Re: [TIED] Digest Number 77

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

From: Guillaume JACQUES

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Thursday, June 22, 2000 12:05 PM

Subject: Re: [TIED] Digest Number 77

Nu slavjane, pozhalujsta, pishite na vashix ljubimyx jazykax. Esli ty znal, Petja, kak mne skuchno, celyj den' chitat'iskljuchitel'no po angliskij!

 

<rus>Mne tozhe skuchno -- chort poberi -- no kto skazal, shto za udobstvo ne platits'a? Ty prekrasno izjasn'aeshs'a po russki, Gijom,</rus> <pol>ale podejrzewam, ze z polskim nawet ty mialbys troche trudnosci.</pol> :)

 

Non, serieusement, je pense que le francais et l'allemand devraient etre maitrise au moins passivement par quiconque s'interresse a l'indoeuropeen, sans quoi l'acces a la literature primaire lui-meme est impossible.

 

Well, there was a time when ninety-odd percent of the IE bibliography was in German; then Meillet, Benveniste and Martinet hewed out a large niche for French. Now it's mostly English; alas, many people seem to believe that what is not written in English isn't knowledge. I've often met with a new kind of Anglocentric parochialism: by contemplating the workings of a single language (preferably American English) you can discover everything that is worth knowing about language in general. Georges Kurylowicz (comme le dernier des Mohicans) a ecrit en francais la plupart du temps, et c'est ordinairement en francais que je le lis, quelque bizarre que cela paraisse.

 

Ouais, l'analogie je suis d'accord, mais les lois que  H1 > e H2 > a H3 > o lorsqu'elle sont noyau de syllabe sont tres jolies et attractive. Si tu suggere l'analogie pour remplacer la vocalisation suposee de  H1 en e, n'est tu pas du meme coup oblige de faire pareil avec les autres laryngales ? En fait, c'est l'explication de Szemerenyi, non ? En dehors du grec, il n'y a vraiment aucune trace de laryngales syllabiques prenant un timbre different de a (ou de i en arien)?

 

Actually, it was already Meillet who rejected the idea of "triple reflexes" in Greek, and Kurylowicz (L'apophonie en indoeuropeen; Problemes de linguistique indoeuropeenne) was equally critical of it and showed that in most cases the full-grade vowel (dido:mi : dotos) or the vocalism of the next syllable (erepho : orophos) accounted for the quality of the vocalised laryngeal. I'd be quite happy with [@] (very likely to be interpreted as the unstressed allophone of /a/ in most branches) as the normal development of *H1/2/3 in "nuclear" positions.

En tous cas, je pense bien qu'il y avait une laryngale et qu'on doit reconstruire dheH1, car je crois me souvenir que dans le bouquin de Koivulehto (die Uralische Evidenz fuer die Laryngaltheorie), cette racine a un equivalent ouralique *teke ou kekchoz comme ca. Or, dans la couche la plus profonde des emprunts (ou peut etre les cognats, qui sait ?), les laryngeales de l'IE correspondent toute a l'ouralique *k.Comme par manque de temps je n'ai lu l'ouvrage de Koivulehto que tres sommairement, je suggere que chacun aille verifier par soi-meme.

A-t-on des raisons particuliere de penser que les laryngales etaient sourdes ?

 

There is no reason to think that they were CONTRASTIVELY voices or voiceless (cf. IE *s, which could be non-distinctively voiced, as in *nisdo- [nizdo-] 'nest' or *mosgHo- [mozgHo-] 'marrow; brain'). As they seem to have been fricatives, typological considerations suggest that the "default" allophone of each laryngeal was voiceless and that voiced allophones also existed. I fail to see any merit in Martinet's system of 10 laryngeals with voiceless : voiced phonemic oppositions.

 

The aberrant present *pibeti 'he drinks' is often "explained" as *pipH3eti with *p assimilated to a voiced *H3 -- but this is a completely ad hoc solution, not supported by any independent evidence. I reject the very idea that the 'drink' root was *peH3(i)- (in an article published in IF 103 I give my reasons for analysing it as *peiX-/*poiX/*piX, where X = H2 or H3).

 

Piotr