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

Hallo!

On Wed, 17 Dec 2003 02:06:40 -0500,
Rob Haden <magwich78@...> wrote:

> Greetings once again, Jörg!
Welcome back, Rob!

> On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 18:42:39 +0100, =?iso-8859-1?Q?J=F6rg?= Rhiemeier
> <joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:
> >
> >Well, as Afro-Asiatic is pretty well accepted (though the reconstruction
> >of Proto-AA seems to be still lacking, judging from what I have found),
> >if Semitic is related with IE, than the whole Afro-Asiatic is.
> >It is of course not impossible that IE or some other languages
> >turn out to be parts of what we now call Afro-Asiatic, and may
> >be closer to Semitic than, say, to Chadic, but I consider this
> >unlikely.
>
> It seems to me that AA (and perhaps Kartvelian) makes up the "Southern
> Branch" of Nostratic while IE and U (and perhaps Altaic) makes up
> the "Northern Branch".
If you ask me, Kartvelian seems more like being related to IE and
Uralic, i.e. "Northern Branch".

> >Yes, these are things that bug me about Nostratic as well.
> >We have these pronoun roots:
>
> [snip]
>
> With Nostratic, we're talking about time-depths of 15,000 years ago or
> more.  A lot can change in 15,000 years.  I think it's possible that when
> Nostratic was breaking up, there were no set pronouns.  Even today, there
> are languages where pronouns are rarely used (e.g. Japanese).
Yes, pronouns can be replaced, and odd things are possible.  In German,
for example, a 3rd person plural pronoun became a polite 2nd person
pronoun.  Or something like "I-am-here" becomes the 1st person pronoun,
or "Your grace" the 2nd person.

>       Another
> possibility is that some speakers of Nostratic moved into an area of non-
> Nostratic features, the latter of which were more numerous, but
> technologically/culturally/socially inferior, and thus adopted most of the
> features of Nostratic but preserved the most common words of their own
> tongue (i.e. pronouns and such).
Yes, language mixing is always a possibility.  Often, people who acquire
a new language retain phonological and syntactic features of their
old language.

One theory I have is that PIE is a sister language of Uralic
on a substratum related to Kartvelian.  Kartvelian shows ablaut
patterns similar to those of IE, for instance.

> I'd like to go back to the question of (Schwebe)Ablaut.  Jörg, I think you
> were correct in using 'a' for your Pre-PIE reconstructions.  I think it's
> unlikely that /e/ was the original Pre-PIE vowel, since it is much more
> difficult to back+round a front unrounded vowel than it is to front+unround
> a back rounded one.
Or to front a back (or central) unrounded vowel.

>       A central vowel, such as /a/, is more plausible since
> it can swing either way, so to speak.
And, if there is only one vowel besides /i/ and /u/, that vowel will
always be /a/ rather than /e/ (or /o/).  This is well established
by typological studies.

> About the variations in stress-accent, I think it would be good to know
> which forms appear in which contexts.  That is, is there any regularity to
> the alternations between the forms?
In PIE proper, it is pretty much lexicalized.  But I suspect that
in an earlier stage of the language, there was a penultimate accent.
So a two-syllable word was stressed on the first syllable, but with
a syllabic suffix the stress shifted to the second syllable.
"Free", i.e. phonemic accents tend to evolve from phonetic accents
when vowels are lost, obfuscating the original rules.

> Perhaps it is more useful to analyze PIE roots from a more Semitic context -
> - that is, separating the vowels and consonants from each other.  In doing
> so, we can readily see that PIE is made up mainly of triliteral roots, with
> some biliteral ones, that are subjected to Ablaut.  Take the two roots
> brought up before -- perk-/prek- and werg-/ureg- -- and separate the vowels
> and consonants.  Then you have two triliteral roots, PRK and WRG.  A
> problem is that there are many common sound sequences in PIE that have
> *many* different meanings.  For example, *bher- can mean "carry"
> and "brown", among other things.  Of course, roots were never stand-alone,
> and once certain roots had become associated with certain suffixes to
> further denote their meanings, it didn't matter if the roots were
> homophonic.  However, there *had* to have been some kind of earlier
> phonemic contrast(s) that subsequently disappeared.  Otherwise, there
> wouldn't have been so many homophonous roots.
Yes, I also suspect this.  Perhaps, PIE was even a tone language,
though I don't think so.  It is healthy to assume that some phonemic
distinctions or segments were lost.

> >I don't know, either, but some people try to reconstruct a 3-vowel
> >system for Pre-Proto-Uralic, before vowel harmony and all that
> >kicked in.  And what regards Uralic reconstruction, it seems that
> >there is still much work to do.  The only complete "reconstruction" of
> >Proto-Uralic I have seen was that by Decsy, and that doesn't hold
> >water because he not even used the comparative method (I guess
> >he is a Marrist)!  Instead, he considers each cognate set (or pseudo
> >cognate set, his method is incapable of distinguishing between the two)
> >*in isolation*, "reconstructing" a proto-form that yields the attested
> >forms with a minimum of changes.  Clearly, this is wrong, and yields
> >many false positives.  And what is worse, Decsy even contradicts
> >himself.  He claims that the speakers of Proto-Uralic didn't use
> >names (an anthropological impossibility!), yet he "reconstructs"
> >a PU word for `name'.
>
> It seems to me that Proto-Uralic, whatever its earlier vowel system was,
> underwent rather extensive reduction of unstressed vowels once its accent
> became regularly word-initial.  I think this is very plausible and there
> are many examples that are more recent.  Probably the reductions occurred
> before vowel harmony developed.
This is very well possible.  Languages tend to reduce unstressed
vowels.

> However, a significant difference between PIE and PU (assuming it actually
> existed - more on that later) is that the former had a clearly delineable
> Ablaut system and the latter did not.  Perhaps PU or its ancestor also
> followed some kind of Ablaut, which it later abandoned.  But perhaps it did
> not.  It's very difficult to tell.
As long as we don't have evidence for ablaut in Uralic, it is more
reasonable to assume that IE and Uralic separated form each other
before PIE ablaut evolved.  And as there is no evidence of vowel
harmony in PIE, it must have evolved in Uralic after the split
(possibly through areal contact or substratum influence from Altaic).
Eskimo-Aleut, which seems to be related to Uralic (and probably more
closely than IE), has only /a i u/ and neither ablaut nor vowel
harmony.  So, I think that Proto-IE-Uralic-Eskimo had only /a i u/.

Greetings,

Jörg.