Re: [tied] IS's "regular roots"

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 5843
Date: 2001-01-29

To be sure, Bomhard admits -(V)C- suffixes as root extensions, which greatly enlarges the encoding potential of CVC-. His reconstructed _lexemes_ (as opposed to abstract "roots") are often of the form CVC-(V)C-. You remarked that despite the number of posited protosegments there is a lot of homophony in Bomhard's Nostratic. I would think homophony is a near-constant element of lexical systems, no matter what the phonotactic structure is. Note how much homophony exists in English despite its large phoneme inventory and relatively complex phonotactics. One could easily compile a list of _hundreds_ of homonymic doublets (and many triplets as well) involving not loanwords (as Torsten would have it) but good Anglo-Saxon words that have became homophones because of perfectly regular mergers (meat -- meet -- mete, ewe -- yew -- you, wright -- right -- write, so -- soe -- sew, bare -- bear[1] -- bear[2], roe -- row[1] -- row[2], weather -- wether -- whether, etc.)
 
Piotr
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, January 29, 2001 5:03 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] IS's "regular roots"

I was discussing the case of a hypothetical Bomhard-like
reconstruction, but with the phonological inventory stripped, and no
mention of tones, etc.  Ehret's "Proto-Afrasian" is also CVC, but at
least he posits 2 por 3 tones (in itself not unreasonable: Chadic,
Cushitic and Omotic contain tonal languages).  There are 42 consonants
and 10 vowels in his system.