On Mon, 29 Jan 2001 09:48:42 +0100, "Piotr Gasiorowski"
<
gpiotr@...> wrote:
>To be sure, Bomhard admits -(V)C- suffixes as root extensions, which greatly enlarges the encoding potential of CVC-. His reconstructed _lexemes_ (as opposed to abstract "roots") are often of the form CVC-(V)C-. You remarked that despite the number of posited protosegments there is a lot of homophony in Bomhard's Nostratic. I would think homophony is a near-constant element of lexical systems, no matter what the phonotactic structure is. Note how much homophony exists in English despite its large phoneme inventory and relatively complex phonotactics. One could easily compile a list of _hundreds_ of homonymic doublets (and many triplets as well) involving not loanwords (as Torsten would have it) but good Anglo-Saxon words that have became homophones because of perfectly regular mergers (meat -- meet -- mete, ewe -- yew -- you, wright -- right -- write, so -- soe -- sew, bare -- bear[1] -- bear[2], roe -- row[1] -- row[2], weather -- wether -- whether, etc.)
Admittedly, the situation under *b is not representative of the whole
dictionary, but I don't have the time to compile full statistics:
Total etymologies under *b: 33
Homophones: 22 (9 *bar's, 4 *bur's, 3 *bul's, and a pair each of *buw,
*bah and *bay)
CVC lexemes: 30
CV lexemes: 1
CVC-(V)C lexemes: 2.
As you say, if we delve into the history of English, we find "words
that have became homophones because of perfectly regular mergers".
One would expect the same from a reconstruction that claims to go
beyond PIE: it should explain by which regular develpments PIE (or
PAA, PK, PU...) homophones came to be homophones. I get a bit worried
if the number of homophones does nothing but rise...
That is not to say that I reject Bomhard's work. I think that some of
it (as some of Illich-Svitych's) is very suggestive of real
connections (genetic ones, in all likelyhood) between the various
language groups classified as "Nostratic". That is to say, as far as
I can judge such matters: I think I know something about IE, but my
knowledge about Uralic, Afro-Asiatic, Kartvelian, Altaic, etc. is
unfortunately limited.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...