David:
> Regarding nursery and echoic words, is it being suggested that these
>grew up post-PIE and resemble each other for certain reasons, or rather
>that they actually existed in the PIE period? If the latter, why would the
>PIEs have created words with a sound that wasn't in their language already?
The very problem with nursery and echoic words is their ability to pop up
in similar forms independently in various languages, even unrelated
languages, without there being a common heritage. If you see something
like "blah" in two languages and they mean "vomit" in both of them, because
the sound is obviously echoic means that the two words can easily arise
independently in the two languages without there being a common heritage.
Words for "crow" for example often end up sound something like "kaw"
because of this human penchant for imitative coinage.
So when we attempt to reconstruct echoic terms in IE, there is no guarantee
that the words are truely (or truly, if you must spell it that way) a part
of Indo-European vocabulary. So unless you can further prove that the echoic
words WERE Indo-European words and not invented later, we don't need to
worry about **b, do we?
- gLeN
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