Dolgopolsky's new book

[manaster at umich.edu]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I certainly agree with Wolfgang Behr's comments re IE
lion words.  There are altogether too many cases where
Nostraticists have proposed things within IE or one
of the other branches of Nostratic that cannot be
justified.  Of course, while Illich was an Indo-Europeanist,
Dolgopolsky is not.  I myself think that several of Illich's
ideas about IE which came out of Nostratic are quite
sensible (his analysis of *ket and its semantics, his
suggestion that *bher originally meant 'take' and
not 'take', and some others), but some are absurd,
as I have pointed out in print.  However, it is
sometimes the case that the absurd ones are ideas
which are widely accepted by IEnists who have no
Nostratic bias.  My favorite example, since i
recently worked on it, is the Armenian plural ending
-kh, which some IEnists have long realized must come
from PIE *-es but which even more people keep insisting
comes from something entirely different.  Illich unfortunately
went with teh majority in this case.
 
BTW, one of Illich's proposals which I once
was rather enamored of, namely, that PIE had an
inclusive/exsclusive distinction makred by n vs. m
agrees with a widespread, though not unviersal,
idea that PIE had two 1pl. pronouns starting with
the two nasals. However, it now seems to me that
since one of these (*mes) is only found in
Armenian and Balto-Slavic, it is possible and
even methodologiucally perhaps necessary to
take *mes as an innovation of one branch of IE only
and hence not of Nostratic pedigree.
 
All in all, I remain convince that, even if
Nostratic is basically right, only a small
percentage of the etymologies proposed for it
can possibly be right.  Many of IS's etymologies
seem to me to beborrowings or else innovations
of some branch of Nostratic only.  And I think
that the etymologies proposed since his death are
mostly even worse--although I hope that perhaps
one or two of mine will turn out to belong to
the small minority of etymolgies that will
stand the test of time (:-).
 
I am in any case very happy to see that
we are actually looking at specifics here, as I suggested
we should do some time ago.
 
Re *ket- or *kat-, the IE evidence points to *-e-, tehre
is very little evidence *-a* in PIE anyway (some would
say, none at all), and Nostratic *-a should give PIE *-e-.
I wonder if the form cited by Larry is a typo?
 
Alexis MR