Re: Nostratic (was Re: Schwebeablaut (was Re: tolkien?))

On Fri, 19 Dec 2003 22:18:23 +0100, =?iso-8859-1?Q?J=F6rg?= Rhiemeier
<joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:

>It doesn't seem that the cultures of Anatolian and central European
>neolithic farmers match.  The former built small houses with square
>plans; the latter built long houses (wherein long means about
>20 metres and more) from the start.  Colin Renfrew picked Anatolia
>because before the Black Sea Flood was discovered, it seemed the
>only possibility.  No-one had areas on the board that are now
>drowned beneath the Black Sea.
Interesting!  How long did it take for people from northeast of the Black
Sea to reach Central Europe?  And when did the Black Sea flood occur?
Pardon my ignorance :)

>I have seen some bits of the debate on whether Proto-Uralic ever
>existed or not.  I think the reconstruction is so lacking for two
>reasons.  First, Uralic lacks ancient written records, which in the
>case of IE bridge about half the time elapsed since the breakup
>of the protolanguage.  One can easily see that Sanskrit and Latin
>are related, for instance.  It is much more difficult with Hindi
>and French, I mean without looking at their (fortunately known)
>ancestors.  Second, there are fewer scholars working on Uralic
>than on IE.  Most historical linguists choose their own family
>as their main object of study.  And the speakers of IE languages
>outnumber those of Uralic languages 100 to one.
Good points.  However, in general Uralic languages are more conservative
than IE ones.

>But it is very well possible that (a) Proto-Uralic is even farther
>back in the past than PIE and (b) many Uralic similarities are
>due to contact.
Since the people of northeastern Europe and Northern Asia are presumed to
have been (semi) nomadic hunter-gatherers, there would have been much more
contact between disparate language groups than if they were sedentary
agricultural people.

>Certainly.  When a language has spread from A to B, *someone* must
>have actually made the trip - not necessarily in person, but perhaps
>it were multiple generations involved.
Right.

>Of course.  Hence, add the asterisks that I have left out.
Right.

>I am not sure.  The pre-ablaut form might have been *laikW-, but,
>as I have laid out above, it could just as well have been *likW-.
>I tend to the latter version where another consonant follows the
>semivowel (as in *leikW-), as there seems to have been a tendency
>towards CVC roots.  In case such as *bhei- `bee', where the semivowel
>is the last segment of the root, a diphthongal form *bai- is more
>likely than *bi-.  And keep in mind that the vowels /i/ and /u/
>most likely have been there besides /a/ for typological reasons.
Typology only goes so far.  I agree that the pre-ablaut form might have
been *laikW-.  However, since Ablaut still occurs in the presence of /i/
and /u/, this means that they were still independent of the Ablautend
vowel.  To me, the only way for this to be is if /i/ and /u/ were in fact
the semivowels /y/ and /w/.  If we presume that the original root was
*layakWa, penultimate accent and vowel-reduction would have given *lyakW.
But that form is clearly not the root for PIE; is it possible that *laikW
was reached via metathesis?

>> PIE was fairly lenient on consonant clusters.
>
>Which suggests that quite a number of vowels were lost.
Exactly.  Furthermore, there are apparently many instances of the cluster -
tk- in PIE.  Another language group with this feature is Kartvelian.

>Yes.  Non-initial, in any case.  And the more archaic PIE accent
>patterns indeed point at a penultimate accent.
What are the more archaic PIE accent patterns?

>Yes, nominal thematic vowels have nothing to do with verbal thematic
>vowels, except that the same phoneme was involved.  I think the verbal
>thematic vowel was a 3rd person object marker (the same morpheme
>as the 3rd person stative ending *-e < *-a) that later became
>a transitivity marker and yet later a semantically empty stem-forming
>element.  The thematic nouns might have been adjectives originally,
>or just nouns that happened to end in *-a.  There were noun stems ending
>in *-i and *-u, so there probably also were noun stems ending in *-a.
>That's all.
The i- and u-stems are proplerly y- and w-stems, part of the consonant-
stems.

>As Steg already pointed out, the other way 'round.  And the Afro-Asiatic
>stative endings closely resemble the IE ones: [snip]
Sorry about that!  I knew they were the other way 'round :)

>Miguel Carrasquer had the brilliant idea of tracing the stative
>endings back to the AA prefix conjugation via a copula *-ku that was
>suffixed to stative verbs:
>
>1st  *?a-ku > *-ku
>2nd  *ta-ku > *-tku + gender markers *a/*i > *-tka:/*-tki:
>3rd  *ya-ku > *-a
I dunno about that.  At the very least, how can *?a-ku become *-ku but *ya-
ku become *-a?  Given the other two rules, *ya-ku should become *-iku.

>I don't know.  If you ask me, the ending-stressed cases originally
>had bisyllabic (and possibly not monomorphemic) case endings from
>which later final vowels were lost, e.g. genitive *-asa.
>This caused the accent to sit on the (first syllable of the) ending.
>But why the genitive ending has an *o rather than the expected *e,
>I don't know.
Nor do I.  There are actually two forms of the PIE genitive: *-es, used in
e.g. Latin, and *-os, used in e.g. Greek.  With current evidence, it's
difficult, if not impossible, to tell which one was more original.  Regular
penultimate accent would give *-es, but I think the situation was more
muddled than that.  Mainly, I think that the genitive came to be used as an
ergative or active suffix, and then became the nominative.  Semantically,
this seems to check out: the genitive, being an originative case, is
perfect for the role of transitive subject marker, since it would denote
who originated the action (i.e. the subject).  Although it makes sense in
purely phonological terms, the idea of Glen Gordon et al. that the sigmatic
nominative derives from a postfixed demonstrative does not hold water in
the bigger picture.  Most languages with postfixed demonstratives or
articles include them in case inflections (i.e. separate definite and
indefinite conjugations).  This is clearly not the case with PIE.  Of
course, once the genitive also came to denote transitive subject, there
would be semantic confusion at times.  Perhaps this was lessened by having
a different intonation for each role.  This seems to be common in
languages.  I would like to discuss this further.

>> Has anyone considered the possibility of, or tried to implement, a
>> sophisticated AI program for looking at different languages and trying to
>> find connections between them.  I think it would be fascinating to try to
>> do that.
>
>It would be.
I think the AI would find connections where people don't see them.  AIs
have a habit of producing results that surprise their inventors.

- Rob