Re: Q (Caucasian Elf)

Jörg Rhiemeier:

> I actually poundered the issue whether I should depart completely from
> Tolkien's languages, but I have found too many things in the real world
> that *could* be construed as traces of languages very similar to
> Tolkien's.  Here are a few of them:
>
> Engl. iron < Celt. *isarn- < Quend. *el-sarn "meteorite" (lit.
> "star-stone")
> Engl. silver < PGmc *silbr- < contamination of Quend. *kjelep- "silver"
>                                            and Quend. *sil- "shine"
> Engl. London < Celt. *Londinion < Quend. *Lond Din "quiet haven"
Pre-IE European roots? This link might interest you:

http://www.muw.edu/~rmccalli/subsGerIntro.html

> Then, there were numerous tribes called "Veneti", "Venedae" or something
> similar all over western and Central Europe 2000 years ago.  These might
> all have been splinters of the mysterious Bell Beaker people, whom I
> imagine to have been the original "Elves".  (I remember someone
> mentioned such a theory in CyBaList as well.)  Thus, the name by which
> the Bell Beaker people referred to themselves could easily have been
> something like *kwendi or *kwenedi.  Even the Guanches of the Canary
> Islands fit into this pattern.  They were Berbers, but probably with a
> European substratum which could well have been Bell Beaker folk or
> descendants thereof.
It would help to look at genetic data from various people of Western Europe,
especially the Basques and the Celtic peoples (including Galicians).  There
are some major distinctive features, though I don't remember what.

Concerning language affiliations, a Basque-Aquitanian family seems possible;
that could explain who might've inhabited Europe prior to Aryan invasions
from the southeast...

> I also think that the glottalic theory of PIE makes sense.  The problem
> of going from glottalized to voiced can be solved by an intermediate
> stage:
>
> "Glottalic" PIE          "Intermediate" PIE      "Traditional" PIE
>
>  voiceless (aspirated) -> aspirated            -> voiceless
>  glottalized           -> voiceless            -> voiced
>  voiced                -> voiced               -> voiced aspirated
Gamqrelidze and Ivanov's theory!  (Which I agree with by the way; Armenian
and the Germanic languages are the best testaments to that.  I reflected
that in my Calistan conlang.)  There may be a gap in the chart; traditional
/p/ or "reformed" /p`/ is poorly attested and may not be an integral of IE
phonology.

Another possibly pertinent case: The voiced plain and voiced aspirate stops
in Pali are all pronounced as voiceless aspirates in Thai, in the low tone
register.  An example is the Indic nasal vowel marker: Pali _bindu_ > Thai
_phinthu_.

> In my conworld (where Quendian seems to be related to IE and
> Kartvelian), the change from glottalic to intermediate might have
> happened before IE and Quendian parted from each other, but after
> Kartvelian began going its own way.  Or IE and Quendian "deglottalized"
> independently.
I'll admit it right off; I'm pro-Nostratic.  Afro-Asiatic's membership is
dubious, and its inclusion is opposed by Starostin among others.  But IE and
Uralic are very close for "unrelated" languages, and we know that the
Ural-Altaic theory was in vogue for a while (and has now obviously been
resurrected due to Nostratic).  Kartvelian has a strikingly similar noun
declension scheme as Indo-European (as does Uralic).

Ural (now grouped with the small Yukaghir family of Siberia), Altaic (which
probably does include Korean and Japanese) and Dravidian (and its likely
ancestor, Elamite) seem to make up a fairly tight group of families, an East
Nostratic branch perhaps.  (West would be IE and Kartvelian and *maybe* AA.)
Sumerian's place in this is uncertain, and any relationship to Basque or
anything else (except possibly Inuit-Aleut)

> > With diacritics, may not come out right with some e-mails:
> > i ü u
> > e ö o
> > a ä å
> The bottom row corresponds poorly with the top and middle row which are
> both based on the pattern: front unrounded - front rounded - back
> rounded.  The vowels in the bottom row are, hmm, central unrounded -
> front unrounded - back rounded.  (Of these, Nur-ellen only has /a/,
> while the non-low vowels are the same as in your pattern.)
That's an intentional irregularity.  This is based on data from languages as
diverse as Finnish, German, Turkish, Korean, Amharic, Modern Assyrian and
Thai among others.  The "Umlaut" vowels are grouped together to indicate
that they are fronted variants of the vowel minus the diaeresis.  The
roundness of each vowel does not change.

In Germanic and especially in Scandinavian, there are two forms of Umlaut:
i-Umlaut (fronting, produces Swedish a-dots, o-dots and y) and u-Umlaut
(rounding, produces Swedish a-ring).  Swedish, Norwegian and Danish carry
over this nine-vowel system (or ten if you count the schwa e/a), but not
Icelandic (which has length distinction).

Not many languages around the world have the low front rounded vowel, which
in IPA is (capital) OE-ligature and some ungodly amalgam of symbols in
Kirschenbaum which I don't remember.  It *might* exist in some Turkic
languages but not Turkish itself.

> I also came up with this system for my own version of Pictish.
Which might be a relative of Basque.  But nothing is known about the
language except the Ogham inscriptions mostly in Ireland and Britain which
only list proper names.

> Yes, I also had that idea, and perhaps will use it some day in some
> conlang.
> Sort of a three-storey version of the Turkish vowel cube, if we push the
> central unrounded series back a bit ;-)
In theory, I've found that for some reason the "back unrounded" series tends
to be central.  It would make more sense to have back vowels and not central
so as to distinguish them more from the front vowels.  It was thought that
the lack of distinction of central unrounded and back unrounded vowels did
not conform to linguistic universals.

But you have the case of Vietnamese, which has all three series of front,
central and back unrounded vowels, but among rounded vowels, only the back
ones.  (There is no high central vowel in standard Vietnamese, but I'm
wondering about the use of the Latin letters I and Y for the same sound
value and could they have been independent vowels themselves.)  You have e
(front), a-circumflex (central) and o-horn (back), all of these at
mid-height.  And Swedish has three distinct high rounded vowels: o (back), u
(central) and y (front).

By the way, IPA lists eighteen cardinal vowels: four front, four back and
one high central, all in round and unround types.

Danny Boy


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