Re: [tied] Re: I'm back with a few questions

On 2006-01-24 19:05, whitedawn wrote:

> Hello to everyone!
> I am the new one on the list. My name is Dusan Vukotic (Serbia) and I am
> an amateur "tongue-digger". Thanks a lot to moderator for approving my
> membership.
>
> It seems to me that all this "laringeal" theories have mislead us and
> directed the "lingua" science to the death end of the road. Why I think so?
>
> 1. During the period when the man was mute or unable for an articulated
> speech only velars (k,g, h) were on his "menu"; just as it is today in
> the world of the vast majority of carnivorous mammals. If this
> supposition were right then any further "larinx" researches would be of
> no importance in the future.

"Suppositions" about the origin of articulated speech, whether right or
wrong, are simply irrelevant for understanding Indo-European
linguistics. Whether we place Proto-IE in the fourth or the sixth
millennium BC, it's still at least a hundred millennia away from the
beginnings of human language.

> 2. It looks that vowels could be observed only as "auxiliary means" in
> genesis of speach; i. e. they were used just for the creation of
> "notion's distinctions". Example: molest, malice, melt; blue, blow,
> bleed, blush; sun, son; tone (muscle), tank (drink heavily), thin...

If you mean that sounds _can_ be iconic, I agree. But it's only a
marginal tendency, not a law. Most of the phonological stuff that words
are made of is arbitrary. In other words, morphemes are the vehicles of
meaning and grammatical function but individual segments (vowels and
consonants) aren't. You might imagine that <thin> has an unrounded high
front vowel because the "creator" of this word wanted it to express "the
idea of thinness". But it goes back to Old English þynne with a rounded
vowel; in Proto-Germanic the same word was pronounced *þunni- < *þunwi-,
with a rounded back vowel (cf. OHG dunni, OIc. þunnr); and in PIE it was
*tn.h2-ú-, with a syllabic nasal an no front vowel anywhere. The farther
back, the less iconic it gets, which shows that its present-day iconic
value is accidental.

> 3. Some consonants were changed in the same sense as I ascribed it to
> vowels above (notion distinction - p,b,v,f; t,d,th; k,g,h; s,z) and,
> finally, palatals came as an "enforced economy of the tongue".

Same as above.

Piotr