown to be of mixed origins?  If the answer is zero the world around, perhaps
our ability to detect ancient creoles is not all that acute.  The key issue
might be, how long has the creole been buried and obscured by later
developments?

It does seem to me that mesolithic-to-neolithic Europeans might pick up a great
deal of vocabulary from Anatolian agriculturalists, and create a language with
dual roots.  If I were to write a story with many simplifications, I'd have
Anatolian colonists coming into the Balkan/Greek area, building "pueblos" on
the model of Catal Huyuk, and setting up cooperative agreements with indigenous
hunters, trade agreements leading to marriages, wives going out to live in
scattered places, bringing grazing stock and seeds.  I'd have the scattered
population prospering more than the pueblo urbanites, who eventually dwindle
out of the picture.  Here everything is mixed, hunters with farmers, language
with language.

But putting down my pastoral flute and setting this story aside, what are the
central tenets of the IE-Anatolian-originists?  I'm pretty sure of two of them:
(1) that IE, or PIE, or *PIE has a time depth of seven thousand years or more,
and that (2) early in its development, IE/PIE/*PIE was influenced by
Afro-Asiatic, Karvellian and Caucasian languages.

The second tenet should be arguable on the basis of linguistics alone,
without getting dirty out in the field.

As for the first, the Bactria Margiana Archaeology Complex apparently sprang
into bloom around 2300bce, and some people think it's the Indo-Iranian
"homeland."  The big Kurgan breakout was around 2300bce or not much before,
which indicates that pioneers very swiftly, possibly within one generation, set
themselves up at a considerable distance from where they started.  Time depth
was not necessary.  Running the clock backward, as JoatSimeon at aol.com
intimates, we might not need another thousand years, and I imagine frowns and a
very grudging concession of two thousand years at most.  But even two thousand
years of marching backwards down the Balkans doesn't get us to the Anatolian
homeland.

Perhaps, as Steve Long suggests, all we need is to trace backward to Tripolye.
What Kilday calls "narrow IE" might start in Tripolye, proto-Hittite nearby,
and proto-Pelasgian up the Danube.  All are related and carry the freight of a
vocabulary with Afro-Asiatic, Kartvellian and Caucasian loan-words.  Even
proto-Etruscan (much more freighted) might be a laggard part of this generous
Balkan/Greek picture, since p-E has four thousand years to go its own way.

In this scheme, there are stops and stages from Homeland Anatolia to the Kurgan
steppes, and generations of mother-daughter languages, of which IE is much more
a daughter than a mother, however successful a mother in the long run.  I take
heart that a scheme similar to this has been advanced by Miguel Carrasquer
Vidal, whose linguistic credentials are vastly superior to mine, and who also
detects Indo-Europeanisms in Etruscan grammar.


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Thu May 24 09:37:19 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 09:37:19 -0000
Subject: Etruscans
Message-ID: <THU.24.MAY.2001.093719.0000.>

Patrick C. Ryan (14 May 2001) wrote:

>I have heard the idea that *wei-no- is not native IE but it has always puzzled
>me to know why this view is held.

>To my way of thinking, it obviously means simply 'vine'.

The difficulty in reconstructing PIE *wei-no- is the monophthong (presumed
long) in Umbrian <vinu>, Faliscan <vino>. These languages retain -ei- in
other words. If they borrowed "wine" from Latin, it is very likely that they
did so before the 2nd cent. BCE, when -ei- became -i:- in Latin. Therefore,
the resemblance between <vi:num> and <vi:tis>, <vi:men> (from PIE *wei- 'to
turn, twist, plait') should be regarded as fortuitous.

The other reflexes given are Gk. <woinos>, Arm. <gini>, Heb. <yayin>, Arab.
<wayn>, Geez <wain>. The source was presumably in the eastern Mediterranean.
I do _not_ refer this to "Pelasgian", due to the -oi- in the Greek form.

DGK


From dlwhite at texas.net  Wed May 23 16:48:09 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 11:48:09 -0500
Subject: Genetic Descent
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.114809.0500.>

        I am, like the Enchanter Tim, a busy man, but I will oblige.

> --On Monday, May 14, 2001 8:30 am -0500 "David L. White"
> <dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

> [LT on Thomason and Kaufman]

>>> Hmmm.  May I know where in their book T and K assert that "anything
>>> goes"? My reading of the book reveals only the more cautious claim that
>>> we cannot know what happens in language contact until we look.

>>         Somewhere in the intro.  Hasty perusal has not revealed where.

> I'm afraid I still can't find any such statement.

        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.

> [A small intervention. I am grateful to Hans-Werner Hatting for his
> information on Anglo-Romani, which concludes by observing that Anglo-Romani
> is indeed a variety of English.  As it happens, this conclusion is endorsed
> by Sarah Thomason in her new book Language Contact: An Introduction,

        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.

> [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.

> 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.

> 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.  And since when is the equivalent
of a mental coin toss to be preferred to a clear standard?  Since borrowing
of categories, without borrowing of specific morphmes to express these, is
not relevant, the case in question is practically indentical to the case of
Anglo-Romani.

> Anyway, I now want to talk about another language, discussed by Thomason in
> her new book.  That language is Laha, spoken in the Moluccas, where the
> locally dominant language is a variety of Malay, which is distantly, but
> not closely, related to Laha.  The principal investigator here is James T.
> Collins:

>   J. T. Collins. 1980. 'Laha, a language of the central Moluccas'. Indonesia
>   Circle 23: 3-19.

> 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."

> But now consider the following.  The Laha are reportedly regarded by
> themselves, and by others, as a distinct ethnic group with a distinct
> language.  All Laha-speakers are also fluent in Malay, but other speakers
> of Malay do not speak Laha.

        The Romani are regarded by themselves, and by others, as a distinct
ethnic group with (where it survives) a distinct language.  All Anglo-Romani
speakers are fluent in English, but other speakers of English do not speak
Anglo-Romani.  Why come to a different conclusion in the two cases, unless
coin tossing is the latest fashion?

> The conclusion of Collins, and of Thomason, is
> that Laha has developed as follows: it started out as a language entirely
> distinct from Malay, but, under enormous pressure from Malay, it has
> gradually, in piecemeal fashion, absorbed more and more Malay grammar,
> until today the grammar is almost entirely Malay, and only a few bits of
> Laha grammar survive -- for the moment, since it is possible that these few
> fragments will also give way to Malay grammar in the future.

> 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.

> Is this
> reasonable?  Earlier, David rejected a similar scenario for another
> language as impossible in principle.

> 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.  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.

> (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
woyld 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.

> Thomason expressly endorses position (2), as does Collins.  Native speakers
> of Laha also take position (2).  Apparently Moluccans who don't speak Laha
> also accept position (2).

        What the naive natives think has nothing to do with anything.  It is
fairly easy to find naive natives in the English-speaking world who think
that English is a Romance language.

> David, what's your view?

        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.
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.  But, operating in the semi-dark (Thomason is
routinely vague about the facts of her example languages), I see no reason
to think that the situation is not comparable to Anglo-Romani or Mednyj
Aleut, which are surely not mutually comprehensible with English or Russian
respectively (or for that matter Romani or Aleut), but which nonetheless can
be identified (even by Thomason, in the first case) as forms of "abruptly
re-lexified" English or Russian.

Dr. David L. White


From proto-language at email.msn.com  Thu May 24 11:55:48 2001
From: proto-language at email.msn.com (proto-language)
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 06:55:48 -0500
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <THU.24.MAY.2001.065548.0500.>

Dear IEists:

Three questions regarding the root listed in Pokorny as 1. *g^en-, 'erzeugen',
came up in a discussion on another list; and without argumentation, I would be
grateful for the opinions of list members on them.

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?

2. that the primary meaning was 'produce' and that the meaning of 'beget' was
secondary;

3. that in the case of the Greek reflex /gennao:/, it should be regarded as a
denominative verb derived internally in Greek from /genna:/ rather than *both*
words being derived from an IE form.

Looking forward to your input.

Thank you.

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 zsau at hobbiton.org  Wed May 23 09:50:06 2001
From: zsau at hobbiton.org (Tristan Alexander McLeay)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 19:50:06 +1000
Subject: thy thigh etc. (external sandhi in English)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.4.30.0105171157430.7929-100000@vesuri.Helsinki.FI>
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.195006.1000.>

I don't know how relevant this is to the whole discussion, but I originally
couldn't tell the difference between [T] and [D], even though I was using
them in the regular fashion, as far as I can tell, but 'with' seems to have
lots of fun, alternating between /wIT/, /wID/, /w at T/, and /w at D/, depending
on it's stress, it's compoundness, and the voicing of the next sound.
I am an Australian, speaking English natively, with native-speaking parents.
(well, mother is ESL, but can't remember Dutch very well, and speaks English
as well as a native anyway)

Tristan


From edsel at glo.be  Wed May 23 12:02:13 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 14:02:13 +0200
Subject: thy thigh etc. (external sandhi in English)
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.140213.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas G Kilday" <acnasvers at hotmail.com>
Sent: Monday, May 21, 2001 4:50 PM

[snip]
>(BTW, since commas carry meaning, does this mean they can't be
> phonemes, suprasegmental or otherwise?)

> DGK

[Ed Selleslagh]
What meaning? Only function.Besides, between a final and an initial vowel a
comma has the value of 'hamza'.

Ed.


From petegray at btinternet.com  Wed May 23 18:40:38 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 19:40:38 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc. (external sandhi in English)
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.194038.0100.>

> I would posit that word-initial (and
> syllable-initial) voiced fricative + /r/ (or /l/) are phonotactically un-
> English.

Can we really move from "don't occur" to "can't occur"?   English speakers
have no trouble with names like Vladivostock or words like zloty.   Or do
you simply mean "don't occur"?

Peter


From petegray at btinternet.com  Wed May 23 19:04:28 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 20:04:28 +0100
Subject: thy thigh [Germ x/c].
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.200428.0100.>

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

>> 2. They have now come to contrast in initial position, at least before
>> /a/, albeit only in loan words, and only for certain speakers.

I had a thought about "durch".  Following the usual rule, it is pronounced
with /c,/, after a consonant.   But the actual pronunciation of the word is
often not with a consonantal /r/ but the back vowel replacement /upside down
a/.  This means we have a context in which a back vowel (or two, actually)
is followed by the front /c,/.   Of course there's an explanation for this
in the underlying pronunciation with /r/, but it still seems to show that
the difference between /x/ and /c,/ is not purely phonetically determined.

Compare the difference between clear and velarised /l/ in English - I cannot
think of any factors other than pure phonetics which determine the choice.

Peter


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu May 24 09:56:27 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 10:56:27 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <F179JSFsxf4yp8ARf3s0000e2c9@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <THU.24.MAY.2001.105627.0100.>

--On Monday, May 21, 2001 2:50 pm +0000 Douglas G Kilday
<acnasvers at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Excuse my skepticism, but I can't believe the _net_ number of contentives
> in a given language is growing constantly. As new contentives enter a
> language, others exit. Lexica don't have rubber walls.

Debatable.  If we look at the consecutive editions of any good desk
dictionary of English, we find that these become steadily larger over time,
in spite of the best efforts of lexicographers to prune any items which
seem to have dropped out of use.  It seems that very many of the new words
do not replace anything: 'geopathic', 'mogul' (in the skiing sense),
'cellphone', 'hahnium', and, of course, 'tzatziki'.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu May 24 09:58:37 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 10:58:37 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
In-Reply-To: <F179JSFsxf4yp8ARf3s0000e2c9@hotmail.com>
Message-ID: <THU.24.MAY.2001.105837.0100.>

--On Monday, May 21, 2001 2:50 pm +0000 Douglas G Kilday
<acnasvers at hotmail.com> wrote:

> That is how I was considering it. If you "point out" or "demonstrate"
> something, it acquires definiteness. As a conjunction, "though" means
> "despite the fact that" and "the fact" is definite. As an adverb, "though"
> means "nevertheless", which specifies a definite degree of difference
> (nothing). I'd like to see a sentence in which "but" and "though" are
> interchangeable.

OK.  How about this one?

  She is bright but careless.
  She is bright though careless.

Any good?

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  Thu May 24 16:04:27 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 11:04:27 -0500
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <THU.24.MAY.2001.110427.0500.>

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]

>> 2. They have now come to contrast in initial position, at least before
>> /a/, albeit only in loan words, and only for certain speakers.  I have
>> noticed this for some time, and am pleased that a Duden author has too.
>> This strongly favors the analysis as separate phonemes.

> On the other hand, maybe the distinction in 'Cha-' words is phonotactically
> conditioned - isn't it always [c,] in words beginning 'Chal-' and 'Char-' and
> always [x] in 'Cha-' followed by anything else? (Excluding of course where it
> is [k], [S] or [tS]). And it can't be borrowing that causes this distinction
> - 'Charkow' has /x/ (usually realised as [x]) in the source language but [c,]
> 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


From dlwhite at texas.net  Thu May 24 02:59:17 2001
From: dlwhite at texas.net (David L. White)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 21:59:17 -0500
Subject: Phonemes of New York Dialect
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.215917.0500.>

> An example that I am very familiar
> with concerns the tensing and raising of [ae] (that is "ash") in the New
> York City area.  In broad outline (and I'll omit irrelevant details) [ae]
> is tensed and raised in front of voiced stops, /m/, /n/, and fricatives
> when these are followed by an obstruent or a major morpheme boundary, so
> that, e.g., the stressed vowel of _adder_ 'snake' is not tensed and raised,
> but that of _adder_ 'adding machine; one who or that which adds' is.  If
> morpheme boundaries are not allowed, we have to posit two phonemes.  Not a
> very satisfying solution.  But wait; there's more.  _I can fish._ (with
> emphatic or contrastive stress on _can_) has no tensing and raising of the
> [ae] if it means 'I am able to fish', but has tensing and raising if it
> means 'I work in a fish cannery'.  Pretty straightforward then:  must be a
> phonemic split.  Not so fast:  It turns out that all words that can have
> [schwa] as their only vowel, *always* have untensed and unraised [ae] in
> their stressed form, at least in one major subdialect.  (This list, which I
> have termed "weak words", includes _am, as, can, had, has, have, than_.)
> Wait, I hear you say; why not talk about "function words" or "closed-class
> words"?  Because, _can't_ *is* always tensed and raised.  What sets it
> apart is that it can never have [schwa] as its only vowel--i.e., it is
> never completely unstressed.

> Anyhow, one phoneme or two?  You be the judge.

        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.

Dr. David L. White


From maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Wed May 23 13:30:10 2001
From: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Max Wheeler)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 14:30:10 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <E152WfO-0001rI-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.143010.0100.>

--On Sunday, May 20, 2001 13:58 -0400 "Paul S. Cohen" <pausyl at AOL.COM>
wrote:

> Actually, there's another possible view of this situation that's
> completely consistent with classical phonemics:  since [[eng]] and [h]
> are in complementary distribution in English (yes, I know about the
> Trager&Smith tradition of talking about [h] and [[schwa]] being
> allophones), and since they are, in some sense, phonetically similar
> (they comprise a class that can be characterized as "the back, continuant
> consonants"), why not put them together as allophones of /[eng]/ or /h/
> (whichever you like)? Occam's Razor would seem to demand doing so.  This,
> I would hope, shows off some off the inadequacies of classical phonemics.

Actually [eng] and [h] share no features that are not shared more widely.
[eng] is not [continuant] as normally understood. At best some phonologists
might once have linked them as [+sonorant] (though nowadays [h] would be
seen as [-sonorant]) but even then they don't share this characteristic to
the exclusion of [?], [m], [n]. The phonetic similarity criterion requires
at least that the potential co-allophones be no less similar to each other
than either is to something else.

And if you allow proper names (and whyever not?) it isn't even true that
[eng] and [h] are in complementary distribution, since both occur between
unstressed vowels in e.g. Birmingham, Callaghan, Houlihan, Monaghan.

> Bob Whiting wants to allow morpheme boundaries as part of the allowable
> phonological conditioners in deciding whether it's "one phoneme or two",
> and I'm in full agreement.  In the American school of phonemics, this
> position goes back at least to Kenneth Pike in the 1940's, despite the
> fear of "mixing levels" in that school.  It's clear that perspicuous
> analysis of phonological systems often requires it.  In fact, I would go
> a step farther:  There are times when perspicuous phonemic/phonological
> analysis requires the use of other phonetic, morphological, and syntactic
> characterizations as well.  One may choose to draw the line in various
> places in deciding phonemicity, but being too restrictive will often
> eliminate generalizations--even some that naive speakers are making--
> whether consciously or unconsciously.  An example that I am very familiar
> with concerns the tensing and raising of [ae] (that is "ash") in the New
> York City area.  In broad outline (and I'll omit irrelevant details) [ae]
> is tensed and raised in front of voiced stops, /m/, /n/, and fricatives
> when these are followed by an obstruent or a major morpheme boundary, so
> that, e.g., the stressed vowel of _adder_ 'snake' is not tensed and
> raised, but that of _adder_ 'adding machine; one who or that which adds'
> is.  If morpheme boundaries are not allowed, we have to posit two
> phonemes.  Not a very satisfying solution.  But wait; there's more.  _I
> can fish._ (with emphatic or contrastive stress on _can_) has no tensing
> and raising of the [ae] if it means 'I am able to fish', but has tensing
> and raising if it means 'I work in a fish cannery'.  Pretty
> straightforward then:  must be a phonemic split.  Not so fast:  It turns
> out that all words that can have [schwa] as their only vowel, *always*
> have untensed and unraised [ae] in their stressed form, at least in one
> major subdialect.  (This list, which I have termed "weak words", includes
> _am, as, can, had, has, have, than_.) Wait, I hear you say; why not talk
> about "function words" or "closed-class words"?  Because, _can't_ *is*
> always tensed and raised.  What sets it apart is that it can never have
> [schwa] as its only vowel--i.e., it is never completely unstressed.
>

Well with a phonemic split you expect to find evidence of the original
conditioning environment; with only the examples Paul gives, then the
answer to

> Anyhow, one phoneme or two?  You be the judge.

could well be 'the jury's still out'.

But many speakers who have pronunciations like Paul describes have split
the following class:
sad, glad, bad
(according to Labov) so that these words don't all have the same vowel. So
real split.

As has happened with British English GAS/PASS, most English PUTT/PUT,
though with these grammatical conditioning seems never to have entered the
story.

Max
____________________________________________________________
Max W. Wheeler
School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer
BRIGHTON BN1 9QH, G.B.

Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975 Fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 Email:
maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk
____________________________________________________________


From sarima at friesen.net  Wed May 23 13:49:58 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 06:49:58 -0700
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.064958.0700.>

At 01:58 PM 5/20/01 -0400, Paul S. Cohen wrote:
>whether consciously or unconsciously.  An example that I am very familiar
>with concerns the tensing and raising of [ae] (that is "ash") in the New
>York City area. ...

>Anyhow, one phoneme or two?  You be the judge.

Sound like two to me.  It is used by itself to carry differences in meaning.

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


From colkitto at sprint.ca  Wed May 23 12:24:07 2001
From: colkitto at sprint.ca (Robert Orr)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 08:24:07 -0400
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.082407.0400.>

>"duinhewassel" /DIn at was@l/ (a Scots designation of minor
>nobility, variant of "duniewassal").

duniewassal (duine uasal) with a D?  Naaaa ......

and does acceptance of "dhal" as an English word imply all the other
letters of the Arabic alphabet as well? ('ain, qaf, etc.?)

Robert Orr


From douglas at nb.net  Wed May 23 14:29:31 2001
From: douglas at nb.net (Douglas G. Wilson)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 10:29:31 -0400
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <125018638.3199426918@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <WED.23.MAY.2001.102931.0400.>

>So, what we need is for the Greeks to come up with a prince of
>a dish which we English-speakers will delightedly take up -- and which has
>a name starting with [D].  Sadly, Greek chefs have not so far obliged us on
>this matter -- at least as far as I can think.  C'mon, Greek chefs: we need
>you! ;-)

Isn't that stuffed grape leaf called "dolmos"? Unfortunately, always with
/d/ in my experience.

A true story: I saw a local restaurant had put up a big sign advertising
its new specialty: "GYROS". So I went in and asked for /Giros/ ['G' = IPA
gamma] or so. Blank stare. I tried /jiros/, /giros/. Blank stare. "What is
it that you are advertising on the big new sign by the door?" I asked.
Answer: /dZairouz/. I would never have thought of that except as a joke --
and this is from the restaurateur advertising the item.

-- Doug Wilson


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu May 24 10:02:38 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 11:02:38 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.0.20010520054142.00aa4a40@127.0.0.1>
Message-ID: <THU.24.MAY.2001.110238.0100.>

--On Sunday, May 20, 2001 6:11 am -0400 "Douglas G. Wilson"
<douglas at nb.net> wrote:

> Just a footnote, not intended to invalidate the point about initial /D/.

> Are there "non-grammatical" English words beginning with /D/?

> I will take as a working definition of "English word": "any word which
> appears in a conventional English-language dictionary, excluding proper
> names". I also exclude pronunciations which are designated as foreign, if
> an alternative "English" pronunciation is given.

> I find two:

> "dhal" /Dal/ (an Arabic letter);

> "duinhewassel" /DIn at was@l/ (a Scots designation of minor nobility, variant
> of "duniewassal").

> Marginal examples, true ... slightly better perhaps than the imaginary
> river dhelta.

Ah, splendid, and many thanks.  These words are not in my desk dictionary,
and I didn't know them -- and me a Scrabble-player, too.  I happen to know
that 'dhal' is legal in British tournament Scrabble in another sense.  I
don't know if the second is, but I don't suppose I'll ever get a chance to
play it anyway.  Can't recall the last time I played a 12-letter word.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu May 24 10:14:01 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 11:14:01 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <E152WfO-0001rI-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <THU.24.MAY.2001.111401.0100.>

--On Sunday, May 20, 2001 1:58 pm -0400 "Paul S. Cohen" <pausyl at AOL.COM>
wrote:

[on non-initial [eng] in English]

> Actually, there's another possible view of this situation that's
> completely consistent with classical phonemics:  since [[eng]] and [h]
> are in complementary distribution in English (yes, I know about the
> Trager&Smith tradition of talking about [h] and [[schwa]] being
> allophones), and since they are, in some sense, phonetically similar
> (they comprise a class that can be characterized as "the back, continuant
> consonants"), why not put them together as allophones of /[eng]/ or /h/
> (whichever you like)? Occam's Razor would seem to demand doing so.  This,
> I would hope, shows off some off the inadequacies of classical phonemics.

Perhaps not necessarily.  Putting [eng] and [h] into a single phoneme was
proposed by somebody in print several decades ago, perhaps not entirely
seriously.  Apart from the violence this analysis does to native-speaker
intuitions, it founders on the rocks of phonetic similarity: [eng] and [h]
have no phonetic features in common apart from those few shared with all
consonants.

And phonetic similarity is certainly a necessary condition in classical
phonemics, and it was recognized as such: see, for example, page 108 of
Hockett's classic 1958 textbook.  In English, using a following apostrophe
to mark aspiration, we find that *each* of [p'], [t'] and [k'] is in
complementary distribution with *each* of unaspirated [p], [t] and [k].  On
distributional grounds alone, then, we have a free choice: we can group
[p'] with any one of [p], [t] and [k], and similarly for the other cases.
Even the most rigorous classical phonemicist never believed that these
several analyses were equally plausible, and therefore a criterion of
phonetic similarity is essential.  Of course, before the advent of
distinctive features, the notion of phonetic similarity could not be
defined in a principled way.  But features allow us to build a principled
criterion of phonetic similarity -- and any version of this criterion I can
think of rules out the assignment of [eng] and [h] to a single phoneme.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu May 24 10:28:06 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 11:28:06 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <E152X4K-0002cQ-00@rsunx.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <THU.24.MAY.2001.112806.0100.>

Somebody -- I think it was Paul Cohen, but I'm not sure, and my apologies
if not -- wrote this:

>>> And I would judge the Traskian point above about /oi/ never occurring
>>> in native English words, even if true, to be irrelevant to the
>>> discussion:

Let me clarify this.  The point I was trying to make is this: not everything
which is *true* of English is linguistically significant.  It is true that
/oi/ never occurs in native English words, but I cannot see that this is a
linguistically significant statement about English -- in great contrast to the
absence of word-initial [eng] in English, which I firmly believe really *is*
linguistically significant.

Take another case or two.  The rules governing the possible word-initial
consonant clusters in English clearly permit the initial clusters /skl-/
and /gj-/ (second = US /gy-/).  Yet we do not have such words in the
language, apart from the Greek-derived technical term 'sclerosis', the
obscure and French-derived heraldic term 'gules', and the obsolescent and
possibly expressive word 'gewgaw' -- 'obsolescent', because my students
don't know it.  However, I cannot see that the general absence of these
initial clusters is a significant fact about English phonology: it is
merely a historical accident, no more.

And I was arguing that the seeming absence of initial [D] in English
lexical items is likewise a historical accident, and not a significant fact
about English phonology.

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 edsel at glo.be  Thu May 24 10:19:57 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 12:19:57 +0200
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
Message-ID: <THU.24.MAY.2001.121957.0200.>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Leo A. Connolly" <connolly at memphis.edu>
Sent: Monday, May 21, 2001 7:36 AM

> On May 17 Robert Whiting wrote, among other things, concering the
> thy:thigh question:

>>   The fact that initial [D] occurs only in
>> function or grammatical (or closed-class) words is not what keeps initial
>> [T] and [D] from contrasting in English.  What keeps them from contrasting
>> is the fact that initial [D] in English is always a morpheme.

> I beg your pardon?  If [D-] is a morpheme, then _thy_, _this_, _then_
> etc. must consist of at least two morphemes each.  If _thy_ matches
> _thou_ and _thee_, or _then_ matches _when?_, what does _though_ match?
> How could _though_, or _thus_, have more than one morpheme?

> Leo Connolly

[Ed Selleslagh]

[D-] most certainly IS a morpheme or, maybe better, as Larry Trask puts it, a
marker - even though its older form was probably something more like [Di:],
[De] or [D@]. It is, IMHO, a deictic prefix (or marker), just like <wh-> is a
interrogative one (Latin t- and qu-).

However, not all - initial or otherwise - [D]'s are equal: some have a
different origin, like in <thou> etc., which don't belong to the same 'closed
class'. As far as I can judge, <either> etc. belong to still another class. It
seems to me that lumping them all together in one class is a purely an
empirical and practical way of describing the present state of the language,
where the different origins are not readily visible any longer, at least not to
the 'naive' speaker. But I'm sure any better IE-ist than me (easy to find!) can
show you the various origins of these different classes.

In <thus> we have a deictic [D], since it means 'in THIS way'. Its match is
<how>, the initial h being the relict of the interrogative prefix/marker.

The fact that <though> doesn't have and probably never had a match (e.g. with
<wh->) shows that it belongs to another class.

Ed.


From lmfosse at online.no  Sat May 26 11:07:46 2001
From: lmfosse at online.no (Lars Martin Fosse)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 13:07:46 +0200
Subject: SV: PIE
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.130746.0200.>

Enrikay1 at aol.com [SMTP:Enrikay1 at aol.com] skrev 23. mai 2001 08:05:

> best-we-can-at-this-time-construct PIE?  Is there some authoritative book(s),
> which would help me understand PIE and consequently the development of the IE
> languages as seen today?  If any one of you would be so kind as to point me
> in the right direction, it would be much appreciated.  I'm very excited about
> receiving more of your e-mails!

Here are some suggestions. They are given sine ira et studio, without any
preferences and evaluations. I have included some material on Indo-European
culture as well. If you plan to make a boilerplate "intro to Indo-European
studies", they may come in handy.

Beekes, R. S. P. 1996. Comparative Indo-European linguistics : an
introduction. Amsterdam ; Philadelphia: J. Benjamins Pub.

Meillet, Antoine. 1970. The Comparative Method in Historical Linguistics.
Paris: Librairie Honore Champion, Editeur.

Meillet, A. 1964. Introduction a l'Etude Comparative des Langues Indo-Eu
ropeennes. Forge Village: University of Alabama Press.

Kurylowicz, Jerzy. 1964. The Inflectional Categories of Indo-European.
Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag.

Lindeman, Fredrik Otto. 1987. Introduction to the 'Laryngeal Theory'. Oslo:
Norwegian University Press.

Schmitt, Rudiger. 1967. Dichtung und Dichtersprache in indogermanischer
Zeit. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.

Schmitt, Rudiger, ed. 1968. Indogermanischer Dichtersprache, Wege der
Forschung. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

Szemerenyi, Oswald. 1989. Einfuhrung in die vergleichende
Sprachwissenschaft. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

Watkins, Calvert, ed. 1969. Indogermanische Grammatik, Formenlehre. Edited
by J. Kurylowicz. Vol. III/1, Indogermanische Grammatik. Heidelberg: Carl
Winter Universitatsverlag.

Jamison, S. 1979. The case of the agent in Indo-European. Die Sprache
15:129-143.

Kurylowicz, J. 1935. Etudes indoeuropeennes I. Krakow.

Kurylowicz, J. 1956. L'apophonie en indo-europeen. Krakow.

Winter, W. 1965. Evidence for Laryngeals. The Hague.

Meillet, A. 1950. Les dialectes indo-europeennes. Paris.

Cowgill, Warren, and Manfred Mayrhofer. 1986. Indogermanische Grammatik.
Band I. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag.

Lehmann, W. P. 1980. The Reconstruction  of Non-Simple Sentences in
Proto-Indo-European. In Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. Amsterdam.

Lehmann, Winfred P. 1974. Proto-Indo-European Syntax. London.

Lehmann, Winfred P. 1993. Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics.
London and New York: Routledge.

Sergent, Bernard. 1995. Les Indo-Europeens. Histoire, langues, mythes.
Paris: Editions Payot & Rivages.

Mallory, J. P., and Douglas Q. Adams. 1997. Encyclopedia of Indo-European
culture. London ; Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn.

Mallory, J. P. 1989. In search of the Indo-Europeans : language,
archaeology, and myth. New York, N.Y.: Thames and Hudson.


Best regards,
Lars Martin Fosse

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


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sat May 26 19:08:52 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 20:08:52 +0100
Subject: PIE
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.200852.0100.>

> are there any books that teach the best-we-can-at-this-time-construct PIE?
> Is there some authoritative book(s), which would help me understand PIE and
> consequently the development of the IE languages as seen today?

[Oh Moderator:  this is to add to your collection]

O J L Szemerenyi "Introduction to Indo-Euorepan Linguistics"  OUP 4th
edition 1990
    Despite its very conservative phonology, it is an essential book, since
it gives all the evidence and most of the theories, even when it disagrees
with the modern consensus.  I don't think one can study PIE without it.

P Baldi "An introduction to the Indo-European Languages"  Southern Illinois
University  1983
   A rather more light-weight book, but a good introduction with some
information about later developments of, and within, each dialect group.

Rami & Rami "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.

W P Lehmann "Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics"  (Routledge
1993).
   Rather more than an introduction, but good for post-beginners, laying out
some of the divergent ideas, and attempting to look under the surface.

R S P Beekes  "Comparative Indo-European Linguistics"  (Benjamins 1995)
   A laryngeal-friendly Szemerenyi, but without his incisive depth.  Still a
good one to have.

Peter


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Fri May 25 21:53:51 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 17:53:51 EDT
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <FRI.25.MAY.2001.175351.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/25/01 3:52:42 PM Mountain Daylight Time, edsel at glo.be
writes:

>

[ Moderator's note: Presumably something on word order. -- rma ]

-- or for that matter, there are certain situations (poetry) where "came a
man" can be used in English.


From g_sandi at hotmail.com  Sat May 26 11:56:33 2001
From: g_sandi at hotmail.com (Gabor Sandi)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 11:56:33 -0000
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.115633.0000.>

[ moderator edited ]

I agree that the expression "free word order" is something of a misnomer. In
heavily flexional languages (e.g. classical Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, as well
as my native Hungarian) you can mix up elements more than you can in, say,
English and Chinese, but every specific order other than the default one brings
some additional semantic or grammatical information.

E.g. in Hungarian, you can say "La'tom a kutya't" (I see the dog), and this is
the default (unmarked) order. If you say "A kutya't la'tom" (the dog I see),
there is a contextual inference: "I see the dog, but not something else that
has just been mentioned (e.g. the cat), or that I am thinking about". There is
definitely semantic information added by the changed word order. I would guess
that the difference between Latin "canem video" and "video canem" similarly
brings in some kind of inferential distinction, but I leave it to people
knowing more Latin than I do (this wouldn't be hard...) to tell us what this
difference is.

Hungarian leaves off the copula in the third person present (sing. or plural)
in sentences of the type "the house is big" and "he is the president", although
not in sentences like "he is in London". As a result, word order acquires
grammatical significance in the following pair of constructions:

"A ha'z piros" (the house is red)

"A piros ha'z" (the red house)

There is a problem, however, when we try to extrapolate from evidence in
flexional languages to PIE, and specifically to the issue of the origin of IE
personal endings in verbs. If, for example, the singular endings -m, -s, -t of
athematic verbs are to be derived from postposed personal pronouns, we are
looking at a stage in the language which may have been as isolating as modern
Chinese for all we know, with a fixed word order. They might have said:

*Wodon i es me (I am/was in the water)

*Wodon i es se (you are/were in the water)

*Wodon i es te (he/she/it is/was in the water)

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).

As for postposed particles for nouns (as the proposed *i for "in" above), there
are plenty of parallels in modern languages, from Hungarian "A hajo' a hi'd
ALATT van" (the boat is UNDER the bridge), to Japanese "Fune ga hashi NO SHITA
arimasu" (idem).

The coagulation of postposed particles and pronouns with preceding nominal and
verbal elements is for me one of the most fascinating aspects of pre-PIE
linguistics. I wonder what other participants in this group think about it?

With my best wishes to all,
Gabor Sandi


From blf10 at cus.cam.ac.uk  Sat May 26 18:08:15 2001
From: blf10 at cus.cam.ac.uk (bruce fraser)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 19:08:15 +0100
Subject: No Proto-Celtic: word order
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.190815.0100.>

I'm not conversant with the details for Latin, but in ancient Greek there
are three aspects of S, V, and O ordering which could usefully be
considered:

1) Clauses with explicit subject, ver b and object are in the minority
(around 30%), and, in fact, clauses with explicit subjects are also in the
minority, so 3-term and even 2-term (subject and verb) orderings are not,
strictly speaking, major features of the language. So all such typological
generalizations have severe limitations as models.

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.

3) The words themselves affect their order. Pronouns tend to precede verbs
not just if they are enclitic, and so (often) in second position, but
because they are always small: orthotonic personal pronouns like 'ego' and
demonstratives also normally precede verbs. So do nouns, because in
classical Greek they are usually smaller (verbs have more extensive
inflections. This may not apply to earlier Greek, where enclitic verbs were
common, or later Greek, where the change to a stress accent changes the
picture).

In sum, word order appears to reflect 'weight to the right' (cf. Behaghel
1909 and many subsequent commentators). I would not wish to bore with
statistical detail, or enumerate possible reasons (interesting though such
speculation might be) but simply suggest two general rules-of-thumb, which
might apply to all the languages we're studying:
1) 'structure' does not equal 'syntax': word morphology is also crucial.
2) 'clause' does not equal 'sentence': clause linking is also important.

Bruce Fraser


From xavier.delamarre at free.fr  Tue May 29 22:37:25 2001
From: xavier.delamarre at free.fr (Xavier Delamarre)
Date: Wed, 30 May 2001 00:37:25 +0200
Subject: No Proto-Celtic?
In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010522201339.00b60850@getmail.friesen.net>
Message-ID: <WED.30.MAY.2001.003725.0200.>

le 23/05/01 5:17, Stanley Friesen ? sarima at friesen.net a ?crit?:

> At 09:58 PM 5/20/01 +0200, Xavier Delamarre wrote:

>> And Calvert Warkins answered that both were probably wrong (his article
>> on syntax reprinted in his "Selected Writings", IBS), PIE being a flexional
>> language, with free word order (every student in Latin knows this) where the
>> SOV / VSO controversy has no relevance.

> 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.

    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'.

    It is striking the the SOV /SVO / VSO is a typical obsession of the
English speaking scholarly world, possibly due to the mother tongue where
word order is more important than in the other IE languages.

    I would rather recommend, as Watkins did, to learn PIE syntax in the
last three volumes of (Brugmann-)Delbrueck's Grundriss, than in Lehmann's or
Friedrich's books.

    XD


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sat May 26 04:42:03 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 00:42:03 EDT
Subject: Linguistic Succession in Historic Comparison:
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.004203.EDT.>

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.

This took place in a single generation; 20-40 years.  But only very small
groups of Nguni speakers were involved; they spread like a snowball rolling
downhill, sweeping up large numbers of individuals from other linguistic
groups, assimilating them through their systems of polygamous marriage and
'regimental' military organization.

Genetically, it would be virtually impossible to trace these migrations; they
were more of a cultural ripple in populations already in place, in strictly
_genetic_ terms.  Not much hard archaeological evidence, either, since the
material cultures are quite similar -- some differences in settlement pattern
and pottery.  Most of the distinctive Nguni material culture is highly
perishable in archaeological terms; organic materials.

There are millions of (Nguni) Matabele-speakers in Zimbabwe today, for
example.  Prior to the 1830's, that area was Shona-Karonga speaking.

The Matabele arrived from Zululand via the Transvaal, several tens of
thousands strong.  However, most of those tens of thousands were originally
Sotho-speaking natives of the Transvaal who'd been overrun by the original
small band from the Zulu country.

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.

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.


From alderson+mail at panix.com  Sat May 26 16:12:06 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 12:12:06 -0400
Subject: *G^EN-
In-Reply-To: <000901c0e448$7c25bc80$fbf1fea9@swbell.net>
 (proto-language@email.msn.com)
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.121206.0400.>

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.

								Rich Alderson


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sat May 26 18:57:01 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 19:57:01 +0100
Subject: *G^EN-
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.195701.0100.>

>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.

Peter


From jozo.kapovic at zg.tel.hr  Sun May 27 15:29:43 2001
From: jozo.kapovic at zg.tel.hr (=?windows-1250?Q?Mate_Kapovi=E6?=)
Date: Sun, 27 May 2001 17:29:43 +0200
Subject: FYI (pre-IE reconstructions)
Message-ID: <SUN.27.MAY.2001.172943.0200.>

-----Original Message-----
From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv at wxs.nl>
Date: 2001. travanj 05 11:05
Subject: FYI

>I've uploaded a pair of .doc's (for now) to http://home.planet.nl/~mcv
>on pre-Indo-European and pre-Basque phonological and morphological
>reconstructions.  Sorry for the cross-post.  Comments welcome.

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.

M. K.


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Mon May 28 06:53:52 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Mon, 28 May 2001 02:53:52 EDT
Subject: Genetic Descent/Verb Morphology
Message-ID: <MON.28.MAY.2001.025352.EDT.>

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.>>

(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. >>)

Just a quick note.  If we follow through on Dr White's formula above, we seem
to begin to have an "operational" definition of a "genetic relationship."

I presume that "finite verbal morphology" has been given trump card status
above because of the often repeated dictum that such morphology is the least
likely to be borrowed.  Or, as Dr. White seems to be suggesting, may never be
borrowed.

I'd just like to note what should be an interesting corollary to this
position.

If what Dr. White finds is true, then the absence of shared "finite verbal
morphology" in any two languages should put in doubt any "genetic
relationship" between those two languages - no matter what other shared
features might be present.

And of course by "shared" I don't mean by way of a reconstruction that
reconciles what are two different morphologies on their face.  Such
reconstructions are based on a genetic relationship already being
established.  Here, we are talking about a situation where the genetic
relationship is not yet established, and no reconstruction has been justified.

Also Dr. White seems to indicate that any "finite verbal morphology" from
native Laha grammar at all would overturn his hypothesis that these types of
mixed languages don't exist.

I'm wondering if such a mixed language does in fact exist - one that has
"finite verbal morphology" from both of two unrelated languages - whether
that would change his apparent point: that verb morphology is a way to
identify the real genetic lineage in these "mixed language" situations?

As to the observation that these mixed languages are somehow rare, I'd ask
how one would know that - if "(non-grammatical) lexicon,... nominal
morphology, derivational or non-finite verbal morphology, or (worse yet) mere
categories,..." (quoting Dr. White) are such unreliable indicators of genetic
relationship.  There seem to be a good many languages that have been related
to one another based on the items above, but not on shared finite verb
morphology.  Perhaps they are all just mixed languages?

Regard,
Steve Long


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Tue May 29 08:49:48 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Tue, 29 May 2001 09:49:48 +0100
Subject: Genetic Descent
In-Reply-To: <001301c0e3a8$36486960$fc2a63d1@texas.net>
Message-ID: <TUE.29.MAY.2001.094948.0100.>

--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.

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?

[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.

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

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?  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?

>> [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.

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

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?

>> 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.

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.

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?

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

No one is proposing a coin toss.  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?  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.

> Since
> borrowing of categories, without borrowing of specific morphmes to
> express these, is not relevant, the case in question is practically
> indentical to the case of Anglo-Romani.

Who says that the borrowing of categories is not relevant?  It appears that
you have just declared this by fiat.  Languages borrow words and morphemes
at least as often as they borrow grammatical categories.  So why is the
etymology of morphemes sacrosanct, but not the etymology of grammatical
categories and patterns?

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?

[LT]

>> Anyway, I now want to talk about another language, discussed by Thomason
>> in her new book.  That language is Laha, spoken in the Moluccas, where
>> the locally dominant language is a variety of Malay, which is distantly,
>> but not closely, related to Laha.  The principal investigator here is
>> James T. Collins:

>>   J. T. Collins. 1980. 'Laha, a language of the central Moluccas'.
>>   Indonesia Circle 23: 3-19.

>> 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."

>> But now consider the following.  The Laha are reportedly regarded by
>> themselves, and by others, as a distinct ethnic group with a distinct
>> language.  All Laha-speakers are also fluent in Malay, but other speakers
>> of Malay do not speak Laha.

>         The Romani are regarded by themselves, and by others, as a
>         distinct ethnic group with (where it survives) a distinct
> language.  All Anglo-Romani speakers are fluent in English, but other
> speakers of English do not speak Anglo-Romani.  Why come to a different
> conclusion in the two cases, unless coin tossing is the latest fashion?

What is this thing with coin-tossing?  No one is suggesting any such thing.
What T and K are suggesting is that every case of contact is different, and
that each case must be carefully examined before any conclusions can be
drawn: we cannot simply decide in advance, by fiat, what is possible and
what is not.  Is that unreasonable?

>> The conclusion of Collins, and of Thomason, is
>> that Laha has developed as follows: it started out as a language entirely
>> distinct from Malay, but, under enormous pressure from Malay, it has
>> gradually, in piecemeal fashion, absorbed more and more Malay grammar,
>> until today the grammar is almost entirely Malay, and only a few bits of
>> Laha grammar survive -- for the moment, since it is possible that these
>> few fragments will also give way to Malay grammar in the future.

>> 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.

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?

>> Is this
>> reasonable?  Earlier, David rejected a similar scenario for another
>> language as impossible in principle.

>> 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"?

> 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.

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.

>> (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 woyld 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.

All right -- Kormakiti Arabic, then.

[snip]

>         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.

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.

> 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.

To be honest, I can't see why this is relevant.  The point is, in Collins's
interpretation, that Laha grammar was originally different from Malay
grammar but no longer is, except in a few details.

> But, operating in the semi-dark (Thomason is
> routinely vague about the facts of her example languages), I see no reason
> to think that the situation is not comparable to Anglo-Romani or Mednyj
> Aleut, which are surely not mutually comprehensible with English or
> Russian respectively (or for that matter Romani or Aleut), but which
> nonetheless can be identified (even by Thomason, in the first case) as
> forms of "abruptly re-lexified" English or Russian.

I am not so sure, but I'll see what I can find out, when the last pile of
scripts disappears from my desk.

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  Wed May 30 14:29:56 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Wed, 30 May 2001 14:29:56 -0000
Subject: Pelasgian/was Etruscans
Message-ID: <WED.30.MAY.2001.142956.0000.>

Renato Piva (20 May 2001) wrote:

>The fact is that
>'kypeiron is a word found in ancient Greek, and Greek is an IE language.

According to A.M. Davies, no more than 40% of the Greek lexicon is
transparently IE. 8% is known to be non-IE, and the remaining 52% has no
recognized etymology. Even if half of this remainder turned out to be IE
(unattested in other branches), a third of Greek vocabulary would be non-IE
in origin. Of course, the bulk of commonly used Greek words is IE, as are
most of the inflections.

>Or, you can assume Etruscan intermediation for li:lium (with [as]similation
>l_r > l_l) and citrus.

If this assimilation (l_r > l_l) is typical of Etruscan, why do we find the
praenomina Larce, Larza, Larth, Laris, Laru, etc., the gentilicia Larce,
Larcna, Larthu, Larna, Larste, Lartle, etc., the noun <larca> 'type of
vessel', the words <larezul> and <lursth>, and the inscription <lur-anus>?
Etruscan clearly prefers /a/ between initial /l/ and /r/, but there is no
tendency to assimilate the /r/.

Furthermore, many of the West Romance reflexes of this word have l_r: Sp. &
Port. <lirio>, Catal. <lliri>, Sard. <gliri>, Prov., Piem., & Lomb. <liri>,
Pign. <lirru>. Italian has retained the second /l/ but fortited the first in
<giglio>. The simplest explanation is that Romance-speakers have a strong
tendency to _dissimilate_ l_l into l_r which continues the phenomenon seen
in Lat. <a:la:ris>, <mi:lita:ris>, etc. It would be very odd if speakers
adopted an assimilated form only to have their descendents reverse the
process. Therefore, I think we see in <li:lium> the more conservative
sequence of consonants. The Greek form <leirion> is in my view not
systematically dissimilated, but the Attican dialect of Pelasgian converted
*-eil- to *-eir-, while the Italian dialect retained *-eil- > Lat. -i:l-.
The other examples are Gk. *peirins ~ Lat. <pi:lentum> and Gk. <seirios>
'blazing' (epithet of dog-star; cf. gloss "seir = ho he:lios" (Suidas,
Hsch.)) ~ Lat. Si:lius (gent.).

Etruscan intermediation does an equally poor job of getting Lat. <citrus>
out of Gk. <kedros>. Generally, short /e/ in an initial Greek syllable
remains /e/ in the Etruscan borrowing: Cerun < Geruone:s, Ecapa < Hekabe:,
Ec(h)tur < Hekto:r, Thet(h)is < Thetis, etc.

>IMHO, in lack of further material the best and most honest solution would be a
><non liquet>.  For pi:lentum, one should be even more prudent. The meaning is
>not the same as in Greek: *peirins, -inthos (the Nom. is not attested!) is a
>"wicker basket tied upon the cart", while Lat. pi:lentum means more
>specifically "voiture de gala ` quatre roues, qui servait au transport des
>matrones dans les cirimonies publiques" according to Ernout-Meillet. Besides
>that, the word is not attested before classical time (Verg., Hor.), and
>Porphyrius says it is a Gaul word (cf. carpentum).

One can be prudent without throwing up the hands and grumbling "nihil
liquet". The transfer of sense between *peirins and <pi:lentum> is no more
difficult than some of the etymologies accepted by most IE scholars. I don't
claim that Pelasgian derivation is established, but the pattern of
peir-/pi:l- vs. leir-/li:l- is suggestive. When enough patterns have been
observed which fit neither the accepted scheme for derivation from PIE nor
any correspondence expected for direct or indirect borrowing, a good case
can be made for derivation from substrate. As for the other specific
objections, _most_ Latin and Greek words are not attested before classical
time, and the claim that a word is Gaulish doesn't mean that the base must
be _native_ Gaulish.

>What you call "one assumption" is in fact also a set of assumptions, some of
>which are implicit:

By "one assumption" I was referring only to the group of words represented
in Greek and Latin which constitute the "core" of the reconstructed
Pelasgian vocabulary, according to hypothesis. Extending the matter to West
Semitic, Armenian, or what-not indeed requires further assumptions.

>You assume 1. that kyparissos is the same as Hebr. go:pher (which is an
>unknown tree translated in numerous ways in the Septuagint; o.k., one of them
>is kyparissos, but that may be due to phonetical association; the name of the
>cypress in Hebrew is bro:s' or bro:t);

There are several misunderstandings here. I know of only one occurrence of
<go:pher> in the OT (Gen. 6:14), where it modifies the construct for 'wood'
in the expression <te:bhath !'ac,ey-gho:pher> 'ark of gopher-wood'.
Comparison with expressions like <!e:c, s^emen> 'oleaster' lit. 'oil-tree'
indicates that <go:pher> is not the name of a tree as such, but the name of
something it produces. The derivative <gophriyth> 'sulfur, brimstone'
suggests that <go:pher> means 'resin' vel sim. Eduard Selleslagh has
proposed 'glue, sticky stuff' as the original meaning.

It is not necessary for the Hebrew name for 'cypress' to be cognate with the
Greek. By hypothesis, Hebrew acquired <go:pher> 'glue, resin' vel sim. from
Pelasgian. The wood denoted by the Hebrew phrase doesn't even have to be
cypress-wood. There are plenty of cases of IE dendronyms referring to
different trees in different branches of IE. For that matter, Heb.
<b'ro:s^/b'ro:th> can mean 'cypress' or 'pine', and the Aramaic cognate
means 'juniper'.

>2. that there is no borrowing in either way, because both words come from a
>common "Pelasgian" source;

That was my "one assumption" concerning the group of words.

>3. that -issos is not Greek;

There are certainly Greek words of IE origin like <dissos> 'double' and
<melissa> 'honeybee'. I never claimed or assumed that all words having
particular endings were necessarily derived from substrate. The fact that
numerous toponyms and phytonyms end in -ssos and -nthos is highly suggestive
of substratal derivation, but it doesn't make these endings etymological
markers. If I appeared to imply that, I'm sorry.

>4.  that the suffixation had no function (otherwise, it could have remained
>*kyper, *kypar, *go:pher or the like).

I have _never_ claimed that -issos or any identifiable morpheme has no
function. If you recall the Etruscan discussion with MCV, I was the one
arguing vehemently against the interpretation of Beekes and van der Meer,
who consider Etr. -thi to be an optional (i.e. functionless) suffix. You'll
see Berlusconi taking a vow of poverty before you see me supporting
linguistic forms without functions.

In the Greek words of presumed Pelasgian origin, I regard -issos or more
generally -ssos as a denominative suffix: it produces nouns from other
nouns. I'm sure I've posted this opinion before. If *kupar- means 'glue,
resin, fragrance' vel sim., <kuparissos> denotes an object (such as a tree)
associated with it.

>In R. Lanszweert's reconstruction there is nothing weard about regular
>sound-correspondences, and the semantic analogy involved is not just <funny
>stuff>.  Assumptions such as the ones suggested have to be discussed
>seriously.
>Whether you agree or not. It is very easy to hide behind a wall of <subtrate>,
>but it may lead only to deviating attempts such as those one can read in the
>works of such omnicomparatists as Trombetti, van Windekens, Furnie, etc..

In my opinion the problem with Trombetti and his successors isn't "hiding
behind substrate" but failing to recognize that comparative work requires
the identification of _patterns_, not merely _resemblances_. Larry Trask had
a rather eloquent posting on this topic recently. Anyone can find
resemblances between any languages, and there has never been a shortage of
impressionistic "decipherments" of Etruscan having all the value of spilled
alphabet soup.

>IE languages were able to form compounds, so in my view there was only a
>limited need of loans. Just look at what German or Modern Greek are doing. But
>beware:  I'm not saying there were no loans at all. We only need to be careful
>with what we call <substrate>: <substrate> risks to become a waste-basket for
>anything difficult to analyse. Many of the words for which we do invoke
>subtrate may only be obscured compounds waiting to be rediscovered. Such Greek
>words do not occur in other IE languages, as they were specific of the Greek
>contest.  But the same may apply to any single IE language, of course.

And the same problem that you see in substrates is lurking in the method of
compound-recovery. Obscured compounds can fill a waste-basket just as
quickly as substratal forms. In fact, if the method involves free-lance
restoration of "lost" consonants, we have dragged ourselves down to the
alphabet-soup shenanigans of the "IE Etruscanists".

>> Then why are there still Greek words in -iskos?

>Because -iskos and -issos differ in expressivity: -issos can be the mycenaean
>expressive variation of -iskos (through *-iskjos). Exactly as there are both
>'polemos and 'ptolemos < *pjolemos, 'polis and 'ptolis < *pjolis, 'skyla and
>'syla < *ssyla < *skjyla, etc. Expressivity is a reality in every language -
>or shall we say that 'ptolemos, 'ptolis ans 'syla are substrate words?

I find this extremely difficult to take seriously. The function of <ptolis>
and <ptolemos> is to make preceding syllables long by position, which is a
mechanical feature of poetry and has nothing to do with expressivity.
Admitting arbitrary "expressive" phonetic mutations is the linguistic
equivalent of inviting Hell's Angels to your daughter's wedding. It should
be crystal-clear to any sane comparativist that no useful results can emerge
from such anarchy.

>I don't see any difficulty in pronouncing *pk'u-perih2. Can you pronounce all
>of the reconstructed words? If you don't believe that such "complicated" words
>may exist, take a look at the Kartvelian languages, or simply try to pronounce
>Georg.  vprtskvnis, a regular verb form meaning "they let us pay for it".  Of
>course, the initial cluster in *pk'u-perih2 was quite instable, thus it was
>simplified very soon to k- in Gk and c- in Lat., while it led to fs'- in Av.
>and ks.- in AI.

If you see no difficulty in pronouncing this, why would _native_ speakers
have any trouble with the initial cluster? Isn't instability just another
waste-basket for etymological difficulty?

>> How common is the typology of ejectives with laryngeals?

>I think this question doesn't apply here, or am I misunderstanding you?

I misunderstood your notation. I thought ['] indicated the preceding stop
was glottalized. Not that it matters ...

>Have you read [R. Lanszweert's paper]?

It's on my reading list, and I'll get to it when I can. In the interest of
good taste, I'll avoid further comments until I've read it.

>Ask the ancient Greeks. Why is resemblance to a beetle a more plausible
>connection than to the typical, hideous hum of the engine in the case of a
>famous car?

Because the car in question is being contrasted with a hundred boxy-looking
others.

>> For that matter, how distinctive is a
>> sheep-spit compared to a goat-spit, hog-spit, or (most aptly) bull-spit?

>Ask the Indoeuropeans, but *pek'u- may also mean cattle. In any case, Lat.
>cuspis comes from *pk'u-spid, see P. Thieme, Radices postnominales, in; Akten
>d. VII.  Fachtagung etc., Wiesbaden 1985.

I'll withhold pkomment until I've read the kpaper. I'm still puzzled by the
notion that Proto-Greeks would retain 'sheep' or 'cattle' or anything as a
prefix for something looking like a spit.

>I think I was wrong in what the name of the Island is concerned, but I guess
>you wouldn't be right, either. I probably mixed it up with Gk. 'obeloi "spits
>used as money" (in Plutarch and elsewhere according to LSJ). I'd like to
>correct myself: It seems that the name of the metal is secundary to the name
>of the Island. In turn, the Island seems to be named after the colour (henna)
>won from the plant called kypros - which by chance is also the colour of the
>metal.  This word is of Semitic origin (Hebr. kopher), as already stated by E.
>Masson and others.

This makes as much sense as anything I've seen. Henna was used for covering
women's nails with a reddish hue, so Heb. <ko:pher> lit. 'covering' (also
'village', 'pitch', 'ransom') was applied. The resemblance between this and
<go:pher> seems fortuitous.

>Gk. 'kypeiron and ky'parissos have probably nothing to do with kypros or
>Cyprus (or copper). If you still wonder, how a spit can be the origin of the
>name of a tree, see Ovidius, Met.  10, 106: metas imitata cupressus "the
>cypress looking like the obelisk" (obelisk is diminutive of obelos "spit").

Fine, but it's not *oiobelos, *bouobelos, or the like, is it?

DGK


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sat May 26 03:55:30 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 23:55:30 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <FRI.25.MAY.2001.235530.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/25/01 5:16:39 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com
writes:

> Nor would it be surprising if bride and groom sat down afterwards and enjoyed
> a celebratory dinner of fallow deer, which they would have called *kerwos -
> what PIE speakers may have called it in Anatolia.

--  no, that was their word for "teryaki BBQ giraffe".

There's just as much evidence for that.

In fact, just about as much evidence as there is for the whole "Anatolian
hypothesis", which is to say, zero.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sat May 26 04:06:43 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 00:06:43 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.000643.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/25/01 5:16:39 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com
writes:

> Words never changed meaning back then, like they do now.

-- well, this is a little odd, considering your argument is that a langauge
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.

Not to mention the names of deities, ceremonies and poetic kennings.

After 5000 years and 7000 miles of separation.

In which case, to account for their current degree of divergence, the Romance
languages must have started diverging around... when?  2000 BCE?

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


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Thu May 31 07:47:01 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 03:47:01 EDT
Subject: Fallow Deer/A Closer Look
Message-ID: <THU.31.MAY.2001.034701.EDT.>

On 14 May 2001, at 9:24, Rick Mc Callister wrote:
<<Is there a known etymology for <dama> and Greek <tame>?>>

In a message dated 5/19/2001 10:27:19 PM, bmscott at stratos.net replied:
<<For <tame>, Gk. <dama:n> 'to tame', and Lat. <doma:re>
'to tame, subdue' Watkins (2000) gives PIE *demH2-.>>

It's a bit more complex in Greek and Latin.  I'm not sure about <dama:n>, I
don't see that particular form.

The development perhaps points to the transfer of the word from cattle and
horses to deer.  The Romans kept herds of deer in compounds as may have been
the practice in the Near East.  Note that while the fallow deer is modern
taxa "dama", the official taxa "damaliscus" refers to the "damalis" as cow
(-like.)

As far as Greek goes:
damazo: - to tame, to break in, to subdue (breaking in an untamed mule of six
years in Homer as: "damasasthai";  pres. part. "damazo:n ti" in Xenophon.)
This form of verb seems to be "a derivative."

damasis - taming, subduing

Damaios - interpreted as Horse-Tamer, epithet of Poseidon

Damasippos - horse-breaking, of Athena

Damate:r - Dor., Arc., Thess. and Boeot. form of goddess Demeter

damase:no:r - man-subduing (lion)

damasikondulos - subduing with the knuckles (boxer)

da:mante:r - tamer (of wild animals?)

da:male:s - subduer (Eros)/ young steer

da:ma:lis - young cow, heifer

dama:los - interpreted as perhaps a calf

damalopodia - calves' feet

da:ma:le:phagos - beef-eating

da:ma:le:botos - interpreted as browsed by heifers

dme:sis - taming, breaking ("hippo:n" - Iliad17:476)

dme:te:r - tamer (early)

dmo:s - slave or animal taken in war (cattle raid or perhaps the hunt?)

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.

In Latin:

damma (dama) - "a general name for beasts of the deer kind; a fallow deer,
buck, doe, antelope, chamois" (L-S); also an early word for "venison"

damium  -  an animal sacrifice "in honorem Bonae Deae"; the part sacrificed

damalio - a calf

damula - interpreted as either a fawn or a small fallow-deer

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


From X99Lynx at aol.com  Sat May 26 06:37:11 2001
From: X99Lynx at aol.com (X99Lynx at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 02:37:11 EDT
Subject: Deer and Yellow words
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.023711.EDT.>

Regarding the posts from Hans-Werner Hatting and Brian M. Scott below, I
think I need to mention some things:

1. Note that I used "cf." in (... deer is "jelen" (cf., Pol.,"zielony",...).
In law, cf. in a citation means "compare".  It is somewhat noncommittal,
meant to note a parallel that may be relevant in some indirect way.  In
paleontology and taxonomy, "cf." refers to a tentative identification, one
that may not be correct.

Obviously, both of these correspondents feel that the etymologies here are
settled and there is absolutely no connection between the words.  I prefer to
think this is something about which reasonable persons can differ reasonably.

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

3.  Because of the above, I must honestly find such etymologies as "*el2-)
originally" meaning "red, brown" and *g'hel- "originally" meaning "green,
yellow" as unsatisfactory and dubious.  But once again this is the type of
thing that reasonable persons may differ about reasonably.  When these terms
eventually, due to some material process or by analogy, came to mean colors,
they were probably originally based on specific things or actions - not on a
concept of independent colors.  What those objects were is a different
question.

And of course I do not know how it would affect these reconstructions if for
example "*el2-" and *g'hel- originally referred to the same thing - e.g., a
deer hide - or different parts of a deer - antlers and hides.  Again, I
suspect it is likely that these words refer to by-products as to the live
animal.  Homer never mentions an elephant using the elephant word.  The word
is only used to describe ivory.

4. The reason that I cf'ed - Pol.,<zielony> - was because it sent to me with
a group of other words - <jalos-sko>, cow; <gala:z:> (?), branch;
<jalow-iec>, barren or withered field or forest; BUT SEE <plowa>, flaxen,
yellow > <plowa zwierzyna>, red deer - and together with other examples
including some Hebrew el- words that do seem somehow to connect antlers and
branches, if I understand correctly.  That connection does make sense.  Wood
and antler were worked in much the same way and some start out looking
structurally pretty much the same.  Antlers branch.  Wood branches. Both can
be colored brown- yellow- green (unripe) - red.  Thus, maybe, elms and elks
together, as mentioned below.

I originally wrote:
(BTW, in Slavic, deer is "jelen" (cf., Pol.,"zielony", green, definitely not
red; cf, Greek, "chalkeios") which might connect it to the "yellow deer"
which is what the fallow is called in Iran. "Fallow" might even suggest the
same color connection.)

In a message dated 5/22/2001 11:37:40 PM, bmscott at stratos.net writes:
<<Aren't <jel-> and <ziel-> here just the expected reflexes of PIE *el-
and *g^hel- resp.?  And if so, how is Pol. <zielony> relevant?>>

In a message dated 5/25/2001 6:42:05 PM, hwhatting at hotmail.com writes:
<< Slavic "jelen'" is not connected to Polish "zielony". "jelen'" is originally
an n-stem formation (Proto-Slavic *el-en-) of the root PIE *el- (whither "elm"
and "elk"), which Watkins (AHD of IE roots s.v. el2-) quotes with an original
meaning "red, brown", while "zielony" goes back to a Slavic "zelenu0-" ("u0" is
to denote the back yer) belonging to the PIE root *g'hel- "green, yellow". >>

Steve Long


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sat May 26 04:10:06 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 00:10:06 EDT
Subject: European Genetics/IE
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.001006.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/25/01 6:31:05 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
philjennings at juno.com writes:

> but mostly the language conversion swept clean over a vast area.

-- this is a non-argument.  Exactly the same thing happened in the spread of
Indo-Iranian over an equally vast, equally densely populated area in the
Bronze Age.  If there, why not earlier in Europe?


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sat May 26 04:19:51 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 00:19:51 EDT
Subject: European Genetics/IE
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.001951.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/25/01 6:31:05 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
philjennings at juno.com writes:

> Because if IE stemmed from a creole, even one buried a long time in its
> past, that fact would be detected.  Is this really true?

-- ah... yes.  Creoles have highly distinctive, and extremely similar,
characteristics.

PIE has none of those characteristics; in fact, it's at the extreme opposite
end of the linguistic spectrum.  For example, it's a very highly inflected
language.

> As for the first, the Bactria Margiana Archaeology Complex apparently sprang
> into bloom around 2300bce, and some people think it's the Indo-Iranian
> "homeland."  The big Kurgan breakout was around 2300bce or not much before

-- ah... no.  The mainstream consensus would posit that the original PIE
speakers were roughly coterminous with the Sredny Stog (4500-3500 BCE) and
Yamna cultures of the eastern Ukraine and western Kazakhstan.

The European spread of PIE in the area between the Rhine delta and the Volga
would be associated with the Corded Ware/Battle Axe culture and then its
Beaker offshoot, from around 3200 BCE through the third millenium.

The eastern extension would be the Anafasevo culture of roughly the same
period, which brought the neolithic-pastoral economy to the eastern part of
the steppes, and is often cited as a percusor of the Tocharians.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sat May 26 04:32:01 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 00:32:01 EDT
Subject: European Genetics/IE
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.003201.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/25/01 6:31:05 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
philjennings at juno.com writes:

> As for the first, the Bactria Margiana Archaeology Complex apparently sprang
> into bloom around 2300bce, and some people think it's the Indo-Iranian
> "homeland."

-- ah... no.

The mainstream consensus would posit that the original PIE speakers were
roughly coterminous with the Sredny Stog (4500-3500 BCE) and  Yamna cultures
of the eastern Ukraine and western Kazakhstan.  This coincides pretty well
exactly with the consensus linguistic terminus ad quem for PIE, and has all
the right technologies.

The European spread of PIE in the area between the Rhine delta and the Volga
would be associated with the Corded Ware/Battle Axe culture and then its
Beaker offshoot, from around 3200 BCE through the third millenium.

That is the last big archaeological "turnover" in that area before historic
times, with massive and very rapid shifts in burial practice, settlement
patterns, and economies --
a huge area between Holland and Moscow was "reformatted" culturally within
the space of a few centuries.

The eastern extension would be the Anafasevo culture of roughly the same
period, which brought the neolithic-pastoral economy to the eastern part of
the steppes, and is often cited as a percusor of the Tocharians.

By the late 2000's BCE we're on the border of the Andronovo period in the
eastern steppes, thought (with assoicated cultures to the west) to be
specifically Indo-Iranian, and giving us very early chariot burials with
distinct links to Vedic ritual practice.   The Indo-Europeanization of the
Iranian plateau and northwestern India -- post-2000 BCE.

Meanwhile, movement into the Balkans (or, much less likely, through the
Caucasus) brought the proto-Anatolian speakers to Anatolia sometime between
3500 and 2500 BCE, probably towards the earlier part of that periodl

So by roughly 2500  BCE, a fairly uniform field of PIE dialects would extend
from the Atlantic to Gansu in China, after a dispersal starting in the
mid-fourth-millenium BCE.

These would already be undergoing differentiation, but the central and
western dialects would still be mutually comprehensible -- from Balto-Slavic
to Germanic-Italic-Celtic; the Graeco-Armenian and Indo-Iranian zones would
be diverging somewhat more (satemization, for instance), and Anatolian rather
more so.

In the next thousand to two thousand years, the various dialects would assume
more-or-less their early historic ranges and start to assume the
characteristics we reconstruct as Proto-Celtic, Proto-Italic, and
Proto-Germanic.


From JoatSimeon at aol.com  Sat May 26 04:50:27 2001
From: JoatSimeon at aol.com (JoatSimeon at aol.com)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 00:50:27 EDT
Subject: European Genetics/IE
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.005027.EDT.>

In a message dated 5/25/01 6:31:05 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
philjennings at juno.com writes:

> It seems that the IE-Kurganites forcibly converted western Europe
> to their language, fighting uphill against a population gradient of
> established

-- nobody is talking about hordes of frenzied Aryans slashing their way out
of the Ukraine and into the works of comparative philologists.

It's more productive to think of a set of migrating memes, carried by people
-- often fairly small numbers, although (crucially) _locally_ dominant.

A society which has better methods of assimilating foreigners can "eat out"
one that has no such mechanisms in a few generations, and no large dramatic
conquests are necessary.  It's more like a cultural reorganization.

Remember, we're talking about pre-State forms of social organization, without
clear boundaries or means of acting in concert over large areas.

If a band of People X move in, there's no large scale organization to throw
them out.

If they have a method of attracting individuals -- say they're patrilocal,
polygamous, and have a system of young people attaching themselves to
chieftain's households  or being initiated into phratries or age-sets --
their numbers can grow quite rapidly and they can take in outsiders _as
individuals_.

If they're also more mobile and more aggressive, you don't get vast campaigns
of conquest, but a series of local brawls with a fairly uniform outcome;
eventually, each area becomes the source of new swarms of small groups hiving
off.

Area A ==> Area B ==> Area C, and so forth, and by the time you're in Area X,
virtually none of the _genes_ come from Area A.  But the _memes_ do - and
language is a meme.


From philjennings at juno.com  Fri May 25 23:47:06 2001
From: philjennings at juno.com (philjennings at juno.com)
Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 18:47:06 -0500
Subject: thy thigh, etc. (external sandhi in English)
Message-ID: <FRI.25.MAY.2001.184706.0500.>

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 edsel at glo.be  Sat May 26 08:49:21 2001
From: edsel at glo.be (Eduard Selleslagh)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 10:49:21 +0200
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.104921.0200.>

----- 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]
[snip]
> 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.

Very much like English.

Ed.


From petegray at btinternet.com  Sat May 26 18:43:09 2001
From: petegray at btinternet.com (petegray)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 19:43:09 +0100
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.194309.0100.>

> .  If we look at the consecutive editions of any good desk
> dictionary of English, we find that these become steadily larger over time,
> ....  It seems that very many of the new words
> do not replace anything:

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  Sat May 26 20:22:36 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 15:22:36 -0500
Subject: thy thigh etc. (external sandhi in English)
In-Reply-To: <00a801c0e3c1$eb1b44c0$9c35073e@xpoxkjlf>
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.152236.0500.>

[snip]

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

[snip]

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

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


From acnasvers at hotmail.com  Mon May 28 15:19:26 2001
From: acnasvers at hotmail.com (Douglas G Kilday)
Date: Mon, 28 May 2001 15:19:26 -0000
Subject: thy thigh etc.
Message-ID: <MON.28.MAY.2001.151926.0000.>

Larry Trask (24 May 2001) wrote:

>[DGK]
>>Excuse my skepticism, but I can't believe the _net_ number of contentives
>>in a given language is growing constantly. As new contentives enter a
>>language, others exit. Lexica don't have rubber walls.

>[LT]
>Debatable.  If we look at the consecutive editions of any good desk
>dictionary of English, we find that these become steadily larger over time,
>in spite of the best efforts of lexicographers to prune any items which
>seem to have dropped out of use.  It seems that very many of the new words
>do not replace anything: 'geopathic', 'mogul' (in the skiing sense),
>'cellphone', 'hahnium', and, of course, 'tzatziki'.

[DGK]
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. 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.

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.

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.

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.


From alderson+mail at panix.com  Sat May 26 16:26:39 2001
From: alderson+mail at panix.com (Rich Alderson)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 12:26:39 -0400
Subject: hang-ing by a thread of phonetic similarity [was: Re: Return of
 the minimal pairs]
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.122639.0400.>

In response to Paul Cohen's posting regarding the status of [h] and [N] as
allophones of a single phoneme in English, both Max Wheeler and Larry Trask
bring in the notion of phonetic similarity.

As I was taught it, "phonetic similarity" was introduced into classical
phonemics precisely to counter the argument that complementary distribution
(originally the only criterion in the classical theory) required so defining
them.

								Rich Alderson


From connolly at memphis.edu  Sun May 27 01:41:18 2001
From: connolly at memphis.edu (Leo A. Connolly)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 20:41:18 -0500
Subject: Phonemes of New York Dialect
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.204118.0500.>

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.  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.

Leo Connolly


From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi  Sat May 26 11:14:06 2001
From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 14:14:06 +0300
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <140908378.3199690958@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.141406.0300.>

On Thu, 24 May 2001, Larry Trask wrote:

> --On Sunday, May 20, 2001 6:11 am -0400 "Douglas G. Wilson"
> <douglas at nb.net> wrote:

>> Just a footnote, not intended to invalidate the point about initial /D/.

>> Are there "non-grammatical" English words beginning with /D/?

>> I will take as a working definition of "English word": "any word which
>> appears in a conventional English-language dictionary, excluding proper
>> names". I also exclude pronunciations which are designated as foreign, if
>> an alternative "English" pronunciation is given.

>> I find two:

>> "dhal" /Dal/ (an Arabic letter);

>> "duinhewassel" /DIn at was@l/ (a Scots designation of minor nobility, variant
>> of "duniewassal").

>> Marginal examples, true ... slightly better perhaps than the imaginary
>> river dhelta.

> Ah, splendid, and many thanks.  These words are not in my desk dictionary,
> and I didn't know them -- and me a Scrabble-player, too.  I happen to know
> that 'dhal' is legal in British tournament Scrabble in another sense.  I
> don't know if the second is, but I don't suppose I'll ever get a chance to
> play it anyway.  Can't recall the last time I played a 12-letter word.

Not quite so fast, Larry.  These may be splendid for your scrabble
strategy, but they don't don't much affect the Engish initial [T] - [D]
situation.

The definition of 'dhal' as "(an Arabic letter)" does not tell the story.
It is not the name of any Arabic letter, but it is the name of the letter
that represents the sound [D].  As such it fills the same ecological niche
as English 'edh'.  So 'dhal', despite its lack of capitalization is the
name of a specific person, place, or thing); it is the name of the symbol
used to represent the sound [D] in Arabic.  If this makes it an English
sound, so then are all the names of Arabic letters English sounds.  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.  You can use 'dhal' in scrabble because it
is in the English dictionary and it is not capitalized, just as you can
use 'psi' and 'xi' in scrabble, but that doesn't mean that they affect
English phonology except in a very peripheral way.

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.  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.  Its
inclusion is completely arbitrary.

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').

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

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Sat May 26 20:14:57 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 15:14:57 -0500
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <140908378.3199690958@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.151457.0500.>

[snip]

dhal, however is /dhal/ rather than /Dal/ --if you're talking about Indian food

>Ah, splendid, and many thanks.  These words are not in my desk dictionary,
>and I didn't know them -- and me a Scrabble-player, too.  I happen to know
>that 'dhal' is legal in British tournament Scrabble in another sense.  I
>don't know if the second is, but I don't suppose I'll ever get a chance to
>play it anyway.  Can't recall the last time I played a 12-letter word.

>Larry Trask

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


From rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu  Sat May 26 20:17:36 2001
From: rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu (Rick Mc Callister)
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 15:17:36 -0500
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <140908378.3199690958@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SAT.26.MAY.2001.151736.0500.>

[snip]

	Another <dh-> word that should be acceptable in Scrabble is dhole.
Perhaps dhoti

>Ah, splendid, and many thanks.  These words are not in my desk dictionary,
>and I didn't know them -- and me a Scrabble-player, too.  I happen to know
>that 'dhal' is legal in British tournament Scrabble in another sense.  I
>don't know if the second is, but I don't suppose I'll ever get a chance to
>play it anyway.  Can't recall the last time I played a 12-letter word.

>Larry Trask

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


From sarima at friesen.net  Sun May 27 13:50:24 2001
From: sarima at friesen.net (Stanley Friesen)
Date: Sun, 27 May 2001 06:50:24 -0700
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <141000341.3199692486@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <SUN.27.MAY.2001.065024.0700.>

At 11:28 AM 5/24/01 +0100, Larry Trask wrote:

>Let me clarify this.  The point I was trying to make is this: not everything
>which is *true* of English is linguistically significant.  ...

How true.

>Take another case or two.  The rules governing the possible word-initial
>consonant clusters in English clearly permit the initial clusters /skl-/
>and /gj-/ (second = US /gy-/).  ..., and the obsolescent and
>possibly expressive word 'gewgaw' -- 'obsolescent', because my students
>don't know it.

Hmm, I do not pronounce this with /gj/.  But perhaps because it *is*
obsolescent, and my pronunciation comes only from seeing it in writing.  (I
pronounce it goo-gah);

>And I was arguing that the seeming absence of initial [D] in English
>lexical items is likewise a historical accident, and not a significant fact
>about English phonology.

This seems likely to me, at least in most dialects.  One post just
distributed suggests that in at least one Australian dialect /D/ and /T/
are still allophones.

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


From whiting at cc.helsinki.fi  Tue May 29 15:15:23 2001
From: whiting at cc.helsinki.fi (Robert Whiting)
Date: Tue, 29 May 2001 18:15:23 +0300
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a
 morpheme?)
In-Reply-To: <125018638.3199426918@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <TUE.29.MAY.2001.181523.0300.>

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 'tauchen'.  If [T] and
>> [D] contrast in 'thigh' and 'thy', then so do [c,] and [x] in
>> German.

> No.  The German contrast depends crucially on the presence of a morpheme
> boundary.  The English one does not.

> [on my minimal pair 'Than' (for 'Thandy') and 'than']

>> It is not a minimal pair as long as there is a morpheme
>> boundary involved.

> But there isn't.

>> Unless, of course, you claim that morpheme boundaries are not
>> phonological conditions.

> I do not.

> [on my list of near-minimal pairs like 'this' / 'thistle']

>> And every one of your near minimal pairs involves a morpheme
>> boundary after [D].

> Certainly not.

>> You stick by your contention that morpheme boundaries are not
>> phonological conditions then?

> No.  I never said any such thing.  It is beyond dispute that
> morpheme boundaries can have phonological consequences.
> Accordingly, it seems to be in order for our theories of
> phonology to take morpheme boundaries into account.

> [LT]

>>> The observation that initial [D] occurs only in
>>> "grammatical" words and initial [T] only in "lexical" words is
>>> just that: an observation.

>> Quite true.  But the observation that morphemes are units of
>> meaning is, I think, more than an observation.  It is a basic
>> principle of how human language works.  Duality of patterning
>> says that morphemes are made up of phonemes and that morphemes
>> have meaning (iconically, indexically, or symbolically) but that
>> phonemes do not have any inherent meaning.  Initial [D] in
>> English is a morpheme because it has meaning associated with it.
>> Admittedly, it is grammatical meaning rather than lexical
>> meaning, but meaning nonetheless.

> I'm sorry, but I must disagree flatly.  I have no problem with
> grammatical morphemes, or even with semantically and functionally
> empty morphemes.  But I cannot see that word-initial [D] is ever
> a morpheme at all.

Then please read Z. Harris, _Methods in Structural Linguistics_ (Chicago
1951), 192-93 and G. Trager, _Language and Languages_, (1972), 76-79, and
tell me why their analyses are wrong.

> First, word-initial [D] has no recognizable meaning or function.

Okay, since you refuse to read it, let me read it to you.  Z.
Harris, _Methods in Structural Linguistics_ (1951), p. 192:

   Similarly, in _there_, _then_, _thither_, _this_, _that_,
etc., we obtain by the Appendix to 12.22 a segment /D/ with
demonstrative meaning, plus various residue elements with unique
meanings (/is/ 'near', /aet/ 'yonder', etc.).

> Second, if we segment it away as a morpheme, then we are left with all
> those unanalyzed residues like <-is>, <-en>, <-ere> and <-e>.  These must
> now also be analyzed as morphemes, or as sequences of morphemes, and the
> position is impossible.  Remember, a morpheme boundary has to have a
> morpheme on each side of it -- not just on one side.

Gee, Larry, have you ever heard of case endings?  We're not
talking about productive morphology here, but perceptual
morphemes -- the ability of naive native speakers to recognize
units of meaning and base their perceptions of the structure of
their language on them.

Now what you are saying is that a word like 'boysenberry' must be
monomorphemic because if you segment off the morpheme '-berry'
then what you have left is the unanalyzable residue 'boysen-',
which cannot be a morpheme because it has no meaning in English.
Pish and tosh.  What remains is a morpheme precisely because of
what you said above:  "a morpheme boundary has to have a morpheme
on each side of it."  If you take an utterance like 'give Tom a
boysenberry' and identify the morphemes, you have 'give', 'Tom',
'a', '-berry' ('berry' is a morpheme because if we replace
'boysenberry' with 'berry' in the original utterance we still
have the same sense, just a more general statement).  Since
speech is composed of morphemes, what is left over (viz.
'boysen-') is also a morpheme by your very rule.  It is called a
"unique residue" and its meaning is that it differentiates
boysenberries from other kinds of berries (e.g., blueberry,
blackberry, raspberry, cranberry, huckleberry, gooseberry, etc.).

> It is reasonable to take initial [D] as a *marker* of
> closed-class membership, perhaps.  But it is not reasonable to
> take it as a morpheme.

More pish and more tosh.  It is as reasonable to take initial [D]
as a morpheme as it is to take initial 're-' or 'con-' as
morphemes.  According to your analysis, 're-' and 'con-' could be
markers of class membership but not morphemes because if you take
pairs like 'resist'/'consist', 'remit'/'commit',
'revert'/'convert', 'refer'/'confer', etc., then if you segment
off 're-' and 'con-' then you have unanalyzed residues like
'sist', 'mit', 'vert', and 'fer', none of which have any
independent existence in English.  Therefore, 're-' is a class
marker of verbs that have a sense of "again, back, against" and
'con-' is a class marker of verbs that have a sense of "with,
together" according to this analysis.

To go back to native words, '-less' cannot be considered a
morpheme used to create adjectives from a noun X meaning "without
X", but can only be considered a class marker of certain
adjectives, because if we consider 'feckless' or 'gormless' then
the residues 'feck' and 'gorm' have no meaning in English and
therefore can't be morphemes and therefore '-less' can't be
a morpheme because "a morpheme boundary has to have a morpheme on
each side of it."  It is exactly the other way around:  'feck'
and 'gorm' must be morphemes because '-less' is a morpheme (as
shown by such things as 'hopeless', 'helpless, 'fearless',
'witless', 'senseless', 'ruthless', 'peerless', etc., etc.) and
"a morpheme boundary has to have a morpheme on each side of it."
But your analysis requires 'feckless' and 'gormless' to be
monomorphemic.

On the other hand, by your analysis, there must be an English
morpheme 'n-' with negative meaning since pairs like
'either'/'neither', 'or'/'nor', 'ever'/'never' leave a
recognizable morpheme when initial <n> is extracted.

What makes me so sure that initial [D] is a morpheme (perceptual,
not productive)?  After all, in the examples cited above, there
are always clear examples of the morphemic use of one of the
morphemes involved which allows us to say "once a morpheme,
always a morpheme," or there are sufficient other examples to
make an incontrovertible case (e.g., not only 'resist' and
'consist', but also 'assist', 'insist', 'desist', 'persist', and
so on).  But what is needed to identify morphemes is a pattern of
sounds and a corresponding pattern of meanings.  When these
things co-occur, speakers will tend to identify the corresponding
sounds and meanings as morphemes.  Perhaps not consciously (after
all, the average NNS doesn't know what a morpheme is) and perhaps
not even correctly from a historical perspective (this is the
basis of folk etymology), but as part of the way that the NNS
organizes his knowledge of his language.

Showing how this patterning works is easier done than said
("longum iter est per precepta, breve et efficax per exempla"
Seneca, Letters vi.5).  Let us take as an example three deictic
("pointing" or "demonstrating") words: 'there', 'here', 'where'.
Now Larry says that at most initial [D] can be a class marker,
not a morpheme, because if one segments initial <th> then one is
left with an unanalyzed <ere>.  Now unlike the 'boysen-' in
'boysenberry', this <ere> actually appears elsewhere in English;
in fact, in appears in the three deictic words that we are
discussing.  Therefore, if initial [D] (<th>) is a class marker,
then so must initial <h> and initial <wh> be class markers.  It
is a characteristic of class markers that they do not contribute
to the meaning of a word, but only mark it as belonging to a
particular word class (in fact, they can't contribute to the
meaning or else they would be morphemes, wouldn't they?).

So, following Larry's analysis, if <th>- is a class marker, then
<h>- and <wh> must also be class markers.  And if they are class
markers, then there must be an English word <ere> whose meaning
we can establish empirically as "in ___ place."  Now, again
empirically, when the class marker is <th>- ('there') the word
means "in that place", when it is <h>- ('here') the word means
"in this place", and when the class marker is <wh>- ('where') the
word means "in what/which place."  Therefore, if these are class
markers, English must have class markers that mark word-classes
as "far deixis" (<th>-), "near deixis" (<h>-) and
"relative/resumptive/interrogative deixis" (<wh>-).  We can check
this by looking at some of the other triplets where we find a
word <ence> that means "from ___ place/time" and the same class
markers produce 'thence' "from that place/time", 'hence' "from
this place/time', and 'whence' "from what/which place/time"; and
a word <ither> that means "to ___ place/time" and 'thither' "to
that place/time", 'hither' "to this place/time", and 'whither'
"to what/which place/time."

The existence of 'then' "at that time" and 'when' "at what/which
time" implies that there should be a '*hen' "at this time."
Historical investigation shows that indeed there was at one time
but it has been replaced by 'now'.  We know that it existed,
however, because 'hence' is derived from it (of course, if we
didn't have the historical information about the existence of
earlier 'hen(ne)' we could always say that 'hence' is an
analogical form based on the "class marker" <h>- and the forms
'thence' and 'whence').

So we have a (nearly) complete set of adverbs of time/place
comprising far deixis, near deixis, and relative/interrogative
forming as tight a pattern as anyone could ask for.  By simple
linear analysis there is no question where any part of the
meaning of these words comes from.  So let us turn to the adverbs
of manner.  Here, the pattern is not so tight, but the "class
markers" are still recognizable.  The deictic adverbs of manner
are 'thus' and 'how'.  The <h>- of 'how' is really a *<wh> which
has lost its <w> because of the other <w> in the word.  Perhaps
this has forced the far and near deixis into a single form with
<th>- because the near deictic <h>- could not be distinguished
from the <h>- (< <wh>) of the relative/interrogative (or perhaps
not).  In any case, after segmenting the "class markers" we have
two unique residues <us> and <ow> both with the same meaning "in
___ manner".  We can then establish that 'thus' means "in
this/that manner" and 'how' means "in what/which manner."

But wait a minute.  How does the meaning of <us>/<ow> differ from
the meaning of the adverbial marker '-ly'?  This marker is used
to make adverbs from adjectives and adds a sense of "in (a) ___
manner" to the word.  Thus from 'cold' we get 'cold+ly' = "in a
cold manner", from 'warm' we get 'warm+ly' "in a warm manner",
from 'quick' we get 'quick+ly' "in a quick manner", and so on
through hundreds (if not thousands) of such words.  Clearly, if
we follow Larry's analysis, the '-ly' is a class marker of
adverbs because '-ly' has no meaning of its own, it simply marks
adverbs of manner derived from adjectives.

But wait another minute.  In every case where we have '-ly' as an
adverbial marker, what comes before it is clearly a morpheme
('cold', 'warm', 'quick', etc., etc.).  Since '-ly' clearly marks
the sense "in (a) ___ manner" (one can't say that it has the
meaning "in (a) ___ manner", because if '-ly' had meaning it
would be a morpheme, wouldn't it?), then equally clearly is it
<us> and <ow> that mark the same sense in 'thus' and 'how'.
Since it is a morpheme that goes into the blank that completes
the sense (not meaning; can't be, can it?) of the '-ly' adverbs,
then it must be a morpheme that goes into the blank in the
<us>/<ow> adverbs to complete the sense.  And similarly it must
be a morpheme that goes into the blank that completes the sense
of the place/time adverbs.  Otherwise, the method of using
"slots" to show identity of grammatical function is a hoax.

Therefore, the <th>-, <h>-, and <wh>- in the place/time adverbs
are morphemes in the same way that 'cold', 'warm', 'quick', etc.,
etc. are in the manner adverbs, and it is the <ere>, <en>,
<ence>, <ither>, that are the "class markers" in these words,
just as the <ly> and <us>/<ow> in the adverbs of manner are.  The
difference is that <th>-, <h>-, and <wh>- are grammatical
morphemes (have grammatical or functional meaning) while 'warm',
etc. are lexical morphemes.  Another highly significant
difference is that the <ly> marker is productive (or is an
open-class marker if you prefer) while <ere>, etc. are not
productive (or are closed-class markers).  Obviously, the <ere>,
etc. slots do not accept lexical morphemes (because they are
closed-class) and the <ly> slot does not accept grammatical
morphemes (an exception [there always seem to be a few] is the
secondary, doubly-marked 'thusly'; this is simply an example of
using a productive marker to clarify or reinforce a
non-productive marker [in much the same way a child learning
English will often say 'feets' or 'childrens']).

So Larry's analysis is exactly backwards.  Words (pronouns,
adjectives, and adverbs) with far deixis is not a word-class in
English.  It is adverbs (subclassed into adverbs of manner and
adverbs of place/time and further subdivided into adverbs of
far/near/asked-about place/time) that is the word-class.  Hence
initial [D] is not a class marker but is a morpheme with deictic
(demonstrative) meaning.  QED.

To check this analysis, let's take a typical English word-class,
say attributive adjectives, and see what happens through the use
of various "class markers" to modify the original class.  Now
primary attributive adjectives do not have any overt class
marker.  As an example we will take just two (to save space),
let's say 'sharp' meaning "keen, pointed" and 'soft' meaning "not
resisting, not hard."  These are morphemes because they are
sequences of sounds associated with meaning.  How do we change
this meaning through the use of "class markers"?

  Primary meaning + "class marker"   General sense of class marker

  sharp         soft

  sharp+ly      soft+ly               adverb of manner:  "in (a)
                                      ___ manner"
  sharp+en      soft+en               causative/factitive/inchoative
                                      verb:  "to make/become ___"
  sharp+ness    soft+ness             abstract noun:  "quality of
                                      being ___"
  sharp+ish     soft+ish              inexact/relational adjective:
                                      "sort of ___"; "more ___ than not"

So what does it look like?  Are sequence of sounds like 'sharp'
or 'soft' class markers of words having to do with sharpness or
'softness' and so on, or are the meaningless (but full of sense)
particles <ly>, <en>, <ness>, <ish> the real class markers (if
such there be in English)?  Of course it is possible the these
markers are really derivational morphemes (as most people seem to
consider them) and then we don't have to consider words like
'sharply' and 'softness' as monomorphemic.

>> No, the fact that these are all function words is not particularly
>> phonologically significant.  The fact that they all begin with a
>> functional morpheme is.

> I've just denied this.

Denial is not the same as disproof.

In order to disprove it you need to prove that it is completely
impossible for the speakers of English to perceive initial [D] as
a morpheme.  Now a morpheme is a sound or sequence of sounds that
has meaning associated with it.  It is particularly difficult to
prove that there is no meaning associated with initial [D] in
the face of an extremely tight pattern of sound and meaning
correspondences:

        Meaning of initial segment
 far deixis    near deixis     rel./interr.       General Meaning
    <th>-         <h>-            <wh>-         of residual segment
   "that"        "this"        "what/which"

   there       here              where          "in ___ place"
   then       *hen [OE henne]    when           "at ___ time"
   thence      hence             whence         "from ___ place/time"
   thither     hither            whither        "to ___ place/time"


Now if anyone told me that they couldn't see any pattern to the
initial sounds in the columns and the meanings in the rows, then
I would not conclude that there is no meaning associated with
these sounds, but would instead conclude that whoever said this
was not very good at pattern recognition.  I'm sorry, but I just
really don't see how anyone can look at this table and fail to
see a relationship between sound patterns and meaning.  This is
not (with the exception of '*hen') some reconstruction of
something that hasn't existed for centuries or millennia pieced
together from coincidental look-alikes from around the world and
through the ages.  This is the English as she is spoke today.

So you are free to deny it and I will accept your denial as an
admission that you can't see the pattern or are willing to accept
it as coincidence.  But if all you can do in the way of disproof
is to raise points that have already been discussed and dismissed
in the literature, then it is just your word against that of
people like Zellig Harris and George Trager.  What you need to do
to establish your point is to refute with evidence their analyses.
In short, it's your burden of proof.  Now I have heard that
linguists in Britain do not pay any attention to American
structuralism, but I was not aware that they would not even read
books by American structuralists.  But until you read your
homework assigment, there is little point in discussing it in
class.

> [on my /oi/ example]

>> But is the diphthong /oi/ a morpheme?  What morphemic function do you
>> claim it has?

> It is not a morpheme.  It is merely a marker -- in this case, a
> marker of non-native origin, as is the consonant [ezh].

I'd be careful about saying things like this, otherwise Ross
Clark will get you.  He will tell you that native speakers cannot
distinguish non-native words from native words.  They are all
just English words.  On the other hand, I quite agree with you
that there are phonological markers of non-native origin in
English words (and in most other languages as well).

> [on my hypothetical example of a Greek 'dhelta']

<snip>

>> What you need to establish your point is not answers to
>> questions like "What would the world be like if Napoleon had
>> conquered Russia?" but an example of an initial [D] in English
>> that is not a deictic or a pronoun (i.e., does not begin with the
>> pronominal/deictic morpheme).  It doesn't even have to contrast
>> with a word with initial [T].  Any word that begins with [D] in
>> which the [D] is not a morpheme would be sufficient to justify
>> your claim that the fact that all words in English that begin
>> with [D] are pronouns or deictics is mere coincidence and that
>> the distribution of initial [T] and [D] is not predictable by any
>> phonological rule.

> Indeed.  Let me clarify my point.

> Word-initial [eng] is prohibited by English phonology and is
> wholly unpronounceable by most English-speakers.  When we borrow
> foreign words or names containing initial [eng], it is always
> eliminated in one way or another.

Yes, and, as I say, we have done this before.

> But initial [D] is not unpronounceable in English at all, and I
> cannot see that it is prohibited by English phonology.  So, what
> we need as a test case is a noun or a name with initial [D]
> borrowed into English from a language that permits it.

No, it is not prohibited at all.  It only happens to occur in
pronouns and deictic words.  Nothing in the phonotactics of the
language prevents borrowing words with initial [D] or coining new
words with initial [D].  It just hasn't happened.

The situation with initial [D] is paralleled by English words
with initial [v].  There are very few native words with initial
[v] just as there are very few words with initial [D].  This is
because [v] and [D] were originally just allophones of [f] and
[T], respectively, occurring in intervocalic position.  Therefore
initial [f] and [T] were not affected by this allophony and the
voiced sounds in initial position had to find their way there
from somewhere else.  The few native words with initial [v] are
loans from the southern dialects of English, where initial [f]
was voiced to [v], taken into the standard dialect.  But there
are many words with initial [v] that have been borrowed from
Romance which had an [f]:[v] contrast for a long time and so
English has a large number of words with initial [v], almost all
of them loans.  But there are also new coinings with initial [v]
in English (e.g., 'vax', 'Velcro'), which is something that
initial [D] does not share.

So the fact that there have been no borrowed words with initial
[D] even from languages that have this sound (see below), and
especially the fact that there have been no new coinings with
initial [D] in English suggests -- at least to me -- that
speakers recognize some kind of restraint on the use of initial
[D].

> Unfortunately, there appear to be few such languages, and
> English seldom borrows anything from most of them.  But I've
> pinned my hopes on Greek, the one contemporary language which
> both permits initial [D] and lends words into English.  But Greek
> is not ideal, because of our long-standing tradition of
> converting Greek words and names into English by conventions
> which are more appropriate to classical Greek than to the modern
> language. The chief exception is food and drink, in which modern
> Greek pronunciations are usually the basis of the English form,
> as with 'souvlaki' and 'tzatziki'.  So, what we need is for the
> Greeks to come up with a prince of a dish which we
> English-speakers will delightedly take up -- and which has a name
> starting with [D].  Sadly, Greek chefs have not so far obliged us
> on this matter -- at least as far as I can think.  C'mon, Greek
> chefs: we need you! ;-)

You might do better to pin your hopes on Arabic, which has a
phonemic contrast between [d] and [D] (in fact, Arabic has dental
contrasts eight ways to Sunday).  Unfortunately, words with
initial [D] in Arabic don't come into English with initial [D].
An example is 'dahabeah' which is a kind of houseboat used on the
Nile (variants 'dahabeeyah', 'dahabiya', etc., but never with
[D]).

The only loan words that I know of with [D] are two Islamic month
names 'Dhu al-Hijja' and 'Dhu al-Qa`dah' (` for `ayn; dhu is an
indefinite pronoun so 'Dhu al-Hijja' is literally "the one of the
Hajj") and these are clearly more technical terms than everyday
English words.  They will only be known by those who study or
have some interest in Islam (or possibly in menology).  Those who
speak Arabic will pronounce them with [D] as in Arabic, those who
do not (and yes, there are those who study Islam without knowing
Arabic, just as there are those who study Christianity or the
Bible without knowing Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek) will pronounce
them with [d].  Other than that there is only 'dhal', the name of
the letter in Arabic.  Anyone who knows this word is likely to
know its correct pronunciation (this occupies the same niche as
the name of the letter 'edh' in English; i.e., the only place
where <dh> represents [D]).  But this word, like 'edh', has no
existence apart from the sound that it represents.  [D] in these
words is not a symbol, but an icon.  Otherwise, <dh> usually
represent the phryngeal [d.] (sometimes referred to as
"emphatic") in Arabic transcription, as in the place name
'Riyadh'.

While we're on the subject of Greek and the names of letters and
people not being able to pronounce sounds that are not part of
their phonetic inventory (well sort of), there is an interesting
example of the effects of the loss of a sound on an alphabet.
Ancient Greek had a [w] sound and, naturally, a sign to write it
called wau.  Then the [w] sound was lost, and, normally, the
letter would have been lost also.  But the letter couldn't be
gotten rid of because it was part of the number system
(representing 6).  However, it was no longer possible to talk
about the letter using its original name because the sound needed
to say its name no longer existed in the language.  So the letter
had to be renamed, and it was called digamma because that's what
it looked like:  a gamma with an extra stroke.  Thus it is the
only Greek letter whose name reflects its shape rather than its
sound.

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.

<snip>

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi


From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk  Thu May 31 08:49:52 2001
From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask)
Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 09:49:52 +0100
Subject: Return of the minimal pairs
In-Reply-To: <10955055.3199617010@maxw.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <THU.31.MAY.2001.094952.0100.>

--On Wednesday, May 23, 2001 2:30 pm +0100 Max Wheeler
<maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk> wrote:

> And if you allow proper names (and whyever not?) it isn't even true that
> [eng] and [h] are in complementary distribution, since both occur between
> unstressed vowels in e.g. Birmingham, Callaghan, Houlihan, Monaghan.

A very interesting point.  The pronunciation described, with /h/ followed
by schwa, is general in the educated speech of England, and perhaps of
Britain.  But it's impossible in my American accent.  I have to follow the
/h/ with a stressed vowel (ash) in every case when I'm speaking in my
native English.  Just recall Dirty Harry.  After 31 years in England, I
have somewhat uncomfortably picked up the British pronunciations, but
(except in 'Birmingham', in which I simply have no /h/), I always feel as
though I'm pronouncing a foreign name, much as when I pronounce 'Goethe' in
English with my best German accent.

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'.  For 'Haughey', Wells gives /h/ as usual in Britain, /k/ as usual
in the US.  Since I never encountered this name before coming to Britain, I
have no good intuitions about how I would have pronounced it before leaving
my beloved homeland, but I now use [x] again, even if nobody else does.

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'?

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)