[tied] Fun?! (correction [Re: Weeping])

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "alex" wrote:

>> I fail to see what's so funny about that. It's exactly what
>> analogy is about: two originally different paradigms are reduced
>> to the one of them which looks more "regular" in the language.
>> In Romanian the alternance /d/ - /z(i)/ is well in place, there
>> is nothing to wonder about.
>
> Exactly what you mentioned before.

So objective existence of analogies (not only in Romanian, BTW)
is funny?

> There is the form "iez'" versus "ied".

So?!

> Let us be serious.

I am serious. You think you're making fun. Failure.

> Since in Latin exist "haedus" there was no need to
> think at eventually a substratual word.
> If there should have bean any "*bradus" in Latin there should
> have been too, no need to think at a substratual word.

But there wasn't, so the discussion has little sense.

> The very fact is this:
> substratual words are considered for sure these ancient words
> which does not resamble Latin, Greek or Slavic and which have
> their counter parts in Albanian.

No. Substratum words are those for which one can attribute a
decent probability to be derived from it. That is much more complex
than your reductionist definition. There are some criteria, and
it is not enough to list them in order to be used, one has also
to learn how to consistently articulate them. This is the point
of major rub.

> One has to ask himself, if Dacian/Thracian/Ilirian have been IE
> languages, how should have developed these languages the IE roots,
> in a such manner that these words should be different from Slavic,
> Latin, Greek but they should have been in the same time, special
> forms for not being confounded with the words of these 3
> languages. We don't know.

Of course one cannot know exactly how words in ancient Balkan
languages were like since having some PIE roots does not imply
all these roots should been preserved, and if preserved, how the
formants would have affected them in order to create actual words.
But on the basis of the few we know about these languages, and
by comparaison with other languages, we have a pretty clear picture
of how different should these words be. One can safely assume that
a perfect match between form of a word in some ancient Balkan
language and different IE languages as Latin, Greek or Slavic
would have been rather exceptional, and morphologies sensibly
different to ensure further misfits.

> It remains just an obscurity: the Albano-Romanian connection,
> the common words of these two languages are hardly to connect
> with the IE roots. And that is strange conclusion.

This is not a conclusion. This is a (doubtful) statement of
yours.

> What should one expect from a such conclusion?

Replacing "conclusion" with "statement" and accepting it for the
moment as work hypothesis, one can try several explanations, one
of them being:

> -the common words are not of IE origin ?

(actually "some of", not all of them). That is likely enough up
to some point, since we know that Balkans were pretty inhabited
before IE invasion and there are non-IE words in practically all
European languages (that would make them "sub-substratum"). Any
analysis would be affected by uncertainty, but one can expect
statistically that a few of these common words have a pre-IE
origin.
The most likely hypothesis for the words having difficulties to
be linked with PIE roots is not that...

> -the properly developments of the IE roots of Dacian/Thracian/
> Illyrian are "lost" in the known forms of Latin, Slavic, Greek?

... which is the least likely one, but that the transformations
occured in substratal languages were important, either phonetically
or semantically (usual result of language evolution): the simple
fact we practically ignore morphology of these ancient languages
does not allow us to be such at ease with tracing back to PIE.

> By myself I cannot find a satisfying answer here.

Piotr explained you some days ago why is that.

Marius Iacomi