Re: [tied] Nominative: A hybrid view

From: Glen Gordon
Message: 22534
Date: 2003-06-03

Jens:
>Right, and therefore you do not suggest that. Now, since the obvious lack
>of motivation stops you from making singular and plural forms come from an
>undifferentiated source, why does the same lack of motivation not stop you
>from deriving the dual and plural forms from a common source? This refuted
>itself.

That didn't make sense. Anatolian shows a clear and ubiquitous distinction
between singular and plural. This distinction is related to that found in
the
rest of IE. The dual is much harder to find and even when it is found, it is
not
fully worked out as a system.

We can make your same weak arguement for claiming that the feminine is
ancient, as I believe you had. We can find whatever small instances of a
feminine marker and use that to show that Common IE was never just
animate-inanimate. Yet, this is crazy because the arguement is not unified
to
show that an entire _system_ underlies the evidence.

It's like Cyrus Gordon claiming that Minoan was Semitic. He found small
textual fragments here and there that seemed to him to show that it was
a Semitic language but yet he never analyzed the Minoan texts as a _whole_,
making his analyses largely meaningless and unscientific.

Here, you do the same thing. You take fragments here and there of Hittite
or Luwian or Lycian or whatever Anatolian to support your assertions. Yet,
as a whole, there's really nothing that shows that there was an underlying
dual system behind Anatolian that relates to the rest of IE. Just fragments.


>>>And why can we establish element functions between IE animate dual
>>>markers and non-IE dual markers if none of them ever were dual markers
>>>in a shared past?
>>
>>Elaborate.
>
>That's what I did in the parts of my posts you did not quote.

Oh right. You're talking irrelevant junk again about EskimoAleut. I thought
you were alluding to loanwords from IE into neighbouring languages
that showed somehow that the dual was ancient. That would at least be
more relevant.


- gLeN

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