Re: [tied] *ekwos and friends

----- Original Message -----

From: george knysh

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2001 3:36 PM

Subject: Re: [tied] *ekwos and friends

> Therefore the expected vocative of *ek^w-o-s need not be the one which actually emerges.

 

Ha, but what would this colloquial vocative be like? The full form of the nominative is an even less likely candidate than the formal vocative. Calls are typically truncations or "baby-talk" distortions of normal words. Since they tend to be short-lived, imitative and irregular, they are of little use to historical linguists and can't be said to be reconstructible in the normal way. The price of proposing a highly irregular development is that you can't demonstrate it.

 

In Poland, we say "kici-kici" to cats (for "come here"), "tas'-tas'" to ducks, "cip-cip" to hens, etc. "Kos'-kos'" seems to be something created along the same lines. Sometimes such calls are vaguely reminiscent of the names of the animals in question, sometimes they seem to be quite arbitrary (perhaps the kind of sound that a given animal is likely to react to). They are not likely to be very ancient or to reflect protolanguage words.

 

> You have not convinced me that it is not an ancient word used to call horses [...]. Perhaps the problem is insoluble. But I do like the evocation of an individual standing in the steppe of Dereivka in 4000 BC holding a bone bit in his hand and shouting "kos' kos'" (or perhaps "kos kos" (without the ')

 

A new irregularity: final *-s was _always_ lost in Slavic, so *kos would have become *kU (or *ko, at best).

Piotr