Re: [tied] Re: Earth and Thorn

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

From: elmeras2000

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Monday, July 11, 2005 11:13 AM

Subject: [tied] Re: Earth and Thorn

 

***

Patrick:

 

I will try to respond to some of the other points raised by Jens in subsequent postings.

<snip> 

 

[Jens:]

Hey, what kind of swindle is this? The Hittite form is not "tikan",
but /te:kan/, commonly spelled <te-e-kán> or <te-kán>. Since both
<te> and <e> are unambiguous signs in the Hittite syllabary being
both opposed to i-signs <ti> and <i>, there is no possibility of
reading the form with an i-vowel. The Luwian counterpart of
Hitt. /e:/ is <i>, as indeed it is in tiyammi-, so these two fit
exactly. I do not think there are plene writings of unetymological
vowels, and now that we have the Luwian in-zgan showing what did
come out of the cluster produced by zero-grade, any opposition
becomes even more pitiful. The weak-case forms of the Hittite
paradigm, such as the genitive /tagna:s/ <ták-na-a-as>, completely
rule out any possibility that the root had an i-diphthong (and an i-
vowel in the zero-grade).

***

Patrick:

 

You have the audacity to imply a swindle on my part while all you have done is display a lamentable lack of knowledge about cuneiform and how it is to be read.

 

Now, I am going to quote Sturtevant (1951) on several issues you bring up. Your answer to all these, I am sure, if you follow established patterns, will be to dismiss anything Sturtevant held (that clashes with your own opinions) as a charming relic of the past; and label your own unsupported opinions as examples of the wonderful progress since those sad and benighted times (dialectic linguisticism?), but I owe it to the other readers of this list to review some of Sturtevant's opinions on statements you have made — without any proffered justification but your own hallowed opinion — and less honorably, for the sake of your argument. I will not, and they should not blithely accept your dismissal of past knowledge unless you are willing and able to present new evidence or arguments to support your progressive opinions. An admonition to 'read up on it', with the implication that if only one read what you have, he will agree with you totally, will be regarded as the _cop out_ it so richly deserves to be labeled. Delphi has been closed some several years now.

 

1) you write: "The Hittite form is not "tikan" but /te:kan/"

 

Sturtevant (p. 19): "At the time our texts were composed (ca. 1300 B.C.) e and i represented a single phoneme, but when Hittite was first reduced to writing they were distinct, and in many common words the distinction was preserved in the traditional spelling."

 

Now it is possible that te-kan is spelled with 'e' (and as te-e-kan) because the vowel was /e/ at the time the word was "first reduced to writing" but for IH, Sturtevant does _not_ reconstruct an /i/ so what significance can "original" 'e' have? It could not have contrasted with IH **i since such did not exist.

 

As for whether the word was /digan/ or /degan/, if Sturtevant is right, such a phonemic contrast did not exist either in IH or Hittite.

 

For Hittite, Sturtevant postulates three vowels: i, a, and u (p. 17). Therefore, if he is right, <te-kan> or <ti-kan> would _both_ have been pronounced /digan/. But, there is the question of his "Suggested phonetic interpretation" of te(e)kán on p. 187 of his dictionary: "degan". On the first page of his dictionary, Note 2, appended to the heading "Suggested phonetic interpretation", he includes the sentence: "Consistency in writing e or i is not attempted." Though I deplore this lack of consistency, it seems obvious that Sturtevant intends that, written <e> or <i>, the same phoneme is intended, and by p. 17, that phoneme is /i/.

 

Therefore, Jens' attempt to differentiate between tikan and te(:)kan is meaningless and uninformed.

 

When Jens wrote above, "Since both <te> and <e> are unambiguous signs in the Hittite syllabary being
both opposed to i-signs <ti> and <i>, there is no possibility of reading the form with an i-vowel".

 

We have seen that, according to Sturtevant, these signs are _not_ differentiatable.

 

Jens writes that the vowel of this word should be reconstructed as /e:/. He apparently bases that on occasional spellings like <te-e-kán>; again, dead wrong, according to Sturtevant, who writes on p. 37:

 

"IN Akkadian, vowels are frequently written double (U-2-UL 'not', BE-E-EL 'lord'). A similar usage is characteristic of Hurrian writing, including the Mitanni letter. In Akkadian writing an extra vowel sign may indicate a long vowel, but in Akkadian texts at Boghazköy the double writing of short vowel is unusually frequent. There is therefore no reason to infer vowel length from the insertion of an extra vowel sign in Hittie words. Hittite e-eš-zi is the constant spelling of the word for 'is', which must be identified with Skt. asti, (Greek) ésti, Lat. est."

 

Now, for the sake of fairness, let us pretend that the vowel of tekán is /e/. Jens insisted on /e(:)/ to eliminate my suggestion that tekán might be derived from PIE *dheig^h-, 'clay?', namely. *dheig^hón. On p. 21, Sturtevant writes:

 

"IH y after a tautosyllabic short vowel yielded Hittite e; after a tautosyllabic long vowel it yielded Hittite ai."

 

Thus, PIE *dheig^hón would be expected (by Sturtevant, at least) to yield Hittite tekán.

 

Now, Jens continues to assiduously shovel out the grave of his own argument with:

 

"The Luwian counterpart of Hitt. /e:/ is <i>, as indeed it is in tiyammi-, so these two fit exactly."

 

1) There is no Hittite /e:/ that is unambiguously indicated in the cuneiform even if it existed, which Sturtevant says it did not.

 

2) Even if Hittite /e:/ was assumed, it could represent PIE /ey/ so the example is interesting but the conclusion is totally unjustified, i.e. tiyammi would not exclude the possibility of PIE *-ei-.

 

We should also ask ourselves if we have ever seen a reconstructed PIE form like *dhe:g^hóm, which is what Jens seems to be proposing for the prototype for his Hittite te:kán. I have not. Perhaps some of you readers have. If so, I would like to know about it. In my antiquated pre-classical thinking, a stress-accent on the second syllable, which is supposed to produce the tongue-twister *dhg^hóm, necessitating the non-Hittite metathesis to *g^hdhóm (oops! *g^hðóm), would not allow *dhe:g^hóm but at the very most *dheg^hóm (reduced grade). And why would this word have /e:/ in the first place: Hittie vrddhi? Now these are questions of PIE rather than cuneiform, and I wonder where Jens got these ideas.

 

 

Then Jens writes: "I do not think there are plene writings of unetymological vowels . . ." No one who has the slightest knowledge of cuneiform, Hittite or otherwise, could make such a bald-faced misstatement. This is simply ignorant of the facts we have. Furthermore, anyone who knows cuneiform realizes that it was written inconsistently throughout its long history. As for Hittite specifically, I think Sturtevant possibly looked at a few more tablets than Jens has or will; you read what he wrote above. The Academie Accadienne simply was not omnipotent in Boghazköy.

 

And finally, Jens continues: "and now that we have the Luwian in-zgan showing what did come out of the cluster produced by zero-grade, any opposition becomes even more pitiful." This is vintage Jens. Anyone who disagrees is not just benighted, unprogressive, and unread, he is also "pitiful". Jens, you omitted "wretch", out of kindness, no doubt. I do not doubt that tekán might, under some circumstances, have had a zero-grade (/dgán/) though I thought the original pitch by Jens was that tekán showed a pre-Ablaut vowel which Ablaut would have deleted, demonstrating its relatively earlier origin than the "metathesized" *g^hdhóm from earlier *dhg^hóm (A.A., after Ablaut). What Jens does not know is that Hittite phonological developments and spelling conventions would mean that *dhig^hóm could also be written *tekán in Hittite.

 

And very last, Jens writes: "The weak-case forms of the Hittite paradigm, such as the genitive /tagna:s/ <ták-na-a-as>, completely rule out any possibility that the root had an i-diphthong (and an i-
vowel in the zero-grade)." If the nominative had been /deg-án/ (from *dheg^h- or *dheig^h-), we could expect a zero-grade for genitive to yield /d(6)gnás/. If, in fact, it resulted in just a reduced vowel in the root syllable, then Hittite would have written tak-na-aš to be sure since Hittite <a> represented /6/ (schwa). This would have been written the same way if the result had been /dgnás/. Hittie had no real way to indicate it otherwise. Only if the long had been long would Hittite have written <ai> for the nominative.

 

Perhaps I am older than you, Jens, but one of the few things I think I have actually learned through life is that nothing completely rules out anything. There are only probabilities, and the probabilitides of your explanation are, because of your mistaken understanding of cuneiform, unimpressively low.

 

Have I proved my case? No. I have only showed, I hope, an incrementally greater probability for its consideration.

 

Frankly, Jens, this tripe could not be sold on a Mexican street-corner carnicería.

 

 

Patrick 

<snip>