From: Danny Wier
Message: 2752
Date: 2000-07-04
>From: "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...>The Armenian ejectives may be areal influence from Georgian and various
>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,The apologia for a *s/*s^/*sw triad is based mostly on "s-mobile" which
>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 AnatolianI favor an Anatolian ("Turkish") homeland (because of the Hittites), with
>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.)
>The IE case system seems to have been permanently in the process ofIt seems like the declension of consonant-stems and short *o-stems is pretty
>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,Possible evidence of an "ergative" system for neuters. (I thought the
>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).