Re: THEORY: derivation question

dunn patrick w wrote:

> My lack of linguistic knowledge is showing *tugs his shirt down*.  How
> exactly does one go about deriving a word from a root?  Is there a syst=
em,
> or does one just make sound changes until it looks right?
If you mean, how do we know how words are cognate with eachother,
what you're asking is really a fairly complicated question.  The short an=
swer
is yes, it involves the use of finding _Lautgesetze_ (soundlaws) that lin=
k
words together, but it's not as arbitrary as it might sound (you can't ju=
st
say "this word comes from this protoform because here's a nifty law to
explain it"), because these sound laws are not just invented on the fly, =
but
when you create the law (or rather, find one), it must apply in *all* rel=
evant
areas of the language.  That is, if you postulate, e.g. as Jakob Grimm (o=
f
fairytale fame) did, that all voiceless stop consonants of Proto-Indo-Eur=
opean
become voiceless fricative consonants in Germanic, wherever they are, you
must apply that without exception.  If that makes trouble, then you'll ha=
ve to
rethink your theory, or scrap it.  (Incidentally, don't allow big words t=
o
intimidate you;  linguists are particularly bad about using jargon like t=
hat).

To use that as an example, Grimm found the following correspondences betw=
een
Germanic consonants and those of Latin, Greek and Sanskrit (which were th=
e primary
objects of philological study at the time):

Germanic     Lat, Gk, Skt
f  th  x^        p   t   k

(^ =3D "ch" in Bach")

For example, English and German have /f/ in "foot" and "Fu=DF", while Lat=
in
has /p/ in "ped-", Greek has "pod-" and Sanskrit has "pad-"  (IIRC).   (N=
ot just in
these words, but ALL places in the languages).  Where the Germanic
languages have /f/, the other Indo-European languages (or the oldest form=
s
of many of them, at any rate) had a /p/.  Grimm postulated that in these
Germanic languages, a regular rule had changed all original /p/s to /f/s.=
*
Moreover, he found the other consonant laws above.  All the ealier forms
had the quality of being voiceless stop consonants (they completely block
the air flow and don't have vibration of the vocal chords), while the Ger=
manic
consonants allowed a little more air to pass by through the mouth (i.e., =
were
"fricatives", as they caused "friction" or "frication").  So, Grimm disco=
vered
that there was something even more underlying to this set of changes:  it
wasn't just that all /p/s change to /f/s in Protogermanic (the ancestor l=
anguage
of the Germanic languages), but a whole series of similar consonants were
undergoing a change, and a regular, language-wide one at that.  In one fa=
il
swoop, he practically invented the science of linguistics, putting it on =
a much
more empirical foundation.

After much work, Grimm was able to come up with two other rules:

PIE                 Germanic
p   t  k      --->  f   th   x
b  d  g      --->  p   t    k
bh dh gh   --->  b  d    g

* (Incidentally, there was no particular reason why the protolanguage had
to be reconstructed with an original *p;  it could have had an *f, but th=
en
you would have to say all the other languages changed with the very same
rule, from *f to *p, rather than just Germanic changing from *p to *f, an=
d
it's much easier to say one family made the change than all of them
did.  There could have been this other change, but it'smuch less likely.)

You can find more about Indo-European on the section of my website
dedicated to that:

<http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/indoeuro.html>

There's a better explanation there, too, called "Everything you ever
wanted to know about Proto-Indo-European (and the Comparative
Method) but were afraid to ask!".


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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
ICQ#: 4315704   AIM: Deuterotom
Website: <http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."

There's nothing particularly wrong with the
proletariat. It's the hamburgers of the
proletariat that I have a problem with. - Alfred Wallace
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