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

Rob Haden scripsit:

> On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 17:26:30 +0200, Isaac Penzev wrote:
>
> >Again, in Old Georgian it was -(i)sa, now it's -(i)s.
>
> Yes.  However, in other Kartvelian languages, the genitive suffix
> apparently contains /S/ instead of /s/.  Does anyone know more about this?
No wonder. /S/ and /s/ are often swapping places to and fro in too many langs.
Cf. Arabic _salâmu_ and Hebrew _Sâlôm_. Moreover, in Ge'ez they find /S/ while
the same letter in its daughter Amharic stands for /s/, and Amharic needed a
diacritic for representing /S/ in newer loans!

> >"I don't believe in PIE"
>
> Intriguing quote.  Care to explain?
Instead of thinking for better explanation myself, I've recently found a
stricingly similar attitude in one of our workshops messages:

On Wednesday, December 24, 2003 2:30 AM Keith wrote in
<Celticonlang@...>:
> I actually find general IE material rather esoteric. I mostly work
> within Celtic where the rules seem fairly well defined, as within
> Romance or Germanic. However once you get into the rarified atmosphere
> of PIE I'm pretty much lost. It seems that you can prove almost anything
> with ablaut and a sufficiently elastic semantic field :)
I feel much the same. Moreover, most of those "reconstructions" are based on
presuppositions I cannot share.

-- Yitzik who wrote this on the 29th of Kislev, year 5764