From: Bhrihskwobhloukstroy
Message: 68630
Date: 2012-02-28
> It was several yeras ago (my alias was <bhrghowidhon@...>)
> I have no difficulty in believing that all of Pokorny's and
> Mallory-Adams' (and LIV's) roots can belong to a single protolanguage
> and I think that the Germanic words for 'bear' and 'horse' are neither
> younger nor older of the ones found in other IE classes: they are all
> ultimately "common IE".
> I too consider the tradition PIE model as inadequate. I'd like to
> replace it with a model without language replacements and with just
> one tree, but with a couple of dozens of branch-crossings. So, a very
> strongly genealogical - but in noway binaristic - model, where there
> must have existed at least 500 diatopically differents branches of PIE
> still in PIE phonology from Atlantic to China along 40 millennia. This
> is an external linguistic model, it doesn't affect the etymologies,
> where the only principle is: 2140 PIE roots, 100 suffixes and five
> ablaut grades regularly generate 11,449,000 BILLIONS of perfect
> formations, where one can always find the best etymology for every
> historically attested word or noun
>
> 2012/2/28, Tavi <oalexandre@...>:
>> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Bhrihskwobhloukstroy
>> <bhrihstlobhrouzghdhroy@...> wrote:
>>>
>>> > IMHO the root *perkW- 'oak, pine' isn't a native IE word but rather
>> a substrate borrowing (call it "Paleo-
>>> > European" or whatever else), and its similarity to the name of a
>> thunder god in some cultures is purely
>>> > coincidential. There's no need to imagine implausible semantic
>> shifts and the like.
>>>
>>> @Octavià: (we had already discussed the topic in other lists)
>>>
>> Sure? Under whose alias? I can't remember you.
>>
>>> a Non-Indo-European substrate can be alternative to an Indo-European
>>> etymology only if one has documented Non-Indo-European languages with
>>> assuredly known diachronic phonology and where those lexical items are
>>> precisely attested in the very expected form; otherwise it's just
>>> possible, but always less probable (because far less economical) than
>>> a plain Indo-European etymology. A diachronic phonology based simply
>>> on comparisons between words attested in Indo-European languages only
>>> and in unexpected mutual phonological relationship runs the risk to be
>>> based on simply wrong comparisons
>>>
>> As pointed by F. R. Adrados et al. (Manual de lingüística
>> indoeuropea, 3 vols.), the IE lexicon has been rather USED for
>> stablishing sound correspondences than studied by itself. Do you really
>> believe the hundreds of supposed PIE roots one can find in etymological
>> dictionaries such as Pokorny's or Mallory-Adams' actually belong to a
>> single (proto-)language? My educated guess is NOT.
>>
>> For example, using the comparative method I can reconstruct perfectly
>> valid IE etymologies of the Germanic words for 'bear' and 'horse', whose
>> reconstructed meanings are respectively 'wild animal' and 'to run'. As
>> they're different from the ones found in "common IE", the traditional
>> explanation is the latter were replaced in Proto-Germanic by tabooistic
>> reasons. However, I think it's more likely the Germanic words were the
>> ones not replaced by the common IE words and not the other way around.
>>
>> In chronological terms, such semantic shifts usually indicates an older
>> age, so the roots corresponding to the Germanic words must be OLDER than
>> the common IE ones (in fact, the terminus post quem of common IE
>> *h1ek´w-o- 'horse' is the domestication of the animal in the
>> Pontic-Caspian Steppes around 4,000-3,500 BC.)
>>
>> By this and others reasons I consider the traditional PIE model as
>> inadequate. This is why I replace it with a multi-layer and multi-tree
>> model. "Multi-layer" means that IE languages are the result of one or
>> more language replacement processes, which caused a superposition of
>> lexical layers, and "multi-tree" means there was more than a
>> protolanguage these layers have originated from. So IMHO they weren't a
>> single but several PIEs.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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