Re: The palatal sham :) (Re: [tied] Re: Albanian (1))

On Thu, 12 Feb 2004 15:29:44 +0000, tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...>
wrote:

>--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:
>> On Thu, 12 Feb 2004 12:06:38 +0000, tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...>
>> wrote:
>>
>> >So much for that. I'd like to discuss the idea that supposed PIE
>> >plain velars occur only in loans. So, fire away, list some
>examples
>> >of what you believe to be incontrovertible examples of plain
>velars
>> >and I'll check with Møller and Bomhard.
>>
>> *-(i)ko- "diminutive suffix".
>>
>> >I find them, you lose; I don't find them, I lose. OK?
>>
>> You lose. If only because Møller and Bomhard don't list suffixes.
>>
>> Anyway, this is silly. I can find any vowel or consonant occurring
>in a
>> PIE root in Möller and/or Bomhard. And if I don't find anything
>specific
>> enough, I can try Illich-Svitych, Dolgopolskij, Gamqrelidze/Ivanov,
>> Starostin, Greenberg, or even Ruhlen and Manansala, until I find
>it. That
>> doesn't mean anything.
>
>
>Your parody of what I'm proposing is silly alright. I'll be checking
>for matching roots containing 'plain velars' in Møller and Bomhard,
>not "vowels or consonants".

Are plain velars not consonants? What would happen if you were to check,
say, for matching roots containing /m/? Plenty of them in Bomhard and
Møller. Would that prove that /m/ was borrowed into PIE?

>You said (something like):
>
>"The existence of reconstructed PIE *kap- "take" proves that PIE had
>plain velars"

Indeed it does.

>Bomhard 242:
>PN *k{h][a|&]p[h]- "to take, to seize; hand"
>PIE *k{h]ap[h]- "to take, to seize"
>PAA *k[h][a|&]p[h]- "TO TAKE, TO SEIZE; HAND"
>PFU *kappe- "to take, to seize, to grasp"
>*käppä- "hand, paw"
>PD *kapp- "to touch, to feel"
>PA *kap- "to grasp, to seize"
>
>
>In the face of that, one might propose one of two mutually exclusive
>alternatives:
>
>1) PIE *kap- is a loanword from some other language
>2) PIE *kap- is not loaned from anywhere

The alternatives are not mutually exclusive.

The root *kap- is PIE, as it occurs in more than enough branches, showing
regular correspondences. It's definitely not a later borrowing into only a
part of IE.

In PIE itself, the word may be inherited (from an ancestor language, which
we'll call pre-PIE), or it may be a borrowing. If it's inherited from
pre-PIE, then again in pre-PIE it may have been borrowed, or inherited from
pre-pre-PIE (let's call that Nostratic). The fact that similar roots occur
in other Nostratic languages suggests that the root is inherited from
Nostratic, unless you can prove there are phonetic irregularities which
indicate borrowing from one branch to another instead of inheritance. You
can't do that, however, because we know too little about the *regular*
correspondences between the Nostratic languages, so any irregularity you
come up with may turn out to be regular (and any apparent regular
correspondence may in fact turn out to be irregular).

If we limit ourselves to PIE, there are plenty of native PIE roots and
affixes containing the plain velars *k, *g and *gh. It's completely
irrelevant whether some of them, or most of them, or all of them, were
borrowed by some earlier stage of PIE from languages unknown and most
likely unknowable. The only relevant fact for the study of PIE is that the
PIE phonological system had a full series of "plain" velars, "palatal"
velars, and labio-velars.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...