Re: [tied] IS's "regular roots"

Piotr:

>The "Slava" system, as revised and recently canvassed by Dolgopolsky, >is
>indeed Gargantuan:
>
>25 stops and affricates (3 rows of eight + glottal stop)
>12 fricatives (2 rows of 5 + pharyngeal and glottal fricatives)
>13 sonorants (5 nasals, 3 laterals, 2 rhotics, 3 semivowels)
>7 vowels
>
>Total: 57 phonemes, including 50 consonants

Yuck! Stop the insanity! This is madness, people! :) I like to stop at a
three-vowel system [*a, *i, *u] for Nostratic. Again, it doesn't mean that I
think that Nostratic may only have had three vowels but you gotta start
somewhere and why not at the bottom? Afaik, the number of vowels in Uralic
is still under some debate so to reconstruct seven for a language 10,000
years older is very overdone.

>The reconstructed prosodic structure of content words can be >represented
>thus: (CV.)CV(C).CV, where dots stand for syllable >boundaries and optional
>material is parenthesised. Actually most >roots are disyllabic, but the
>final vowel is left unspecified more >often than not.

Why this structure? Is this the structure you would recommend for Nostratic
or is this the structure that Dolgo. reconstructs?

>The postulation of a parent system so much more complex than any of >its
>daughters raises the suspicion that protosegments have been >artificially
>multiplied in order to obtain a satisfactory number of >matches. This
>suspicion is reinforced by the following facts:

Exactly my point of view. As much as some fundamental basics about Nostratic
seem to be agreed upon (contains ejectives, analytical language,
predominantly SOV, *m-/*t-/*s- proniminal set, etc), there is a bunch of
unnecessary, arbitrary fluff that comes along with the theory that needs to
be taken out.

>(2) The relative frequency of protosegments in reconstructions does >not
>seem to correspond to their typological markedness -- e.g., the >inventory
>contains a plethora of coronal fricatives and affricates >(no fewer than
>twenty!), but plain *s is extremely rare.

This point is interesting for me. I personally don't think that *s ever
existed in Nostratic and it certainly seems so given the little amount that
Bomhard offers for this phoneme. To lack /s/ is a rare linguistic feature (I
only know of one living example, Hawaiian) but afaik Dravidian, an offspring
of Nostratic, doesn't contain *s either. Could it be that Dravidian
inherited *s-lessness from its mommy? I would only reconstruct a dental
affricate *c and maybe an ejective counterpart *c?.

>(3) Dolgopolsky employs -- very liberally -- a large number of
> >"uncertainty symbols": unspecified vowels, [...]

And as I say, unlike Dolg. and IS. at least Bomhard, as un-perfect as he is,
is respectful enough to not do this to his readers.

>There are some really mind-blowing "correspondences", e.g. where a
> >Nostratic "egg" is reconstructed as <glottal stop> + <a|o "or >similar"
>_or_ u> + <uvular or pharyngeal fricative> + <i> on the >basis of the IE
>"egg" word (cited as *ou(y)o-),

And then again the "egg" word could even be derived from the "bird" word.
Who knows? I certainly have no clue so far. I see no Nostratic etymology for
this particular item.

>To be sure, Dolgopolsky himself marks the most bizarre of such
> >reconstructions as "questionable" (many others deserve the same
> >qualification but don't get it). However, if they are bizarre and he
> >realises it, why the heck does he publish them?

More pages. It makes one's work more volumnous and volumnous is all about
style. If your work isn't volumnous, it doesn't look as professional, and if
it doesn't look professional, your work will be completely overlooked rather
than mostly. :)

- gLeN

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