Re: [tied] Re: PIE athematic neuters

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

From: pielewe

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Friday, March 10, 2006 9:58 AM

Subject: [tied] Re: PIE athematic neuters

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Ryan" <proto-language@...>
wrote:
 
>   Kordtland and Pedersen made good use of strictly internal PIE
materials but any analysis of theirs suffers from myopia by their not
being able to look beyond PIE for greater understanding of PIE
origins.



Myopia and "not being able to look beyond PIE" somehow don't seem
quite the right way to refer to:

- Pedersen, who was constantly on the look-out for extra-IE
connections and who actually coined the term "Nostratic", if I am not
mistaken, while discussing correspondences between PIE and Hurrian-
Urartian (it is somewhere in the Danish introduction to comparative
linguistics he contributed to the systematic encyclopaedia
entitled "Det nittende aarhundrede").

- Kortlandt, who writes such statements as "we may think of Indo-
European as a branch of Indo-Uralic which was transformed under the
influence of a Caucasian substratum connected with the Maykop culture
in the northern Caucasus", is a strong adherent of Greenberg's
Eurasiatic family, etcetra.

***

Patrick:

 

You are 100% correct. "Myopia" should not be applied to the thinking of these two men. I stand corrected.

 

***

>   To consider *-s a "genitive" is absurd considering its uses as a
nominative/ergative/singular and plural marker. With this range of
uses, it could have marked nothing unambiguously.


IMHO this does justice neither to Pedersen's nor to Kortlandt's
conception of this ending. 

***

Patrick:

 

I would hate to think I have stuck _both_ feet into my mouth. I confess, I took the quickest interpretation of what I read in the posting to which I responded.

 

Willem, would you care to explain their positions at a little greater length?

 

***

 

 
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