Re: Evidence for Nostratic? (was Re: Proto-Uralic?)

Quoting Rob Haden <magwich78@...>:

> On Thu, 3 Jul 2003 10:47:05 +0200, =?iso-8859-1?Q?J=F6rg=20Rhiemeier?=
> <joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:
>
> >I am not an expert on Kartvelian, but I found some information on this
> >in Gamkrelidze's and Ivanov's book, _Indo-European and the
> Indo-Europeans_.
> >
> >First, the phonology.  PIE, if one accepts glottalic theory (which I do),
> >had a three-way distinction between voiceless, voiced and ejective stops,
> >as does Kartvelian (and other Caucasian languages); and apparently,
> >Kartvelian has an ablaut system similar to that of IE.
>
> It seems to me that ejective stops can also be called aspirated stops.
No, that is actually precisely what they are *not*.  It is
in fact articulatorily impossible for a glottalized consonant
also to be phonetically aspirated. (Though it is possible for
a *phonemically* 'glottalized aspirate' to exist if it's a
combination of phonetic aspirate plus a phonetic glottal stop,
which pattern together as unit phonemes.  This is the case in some
C'ali dialects.)

> I've seen some e/o variations in Georgian morphology, particularly in
> affixes, but nothing as seemingly paradigmatic as in PIE.  Can you give any
> examples of Kartvelian Ablaut?
Ablaut in modern Georgian is essentially a verbal phenomenon.
There are three types: null/e ablaut, null/a ablaut, and e/i
ablaut, which occur in a variety of inflectional and derivational
paradigms:

  Present: v-gn-eb      "I find it"
  Aorist:  v-i-gen-i    "I found it"
           i-gen-i      "you found it"
           i-gn-o       "he found it"

  Present: mo-v-k'l-av  "I kill it"
  Aorist:  mo-v-k'al-i  "I killed it"
           mo-k'al-i    "you killed it"
           mo-k'l-a     "he killed it"

  Present: da-v-grex    "I twist it"
  Aorist:  da-v-grix-e  "I twisted it"
           da-grix-e    "you twisted it"
           da-grix-a    "he twisted it"

In Old Georgian, first and second person aorists had no following
vowel, and it is assumed that the presence of the vowel in the
third person is what triggered null ablaut there.

> >The common points in syntax are SOV order (a frequent pattern that
> >proves nothing and is also shared by Proto-Uralic) and active-stative
> >argument marking.  That is, intransitive subjects are marked like
> >transitive subjects if they are agents (as in 'The man runs'),
> >but like transitive objects if they are not (as in 'The stone falls').
> >Typically, only animate nouns can take agent marking.
>
> SOV is, apparently, a very ancient (and likely original) word order.  In my
> opinion, the first great split within Nostratic occurred when the southern
> speakers (> Afro-Asiatic) adopted VSO instead of SOV.
This is certainly true of Kartvelian.  Old Georgian was extremely
right-branching, and today it is near the opposite extreme.

> >Yes.  And possibly, transitive verbs agreed with both arguments,
> >as would be the typical pattern in an active-stative language.
> >The thematic vowel might be the last remnant of a 3rd person object
> marker.
>
> I have also considered this.  However, there does not seem to be a clear
> pattern whereby transitive verbs are always thematic, and intransitive ones
> are always athematic.  For example, *gwhen- 'strike, slay, kill' is
> athematic (*gwhenmi 'I kill') but transitive.
I do not consider myself an expert by any means on PIE, but
how do you go from semantic agency, as with "kill", to being
transitive?  In plenty of languages, what we would think should
be transitive ("hit", for example) is intransitive.

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