From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 17107
Date: 2002-12-10
----- Original Message -----
From: <richard.wordingham@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2002 11:17 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Does Koenraad Elst Meet Hock´s Challenge?
> One thing that has bothered
> me is that although reconstructed PIE is rich in roots, it seems very
> short of actual words. I suspect that would be one of the biggest
> problems in writing 'Teach Yourself Proto-Indo-European'. Translated
> fables have a very small cast of animals - horse, sheep, dog and wolf
> seem to be the prime actors.
Is that so? Many actual words are reconstructible. We're able to determine the declension type of many nouns and the conjugation type of lots of verbs. There may be subtle problems like deciding which of the attested alternative forms is historically older and which have been restructured, but this a form of l'embarras de richesse rather than lack of attested forms. If writing a PIE phrasebook is a problem, this is mostly because the reconstruction of PIE syntax is possible only in the vaguest outline, and that we have no idea what everyday usage and conversational phraseology were like -- how the IEs said "Yes", "No", "Good morning", "See you later" and "Thanks a lot". It's like having a dictionary but no list of common phrases and no guide to sentence grammar. If you want more fully derived animal names, think of pigs, cattle, bears, mice, hares, geese, ducks, and even hornets.
Piotr