Re: [tied] Nominative: A hybrid view

From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen
Message: 22539
Date: 2003-06-03

On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, Glen Gordon wrote:

>
> Jens:
> >Right, and therefore you do not suggest that. Now, since the obvious lack
> >of motivation stops you from making singular and plural forms come from an
> >undifferentiated source, why does the same lack of motivation not stop you
> >from deriving the dual and plural forms from a common source? This refuted
> >itself.
>
> That didn't make sense. Anatolian shows a clear and ubiquitous distinction
> between singular and plural. This distinction is related to that found in
> the
> rest of IE. The dual is much harder to find and even when it is found, it is
> not
> fully worked out as a system.
>
> We can make your same weak arguement for claiming that the feminine is
> ancient, as I believe you had. We can find whatever small instances of a
> feminine marker and use that to show that Common IE was never just
> animate-inanimate. Yet, this is crazy because the arguement is not unified
> to
> show that an entire _system_ underlies the evidence.
>
> It's like Cyrus Gordon claiming that Minoan was Semitic. He found small
> textual fragments here and there that seemed to him to show that it was
> a Semitic language but yet he never analyzed the Minoan texts as a _whole_,
> making his analyses largely meaningless and unscientific.
>
> Here, you do the same thing. You take fragments here and there of Hittite
> or Luwian or Lycian or whatever Anatolian to support your assertions. Yet,
> as a whole, there's really nothing that shows that there was an underlying
> dual system behind Anatolian that relates to the rest of IE. Just fragments.
>
>
> >>>And why can we establish element functions between IE animate dual
> >>>markers and non-IE dual markers if none of them ever were dual markers
> >>>in a shared past?
> >>
> >>Elaborate.
> >
> >That's what I did in the parts of my posts you did not quote.
>
> Oh right. You're talking irrelevant junk again about EskimoAleut. I thought
> you were alluding to loanwords from IE into neighbouring languages
> that showed somehow that the dual was ancient. That would at least be
> more relevant.

Well, how *do* you explain that the singular of the stem of the numeral
'eight' exists in Kartvelian in the meaning 'four', if the IE dual form is
to have been a *plural* instead? Did 'eight' originally just mean "several
fours, be it eight, twelve, sixteen or higher"? How can sheer nonsense be
avoided here?

Jens