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

On Thu, 3 Jul 2003 14:57:14 -0500, Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
wrote:

>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.)
Ah, I misunderstood Jorg's post.  Somehow I thought he said "plain,
glottalized, and ejective stops."  However, I can now clearly see
that "ejective" and "glottalized" mean the same thing.

>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"
The first two look like simple reductions of the root vowels.  The
alternation in the third one also seems to involve the final vowel.

>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.
So my earlier hypothesis was confirmed?  Also, why are the final vowels in
1st/2nd different from the ones in 3rd?

>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.
Don't transitive verbs always take direct objects, either expressed or
implied?  How is "hit" interpreted as intransitive in other languages?

- Rob

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