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

Hallo!

On Sat, 20 Dec 2003 19:51:16 -0500,
Rob Haden <magwich78@...> wrote:

> On Fri, 19 Dec 2003 22:18:23 +0100, =?iso-8859-1?Q?J=F6rg?= Rhiemeier
> <joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:
>
> >It doesn't seem that the cultures of Anatolian and central European
> >neolithic farmers match.  The former built small houses with square
> >plans; the latter built long houses (wherein long means about
> >20 metres and more) from the start.  Colin Renfrew picked Anatolia
> >because before the Black Sea Flood was discovered, it seemed the
> >only possibility.  No-one had areas on the board that are now
> >drowned beneath the Black Sea.
>
> Interesting!  How long did it take for people from northeast of the Black
> Sea to reach Central Europe?  And when did the Black Sea flood occur?
> Pardon my ignorance :)
The Black Sea Flood happened around 5500 BC; within the next 500 years,
the neolithic farming tribes had reached the Rhine.  The flood must
have displaced a large number of people.

My hypothesis of how this is connected is that the language spoken
by the refugees was not PIE proper, but an ancestor of the latter.
PIE proper is one of the languages that evolved within the large
area populated by the refugees, and I place it in central Ukraine
shortly before 4000 BC.

> >I have seen some bits of the debate on whether Proto-Uralic ever
> >existed or not.  I think the reconstruction is so lacking for two
> >reasons.  First, Uralic lacks ancient written records, which in the
> >case of IE bridge about half the time elapsed since the breakup
> >of the protolanguage.  One can easily see that Sanskrit and Latin
> >are related, for instance.  It is much more difficult with Hindi
> >and French, I mean without looking at their (fortunately known)
> >ancestors.  Second, there are fewer scholars working on Uralic
> >than on IE.  Most historical linguists choose their own family
> >as their main object of study.  And the speakers of IE languages
> >outnumber those of Uralic languages 100 to one.
>
> Good points.  However, in general Uralic languages are more conservative
> than IE ones.
Yes, I have heard that, too, especially with regard to the Balto-Finnic
languages.

> >But it is very well possible that (a) Proto-Uralic is even farther
> >back in the past than PIE and (b) many Uralic similarities are
> >due to contact.
>
> Since the people of northeastern Europe and Northern Asia are presumed to
> have been (semi) nomadic hunter-gatherers, there would have been much more
> contact between disparate language groups than if they were sedentary
> agricultural people.
Yep.

> >I am not sure.  The pre-ablaut form might have been *laikW-, but,
> >as I have laid out above, it could just as well have been *likW-.
> >I tend to the latter version where another consonant follows the
> >semivowel (as in *leikW-), as there seems to have been a tendency
> >towards CVC roots.  In case such as *bhei- `bee', where the semivowel
> >is the last segment of the root, a diphthongal form *bai- is more
> >likely than *bi-.  And keep in mind that the vowels /i/ and /u/
> >most likely have been there besides /a/ for typological reasons.
>
> Typology only goes so far.  I agree that the pre-ablaut form might have
> been *laikW-.  However, since Ablaut still occurs in the presence of /i/
> and /u/, this means that they were still independent of the Ablautend
> vowel.  To me, the only way for this to be is if /i/ and /u/ were in fact
> the semivowels /y/ and /w/.
Under the theory I posted, pre-ablaut *i and *u give the same results
as pre-ablaut *ai and *au.  I see little reason for a typologically
unlikely system /a ai au/ without true high vowels /i/ and /u/
when one can have a more natural /a i u/, either with or without
the diphthongs /ai/ and /au/.

>      If we presume that the original root was
> *layakWa, penultimate accent and vowel-reduction would have given *lyakW.
> But that form is clearly not the root for PIE; is it possible that *laikW
> was reached via metathesis?
Why not posit *likWa?  The problem arises only because you insist
on a one-vowel system ***which is not attested in any language***.

> >> PIE was fairly lenient on consonant clusters.
> >
> >Which suggests that quite a number of vowels were lost.
>
> Exactly.  Furthermore, there are apparently many instances of the cluster -
> tk- in PIE.  Another language group with this feature is Kartvelian.
Yes.  Paul Bennett goes as far as positing a series of dental-velar
doubly articulated stops (i.e., treating *tk as monophonemic),
but that is untenable because forms with *tk- are zero grades,
alternating with *tek-.

> >Yes.  Non-initial, in any case.  And the more archaic PIE accent
> >patterns indeed point at a penultimate accent.
>
> What are the more archaic PIE accent patterns?
In nouns: accent on the last stem vowel in the nominative, accusative
and locative singular, on the ending in the other cases.
(This includes the especially archaic root nouns.)
In verbs: accent on the last stem vowel in the singular,
on the ending in the plural.

This can be easily explained if one assumes that the unaccented
endings were monosyllabic, the accented ones bisyllabic.

Example:

nom. *kwán-sa  > *kwán-s > *kwo:n
gen. *kwan-ása > *kun-ás > *kunós

(I can't explain why the accented vowels surface as *o, though.)

> >Yes, nominal thematic vowels have nothing to do with verbal thematic
> >vowels, except that the same phoneme was involved.  I think the verbal
> >thematic vowel was a 3rd person object marker (the same morpheme
> >as the 3rd person stative ending *-e < *-a) that later became
> >a transitivity marker and yet later a semantically empty stem-forming
> >element.  The thematic nouns might have been adjectives originally,
> >or just nouns that happened to end in *-a.  There were noun stems ending
> >in *-i and *-u, so there probably also were noun stems ending in *-a.
> >That's all.
>
> The i- and u-stems are proplerly y- and w-stems, part of the consonant-
> stems.
There is indeed more to thematic stems than just a stem-final *-a.
Some of the endings are different from the athematic endings,
showing parallels to the pronominal endings.  Some scholars
thus assume that thematic nouns has pronominal elements suffixed.

> >As Steg already pointed out, the other way 'round.  And the Afro-Asiatic
> >stative endings closely resemble the IE ones: [snip]
>
> Sorry about that!  I knew they were the other way 'round :)
>
> >Miguel Carrasquer had the brilliant idea of tracing the stative
> >endings back to the AA prefix conjugation via a copula *-ku that was
> >suffixed to stative verbs:
> >
> >1st  *?a-ku > *-ku
> >2nd  *ta-ku > *-tku + gender markers *a/*i > *-tka:/*-tki:
> >3rd  *ya-ku > *-a
>
> I dunno about that.  At the very least, how can *?a-ku become *-ku but *ya-
> ku become *-a?  Given the other two rules, *ya-ku should become *-iku.
I don't know.  Perhaps the etymology for the 3rd person is incorrect,
and it is simply an endingless form to which no *ya-ku was suffixed.

> >I don't know.  If you ask me, the ending-stressed cases originally
> >had bisyllabic (and possibly not monomorphemic) case endings from
> >which later final vowels were lost, e.g. genitive *-asa.
> >This caused the accent to sit on the (first syllable of the) ending.
> >But why the genitive ending has an *o rather than the expected *e,
> >I don't know.
>
> Nor do I.  There are actually two forms of the PIE genitive: *-es, used in
> e.g. Latin, and *-os, used in e.g. Greek.  With current evidence, it's
> difficult, if not impossible, to tell which one was more original.  Regular
> penultimate accent would give *-es,
Yes, from -asa.

>      but I think the situation was more
> muddled than that.  Mainly, I think that the genitive came to be used as an
> ergative or active suffix, and then became the nominative.  Semantically,
> this seems to check out: the genitive, being an originative case, is
> perfect for the role of transitive subject marker, since it would denote
> who originated the action (i.e. the subject).
This is not impossible though the endings are clearly different
(nom. *-s < *-sa, gen. *-os < *-asa).

>       Although it makes sense in
> purely phonological terms, the idea of Glen Gordon et al. that the sigmatic
> nominative derives from a postfixed demonstrative does not hold water in
> the bigger picture.  Most languages with postfixed demonstratives or
> articles include them in case inflections (i.e. separate definite and
> indefinite conjugations).  This is clearly not the case with PIE.  Of
> course, once the genitive also came to denote transitive subject, there
> would be semantic confusion at times.  Perhaps this was lessened by having
> a different intonation for each role.  This seems to be common in
> languages.  I would like to discuss this further.
I assume an active-stative of Pre-PIE in which agents were marked
with *-sa and patients with *-ma, whatever the origins of the endings.

It is even possible that the genitive case contains a trace of
suffixaufnahme.  The actual genitive suffix would thus have been *-a;
to this was suffixed the case of the head noun.

Example: `the man's dog'

nom. *h2anar-a-sa kwan-sa
dat. *h2anar-a-aya kwan-aya

In the later stage, the nominative of the genitive was generalized.

(Assuming that genitives preceded nouns in Pre-PIE.)

> >> Has anyone considered the possibility of, or tried to implement, a
> >> sophisticated AI program for looking at different languages and trying to
> >> find connections between them.  I think it would be fascinating to try to
> >> do that.
> >
> >It would be.
>
> I think the AI would find connections where people don't see them.  AIs
> have a habit of producing results that surprise their inventors.
Yes, they think in different ways than humans, and thus recognize
different, often very surprising patterns.

Greetings,

Jörg.

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