From: G&P
Message: 66489
Date: 2010-08-27
Responding to questions that are reprinted below:
1) and 2) I guess we have to assume that their data is correct.
3) We don’t have to accept their conclusion. LIV suggests a PIE origin for the attested forms in 1) and 2), but LIV doesn’t suggest a PIE origin for other forms that also exist in individual languages. This is shorthand for a process of intellectual enquire that the article has ignored. Some attested forms are highly unlikely to be from PIE roots, while others fit common patterns so closely that a PIE origin is possible or probable. Some PIE roots based on a single language are in fact related to a widely attested noun. The article doesn’t mention that, either. It’s a sneaky, deceptive, and unscholarly article. (An example of such a single-language verb based on a widely attested noun is *nebh. The verb is only in Greek, but the noun is found in Greek, Hittite, Baltic, Celtic and Germanic, and possibly also in I-I. [Pokorny p315] Yet the article pretends it is a root based on a single language.)
4) On what grounds do they believe that roots reconstructed with laryngeals are unreliable? It doesn’t matter for their purposes whether the root is reconstructed with a laryngeal, or as Pokorny reconstructs it, without a laryngeal. It’s still a PIE root, deduced logically by known processes. It’s only the precise form of it that is disputed, not the existence of it, as the article pretends.
5) It doesn’t matter how many “laws”, that is to say, phonetic processes, are involved in getting from a hypothetical PIE form to the attested forms. All that matters is whether these processes can be supported clearly from (a) evidence and (b) what we know of common phonetic change. Many of them are the obvious ones likes Grimm’s law and Grassman’s law and the law of palatals. They simply describe what went on as PIE dialects changed into the forms we now see.
So while the article may raise some important notes of caution, I don’t believe it challenges anything particularly.
Peter
Is it true that, as is stated in that article:
1) that 32% of the roots listed and discussed in H. Rix et al.'s _ Lexikon der
indogermanischen Verben_ (LIV) are reconstructed on the basis of data drawn
from *one single* branch of the IE family?
2) that 34% of the roots listed and discussed in LIV are reconstructed on the
basis of data
drawn from *two* language branches only?
3) that 66% of the roots listed and discussed in LIV cannot, therefore,
"be relied upon because they are reconstructed on the basis of just one or
two languages / branches witnesses only"?
4) that of the remaining 34% of the roots listed and discussed in LIV, nearly
half have been
reconstructed using laryngeal segments, and that only 18% of the total can,
therefore, "form evidence, in principle, for genuine linguistic
correlations, because their reconstruction meets the three-witnesses criterion
and do not make recourse to laryngeal segments"?
5) that the number of IE linguistic laws used to reconstruct the verbal roots
in LIV is, thus, higher than the number of "genuine" verbal roots as
defined at point 4)?
I will greatly appreciate any comments on these five points, as well as, in
general, on the article I have posted.
Thanks in advance, and best regards.
Francesco