Re: [tied] Re: Pronunciation of "r" - again?

----- Original Message -----
From: "david_russell_watson" <liberty@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2005 12:10 AM
Subject: [tied] Re: Pronunciation of "r" - again?


--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Ryan" <proto-language@...>
wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "david_russell_watson"
<liberty@...> wrote:
> >
> > to which you were responding in the first place, I
> > was quoting a claim of Patrick's from earlier in the
> > thread, one which I personally give no credence, and
> > which is what prompted me to enter the thread in the
> > first place. :^)
>
> Laryngeal theorists usually assume three different "laryngeals",
> which they call *H1, *H2, *H3, and then squabble over what they
> were phonetically.

That's just it: you admit that it isn't known for sure
what they were phonetically, but then insist on a fit
with Arabic on the basis that it has a large repertoire
of phonetically laryngeal sounds. If the exact nature
of the so called "laryngeals" of P.I.E. isn't known,
then neither can you claim that they closely resembled
any sounds of Arabic.

***
Patrick:

Perhaps you do not read any messages but your own and answers to them but it
is probably clear to most list-members that I do not subscribe to *H1, *H2
or *H3 with vowel-coloring abilities. I believe there were two pharyngal and
two laryngal phonemes in Nostratic, and by the time PIE developed from it,
three of these had coalesced in /h/ while Nostratic /?/ remained.

And no, I did not claim that PIE "laryngeals", even the coloring variety, to
the existence of which I do not subscribe, closely resembled any two of the
"laryngeal" sounds of Arabic. I do believe PIE had /*?/ and /*h/.

What I did claim is that Arabic has four sounds, three of which correspond
to <h> in Hittite, and show unmistakable traces of their former presence in
PIE, most commonly, by lengthened vowels.

***

Indo-Aryan could produce long 'e' and long 'o' out of
nothing more exotic than *az, and so it isn't necessary
to go so far out of our way appealing to high-powered
pharyngealized sounds like those of Arabic to explain
vowel coloration.

***
Patrick:

Indo-Aryan (why not Indo-Iranian?) did not produce *e: and *o: from *az.
That is absolutely a misstatement of the facts. Where did you ever get such
an idea???

And even if it had done so, flatulation and the cry "Fire!" both empty a
room. Which one does not exist?

***


> What PIE-derived language has three "laryngeals"?

Since you put 'laryngeals' in quotes, clearly none, as
the whole big deal about the "laryngeals" is that in
most cases they completely disappeared. You then go on
to give modern instances of glottals, or laryngeals in
the modern phonetic sense of the word, but what has the
one kind of laryngeal necessarily to do with the other?

***
Patrick:

Where are you getting your information? Certainly not from any established
writer on PIE.

They certainly did not "completely disappear..".

There is no "modern phonetic sense of the word". The term has been employed
to indicate three (sometimes four) phonemes in PIE that PIEists believe can
be distinguished by the influence they exert of word development.

What has /p/ to do with /t/?

***

Without an etymological connection between a modern
laryngeal¹ and a P.I.E. laryngeal², even these examples
you admit lend nothing at all to an argument against
the sound system of Arabic being the closest to that of
Proto-Nostratic, but then they're not really relevant
to that question in the first place.

Similarly, without having demonstrated an etymological
connection between each Arabic laryngeal and the Proto-
Nostratic laryngeal of which you believe it is a reflex,
you again have nothing of significance at all in the
fact that Arabic happens to have four laryngeals. That's
true even if we are to give you, for the sake of argument,
that Arabic was unquestionably a relative of P.I.E. If
you truly don't see this, then you can't really claim
to understand how historical and comparative linguistics
are done.

***
Patrick:

Some of the statements made by you above are so egregiously wrong that you
have no standing whatsoever to lecture anyone about "understand(ing) how
historical and comparative linguistics are done".

***

Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that your
Nostratic theory is correct, and that Arabic is related
to I.E., and even if we accept for the sake of argument
that the sound system of Arabic is the closest of all
Nostratic languages to that of Proto-Nostratic, we still
have no way of knowing whether the *r of P.I.E. and the
'r' of Arabic are reflexes of the same Proto-Nostratic
sound. The *r of P.I.E. could well have come from a
Proto-Nostratic **d, while the 'r' of Arabic came from
a Proto-Nostratic **l, or vice versa, and with the time
scales involved, they could have even more apparently
unlikely antecedents than those (Remember the Armenian
word for 'two'?)


***
Patrick:

Well, it seems you really do not understand how comparative studies work.

If PIE *r could be shown to correspond to Arabic <r>, it would be
preferential to assume that Nostratic had /*r/ also but if Nostratic had a
uvular click from which they both developed, it would not affect anything.
The relationship would be there regardless of the phonological shape of the
Nostratic phoneme.

The rest of what you wrote is simply meaningless. One establishes
correspondences by being able to show relationships in many different words.
If in one word, PIE *r = Arabic <r>, in another, Arabic <l>, in another,
Arabic <d>, in another, Arabic <z>, any linguist worth his salt would start
over, and question all these non-conforming and irregular correspondences.

***
Several modern Indo-Aryan languages have a repertoire of
sounds supposedly very close to that of Sanskrit, and
are of course of the same ancestry, but yet quite often
modern Indo-Aryan words don't show the same sound in
the same place as their Sanskrit cognate, even when all
of the sounds in question are available in the repertoires
of both Sanskrit and the modern Indo-Aryan language. For
example the Panjabi word saccA "true" is cognate with
Sanskrit satya-, but even though Panjabi and Sanskrit
are unquestionably related, and both have 'c', 'cc', 't',
and 'y' in their repertoires, it still cannot be claimed
that every, or even any, Panjabi 'c' is a retention of
a Sanskrit 'c' and thus a clue to the latter's original
sound. Likewise, Hindi has a retroflex 'r' that's cognate
to retroflex 'd' in many Sanskrit words, and now imagine
if the regular 'r' of Hindi were to disappear in a future
stage of the language, or change to some other sound that
we wouldn't be inclined to notate as 'r', leaving only the
retroflex 'r'. Wouldn't future linguists, if following
your lead, be inclined to consider the retroflex 'r' a
a clue to the sound of Sanskrit's 'r'? They'd be wrong
if they did so, of course, and only those who looked into
the etymological aspect of the question would realized
that retroflex 'r' was no retention of Sanskrit's 'r'.

***
Patrick:

I cannot comment on the immediately preceding paragraph in a way that would
be acceptable to our moderators. I will only say it displays a _complete_
lack of even the barest understanding of how language change happens, and
the forms it takes.

***

So if this is true for unquestionably related languages
with similiar repertoires of sounds, how much more true
is it of Arabic and P.I.E.?

The pronunciation of Arabic 'r' is no legitimate guide to
the sound of P.I.E. *r.

***
Patrick:

According to you, there is no "legitimate" guide to anything. So why bother
yourself with posting to this list?

***

> Two "laryngeals"? Germanic if you count the glottal stop and /h/,
> even though it is not a _retention_ from PIE. Hittite, if you
> assume initial vowels are really /?V/.
>
> One "laryngeal"? Ah, some IE languages have a glottal stop. Close
> enough.
>
> Arabic has four "laryngeals", /?, h, ¿, H/.
>
> I make the claim again: Arabic has _retained_ "laryngeals"
> (really laryngals and pharyngals)

Really 'laryngeals' and 'pharyngeals'.

> better (more) than any PIE-derived language.
> You still think this is wrong?

I still think it is _unproven_. As I say, for the sake of
argument, the most that can possibly be given you is that
P.I.E. and Arabic are related, and that P.I.E. had three
laryngeals and Arabic has four. However you still must
prove an etymological connection between the laryngeals
of P.I.E. to the laryngeals of Arabic, and then show by
appeal to known sound changes how each Proto-Nostratic
antecedent, with the sound you posit for it, could have
produced both its Arabic reflex (supposed by you to be
unchanged), and its P.I.E. reflex as well. Until you can
do that, you absolutely may not claim that Arabic has
"retained" anything.

Finally, it's not even proper, regardless of what was
given you for the sake of argument, to compare P.I.E.
directly to Arabic. It should be compared to Proto-Afro-
Asiatic.

***
Patrick:

Obviously, you have never read Bomhard. He proves, beyond a shadow of a
doubt, that PIE "laryngeals" and Arabic "laryngeals" can be related.

For the ten-millionth time, if there were a decent reconstruction of PAA
with which to compare PIE, I would be glad to do so. But there is not.

***

> Tell us all why. Your cavalier lack of credence somehow does
> not completely satisfy.

Satisfied? :^)

David


***
Patrick:

I can't get no sat-is-fac-tion.

***




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