Hawaiian meli

[Larry Trask]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Wed, 11 Nov 1998, H.M.Hubey wrote:
 
> How are we to take into account all of those words that are said to
> be cognate in IE when it is quite possible that many (most) might be
> left over a substratum that was living in that neighborhood for many
> thousands of years and had stabilized so that changes were taking
> place very slowly?
 
First of all, languages do not "stabilize".  Every living language is
always changing, and the only language that doesn't change is a dead
one.
 
Now, if some substrate words had managed to enter the ancestor of PIE,
that wouldn't matter.  A PIE word is a PIE word, regardless of its
ultimate origin, and all we are usually trying to do is to reconstruct
PIE, and not to go further back.  Only if we *do* want to go further
back do we need to worry about loan words into Pre-PIE.
 
As for loan words into an already existing PIE, well, that's a problem
familiar to all historical linguists.  We always have to worry about the
possibility that some words in any given language might be loan words.
 
But PIE happens to be a more than averagely convenient language in this
respect.  PIE words tend rather strongly to adhere to certain patterns
of formation, perhaps most typically Root-Formative-Suffix, with all
three elements recurring in other words.  There is no reason to expect a
loan into PIE to conform to such patterns, and hence we perhaps have a
better than average chance of spotting loans into PIE.
 
As for the suggestion that PIE consisted mostly of elements from another
language, well, that's rather reminiscent of the famous claim that the
Iliad and the Odyssey were not written by Homer, but by another poet of
the same name.
 
 
Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK
 
larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk