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

On Wed, 9 Jul 2003 17:12:34 +0200, Christophe Grandsire
<christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:

>The problem is that we just *cannot* consider PIE to be a single instance
>of a language at one time. Reconstruction allows us to get forms of
>different geographical origin (PIE wasn't ever monolithic, no language can
>be, especially when it's illiterate) and from different *times*, without
>always giving us clues of where and when they originate. So reconstructed
>PIE is actually a 3-dimensional (2 dimensions of space and 1 of time)
>mosaic of words and features, which don't always fit together because they
>sometimes never existed together. You must never forget that when you talk
>about PIE, or you will fall in the trap of thinking that PIE is a single
>entity comparable to "Standard French" for instance. It's not. It's a
>necessary incomplete (because you can never completely reconstruct a
>language. Take all the Romance languages and try to reconstruct Latin with
>them, and you will never manage to reconstruct the case system of
>Republican Latin, since it has disappeared without a trace) set of
features
>with a margin in both space *and* time. Think of taking all the British
>dialects of English of the last 500 years, pick up different features of
>them all, and look at the result, and you will get an idea of what PIE
>really is. The incoherence is not there because the reconstruction is
>incorrect or meaningless. It's just the best we can do with the tools we
>have, and we must never forget their limitations.
I understand all this.  What I meant was that I would like to see
reconstructed (or reconstruct myself) a form of PIE that could have
actually existed.  Nothing perfect, mind you, but something better than the
chimera that is 'accepted reconstructed PIE.'  More specifically, I'd like
to use reconstruction to answer the following questions conclusively (if
possible):

1. What was/were the origin(s) for PIE grammatical Ablaut?
2. What was the origin for the sigmatic nominative?

(etc.)

I've been attempting, off and on, to reconstruct the stage of PIE before
all of the daughter languages (including Hittite et al.) separated.

Glottochronology is pretty important in reconstructing proto-languages.  We
have to try to pinpoint, as accurately as we can, when changes occurred.
Of course, I know that the techniques are far from perfect, but I think
that we can come up with something better than what is currently
reconstructed as 'PIE' (and someday we will).

>You are. I've seen transcribed Hittite texts (they were written in
>Cuneiform, so we can read them easily). The laryngeals in Hittite (it has
>two, transcribed usually "h" and "hh") appear pretty much everywhere, and
>the most important point is that the laryngeal theory of phonology of PIE
>had already appeared (not under this name) before Hittite was recognised
as
>an IE language, and the correspondence between the Hittite laryngeals and
>the "sonantic coefficients" that would come to be called laryngeals is
>almost perfect! You just cannot dismiss the laryngeal theory as something
>used "when they Really Don't Know what the correct form is". The
>correspondence between the "sonantic coefficients" (Saussure called them
>that way) reconstructed for purely internal reasons (to explain strange
>alternances) and the Hittite laryngeals is too obvious to be just a
>coincidence (especially since Hittite is an IE language). The laryngeals
>*did* exist, and pretty much everywhere where they are reconstructed (I
>know of only 1 case of a laryngeal put there for purely theoretical
>reasons. It's the case of *H1ed-: the "eat" root. H1 is there only because
>PIE roots are usually biconsonantic, and **ed- - which gives the same
>outcomes in all known IE languages as H1ed- - would be the only known case
>of a monoconsonantic root. So for theoretical reasons, by comparison to
>Semitic languages where words can never begin with a vowel, H1 has been
>added to the root. It's the only case I know of a laryngeal added without
>some strong evidence that it was indeed there). We just have to accept
that
>PIE was a pretty guttural language with lots of consonants. So what? it's
>not as if such languages don't exist *now*! look at Caucasian languages
for
>instance!
My point was not to deny the existence of laryngeals entirely.  I certainly
think that 'laryngeals' existed in PIE; what frustrates me is that
seemingly no attempt is made to figure out exactly what they are.  Instead,
they seem to be just accepted as these 'mystery phonemes' that have certain
alleged effects.  What I'd like to see is some genuine, honest debate as to
what the actual 'laryngeals' were.  I've presented my own ideas on this
topic, and I'd like to see what others think.  This goes for other subjects
on the topic of PIE too.

Perhaps we should move this discussion to a Yahoo group or something, as it
has relatively little to do with conlanging (although you could say that
PIE is something of an a posteriori conlang).  I would be happy to create a
group for that purpose.

Oh, and by the way, I've noticed something rather interesting about Latin
and Greek.  In root nouns, where Latin has -e- for PIE stressed vowels,
Greek has -o-.  For example, Latin pes, pedis 'foot' vs. Greek pous,
podos 'foot'; also Latin dens, dentis 'tooth' vs. Athenian odous,
odontos 'tooth'.

- Rob

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