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

Hello!

On Sun, 21 Dec 2003 22:12:07 +0100, =?iso-8859-1?Q?J=F6rg?= Rhiemeier
<joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:

>Likely.  BTW: My conlang family Hesperic (formerly known as Q)
>is meant to be one branch of this "wider IE" family.
Ah.  However, it seems that the substrate languages do not resemble IE at
all.

>Estonian is essentially Finnish without final vowels.
Right.

>Hmmm.  I know too little about Uralic to make a judgement here.
>Diffusion likely happened within the family, but there seem to be
>similarities (especially in morphology) that are not easily explained
>by that.
There are many similarities between Uralic and Altaic languages, too.  At
the very least, Hungarian should be re-classified as an Altaic(ish)
language.

>There are some Caucasian languages that are analyzed that way by some
>linguists.  But even those have at least allophones that sound like
>[i] and [u], and I think also [e] and [o].  The analysis of those
>languages as having only /a/ and /@/ is doubted my many linguists.
Just because they are doubted does not mean they are incorrect ;)

>These systems are all equally unlikely.
How so?

>The traditional plain voiced stops (which probably were ejectives in an
>earlier stage of PIE) are rarer than the others, and two of them
>*never* occur in a single root.
Any ideas as to why that is?  Perhaps they were allowed before, but then
one or the other was dissimilated?

>The genitive and dative are correct.  The vowel in the accusative
>wasn't long, I think, and the vowel in the nominatoive was only
>lengthened compensatorily when the *d was lost: *peds > *pe:s.
Sorry!  I wasn't sure if the nominative and accusative had long vowels or
not.  My PIE is a little rusty.  So certainly the original root for 'foot'
was *pada or something similar.

>I don't understand what you mean.  The way you put it, it would have
>yielded nom. **-asa, gen. **-sa, while we have nom. *-sa, gen. *-asa.
Sorry, I worded that poorly.

>Yes, they suffixed pronominal elements to disambiguate the cases that
>have fallen together:
>
>nom. *-a-sa  > *-asa > *-os
>gen. *-a-asa > *-asa > *-os + *-yo > *-osyo
>
>But some languages seem to have used other transformations to
>disambiguate this (cf. Latin thematic genitive -i:).
Right.

>Yes.  Miguel Carrasquer, over there on the Nostratic-L list, maintains
>the position that the thematic nouns had a pronoun suffixed.
>But I don't see why they should (why was that pronoun suffixed only
>to some nouns and not to others?), and find that assumption entirely
>unnecessary.
The problem with both Glen and Miguel, as I see it, is that they both take
their previous hypotheses to be true once they've made them.  Some of us
disagree with their premises, let alone their conclusions :P

>The two other etymologies might be correct, though.  But anyway,
>the prefix and the suffix conjugation probably contain the same
>elements.
Perhaps.  Arabic shows two different word for 2nd person in its verbal
conjugations.  The one for subject contains /t/, and the one for object
contains /k/.  However, the actual pronoun itself, anta, also contains
the /t/ element, so I think that that is more original.

>Ah, now I understand what I failed to grasp above.
OK :)

>Yes.  The objective case of neuters remained unmarked because it did not
>contrast with an agentive case which the neuters didn't have.
Right.  But

>Yes.  The suffixaufnahme is rather wild speculation.  There is
>no evidence for it.
Yeah.

>> With penultimate accent, this would have given:
>>
>> nom. *xnarás kwans
>> dat. *xnarás kwnái
>>
>> Which would give reconstructed PIE:
>>
>> nom. *h2nerós kwons
>> dat. *h2nerós kunéi
>
>Exactly.
Actually, it would've given:

nom. *h2norés kwons
dat. *h2norés kunéi

>This makes sense.  I didn't know that the only evidence for *o instead
>of
>*e is from Greek.  The Greek vowel system is generally regarded as
>especially conservative, but sometimes that assumption might fail.
It's a big enigma.  As far as I know, the only evidence for *o instead of
*e is indeed from Greek.  Latin shows *-es (cf. Latin -is), Germanic shows
*-es (cf. Gothic -is), Indo-Aryan shows either (cf. Vedic -as), Baltic
shows ... hmm, I don't know what Baltic shows.

>Yes.  And that makes suffixaufnahme very unlikely.  AFAIK,
>suffixaufnahme
>occurs mostly (or only) in languages where genitives follow nouns.
Right.

>>       However,
>> this also suggests that PIE originally had postpositions instead of
>> prepositions.  I have a theory on how that changed, if you're interested
in
>> hearing about it.
>
>Yes.
Well, PIE prepositions are often prefixed to verb stems in the daughter
languages.  That suggests to me that they could have adverbial
connotations.  There must have been confusion, then, if they were placed
before verbs but after nouns.  PIE's speakers must have decided to make
them go before nouns as well.

Merry Christmas,

- Rob

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