Re: [TIED] IE, AA, Nostratic and Ringo

----- Original Message -----
From: "Danny Wier" <dawier@...>
To: <cybalist@egroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, July 01, 2000 11:25 AM
Subject: [TIED] IE, AA, Nostratic and Ringo



> Since in nature matter breaks down towards chaos and not
the other way, I
> would imagine it would be the same for languages.
Languages seem to become
> phonemically simpler (yet allophonically more complex) as
time goes by.

Hm... English is phonemically more complex than Old English
was -- e.g., it's lost one consonantal phoneme, /x/ while
developing the following new ones: /v, D, z, Z, N/; at the
same time some of the allophonic complexity of OE has been
lost, e.g. /g/ no longer has a fricative allophone, and [s]
and [z] now belong to different phonemes. Old English itself
was more complex than Proto-Germanic, though the latter was
simpler than PIE. In a different branch, modern Polish is
phonemically more complex than Proto-Slavic, though a little
simpler than 16th century Polish. Phonological evolution is
not a one-way road; complexity can vary up and down.

> So here are my questions: ...

If you don't mind waiting a while I'll try to answer your IE
questions in a separate posting soon. I don't claim to be an
expert on Nostratic, so I'll leave that aspect to those
better qualified to discuss it.

> 4) What are true cognates (or loans) between IE and other
language families.
> On a Greenberg-like comparison basis, I found words in
Semitic with
> similar isoglosses in Germanic. Of course this means
little since you have
> to get down to regular sound correspondences.

Very true.

> Also, there's that English
> word "dog", and I know of no IE cognates; most of the
words for "dog" I've
> seen are from *k^won (that is, the "hound-Canis" words).

We have discussed this one before. The first faint
attestation of "dog" in the form _docgena_ 'of dogs' comes
from late Old English. My guess is that the word may have
been a dog's name originally (it's structurally similar to
typical OE nicknames). At any rate, it was coined in England
in historical times and has no cognates even in Germanic
(words like "dog" or "dogge" for 'mastiff' or 'great Dane'
in various languages are loans from English).

Piotr