Re: THEORY: A possible Proto-World phonology

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<CONLANG@...> =====
>Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:
>>
>> Lars:
>>
>> What's Nostratic? Something Pre-IE? I haven't heard of it, so please inform
>> me :)
>
>IIRC, Nostratic is IE and a whole bunch of other languages, some that
>are thought to be isolates, the Siberian langs, etc. I don't know which
>languages are included beyond that. Nostratists (?) are basically trying
>to prove that IE is related to many more languages, that all share a
>common ancestor, which probably would indeed be pre-IE.
And in case everything wasn't confusing enough, Winifred Lehmann rides up and
claims "Pre-Indo-European" as a technical term for an older stage than
Proto-Indo-European but one which has nothing to do with Nostratic;
Pre-Indo-European was active, though Proto- became accusative;
Pre-Indo-European had no reconstructible phonemic vowels*, while Proto- had e
and o.

Basically anything that is a really radical bit of reconstruction, and which
is not *directly* reflected in the IE languages but is theoretically elegant
or compelling in some way, he throws into Pre-Indo-European.

*RE the lack of reconstructible phonemic vowels: Lehmann has been criticized
on this list and elsewhere for this point, which seems rather like
structuralism pushed too far -- it's rather like pointing out that because
they are in complementary distribution, english [h] and [N] could be regarded
as two different realizations of the same phoneme; while it's perfectly good
on a certain theoretical level it is intuitively abhorrent.  I'm not sure I
feel that strongly about the "lack of vowels reconstruction" but in any case,
Lehmann doesn't claim that Pre-IE was *pronounced* without distinctive vowels
or anything nutty like that, only that the vowels were completely conditioned
in quality by their context.

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