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

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 22:08:14 +0100, =?iso-8859-1?Q?J=F6rg?= Rhiemeier
<joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:

>I think that Kartvelian is not as close to IE as is Uralic,
>and some of the similarities between IE and Kartvelian
>are due to contact.
Certainly Kartvelian is not as closely related to IE as "Uralic" is.
However, as I said before, linguists currently believe that Kartvelian
originated from northeastern Anatolia.  If IE originated from north(-east)
of the Black Sea, it is doubtful that there were any meaningful contacts.
There does seem to be evidence of contact with Hurro-Urartian, since both
it and Kartvelian share and adjectival suffix in -Vli.  I'm not sure about
other evidence, to be honest.  (Of course, a lambdaic adjectival suffix
also exists in certain branches of IE, e.g. Latin.)  Also, Kartvelian seems
to have had close contacts with the other Caucasian language groups, due to
its large number of articulatory contrasts.  Some contact with Semitic
could justify this as well.

>No.  If PIE comes from Anatolia, one needs some *very* complex
>migration patterns to explain the similarities between IE and Uralic.
I completely agree!  I honestly can't see how anyone can claim that PIE
came from Anatolia.

>Yes.  And the similarities between IE and Uralic point at an IE origin
>north of the Black Sea, too, no matter whether the languages are
>similar due to common origin or contact.
Right.  This makes sense, since IE would be more southerly than Uralic.
However, I don't think that there was ever a Uralic Family per se.  Rather,
I think "Proto-Uralic" was a looser association than PIE.

>And the neolithic farmers of central Europe don't come from Anatolia.
>They are the descendants of refugees from the Black Sea Flood.
Yes.  Language and history are often very intertwined!  Linguists don't
notice that enough, in my opinion.  The movements of peoples is often
highly significant in the development of languages.

>I don't think that PIE had only one vowel phoneme.  The ablaut patterns
>are as follows:
>
>strong grade   weak grade
>
>  á > e          a > @ > o/0
>  í > ei         i > i
>  ú > eu         u > u
We don't *know* that for sure.  Linguistics, like any other science, is
based on uncertainty.  All we're doing here is theorizing.  That said, the
Ablaut patterns of PIE are usually easily distinguishable, and have been
commonly accepted for decades.

However, it is readily apparent that PIE medial /i/ and /u/ derive solely
from "zero-grade" Ablaut (e.g. leikW- "leave" vs. likWtós "left").  In the
example, I think the root should properly be LYK[W].

>The o-grade appeared where vowel deletion would have resulted
>in an inadmissible consonant cluster; later it was paradigmatized
>as a separate grade from the zero grade.
PIE was fairly lenient on consonant clusters.  However, a powerful constant
in PIE phonotactics seems to be that clusters of more than two consonants
was illegal.  The only exceptions to the rule seem to be sequences of 3
consonants, where one of them is a sonant (and thus, isn't really a
consonant, so there technically may not be any violations to the rule).

Speaking of consonant clusters, the fact that there are so many initial
clusters in PIE makes it almost a certainty that it *did* have penultimate
(non-initial, in any case) accent at some point.

More about Ablaut... it seems to me that there are probably several
different kinds of Ablaut going on in PIE just before it ceased to be a
coherent language or Sprachbund.  If you want, we can try to classify the
different types.  One that seems obvious to me is the root-internal
Ablaut.  Another is the "thematic" Ablaut, which might actually be two
kinds, one for nouns and one for verbs.

Certainly PIE exhibits some morphological processes that are similar to
those of Afrasian languages.  In the Semitic languages, the oldest verbal
distinction is the perfect-imperfect (or past-nonpast) one.  Besides the
fact that one conjugation uses prefixes for marking person and the other
uses suffixes, each also uses a different form of the consonantal root.
Compare Arabic ?aktubu "I wrote" vs. katabtu "I write/am writing".  I think
it is possible that the differences in root forms is originally due to both
stress-accent placement and (later) paradigmatic levelling.  Furthermore, I
think a similar process occurred in (pre-) PIE.  What do you think?

>I also think that it is (mainly) due to accent.  Accented vowels
>became strong grade, unaccented vowels weak grade.
While I agree, there seem to be some exceptions in "commonly accepted
reconstructed PIE".  For example, what about root nouns (a more ancient
class) with genitives in -ós (e.g. Greek kuôn "dog," gen. kunós)?

>True.  And not always the assumption of a simpler system is the
>simpler explanation.
True.  Occam's razor always wins.

>Yes.  The evidence is still very weak.
I'm inclined to agree with you.  Linguistics is, by the very nature of its
subject matter, an imprecise science.  Effectively, each of us speaks a
different language.  However, with many other people, one's personal
language differs only slightly.  But with others, the differences are great
that we cannot understand one another.  So to try to describe language
change in terms of something resembling mathematical axioms is in vain, for
any linguistics theory will always be "messy".

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.

- Rob

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