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

On Friday, December 19, 2003, at 06:20  AM, Rob Haden wrote:
> 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?
> - Rob
Sorry for the nitpicking, but your Arabic examples are reversed.
/?aktub(u)/ ~ non-past
/katabtu/ ~ past


-Stephen (Steg)
  "oi xanike oi xanike a yontef a šeiner
   a lixtiger a freilixer nito nox azeiner
   ale teg mit dreidl špiln mir
   heise gute latkes esn mir
   gešvinder çindt kinder di xanike lixtlex on..."
      ~ yiddish hhanuka song with many variant versions