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

Greetings once again, Jörg!

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".

>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).  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).

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.  A central vowel, such as /a/, is more plausible since
it can swing either way, so to speak.

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?

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.

>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.

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.

- Rob