[tied] Re: Pronunciation of "r" - again?

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Ryan" <proto-language@...>
wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "david_russell_watson"

<liberty@...> wrote:

>
> Perhaps you do not read any messages but your own and answers
> to them but it is probably clear to most list-members that
> I do not subscribe to *H1, *H2 or *H3 with vowel-coloring
> abilities. I believe there were two pharyngal and two laryngal
> phonemes in Nostratic, and by the time PIE developed from it,
> three of these had coalesced in /h/ while Nostratic /?/ remained.

My comment was meant to address the common idea that
the "laryngeals" of P.I.E. could only have been something
like the pharyngeals of Arabic to have the vowel-coloring
properties that they displayed. Since you too are comparing
them to Arabic sounds, it's understandable and forgivable
that I should have included such a comment.

> > Indo-Aryan could produce long 'e' and long 'o' out of
> > nothing more exotic than *az, and so it isn't necessary
> > to go so far out of our way appealing to high-powered
> > pharyngealized sounds like those of Arabic to explain
> > vowel coloration.
>
> Indo-Aryan (why not Indo-Iranian?)

Because it doesn't extend to Indo-Iranian. Iranian preserves
the sequence just as it is. The change is known only from
Indo-Aryan, although not actually all of it, for it isn't
reflected in the Indo-Aryan loans in the Mitanni documents.

> Indo-Aryan (why not Indo-Iranian?) did not produce *e: and *o:
> from *az. That is absolutely a misstatement of the facts.

Then just what do you suppose the outcome in Sanskrit of
Proto-Indo-Iranian *az was?

You do realize that Sanskrit has no 'z', do you not?

> Where did you ever get such an idea???

From reading 'The Sanskrit Language' by T. Burrow.

Please read the file 'The Sanskrit Language - pgs. 64 - 65',
which I've uploaded to the files section of this group,
and see for yourself that it is yours, not mine, that "is
absolutely a misstatement of the facts".

> And even if it had done so, flatulation and the cry "Fire!"
> both empty a room. Which one does not exist?

I have no idea what you're getting at with this one, unless it's
just to complain that nobody will stay long in a room with you?

> Where are you getting your information? Certainly not from any
> established writer on PIE.
>
> They certainly did not "completely disappear..".

Then where are they hiding, and why was it so significant when
some where first discovered in Hittite? Was it not because until
then their existence was only suspected, from the effects they
have left behind?

> There is no "modern phonetic sense of the word".

How many times is it now that I have corrected your phonetic
misconceptions, and yet it still crosses your mind not at all
that I might know what I'm talking about? :^(

J. C. Catford uses 'laryngeal' to cover two places of articulation:
the ventricular, and the glottal. Unless Ladefoged and others
use the word in a substantially different way, then I would say
that _that_ is the modern phonetic sense of the word. The so
called laryngeals of P.I.E. weren't necessarily laryngeal by
that definition, but the traditional nomenclature has stuck,
as it often does, and so we continue to call them 'laryngeals'
regardless.

> The term has been employed to indicate three (sometimes four)
> phonemes in PIE that PIEists believe can be distinguished by the
> influence they exert of word development.

You don't say?

> > Without an etymological connection between a modern
> > laryngeal¹ and a P.I.E. laryngeal², even these examples
> > you admit lend nothing at all to an argument against
> > the sound system of Arabic being the closest to that of
> > Proto-Nostratic, but then they're not really relevant
> > to that question in the first place.
> >
> > Similarly, without having demonstrated an etymological
> > connection between each Arabic laryngeal and the Proto-
> > Nostratic laryngeal of which you believe it is a reflex,
> > you again have nothing of significance at all in the
> > fact that Arabic happens to have four laryngeals. That's
> > true even if we are to give you, for the sake of argument,
> > that Arabic was unquestionably a relative of P.I.E. If
> > you truly don't see this, then you can't really claim
> > to understand how historical and comparative linguistics
> > are done.
>
> Some of the statements made by you above are so egregiously wrong

I've answered all of your claims of error, can you still say
that I'm egregiously wrong?

I wonder if you shouldn't apologize, in fact?

> that you have no standing whatsoever to lecture anyone

about "understand(ing)

> how historical and comparative linguistics are done".

Just ignore me then, because this list permits even people
with "no standing" to express their opinion too. If it
didn't, you wouldn't be here either.

Besides, I think you describe nobody so well as yourself
with these words.

> > Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that your
> > Nostratic theory is correct, and that Arabic is related
> > to I.E., and even if we accept for the sake of argument
> > that the sound system of Arabic is the closest of all
> > Nostratic languages to that of Proto-Nostratic, we still
> > have no way of knowing whether the *r of P.I.E. and the
> > 'r' of Arabic are reflexes of the same Proto-Nostratic
> > sound. The *r of P.I.E. could well have come from a
> > Proto-Nostratic **d, while the 'r' of Arabic came from
> > a Proto-Nostratic **l, or vice versa, and with the time
> > scales involved, they could have even more apparently
> > unlikely antecedents than those (Remember the Armenian
> > word for 'two'?)
>
> Well, it seems you really do not understand how comparative
> studies work.

Well, it seems you really do not know how to read, because
your very next statement:

> If PIE *r could be shown to correspond to Arabic <r>,
> it would be preferential to assume that Nostratic had /*r/ also

is precisely what I already demanded, and more than once: that
at least a correspondence between P.I.E. * r and Arabic 'r' be
properly demonstrated before we accept that the pronunciation
of Arabic 'r' can tell us anything about that of P.I.E. *r. I
gave you that Arabic and P.I.E. were part of Nostratic, and I
even gave you that the sound system of Arabic was the closest
to that of Proto-Nostratic, for the sake of argument, and because
neither was required to demonstrate the central flaw of your
argument.

How do you hope to convince others that I don't understand
some thing, when you immediately follow with an echo of what
I already said myself several times about that thing?

> but if Nostratic had a uvular click from which they both developed,
> it would not affect anything. The relationship would be there
> regardless of the phonological shape of the Nostratic phoneme.

You've forgot the beginning of this thread: you claimed that
P.I.E. *r was most likely a trill because the modern Arabic
'r' is a trill and that there is the Nostratic connection
between the two. That idea would most certainly be affected
were Proto-Nostratic **r a uvular click instead of a trill.

> The rest of what you wrote is simply meaningless.

Or else you simply didn't understand it, or else you simply
have no good answer to it but don't want to acknowledge it
and lose face.

> One establishes correspondences by being able to show relationships
> in many different words.

Of course, but nothing I said contradicts or denies that.

> If in one word, PIE *r = Arabic <r>, in another, Arabic <l>, in
> another, Arabic <d>, in another, Arabic <z>, any linguist worth
> his salt would start over, and question all these non-conforming
> and irregular correspondences.

Of course he would, but I said nothing about irregular
correspondences. That was not the point of my suggesting
that Arabic 'r' might have come from Nostratic **l and
P.I.E. *r from Nostratic **d. That was only an example
to make a point, not a real suggestion about how I think
they might have evolved, and not an example of irregular
correspondences either, only of correspondences at odds
with your own theory.

I've written that X is how it is properly done, and then
you have throughout your message done little more than
reply that I have no idea what I'm talking about because
Y is how it's really done. Y then turns out to be no more
than a re-wording of X.

> > Several modern Indo-Aryan languages have a repertoire of
> > sounds supposedly very close to that of Sanskrit, and
> > are of course of the same ancestry, but yet quite often
> > modern Indo-Aryan words don't show the same sound in
> > the same place as their Sanskrit cognate, even when all
> > of the sounds in question are available in the repertoires
> > of both Sanskrit and the modern Indo-Aryan language. For
> > example the Panjabi word saccA "true" is cognate with
> > Sanskrit satya-, but even though Panjabi and Sanskrit
> > are unquestionably related, and both have 'c', 'cc', 't',
> > and 'y' in their repertoires, it still cannot be claimed
> > that every, or even any, Panjabi 'c' is a retention of
> > a Sanskrit 'c' and thus a clue to the latter's original
> > sound. Likewise, Hindi has a retroflex 'r' that's cognate
> > to retroflex 'd' in many Sanskrit words, and now imagine
> > if the regular 'r' of Hindi were to disappear in a future
> > stage of the language, or change to some other sound that
> > we wouldn't be inclined to notate as 'r', leaving only the
> > retroflex 'r'. Wouldn't future linguists, if following
> > your lead, be inclined to consider the retroflex 'r' a
> > a clue to the sound of Sanskrit's 'r'? They'd be wrong
> > if they did so, of course, and only those who looked into
> > the etymological aspect of the question would realized
> > that retroflex 'r' was no retention of Sanskrit's 'r'.
>
> I cannot comment on the immediately preceding paragraph in a way
> that would be acceptable to our moderators.

Oh can't you?! You can comment any way you like, as far
as I'm concerned, because you make a fool of nobody but
yourself by doing so. You're wrong about this matter, as
you have been wrong about so many others in the past when
you likewise responded so snidely to correction, but yet
you never learn from any of it, and never even think to
hesitate before lashing out.

> I will only say it displays a _complete_ lack of even the barest
> understanding of how language change happens, and the forms it
> takes.

No, it does not, unless you really believe that the 'cc'
of 'saccA' indicates that Sanskrit has the same sequence
with the same pronunciation in its cognate 'satya-'?

No matter what you say, you're trying to force us to accept
a connection between the sound system of one language and
that of another on the basis of their similarity, and then
trying to use that supposed connection to bolster very some
very poor etymologies, when properly you need to do the
etymological work first, after which it matters not in the
least what sorts of sounds or sound systems are thus proven
to correspond.

You're telling us that Arabic has four laryngeals and P.I.E
had three and so, apparently for lack of any other known
candidates with those "proper" qualifications, they must be
related, and that's just ridiculous!

> > So if this is true for unquestionably related languages
> > with similiar repertoires of sounds, how much more true
> > is it of Arabic and P.I.E.?
> >
> > The pronunciation of Arabic 'r' is no legitimate guide to
> > the sound of P.I.E. *r.
>
> According to you, there is no "legitimate" guide to anything. So
> why bother yourself with posting to this list?

Well I can understand why you would want me to go away,
or just stop posting, as you suggest in another message,
but I do not believe, nor have ever said, that there
is no legitimate guide to anything. I've went to great
lengths to describe to you what is the proper methodology.
You even claim to follow that methodology, judging from
your repeating most of it back to me as you've done. It's
just that you don't _really_ follow it, or truly fully
understand it, or you would never have made the claim,
among many others, for example, that the presence of
voiceless aspirated stops in Indo-Aryan lends to the
idea that P.I.E. had the same series, when it has been
demonstrated etymologically that that series goes back
to combinations of plain stop + laryngeal in P.I.E.

> > > better (more) than any PIE-derived language.
> > > You still think this is wrong?
>
> > I still think it is _unproven_. As I say, for the sake of
> > argument, the most that can possibly be given you is that
> > P.I.E. and Arabic are related, and that P.I.E. had three
> > laryngeals and Arabic has four. However you still must
> > prove an etymological connection between the laryngeals
> > of P.I.E. to the laryngeals of Arabic, and then show by
> > appeal to known sound changes how each Proto-Nostratic
> > antecedent, with the sound you posit for it, could have
> > produced both its Arabic reflex (supposed by you to be
> > unchanged), and its P.I.E. reflex as well. Until you can
> > do that, you absolutely may not claim that Arabic has
> > "retained" anything.
> >
> > Finally, it's not even proper, regardless of what was
> > given you for the sake of argument, to compare P.I.E.
> > directly to Arabic. It should be compared to Proto-Afro-
> > Asiatic.
>
> Obviously, you have never read Bomhard.

Oh it's always so "obvious" what others "haven't read" with
you, isn't it, or to what low socio-economic class they must
belong, etc.?! You simply don't realize what such comments
make "obvious" about your own feelings of inadequacy. You
couldn't possibly, and continue without embarrassment as you
do.

> He proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt,

I've seen the sort of thing that you don't doubt, but which I
doubt myself very much, so you'll forgive me if I still don't
defer to the conclusions you've drawn from your Nostratic
theory about P.I.E.

> that PIE "laryngeals" and Arabic "laryngeals" can be related.

Don't tell us about classes of consonants in two different
languages that are both called 'laryngeal'. Show us instead
pairs of morphemes from the two languages with similar
meaning or grammatical function and which show systematic
sound correspondences, which you've claimed now yourself
to understand is required. If Bomhard has done this already,
then by all means scan, cut, and paste it here. If you have
not, and Bomhard has not, then contrary to all your huff and
puff, nothing has been proven "beyond a shadow of a doubt".

> For the ten-millionth time, if there were a decent reconstruction
> of PAA with which to compare PIE, I would be glad to do so. But
> there is not.

If there's no decent reconstruction of Proto-Afro-Asiatic,
then you can hardly claim that the sound system of Arabic
is the most conservative within Afro-Asiatic, much less
Nostratic, as you do. Don't say otherwise and then claim to
understand how to do historical and comparative linguistics.

> I can't get no sat-is-fac-tion.

The only thing that apparently satisfies you is to be told
that you're right, which simply can't be done every time.

David