In a message dated 12/13/99 4:18:03 PM Mountain Standard Time,
brentlords@... writes:
<< But does that mean that all the remainder of related/similiar words are
then assumed to be cognates?
-- you can generally tell which are cognates, yes. Cow and Tocharian 'ku'
and Latin or Greek 'bos' and so forth, to continue the examples.
You can't account for every word that way, however.
For example, the Germanic languages, besides having some characteristic
sound-shifts from PIE, also have a common group of lexical items -- mostly
having to do with the sea and sea products -- which aren't reduceable to
Indo-European roots. This vocabulary entered the PIE dialect which later
became proto-Germanic at some point between the breakup of the PIE linguistic
unity and the emergence of the historic languages. Nobody can say exactly
how; probably from a pre-IE substrate language.
By way of contrast, Baltic and Slavic have very little non-IE vocabulary.
Then again, there's linguistic innovation, the coining of new words. Eg., in
many European languages the word for "bear" traces back to a word meaning
"the brown one". There was a taboo on saying the actual word, and the
euphemism eventually replaced it.
>In reflecting on word origin it seemed to me that words can be introduced
from other societies that would not be visible as loan words, either because
the sounds were not involved one of these conversions you indicated above -
or because the new langauge either did not have the constant or vowel, or was
they were uncomfortable with one and picked one that fit their pronounciation
better.
-- sound changes are pretty well universal and they're extremely regular;
they always happen one and only one way in any given context.
(Eg., PIE *p to Germanic *f; *pater ==>*fadar, to give one of thousands of
examples.)