Proper methodology (was: RE: [tied] Re: Mother of all IE languages)

>
> But no matter. A principal quesion: do you believe that 'pronoun'

is

> a necessary category in language, such that every individual

language

> necessarily must have a set of them?
>
> If so, then this would answer the question of the missing Japanese
> pronouns, they must then have been lost in the course of time.
> Personally, I think the idea of a pronoun requires a certain amount
> of self-reflection on the part of a culture. V. Toporov already in
> the early nineties (Grrr!) wrote an article in which he compared

the

> 1st p. sg. root *m-n- to the ubiquitous *m-n- (see Ruhlen's Proto-
> World for examples) root for "mind", "think", "feel" (even adduces
> Heidegger's derivation of 'meinen' from 'mein'!). If this is so,

then

> the 1st sg pronoun (and with it probably the very idea of using
> pronouns) was _borrowed_ by various languages together with the

idea

> of a mind as something separate from one's physical existence (*m-n-
> "spirit of the deceased" eg. Latin 'Manes'; BTW Ruhlen's other *m-

n-

> root includes English 'mound', now tell me that _that_ doesn't

imply

> the emergence of a culture that believed in the separateness and
> immortality of the soul). This, of course, is not good if one wants
> to reconstruct Nostratic (especially since numbers can be borrowed
> too). But maybe that _is_ what happened.
>

To Miguel:
Alright, let's assume for the moment that you are right and that the
pronouns in Nostratic are inherited, not borrowed. How do you explain
then the occurrence of the "extra" 1 sg. *eg(h)-o-m in some languages
(IE, AfroAsiatic, Chukchi) and not in others (FU, Etruscan). Was that
root inherited from Proto-Nostratic and disappeared later in some of
the daughter languages?

and re Toporov's and mine idea of connecting Proto-World(?) *m-n-
"mind; memory; joy" and *m-n- "remain, stay; mound" with the other 1
sg pronoun *m-n-: Bomhard has a root *w-n- (or similar!) "joy"
(German Wonne, Latin Venus) etc and another one *w-n- "stay"
(German 'wohnen'). It seems there is the same m/w alternation here as
required in a 1st person pronoun.

Torsten