Words versus Roots (was Does Koenraad Elst Meet Hock´s Challenge?)

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:

>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: <richard.wordingham@...>
> To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2002 11:17 PM
> Subject: Re: [tied] Does Koenraad Elst Meet Hock´s Challenge?

> > One thing that has bothered
> > me is that although reconstructed PIE is rich in roots, it seems

very

> > short of actual words. I suspect that would be one of the biggest
> > problems in writing 'Teach Yourself Proto-Indo-European'.

Translated

> > fables have a very small cast of animals - horse, sheep, dog and

wolf

> > seem to be the prime actors.
>
> Is that so? Many actual words are reconstructible. We're able to

determine the declension type of many nouns and the conjugation type
of lots of verbs. There may be subtle problems like deciding which of
the attested alternative forms is historically older and which have
been restructured, but this a form of l'embarras de richesse rather
than lack of attested forms.

This is roughly the problem I was thinking of. Problems arise when
the none of the attested formations is obviously ancestral. An
example is the word for 'red'. The stem is *h1reudH- (unless Greek
misleads us about the laryngeal), but what was _the_ word?

> If writing a PIE phrasebook is a problem,

this is mostly because the reconstruction of PIE syntax is possible
only in the vaguest outline,

A good argument for keeping sentences simple!

> and that we have no idea what everyday

usage and conversational phraseology were like -- how the IEs said
"Yes", "No", "Good morning", "See you later" and "Thanks a lot".

I'd overlooked that problem - but I think the author could subtly skip
this part. I don't think it occurs in 'Teach Yourself New Testament
Greek'! I wasn't taught this part of the language when I learnt
Latin.

Richard.