Hakan:
>Danny, I read your posts with great interest, but still I have to say >that
>Nostraticists make me sceptic. The Nostraticists I've seen just >compare
>lists of words to show that IE is related to other language >families.[...]
>And then the Proto-World guys, like Patrick C. Ryan.
Stop! I can't take anymore! Please, for the love of God! :P First of all,
there is a clear distinction between Nostratic and ProtoWorld. Nostratic is
a reasonable and even likely hypothesis as long as you ignore Joseph
Greenberg's nasty fetish for "mass comparison", which ruins it for the other
Nostraticists who are validly trying the traditional comparative approach.
ProtoWorld, on the other hand, is definitely a theory on crack coccaine
without any sense of reasoning - a cult religion, candy for the mind, a
journey into darkness, an alchemic fantasy.
Another distinction should be made between the ProtoWorld Theory, with its
own problems, and Patrick Ryan, who is far out there, alone on his own plane
of existence without any medication to help him deal with his visions.
Unfortunately, there are some others like him on the net who are completely
unapologetic about being irrational. I've collected some of their links,
putting them in my "schizophrenic" folder and along with more informative
ones, I plan on putting them up soon for all to enjoy (along with a proper
explanation and treatment of the Nostratic theory - and there's more to it
than Greenberg's Eurasiatic, BTW).
>How can anyone take these claims serious?
Patients, I suppose.
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ABOUT *kWei...
Piotr, you mentioned that *kwei- is *kWe + *i-, which I agree with... but
with a twist. Wouldn't it be better to propose a Proto-Steppe inanimate
interrogative *kWi "what?" (Uralic *ken; Aleut ki^n; IE *kWeis, *kWeit) as
deriving early on from Steppe *ku "which" [adj](Uralic *ku-; IE *kWe) plus
Steppe *i [demonstrative] (Uralic *e-; IE *e [enclitic], *eis, *eit) to
explain IE *kWei-?
Afterall, you say that the genitive is *kweso (or is it *kwesyo?) and you
should notice that it and non-nom.acc. cases have *-e- and not **-ei- or
**-i-. I think this is important since medial or enclitic *i/*u in
ProtoSteppe seems to regularly become *e. Thus, Steppe's unmarked nominative
*kWi became IndoTyrrhenian *kWei and then later *kWei-s/*kWei-t since the
vowel was not part of an enclitic word or medial. However, in the genitive,
we would originally have *kWi-se > *kWes > *kWes-*(y)o. The latter addition
of *-(y)o would have been to resolve the thematic merger of the genitive
with the new nominative in *-s.
Secondly, I'm not quite sure why *yo- still can't be reconstructed for IE
and why it should be a dialectal thematic extension of *ei- (or did I
misunderstand?). At any rate, there is certainly Uralic *ya which needs to
be acknowledged before dismissing the archaicy of the word.
Thirdly, there appears to be at least three interro-relative stems present
in ProtoSteppe (and in Nostratic): *mi "who?", *kWi "what?" and *ya "who"
[relative]. Bomhard reconstructs *mi-, *kWi- and *?ay-/*?ya- for Nostratic.
To be honest, I disagree with the initial glottal stop of *?ya as well as
the reconstruction of *?ay. I recommend *ya instead as in my ProtoSteppe
reconstruction.
- gLeN
Thank you for thinking
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