From: fournet.arnaud
Message: 52796
Date: 2008-02-12
----- Original Message -----
From: george knysh
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, February 11, 2008 11:41 PM
Subject: [tied] Arnaud Fournet's "infix" theory
I've just finished reading his interesting paper. It
seems to me that someone who has been working on these
issues for twenty odd years might have come up with
something worth discussing. Since I am not a linguist
but a historian of political ideas, I don't exactly
feel qualified to plausibly comment on this. What do
our specialists think? Perhaps leaving aside the
Fournetian comparisons to Arabic and Semitic
generally, or the implications of distinct infix
patterns in Uralian, just concentrating on the PIE and
IE aspects. Do you think this theory of infixes helps
to demonstrate: (a) a closer affinity between IE
languages than postulated by comparativist orthodoxy?
(b) a better means of accounting for differentia than
sustratal or loanwords approaches? (c) a properly
Ockhamist treatment of IE roots (:=))?
===============
In order to help another bold reader,
Basically in a few words :
I have never been satisfied with either Pokorny's or
Benveniste's approach to the PIE root structure,
and "Erweiterungen" popping up all the time.
I'm proposing a completely different approach
with prefixes, infixes and suffixes.
As a by-product, it happens that Arabic has been
studied by another man whom I met after creating
my new approach.
Our approaches converge.
In the article, I also make a proposal for a richer
laryngeal system.
In other words, "orthodox" PIE is "gutted down".
Now, as for Uralic,
I have never written it had infixes
I think it had only suffixes.
Arnaud
===================