Re: Similarities in Caucasian languages to Indo-European

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "C. Darwin Goranson"
<cdog_squirrel@...> wrote:

> I recently bought John Colarusso's "Nart Sagas from the Caucasus", and
> already I have noted an interesting (possible) connection to
> Indo-European in the decidedly native Circassian name [tatémq°e],
> which Colarusso analyzes as /t-at-ta-m-q°a/
> 'father-INTIMATE.POSSESSION-father-OBLIQUE-son', and translates as
> "grandfather" (p. 16, "How Warzameg and Yimis Came to Be).

> While, having taken 3rd year undergraduate Historical Linguistics, I
> recognise the danger of making connections based on small phonemic
> sequences, I nevertheless find it interesting to note the Indo-European
> *tat- "father" would match the first two elements of this name
> perfectly, i.e. t-at 'father-INTIMATE.POSSESSION', which I propose to
> mean something like "dear father" or "my dear father". Again, however,
> this could just be coincidence; even so, such common phrases have a
> habit of surviving in strange ways, as I've read in many articles by
> Calvert Watkins, not least "How to Kill a Dragon" (1995).

Worldwide, both *pa and *ta seem to be involved in a great many words
for senior male relative. Nursery simplification may well tend to
reverse normal sound changes, thus making the words useless for
anything but short-range comparison. PIE is rather unusual in having
the complex form of *p&ter- facilitating comparisons going back many
millenia.

I've attempted to convert the Unicode to X-SAMPA, as Yahoo groups
tends not to handle Unicode well when one posts from the web page.
I've arbitrarily converted Starostin's underscore (what does that
mean?) to a hyphen, and left 'ä' and V (=unidentifiable vowel?) unchanged.

> Also, while searching through Tower-of-Babel's North Caucasian database,
> I was pleased to notice the reconstructions for the number 5,
> *f-h\a_X and even moreso upon seeing the Proto-Sino-Caucasian
> reconstruction, *xNwäH\V. What pleased me was the similarity to
> the Indo-European *peNk_we [usual notation *penkWe - RW]. If a
> parallel were to be made, one might suppose that the final syllable of
> the Proto-Sino-Caucasian was dropped, leaving something like
> *xNwE; the [N] would become syllabic, and later re-analysed
> as a zero-grade form. The *x would undergo a transformation similar to
> in North Caucasian, and become *p (perhaps strengthened from /f-/).

It doesn't take much imagination to see a connection with Semitic
*H-m-s either. Neither is compelling in the absence of other
correspondences.

Richard.