Re: [tied] *ekwos and friends

--- Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:

>
>
>
> > 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?

****GK: How about "Kos'"?(:=)) We're coming round full
circle. I understand your position.*****

> The full form of the nominative is an even less
> likely candidate than the formal vocative.

*****GK: With all due respect, Piotr, how can you know
what was "more likely" to someone living six thousand
years ago?****

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.

*****GK: I agree. On the other hand I don't think you
can "demonstrate" (I use this in the strong sense)
your point of view either, since there is no evidence
that what linguists reconstruct as ancient IE was
actually ever spoken by anyone. It's internally
consistent. It's very useful. But it could be utterly
unreal.******

>
> In Poland, we say "kici-kici" to cats (for "come
> here"), "tas'-tas'" to ducks, "cip-cip" to hens,
> etc.

*****GK: In Ukraine also, or pretty close. And I
understand that further words can be formed therefrom:
like "tsipyatko" (poussin)*****

"Kos'-kos'" seems to be something created along

> the same lines.

*****GK: Does it exist in Poland? Some of the
derivatives recorded in Hrinchenko (like "ukos'katy")
sound like they could have been around for quite a
while, at least hundreds of years.*****

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.

*****GK: But you can't really prove this. I don't see
why we have to wait a few thousand years for
hypocorisms, "baby talk" et sim.. And what you've just
said can apply equally well to some ancient type
calling out "kos' kos'" to a horse. You have no way of
demonstrating that this is/was impossible except in
terms of a science which while internally consistent
cannot really be verified in all of its assumptions
and claims. I have a high degree respect for its
accomplishments but also a high degree of skepticism
as to the universal existence of a "normative" ancient
IE language, given the reality (verifiable today) of
so much dialectical variety within existing
normativized languages. Dialectologists seems
continually amazed at the variety of terms and words
they discover "in the field". It takes a while for
Academies of Science and school systems to
evolve.*******

>
> > 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).

******GK: My point is that it need not have become
anything. It could simply have been kept as the sound
it was originally. Of course none of the related terms
end in -s.******

>
> Piotr
>
>

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