Re: [TIED] IE, AA, Nostratic and Ringo

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 2751
Date: 2000-07-03

 
----- Original Message -----
From: "Danny Wier" <dawier@...>
To: <cybalist@egroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, July 01, 2000 11:25 AM
Subject: [TIED] IE, AA, Nostratic and Ringo

> 1) Concerning Gamqrelidze & Ivanov.  What are the distinctive ideas
> concerning IE proposed by this
pair?  How do other current linguists view
> these
concepts?
 
With mixed feelings. The historical linguistic community awaited G&I's grande oeuvre with bated breath, only to experience some disappointment. As regards their phonological ideas, G&I advance the standard "glottalic" explanation of IE root-shape restrictions and of the absence of *b. They manipulate aspirated and non-aspirated allophones of *t[h] and *d[h] to project a unified version of Grassmann's Law back onto the PIE time plane, but ignore the distribution of Italic and Germanic reflexes, which are incompatible with that account. Gamkrelidze's old claim that several modern Armenian dialects have a stop system similar to that described in the book has been rebutted in recent years by several Armenologists including at least one Armenian scholar.
 
G&I liberally introduce hitherto unheard-of PIE phonemes (*q, *S, *SW, labialised dentals) without compelling evidence. No specialist to my knowledge has bought these innovations. They seem to attach great importance to the similarity of ablaut patterns in IE and Kartvelian, though the analogies are of a rather trivial kind (processes producing similar phenomena have been reenacted independently in a number of cases familiar to any historical linguist).
 
It's clear throughout the book that G&I are at pains to sell an E Anatolian homeland scenario and that their reconstruction is consistently stretched to fit that scheme. Their linguistic palaeontology, for example, features reconstructed words for 'elephant', 'monkey', 'leopard' and 'lion', amongst other Southern fauna and flora. (I admit there's a faint chance that the IEs were familiar with the lion, which used to be one of the most widely distributed mammals, though its range has been shrinking rapidly since the early Holocene.)
 
Whatever the actual contribution of each of the co-authors in preparing the book, most of the controversial ideas advanced therein are demonstrably Gamkrelidze's. They are laid out or adumbrated in his earlier publications. I've met both scholars personally, and it's clear to me that Gamkrelidze is the less temperate of the two, and more strongly dedicated to championing their common cause.

> 3) I have seen several versions of Proto-Indo-European case reconstructions.
>   What is the most
accepted case endings (it's still eight cases, right),
> given with
singular-dual-plurals and possibly consonant, o, a: ("feminine"),
> other
vowel stems?  I know the roots, but what has been reconstructed in the
> way of grammar?
 
The IE case system seems to have been permanently in the process of forming, hence the difficulty of establishing its "canonical" form. The most fundamental distinctions were those between the inanimate and animate (a.k.a. neuter vs. common) noun/adjective classes (the familiar three-gender system developed only in non-Anatolian IE), and within either class between the more archaic athematic (consonantal and i/u-final) and the more "modern" thematic stems. The so-called a:-stems were originally consonantal (ending in *-x).
 
Inanimate nouns were defective in certain respects: they had no plural, strictly speaking, though there were derived collectives which served as surrogate plurals; they also lacked any distinction between the nominative and the accusative. The syncretic Nom./Acc. case is endingless for inanimate athematics, which suggests that the thematic *-o-m may be secondary (with the object marker *-m taken from the Acc. of animates).
 
The most securely reconstructable case endings are the following:
Nom.sg. *-s (animate, dropped after consonants other than oral stops)
Acc.sg. *-m (animate)
Gen.sg. *-s/*-es/*-os (also, originally, in the thematic declension)
Abl.sg. *-et (in the thematic declension, *-o-et > *-o:t, with *t lenited to *d in some branches)
Dat.sg. *-ei (*-o-ei > *-o:i)
Loc.sg. *-i (esp. in the thematic declension, where *-o-i > *-oi) or uninflected
Voc.sg. no ending (in the thematic declension the thematic vowel surfaces as *-e)
Nom.pl. *-es (animate; in the thematic declension *-o-es > *-o:s)
Nom.coll. *-(a)x or uninflected (for some consonantal inanimate nouns, apparently with a stress shift)
Acc.pl. *-ns (animate, probably < *-m-s)
Gen.pl. *-om (*-o-om > *-o:m)
Loc.pl. *-su (athematic)/*-isu (thematic, with *-o-isu > *-oisu)
A separate directive case in *-o is reconstructed by some on the basis of Anatolian evidence, but it may be just a variant of one of the other adverbial cases, most likely an uninflected Dat./Loc. of thematic nouns. The instrumental varies more than the other (more common) adverbial cases and often involves the agglutinated preposition *-bHi; some of the cases in the plural are likewise variable -- either because they were dialectal or because their relative rarity impeded the survival of the original forms. The ablative and the vocative did not have distinct plural forms.
 
The dual number(unattested in Anatolian) had only four distinct cases: Nom./Acc./Voc., Gen., Dat./Abl./Ins., and Loc.
Nom.du. (animate) *-e (or possibly, but less likely IMHO, *-h), contracted with the stem vowel, if any (hence thematic *-o-e > *-o:)
Nom.du. (inanimate) *-i-e (or maybe *-i-h; in the thematic declension *-o-i(-e) > *-oi)
Gen.du. *-ou-s
Dat.du. *-bHi-o-e > *-bHjo:
Loc.du *-ou
Piotr