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

Danny Wier:

>Well, I don't know about being "schizophrenic". I'm not a
>psychiatrist so I can't diagnose Mr. Ryan or Mr. Greenberg. I happen
>to be mentally ill myself -- I have something called schizoaffective
>disorder, which "sits on the fence" between schizophrenia and
>bipolar/manic-depressive disorder. And I am on four medications (I
>still can't do much in the "real world", plus the meds make me
>constantly sick and tired).

Perhaps it was a bad choice of words. I wouldn't wish to insult the
schizophrenic community with association to Mr Ryan. No need to feel
depressed though. That's my job. Have a Paxil. I'm personally now medicated
for depression, so maybe we're all mentally ill. :) Even though I would
still like to see a large, firey explosion wiping out all traces of this
wretched, 3rd-world hictown I live in, I find I have a more chipper spirit
and carry myself with a little less violent hostility towards humanity in
general. >:)

Why, I can even take John's outright denials of southern influence in SW
Anatolia circa 8000 BCE with a grain of salt even despite his aggravating
ignorance of quotes obtainable from the Enc.Britt and The Ancient Near East
by Charles Burney (1977) which state both architectural and religious
influences from nowhere other than the direction of Syria and Palestine. But
I digress. :)

>All three promoters of Nostratic: I-S, Bomhard, Dolg., have
>diligently charted sound correspondences.

It must be noted however that Bomhard takes the Glottalic Theory approach
and correlates the Nostratic ejectives with IE's voiced plain stops rather
than voiceless. Thus the lack of IE **b is to be explained as an early loss
of the labial ejective and it also solves severe typological problems that
exist in the Dolg./IS system like the unlikely "ejective" pronouns. In this
respect, I think Bomhard's idea should be adopted. I, however, am resistant
against reconstructing ejectives for the actual Common IE stage. As I've
said before, I think a better solution is IE [*d, (*b), *g] as fortis stops
[*t:, (*p:), *k:] rather than ejective.

>1) Stops (labials, dentals, velars, uvulars)
>2) Affricates and Fricatives (alveolar, palatal, postalveolar,
>lateral)

I'm personally skeptical of lateral affricates but it seems to be agreed
upon amongst the Three.

>ltaic does preserve the three-way distinction, but
>I have a hunch that Dolg. did this because he included Korean.

Yeah, it sounds like that to me too but I don't have Dolg.'s substantiations
for his reconstructions available to me yet. Perhaps Starostin's website can
provide a clue...

>Indo-European is a strange case. Here Dolgopolsky (along with Ilich-
>Svitych) links alveolars and palatals to IE s or sk (and of course
>s^k and skw), postalveolars to st and zd, and laterals to s and l.
>Bomhard reconstructs these as initial sk, st, zd etc.

Where does Bomhard do this? His list of sound correspondances in
"Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis" don't show any of this. At any
rate, these correlations I find absurd.

>4) Nasals are the most stable elements. (This is true within the
>history of Indo-European). The distinction of
>dental/retroflex/palatal/velar is only shown in Uralic, Altaic and
>Dravidian. (Dravidian shows dental/alveolar/retroflex/dental.)

Never heard of nasal retroflexes in Uralic. :) I only think that there is
one *n in Nostratic.

>This is where I see problems. How Dolg. came up with *retroflexes*
>in Uralic I don't know,

Neither do I. I don't know of Yukaghir having any either. Personally, I
think the retroflexes are only a Dravidian thing. Of course, the retroflexes
of Semitic are something else entirely and not connectable.

>6) Rhotic history is similar to nasals and liquids. Again, Mongolian
>has initial alveolar (not palatal) r showing up as n.

Are you sure it's just Mongolian?

>7) The labiovelar semivowel /w/ appears as such in AA, IE, Kartvelian
>and Uralic (but many modern languages -- Hebrew, modern Latin,
>Georgian and Hungarian included -- have a w > v shift). Altaic has
>b, especially initially; it is lost in some cases. Dravidian has /v/
>(which in some languages approaches [w] phonetically). After /u/,
>the /w/ becomes a vowel lengthener. /y/ shows up either as /y/ or as
>zero in all families. The distribution of these seems kinda random
>to me, however.

I don't see an Altaic *b = Nostratic *w relationship in Bomhard's list.

>What I see is a "straw man argument", with a very heavy
>presupposition -- not only about the nature of a Proto-Language, but
>the phonomorphological structure of a highly symmertrical system of
>CV syllables. (But the three-vowel system is highly likely; Bomhard
>proposed it for Nost; Semitic itself sets such a precedent.)
>
>I personally see a six-vowel system (high: i-@-u, low: e-a-o)

Neah. I still go with a three vowel system. Why make it complicated?
Further, I disagree with Bomhard that Nostratic had ablaut. Therefore, it
would have been alot like Sumerian in syllabic simplicity:

i u

a

The vowels in Uralic and Altaic are a product of vowel harmony. IE's (or
rather IndoTyrrhenian's) vowel system collapsed when *i and *u became *e
(originally schwa), perhaps through pre-NWC influence. Similarly,
Kartvelian's system underwent similar changes.

I, to the chagrin of many on the Nostratic list, maintain that Dravidian had
a vowel shift (*u > *ya-/-i-, *i > *a:) and hence we can correlate the
absolutive first person *u/*un "I, me" (AfroAsiatic *a-; Dravidian *yan-;
Steppe *-hW) and second person absolutive *nu/*nun (Dravidian *nin-, Steppe
*-n). So far, people have ignored me on that one, even though one would
think that grammatical linkages would lend a larger hand to its relationship
to Nostratic than, so far, semi-random vocabulary.

AfroAsiatic's system either collapsed (if we go for the *a/*@ system and
reconstruct items like *baw-) or it was preserved (and therefore
reconstructing *bu-). Sumerian appears to be the most conservative.

- gLeN

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