Re: [tied] IE *de:(y)- 'bind'.

----- Original Message -----

From: elmeras2000

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Monday, May 23, 2005 11:32 AM

Subject: Re: [tied] IE *de:(y)- 'bind'.

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Ryan" <proto-
language@......> wrote:

>   Some of my views on this subject can be found at:
>
>   http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/c-AFRASIAN-
3_laryngeal.htm<http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/c-AFRASIAN-
3_laryngeal.htm>


I have pointed out some of the mistakes contained in this
presentation. There are others perhaps even more important ones that
need a refutation:

Your site has a link to another site of yours where you take issue
with Lindeman's acceptance of Cuny's argument assigning original
consonantal status to the laryngeals. You write:

"If the plain stem were *stér6-, and 6 were just an obtuse way of
notating the stress-unaccented development from a:, which, in my
opinion, would be a, then we could rewrite the stem as *stéra- (from
*stéra:-). If it, in turn, is placed before a stress-accented suffix
like -*nó, i.e. according to present theory, *stér6- becomes *stR:-.
The long syllabic r appears in Greek and Latin both as ra:, which
would, of course, not be surprising or remarkable at all if derived
from *stéra:-; in fact, the Greek and Latin reflexes would not
necessitate the formulation of a long syllabic r at all. But
according to the theorists, Old Indian requires the theoreticization
of R: because of words like sti:rn[.]á in spite of the fact that we
also have stRtá! It is so plainly obvious that, if Indo-European R:
occasioned Old Indian i:r in sti:rn[.]á, then we should also find
**sti:rtá not stRtá, which is what we do actually find - but the Neo-
Grammarians simply invent a new rule to explain the exceptions."

Your use of "if" is illogical. The point is that it is being tested
whether the laryngeal is an original vowel (reduction of a long
vowel) or an original consonant (a spirant), while you are departing
from ine of the possibilities. And then it is not logical to say
that, in case *stér&- is reduced to zero-grade, it vocalizes the -r-
, for then such vocalization is completely incomprehensible. IE
sonants are vocalized when not adjacent to syllabic sounds and are
otherwise kept consonantal. So, if it is *observed* that it is the -
r- that takes on syllabic function in the reduced form *str.:-nó-,
it is shown that the /r/ is located between nonsyllabic segments.
Therefore the & of *str&-nó- must have been a consonant at the time
of the vocalization. That means that the corect reconstruction is in
fact *str.H3-nó-.

Your appeal to the participle str.tá- is out of place. This is a
different root, IE *ster- with no laryngeal, and so forming a
participle *str.-tó-, seen also in Greek stratós 'army camp'.


Another mistake is contained in your footnote 2. Tou write:

"When (V) began to be treated apophonically, the laryngals had
already disappeared, having already lengthened the vowels that
followed them."

That is most certainly not correct. Quite apart from the facts that
neither the ablaut alternations nor the processes of laryngeal
coloration and subsequent lengthening are momentary events that can
each be assigned to a point in time, the chronology is quite
obviously the opposite of what you say without giving reasons.
Lengthened /e:/ is not coloured by adjacent H2/H3, so the vowel of
such forms was long *before* the laryngeals began to colour. Also,
the diverse o-variants of //e// are not coloured by adjacent H2, so
this was an [o] *before* the laryngeal took to colouring.


On the fate of four presumed "Late Nostratic" laryngeals you write:

"Earliest Indo-European reduced these four "laryngeals" (laryngals
and pharyngals) to two laryngals, /?/ from ? and ¿; and /h/ from h
and H."

That is of course unacceptable because there are at least three
phonemically distinct laryngeals in IE. They have been known since
Møller added E (= H1) in a footnote in 1980 as a reaction to
Saussure's pioneering but curiously unfinished analysis in the
Mémoire.

A central and sadly misguided statement is futher this:

"The earliest Indo-European root initials ?/ha, ?/he, and ?/ho were
transformed into Early Indo-European a:, e:, and o: by the well-
known process of compensatory lengthening when ?/h was lost. Because
these were long vowels, their distinctive vocalic timbres were
preserved; and they escaped the normal stress-accent-induced
apophonic grammatical alternation of non-lengthened (short) vowels
that was introduced in Early Indo-European."

Now, *H1es- 'be' yields *H1és-ti with a short /e/ in its subsequent
life, e.g. Ved. ásti, Lat. esi, Hitt. eszi. The presence of the
laryngeal does not prevent the root from going into the zerograde:
3pl *H1sénti, Ved. sánti, Goth. sind, Oscan sent.

Something comparable applies to your echoing statement about root-
final sequences. You write:

"The earliest Indo-European root finals a?/h, e?/h, and o?/h were
transformed into Early Indo-European a:, e:, and o: by the well-
known process of compensatory lengthening when ?/h was lost. Because
these were long vowels, their distinctive vocalic timbres were
preserved; and they escaped the normal stress-accent-induced
apophonic grammatical alternation of non-lengthened (short) vowels
that was introduced in Early Indo-European."  

That too is wrong. A root-final sequence *-VH is fully capable of
being reduced to *-H if the accent is elsewhere. Thus the roots
*dheH1- 'put', *deH3- 'give' form the 3sg prs. *dhé-dhH1-n.ti, *dé-
dH3-n.ti seen in Vedic dádhati, dádati. Even more impressive are
perhaps the 1/2 pl. present forms, Ved. dadmási, dattá.

Your interpretation of IIr. -i- vs. Lat. etc. -a- by a back-to-
Burrow separation of the original derivations by appealing to i-
extensions for Indo-Iranian as opposed to the other languages can
hardly be taken seriously today (nor could Burrow's in his days),
since it just gives up on the search for a common morphology. You
write:

"What does sthitáH actually prove when we look at the entry
for 'stand' and see that a common form with the root extension -i is
sta:i-?" The basis of the presumed i-extension is this:

"Having made this assertion, we can now look at other evidence which
bears on the question. On page 101 (Brugmann 1972, I) discusses some
interesting forms derived from Indo-European *sta:- in Old Indian.
The reconstructed form of the 1st person optative of that verb would
be *st6-yé:m if we assume the current theoretical teaching. But, on
the basis of the attested Old Indian ste:ya:m, Brugmann tells
us: "On the other hand 6 became a before i-vowels." The root
syllable e: is the normal Old Indian reflex of Indo-European *-ai-.
Though Brugmann had another explanation, I think the simplest one is
simply that, in the optative, Old Indian utilized a stem derived
from *sta:-i-, namely ste:-, to which the optative terminations were
added."

The simplest solution is of course simply that normal morphological
principles were obeyed. From roots like dha:-, stha:-, da:- we
expect an optative of the structure *dhH1-iéH1-m. Now, that is
indeed found in Avestan, 1sg.act. diiaNm, 3sg.act. diia:t. As almost
always the root aorist generalized full grade, so there is also
Avest. 3sg.act. da:iia:t as a variant of the latter form. In Indic,
introduction of the full-grade /d(H)aH-/ before the ending segment [-
iyaH-] of the type preserved in Avest. diia:- yieldes /d(h)aH-iyaH-
/, whence [d(h)aïa:-], written d(h)eya:-. In like fashion stheya:-
is from *stH2-ieH1- via levelling to *sthaH-iyaH- > stheya:-. This
demands no appeal to a y-extension. Something very similar happened
in Greek, which has doíe:n with the same *-ieH1- superimposed on the
productive zero-grade root-shape /do-/ (originally only the
anteconsonantal zero-grade).

You then address the Vedic form sti:rn.á- in the spirit of finding
an i-extension for it:

"The solution is easily at hand. Old Indian words like
stári:man, 'spreading out', and Avestan urvaro:-straya, 'cutting
down plantings', show that, in addition to *ster6-, another stem-
form, *ster6i-, should be reconstructed. Thus, the situation is
analogous to that which we found above. It seems that Indo-Iranian
preferred a stem-form of root + i for some forms which the other
branches combined directly with the root."

The single attestation of a lexeme uruuaro:-straiia-, attested in
the form -straiiaNs-ca, an acc.pl. followed by -ca 'and', occurs in
a listing of bad deeds. It rather obviously means 'the cutting down
of plants'. Bartholomae has the comment that -aiia- is graphic (or
wrong tradition) for -iia-. The compound type would be like Vedic
vr.tra-tú:rya- 'the conquering of Vr.tra' with the same suffix *-(i)
ya- sitting on vr.tra-túr- 'conquering Vr.tra'. Now, -raiia- is not
at all uncommon as a variant spelling of -riia- in Avestan, so
Bartholomae's analysis of this passage from one of the obscure and
often corrupt texts seems very reasonable. It means of course that +-
striia- does not contain a radical, but only a suffixal, *-y-. The
single parallel attestation, also from a "poor-quality text", has
acc. uruuaro:-straNm-ca without the y-element in the same context.

You go on to talk about further implications:

"This, of course, opens a new can of worms. How accurate is the
formulation of branch responses to Indo-European long sonant liquids
and nasals?" You continue immediately with the reply:

"Not very, I am sad to say. For Indo-European R:, L:, current theory
expects Old Indian i:r or u:r, and i:r or u:r. I think it should be
unavoidable to anticipate that the correctly to be anticipated
response is R; and that i:r or u:r are the results of -ra(:)i and -ra
(:)u in stress-unaccented stems. Today, any linguist with normal
phonological knowledge would question the development of a syllable
liquid or nasal to two divergent forms, for which the conditioning
factor has been offered that a preceding labial or labiovelar yields
u:(Resonant) while a consonant of other classification yields i:
(Resonant), especially in view of the fact that an Indo-European
root like *pel6- has pra:tá- and pra:n[.]á-, both 'full', in
addition to pu:rtá-, 'full'. Latin has the clearest and most
straightforward responses to the "long syllabic liquids and nasals":
ra:, la:, na:; and, in fact, it should be noted that it is not at
all necessary to assume "syllabic liquids and nasals" to explain the
Latin reflexes. But the Greek reflexes are suspect. For N:, Greek
na: is proposed, and certainly is reasonable. However, for R: and
L:, Greek ro: and lo: are proposed - in spite of the fact we have
words like stratós."

Now, that is not acceptable either. For one thing, we do not posit
long syllabic sonants now, the PIE protoforms quite plainly had
retained the consonantal laryngeals here, so 'strewn out' is not
*str.:nó-, but *str.H3-nó-; 'engendered' in not *g^n.:-tó-, but
*g^n.H1-tó-, etc. For Sanskrit -i:r-/-u:r-, both corresponding to
Iranian -ar- (which you apparently do not know about), aderivation
from IIr. *-&:r- with rounding influence from labials where such
appear in the immediate environment and no rounding where there is
no such influence, it is indeed just a simple lengthening of the
reflex of syllabic -r-/-l-, which is phonetically [&r] by itself.
The root of 'fill' is IE *pleH1- as in the root aorist á-pra:-
t 'filled'. This has obviously influence the participle so that we
find *pleH1-to- rather than *pl.H1-tó- in the daughter languages.
The original participle was of course *pl.H1-nó- which was
lexicalized as the adjective 'full', Ved. pu:rn.á-. The alleged
variants pra:n.á- and pu:rtá- are highly dubious and perhaps do not
exist at all (if they do, they are rather obviously occasional
contaminations of pra:tá- and pur:n.á-). It is now common knowledge
that the Italic and Celtic reflexes of RH are Ra:, as lat. gna:tus
from *g^n.H1-tó-s, while Greek has a triple representation still
showing the identity of the laryngeal: Re:/Ra:/Ro:. Thus Gk.
stro:tós (with secondary -to- replacing -no- as always) is from
*str.H3-nó-s by development of a propvowel between /r/ and /H3/ and
subsequent lengthening of it by the laryngeal before that vanished.
Again, stratós is a different word, reflecting IE *str.-tó-s without
a laryngeal.

Apparently you are going for the kill in the following paragraph.
You write:

"If we are correct in assuming that Old Indian u:r is best explained
as representing a sequence of CVra(:)u, then the stem of a form like
Old Indian mu:rdhán-, 'head', should be reconstructed as *mela(:)u-;
if Greek blo:thrós, 'soaring upwards', is truly related, the o:
would be explained as a Greek contraction of a:u, a type of
contraction quite frequent in the world's languages. A
substantiation of this reasoning is that the word for 'wool', which
appears in Old Indian as ú:rn[.]a:, and is reconstructed by Lindeman
as *wL:na:. If the Greek reflex were correctly lo:, then we should
expect Greek **(w)lo:nos but what we actually find is lênos, with
Attic ê representing proto-Greek â (I am using the circumflex accent
to represent the Greek tilde). Now, what is extremely disturbing
and, at the same time, disappointing, is that an Indo-Europeanist
like Lindeman will blithely assert that "Idg. L: = . . . gr. lo:",
and cite forms in Old Indian, Latin, Gothic, Old Bulgarian, and
Lithuanian for 'wool' but neglect to include Greek lênos which makes
Greek lo: seem a bit problematical."

First, you are not correct in bringing in u-extension of Ved.
mu:rdhán- which is quite regular from *ml.H3dh-én- with labial
influence from /m/. Greek blo:thrós is equally regular from *ml.H3dh-
ró-. The two rather plainly reflect an IE r/n-heteroclite. A
development of a(:)u to o: does not apply to Greek at any stage
(Modern Greek even aftós), which is what alone matters here. Your
story about 'wool' is fraught with mistakes too: Vedic ú:rn.a:,
Avest. var&na: point unambiguously to IIr. *v&:rna: which is quite
regular if derived from *wl.HnaH2, completely matching Lat. la:na,
Lith. vìlna, Goth. wullo. Again, the Indic vocalism shows rounding
from a labial, here the *w-. The Greek form lê:nos (ntr. s-stem) can
reflect *wl.H1/2-n- without any problems. The laryngeal can not be
shown to be /H2/, for Doric la:nos is not that word (but
means 'bathtub'). The appparently was also an initial laryngeal, as
seen in Hittite hulana- 'wool', so the IE form was rather securely
*H2wl.'H1-no-. There are no problems concerning the development of
the segment -l.H1- in any of this. Your hasty impression that *-l.H-
ought to have given Greek /-lo:-/ was based on two words that just
happened to contain /H3/. If you take a root with /H1/ you get
blê:to 'threw' from *gWl.H1-tó, and with /H2/ you get
kra:té:r 'mixer' from *k^r.H2-té:r, or tle:tós, Dor.
tla:tós 'enduring' from *tl.H2-tó-s.
 
When you conclude,

"This short investigation reveals that the traditional
reconstruction of schwa indogermanicum is so feebly based that it
serves no useful purpose to assume it. The motivation for proposing
it can only have been to include an element known from Hebrew as a
small step towards linking Indo-European and Semitic, a link to
which I subscribe also without feeling the urge to concoct spurious
phonemes for Indo-European to support it."

You are in every way beside the mark. As you must know it was long
held *against* the laryngeal theory that some would like to identify
the IE laryngeals with material found in Semitic. In fact not even
Møller based his IE analyses on the presumed connection with
Semitic, he rather analyzed both families in their own right and
*subsequently* compared the two. And of course what the laryngeals
were supposed to match were *consonantal* laryngeals, which is
precisely what schwa indogermanicum is *not* used to mean.

It has a nostalgic ring to it these days, but the laryngeal has
again won the day when attacked by a selfappointed enemy. That's not
shocking news - we can't go on being surprised.

Jens









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