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

On Wed, 17 Dec 2003 18:33:24 +0100, =?iso-8859-1?Q?J=F6rg?= Rhiemeier
<joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:

>Welcome back, Rob!
Thank you! :)

>If you ask me, Kartvelian seems more like being related to IE and
>Uralic, i.e. "Northern Branch".
While there are some features of Kartvelian that relate it to IE and
Uralic, there are many that do not.  Kartvelian's situation is very
obfuscated.  Apparently Prehistoric Kartvelian was located more southerly,
around the Black Sea coast of North-Eastern Turkey.  This makes it more
likely that it fell into contact with Semitic languages (if not AA before
Semitic broke off).  Also, Hurrian-Urartian was big in the surrounding area.

>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.
Certainly.  Spanish _usted_ "you [formal]" comes from earlier _vuestra
merced_ "your mercy".  English has replaced two of its pronouns: first
_hi_ "they" was replaced by an Old Norse 3p pronoun, which is the ancestor
of Modern English "they"; then _thou_ "you [singular]" was replaced by the
2p form, originally _ge_/_eow_.

Clearly PIE *eg(h)ó(m) was an example of suppletion.

>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.
That's possible.  It works better if PIE's original speakers came from
Anatolia.  I do not accept this theory, however.  Historical record shows
an invasion of the Kurgan peoples from the eastern Ukraine into Europe and
Asia.  This seems to me to be the likely origin of PIE.

>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.
I don't think that PIE had original /i/ and /u/.

>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.
This sounds reasonable to me.

>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.
There has to be *some* origin for the Ablaut.  It didn't appear out of thin
air.  I think it definitely is related to the accent (stress or tonal)
scheme of earlier (or pre-) PIE.

>This is very well possible.  Languages tend to reduce unstressed
>vowels.
Right.

>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/.
More complex systems can come from simpler systems, but the reverse is also
true.  The problem is, we don't really know what is conservative in the
sense of Nostratic.  It could be that the Nostratic hypothesis is flawed,
and its component languages are more loosely related.  I think a more
thorough analysis of glottochronology is necessary.

- Rob

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