Re: Odp: IE athematics

----- Original Message -----

From: Glen Gordon

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2000 3:18 PM

Subject: [cybalist] Re: IE athematics

Yes, I regret anything viewed as uncivil as well. You know me, I get people 
going. I'm bad that way. Sorry :) Just, please, no more talk of "Old School" 
and Protocrustean.

Accepted. Thanks.

The phonological system I reconstruct for Old IE (approx. after 7000 BCE 
till about 6000 BCE) and Middle IE (c. 6000 to 5000) is virtually the same 
as what we find in Common IE except that *e/*o ablaut doesn't exist nor do 
the vowels *o or *e (originating from alternating accent on central schwa 
*@). Thus the vowel system was:

               *(@)i     *(@)u
                     *@         (<- which I just write as *e)
                     *a

The selection of vowels almost seems alot like that of NWC which Bomhard has 
proposed to be a potential source of early loans. But the jury is still out 
on that one.

Among the stops, the voiced aspirate series is reinterpreted as simply 
voiced {*b, *g, *d}, the voiced inaspirate as tenuis {*k:, *t:} and the 
voiceless as itself. The nature of the tenuis consonants can still be 
explained under the same typological constraints that are used to claim that 
IE was spoken with ejectives (which isn't possible). Instead, the tenuis 
stops are presumed to have once been ejectives to explain the lack of *p: 
(from an earlier *p?). I'm confident that they were nothing but tenuis stops 
well before the time of Old IE as shown by some IE-Semitic loan 
correspondances which I will have to get into later.

I'd appreciate more detail. "Tenuis" is a traditional and now informal synonym for "voiceless" (taken from grammars of Classical Greek and opposed to "media" = voiced). You seem to give the term a different meaning. Could you explain it to me? What are your "tenues" in phonetic terms?

First we must understand that initial consonant clusters like *pl- are the 
result of lost intervening unstressed vowels. The irregularity of *s-énti 
"they are" is then explained by a loss of unstressed syllable, hence from 
earlier **es-énti (note: eszi/asanzi). There is a tendency towards syllabic 
simplicity the further we delve into IE's past. Got it? Good.

Glen, what you've been doing so far is something like internal reconstruction within PIE instead of the promised longer-range comparative work. You asked me what kind of proof I would accept as demonstrating inter-family relationship.

Now, the penultimate accent law (PAL for short, because I'm sick of typing 
it all the time) is designed to expose the regularity of the "free" accent 
of IE more than anything. It is not contrary to Nostratic nor is it in any 
way contradictory to the conclusions of mainstream IE studies. It works for 
everyone, hooray!

Penultimate accent law:
    Alternating accent between athematic roots and suffixes
    are the result of a more ancient and regular accent
    pattern occuring on the penultimate syllable, subsequently
    obscured by an ancient loss of final vowel.

As a result of this law, most of the non-nomino-accusative case endings, for 
instance, are seen to be nothing more than regularly accented disyllabic 
suffixes (cf. *-ése [gen], *-éta [abl], etc) and the plural conjugational 
forms in the more ancient non-indicative conjugation shows regular accent 
for the same reasons (*-éne [3ppl]).
What's more, for the first time, the seemingly unexplainable  differences in 
accent and syllable structure and yet similarities in phonology between the 
ablative forms in Uralic (*-ta) and IE (*-éd) can now be explained through a 
Pre-IE stage with predictable penultimate accent (*-éta). Forms with extra 
vowel are attested in Tyrrhenian languages like Etruscan (Compare Etruscan 
-isa and Old IE *-ése, [genitive])

This is somewhat speculative. Uralic *-ta vs. IE *-et/d is so-so, considering that the most common consonant of all is involved. Etruscan -isa is not an ordinary genitive but a patronymic suffix that may be added to a form already having a genitival inflection (e.g. Larth-al clan = Larth-al-isa 'son of Larth', or rather 'of Larth's'; the proper Gen. ending here is -al; it alternates with -us, which is used after liquids). Consonants like /t/ and /s/ recur in all sorts of suffixes with great frequency and are likely to produce illusory correspondences. But for all that it's a step in the right direction. I'd be glad to see some tangible stuff like that -- correspondences illustrated with word equations. How can I begin to evaluate a reconstruction without them?

>Wrong. The regular pattern in historically attested Germanic is that of 
>weak verbs like "love : loved". The ablauting strong verbs were a
>non-productive, dying-out category already in Gothic, Old English and
>Old High German.

I'm afraid _you_ are wrong. We were talking about the _regular_ pattern not 
the _commonest_ pattern. I look for forms that cannot be explained other 
than through previous stages of a given language because of their 
_complexity_ and _irregularity_. Perhaps weak verbs were popular, 
whoop-dee-doo! I don't care about them. They are regular and therefore 
uninteresting to me. Whereas, the lie/lay example that you gave shows a 
pattern that is definitely very irregular and thus quite ancient. Plus the 
verb "to love" is in no way relatable to French without getting weird (love 
< Fr "lŕ-bas", a pick-up line used by French women to gain the attention of 
men?), and there is no motivation to do so because a substantial amount of 
these verbs likewise have no direct French correlations. Don't be silly.

Sorry, Glen, but I can make little sense of the above, or of the paragraphs that follow. You sidetrack into loose associations, digressions and witty innuendos, forgetting to develop vital points. If somebody misinterprets your meaning, it may be because of the vagueness of the argument.

In contrast, almost all athematic verbs have demonstrable, direct Semitic 
counterparts and the IE athematic, because of syllabic constraints, cannot 
be ancient - there's a definite difference.

>French loans followed the productive English pattern.

And? The point here is that there was no motivation for the Middle English 
speakers to subject the innocent French loans to Germanic ablaut torture, 
was there? The lack of initial consonant clusters in early stages of IE 
shows a tendency towards LESS syllabic complexity! How can we possibly view 
the athematic as ancient when it promotes tonnes of vowel clusters by its 
very nature?? Boy, you're really fighting against the stream, aren't you?

[...]

>I don't see a reason for a different interpretation of PIE grammar.

There isn't, but you misinterpreted what I'm saying.

>One more thing. Just out of curiosity: where do you find reflexes of
>the "reconstructed" verb *pelh-? I mean the "underived form", of course.

Well, look, Piotr. Regardless of whether *pelh- itself is attested without 
any suffix whatsoever, there's no reason at all to assume that it wasn't 
there just to find any lousy point to oppose me with.

There are forms with an _un-reduplicated_ stem present (Sanskrit pu:rnah, 
epra:t; Greek eple:toi) and we do see *plh-nó- reconstructed in many a 
textbook which is nothing more than a participle suffix on a root *pelh-. 
How "derived" do you need it to be? There's absolutely no reason I can think 
of to presume that *pepelh- is the true form unless perhaps you think of it 
as of echoic origin. What are you trying to state here exactly anyway?

This was just an aside. I was provoked to ask this question by your compassionate remark that I'd possibly been tired when claiming that *pelh- was unattested as a verb stem. Well, it isn't attested as such; I knew what I was writing. The forms you quote are either adjectives (*plh-nó- > Skt. pu:rna-) or Greek/Sanskrit aorists like *(é) pleh-t (IF this particular reconstruction is justifiable for IE in general, which some specialists deny). The fact that an adjective is deverbative doesn't mean that it CONTAINS the verb; e.g. English separ-able is related to separate, not to a  (non-existent) "root form" *separe. Lousy or not, the point illustrates our different attitudes towards comparative reconstruction -- but I have already developed that in a separate posting on roots versus words as "true forms".

 

Piotr