Preservation and Transparency of PIE Roots (was: Lislakh)

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "piervantrink" <piervantrink@...> wrote:

> 16/Since the guessed proto indo-european roots are not found in any indo-european language(ie of course there is no for example an english word nebhos=cloud)the reflex words in the various indo-european languages are cutted from their roots and ...

The system of manner contrasts in PIE - for which the original reconstruction [t] ~ [d] ~ [dH] still seems good enough - is very unusual and therefore it is not surprising that it does not survive widely. Some argue for there also being [tH], but if it existed it was rare enough to provide little support. Thus the old manner contrast is maintained only in Sanskrit amongst the oldest documented languages. (I'm allowing oral transmission to count as documenting, so excluding Pali.) However, Sanskrit's living descendants (or near-descendants) that preserve Sanskrit's [t] ~ [tH] ~ [d] ~ [dH] contrast have mutilated the structure of [i]Sanskrit[/i] roots.

Semitic consonants have also undergone their changes. None of the Proto-Semitic affricates have survived as such in Arabic, and several other consonants have undergone significant changes in Standard Arabic, let alone the dialects. Hebrew and Aramaic have had their lenition, though it is barely phonemic in Tiberian Hebrew.

The PIE vowels *a (whose existence is disputed), *e and *o all merged in Sanskrit, and *a and *o merged in many branches.

Thus, I'm afraid the nearest we can come to preserving the PIE roots is the consonants of Sanskrit and the vowels of Greek, and even then we have to contend with the palatalisations of Sanskrit. Even this fails to capture the 'laryngeals'. These are horribly common - but then so are Middle Egyptian "aleph", "ayin" and "'i" in Middle Egyptian.

> their semantico-phonetic derivations and inner pradigmas are rather arbitrary ones lacking a clear system, for example in Semitic every speaker who knows the meaning of a root automatically will know the meaning of its derivatives(example from the root *ktb, the derivative kVtVb(V stands for vowel) is always connected with the active form and nkVtVb with the passive form and so on... ie with clear and well defined paterns a system that is lacking in the indo-european daughter languages in respect with the constructed proto indo-european roots)

The system isn't any better in Greek or Sanskrit.

Incidentally:
(1) in Hebrew ka:tu:b (leaving lenition implicit) is the *passive* participle of the simplest verb form.
(2) in Arabic, active and passive differ only in their vowels.

Richard.