Re: [tied] *kap-

----- Original Message -----
From: "Grzegorz Jagodzinski" <grzegorj2000@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, September 29, 2005 6:46 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] *kap-


>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...>
> To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2005 9:27 AM
> Subject: Re: [tied] *kap-
>
>
> > Grzegorz Jagodzinski wrote:

<snip>

> OK, let all three *ghab(h)- (Lat. habe:re, Slavic gabati), *kap- (Gmc.
> habe:-, Lat. capere), *go:b- (Eng. keep) be different roots in PIE. How
> many
> different roots with similar meaning were there in PIE? Oh, PIE had to
> have
> a very rich number of lexical units! Do you think that such a thesis is
> methodologically correct?

***
Patrick:

It is a _prejudice_ of some modern men to believe our ancestors were,
somehow, far behind us in intelligence.

Progress, etal.

We have a rather false impression of the richness of the PIE vocabulary
because early (P)IEists were constrained to group roots under *Ce/oC-
rubrics. Working from within IE, this was both understandable and
legitimate. But PIE *Ce/oC- represents the outcome of pre-PIE
*Ci/a/uC(i/a/u), and it is immediately apparent why so many PIE roots have
been overgeneralized in meaning to account for unexpectedly wide semantic
ranges: the fact is, several separate and originally distinct words are
masked within most PIE roots; and this mask can only be removed by
comparison outside of PIE.

My answer is that we should expect, in some future day, when midnight has
come at the ball, to see a wonderful world of possible verbal expression for
pre-PIE's.

***