Re: [tied] Re: PK

From: Miguel Carrasquer
Message: 14976
Date: 2002-09-02

On Mon, 02 Sep 2002 17:43:41 -0000, "richardwordingham"
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

>--- Miguel Carrasquer wrote:
>> Nostratic evidence is hard to come by, and even if found not likely
>to convince many people. PIE *ye:kWr "liver", pre-PIE **lyé:pWn.t <
>**lí:punt can be compared to words for "spleen" in Cushitic (Afar
>ale'fu:, pl. a'lefit); Chadic (Angas lap); Uralic (Cheremis lep(a),
>Votyak lup, Zyryene lOp, Saami *dapde,Teryugan Ostyak LAp&tne, Hung.
>lép, Forest nenets Laps'a) and Tungus (Orok lipc^e): Dolgopol'skij
>#104)
>
>Richard:
>What's the Afro-Asiatic reconstruction?

What's an Afro-Asiatic reconstruction? :-)

I have Ehret, and frankly, it's rubbish. Orel & Stolbova, from what I gather,
are not much better.

>The semantics are good.
>
>Miguel:
>> while PIE *kWétwor- "four", pre-PIE **pWét-wa:r- < **pút- can be
>compared to Afro-Asiatic *p.ut.-/*?a-p.t.- "four" (Chadic *fud.u,
>Eg. ?ftaw,

Correction *?fdaw (where <d> was emphatic /t./).

>Beja fad.-ig, Somali ?afar, Semitic (with metathesis) *?arb-a3-).
>
>> Convinced? I didn't think so.
>
>Richard:
>If the Afro-Asiatic labials are the same, and the ideas went from PIE
>out to Nostratic, it looks convincing. (I wouldn't be convinced if
>the origin of the idea were some mass comparatist matching labials
>and just picking out Germanic words when the other IE words did not
>match. In statistics, the way you do the sampling matters.) I'd
>like to see Piotr's demolition job. Or does that offer only apply to
>the dormant Nostratic list?
>
>To demonstrate IE *pW, the words for 'four' don't even have to be
>cognate! I think a loan between the ancestral languages is
>plausible. Someone please correct me if I am wrong.

True, borrowings will also do. The most likely source of borrowing, Semitic, is
problematic in this case, however (?arba3u, with metathesis *?ap.t.- > *?at.p.-
> *?adb- > ?arb-, and a what's the `ayn doing there?), while Egyptian (not
likely, but possible) has *?fdw < *?ap.t-. The best fit is Chadic, but somehow
a PIE-Chadic borrowing seems unlikely. I find it encouraging that there's also
a plausible link between AA and IE "3": "PN" *tiláti > PAA *c^ala:c^ > Sem.
*t_ala:t_ // PPIE *t^lát^ > *trét^- > PIE *trey- (ordinal tr.t-yós).



=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...