Re: a(i)s-

From: tgpedersen@...
Message: 9988
Date: 2001-10-04

--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> Torsten,
>
> They are lookalikes, not cognates. Cognacy is demonstrated by
establishing regular correspondences and showing that your forms
conform to them. Even if you want to get around this requirement by
postulating loans rather than cognates, you have to make it clear
which ancient stage of the source language the borrowing comes from.
Your use of ahistorical collections of modern words (following
Manansala, in the case of Austronesian), with no diachronic analysis,
produces merely a mirage of similarity. For example, Malayo-
Polynesian "fire" words like <afi> or <ahi> may seem to resemble PIE
*h2ah-, until you realise that the medial consonant reflects earlier
(lenited) *p (Malay api might have given you a hint). Actually, the
PAN protoform is *Sapuy (> *hapuy > api etc.). The similarity is
gone. You don't go through this kind of historical checking branch
after branch. The fact that, say, modern Binandere has a "fire" word
which looks exactly like Sumerian izi (used almost 5000 years ago),
means nothing. Sumerian didn't borrow words from modern Binandere,
and the early MP prototype of the Binandere "fire" word was not like
<izi> at all.
>
> Piotr
>
>
I'll admit that the epithet "ahistorical collection" applies in the
case of Manansala's word list., since he doesn't supply any
description of the rules by which the collections of words he
provides might have been derived from a hypothetical Austric. I
should have been finding a description of the historical development
of (at least) the Austronesian languages a long time and added the
reconstructed Austronesian proto-forms. Unfortunately the Library of
the Linguistics Department of the University of Copenhagem doesn't
seem to have any; perhaps I should resort to the Royal Library.
In order that people wouldn't accuse me of using unstructured non-
rule-connected material on my website I chose only to add stuff from
textbooks, thus Bomhard for Nostratic, Orël & Stol'bova (and Møller,
but not in this case) for AfroAsiatic and EIEC for IndoEuropean. The
only non-structured part is thus that of Manansala's list, and of
course my own (implicit) comparison between reconstructed PAA and PIE
forms with Manansala's heaps. Your description of my "use of
ahistorical collections of modern words (following Manansala, in the
case of Austronesian)" is thus, shall we say, incorrect.
In the given case, we have

EIEC:
*H2eH-
(pres. *H2éHor) "burn, be hot"

*H2éHo:s
ha:s (acc. ha:ssan) "soda ash, potash; soap;
(pl.) ashes" Hittite

*H2eH-seH3 "hearth"

Orël & Stol'bova
82:
*?es- "fire"

Are you saying that if someone doesn't provide rules with which to
relate these two roots, then they are not related? And if someone
should claim that this might be a case of borrowing one way or the
other, and no date of borrowing is provided, then no borrowing has
occurred? Because that is what your words mean, as they stand.

Let me give you an example: everone and his brother agrees that
Greek "pyrgos" and German "Burg" etc are related and that they were
borrowed probably from AfroAsiatic. Probably, a date can be fixed on
to that loan too. But does that mean that if no one had been able to
put a date on the loan, if all we had was a similar-sounding word in
some AfroAsiatic language, we would be forced to accept a null
hypothesis that they were native IE words? I don't think so.

And don't forget either the context of the argument: Miguel claimed
that the PIE bronze and iron words were not related, since the former
(but not the latter) was derivable from the *H2eH- "heat" word. For
that argument to work *H2eH- has to be a IE-only root. So I pointed
out (among other things) the AfroAsiatic *?es-. In the face of that,
I don't think Miguel's implicit claim of IE-only status for the root
*H2eH- (especially give the extensions *H2éHo:s and *H2eH-seH3) is
tenable. You might of course set up a (Neo-Grammarian?) rule of the
game that if roots can't be connected at once with a set of rules
they are not related, but the strict application of that game rule
would, given yours and Miguels admission that none of your rule sets
cover the whole reality of the development of Slavic, entail that
Slavic is not a branch of IE but (by application of a prudent rule of
null-hypotheses) language isolates like Basque and Burushaski.

Torsten




Torsten