Re: [pieml] Labiovelars versus Palatals + Labiovelar Approximant

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "congotre o" <congotron@...> wrote:

>
>
> It was interesting to see these arguments.
> I am a novice to many of these details, but I want advice on
> something rudimentary.
> I met a guy from Kurgan, Russia where some say this whole language
> family 'originated.'
>
> I started trying to explain this whole idea of a common ancestral
> language, and started off with the word he used 'sto', Russian for
> 100, and I explained to a group (of math students) its roots and
> relation to 'hund' of hundred, following that centum/satem argument
> from introductions to etymology. I explained the detail, but it
> wasn't impressive, because it wasn't obvious to others that these
> relationships were not accidental. On the other hand, if you
> use common words like 'mother', some assume that similar words in
> faraway places are an accident, or a more recently globalized word.
>
> What kind of examples will bring the average person uninformed of
> p-IE ancestry to give it any attention, since common words like
> 'dog' and 'perro', as you said here, are from sidestreams?
>
> I know this jumps the whole conversation backwards, but for me, in
> the real world, it's hard to strike up a conversation where I can
> make the argument about common ancestry believable at all.

Like everything else, there should be some tangible benefit at the end
of the road, before you choose to take it. To Rasmus Rask, there was
the everyday puzzle of why two such similar languages as Danish and
Swedish should exist, without one being more 'right' than the other.
To the Grimm brothers, the puzzle was why Low German which was so
similar to Dutch should be a German dialect while Dutch wasn't (why is
it not part of Germany?). To William Jones, the striking similarity
between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin offered an opportunity to see the
English as distant cousins of the Indian upper class, with just as
much claim as that to interfere in Indian matters.
In contrast, the average American is not interested in demonstrating
any relationship with his own language and any one language of the old
world, which he sees as passé and irrelevant. Inasmuch as he is able
to see that there actually might be a relationship, he will get
annoyed rather than enthusiastic, since it threatens to drag the
status of his country down from being the country to end all nations
and nationalism to being just another one of them.


Torsten