Re: [tied] Bending IE roots

Pokorny's favourites are roots producing verbs of motion, glossed "bewegen" or the like; there must be scores of them. There's nothing strange about that; ANY language has many morphemes meaning APPROXIMATELY "move, go, travel, etc." or "bend, twist, turn, distort" or whatever. "He-goat" may well have had a number of regional variants -- farming terms often do, even nowadays. The problem is rather to what extent the concept of "fundamental root" is useful in linguistics. Listing "roots" for concrete or even technical terms like "he-goat" is hardly the best way of representing such vocabulary. Listing roots as such may be a didactically useful exercise if you show at the same time how lexical derivation processes work. Languages use words, not roots, as building blocks.

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: Andrei Markine

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Tuesday, May 08, 2001 7:55 AM

Subject: Re: [tied] New file uploaded to cybalist

Something is strange about this list. I can understand three roots for "sheep", three roots for "goat". But five roots for "he-goat"?.. And how to explain eleven roots "to shine" and twelve roots "to glitter" (not counting three "glittering")? The most striking is "to bend" ( was it IE favourite pastime?): 19 roots with meaning "to bend" only 8 roots - "to bend" with secondary meanings 3 roots - "to be bent" (didn't IE have mediopassive?) plus 1 root "to become bent". Altogether - 31, while total number of roots is just about 2000... All roots are described as "fundamental roots (i.e., without extensions)". Are they really without extentions? E.g. out of twelve "to glitter", five start with Ble-...