From: Jörg Rhiemeier
Message: 70301
Date: 2012-10-26
On Friday 26 October 2012 20:03:46 Tavi wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
> wrote:
> [...]
> > OK. The standard model does not account for *everything* in the
> > attested IE languages, as those languages *do* have loanwords
> > from other, mostly unknown languages, and may have been
> > influenced by them in their grammatical structures. This is
> > certainly true. And what regards the unknown languages, there
> > remains much to be found out about them.
> >
> > But the *larger* part of the IE languages' lexicons and grammars
> > are inherited from a single (though not perfectly homogenic)
> > source, namely PIE. What you prefer to call "Kurganic".
>
> The problem is the "PIE" reconstructed by IE-ists isn't the same thing
> than the *real* PIE, i.e. "Kurganic", because a very significant portion
> of it comes from pre-Kurganic languages, i.e. "Paleo-IE".
Certainly, the reconstructed PIE is not the real PIE. Such
a reconstruction is always incomplete and misses details.
Many words of the real PIE are unknown because they are lost
in so many branches that in those where they survive, we are
not sure whether they are inherited at all. There may have
been words that survived in *no* branch and thus remain unknown.
But if a word, or an inflectional paradigm, exists in a number
of branches not skewed in location - say, in Italic, Germanic,
Slavic and Iranian - and it shows perfectly regular sound
correspondences, we can be confident that it is inherited from
PIE.
There is no "Paleo-IE" in the sense of a second, unrelated
protolanguage (or language family) that underlies *all*
branches of IE. In fact, there must have been many different
substratum languages, some related to each other, others not.
It is IMHO ridiculously unlikely that the substratum the
Indo-Aryans met in India had anything to do with the
substratum the Insular Celts met in the British Isles, for
instance.
What I consider plausible is a pre-IE substratum family that
covered most of Central and Western Europe - it has left traces
in the Old European Hydronymy. This family (which I have named
"Aquan") would have exerted an influence on most European IE
languages - Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic. That
means that many words that are found only in these branches but
not in Greek or Indo-Iranian probably come from there.
> [...]
>
> > What Trask and others mean when say that Basque was a isolate
> > is that it is not known to which languages Basque is related.
> > It is very likely that relatives of Basque have existed in the
> > past, and that there are living languages that are related to
> > Basque, but at a time depth so great that the resemblance has
> > withered away.
>
> The so-called "Mediterranean substrate" (which IMHO is mostly
> Vasco-Caucasian) has been studied by scholars such as Johannes
> Hubschmidt, and loanwords from this source can be found in Basque,
> although Trask and others consider them to be "Romance" loanwords,
> because they don't conform to native Basque phonetics.
Can you point me to useful references? That matter sounds
interesting.
> Aprox. in the 1st millenium BC, the native core of Basque underwent
> phonetic changes such as loss of initial stops which made their
> relationships almost unrecognizable.
I am not an expert on Basque historical phonology, but I have
heard that some strange things happened there. Yes.
> > Indeed, Vasco-Caucasian is not really that nonsensical - those
> > languages may all descend straight from the language of the
> > Cro-Magnon people (the first Homo sapiens in Europe). But that
> > means a time depth of about 40,000 years, and it is uncertain
> > whether anything can be recovered over such a range of time
> > with the currently available methods.
>
> I don't think Vasco-Caucasian is that old, but possibly "Eurasiatic"
> might approach this time depth.
I feel that it is the other way round. IE, Uralic and Turkic look
more similar to each other than Basque, Abkhaz-Adyghe and Nakh-
Daghestanian, for instance. I'd estimate the time depths as
follows:
Indo-Uralic 10,000 years
IU + Eskimo-Aleut etc. 12,000 years
Altaic 10,000 years
Eurasiatic 15,000 years
Vasco-Caucasian 40,000 years
But that are just more or less educated guesses.
> [...]
> > Then I apologize. We indeed do not know much about them *now*,
> > but that may change in the future. There are linguists - people
> > better equipped to do the job than either you or me - working on
> > them.
>
> Really? I don't think substrate languages are very attractive to most
> historical linguists. Add to this the fact the most brilliant brains of
> the world work in other areas than historical linguistics.
Indeed, historical linguistics is a neglected field, and within
it, most researchers specialize in the better known families.
Today's science is highly obsessed with applicability - if it
does not have obvious commercial applications, it is not deemed
worth studying and gets no funding. Hence, most linguists work
on the improvement of foreign language teaching methods,
translation software etc. There is not much money to be carved
from the study of lost languages of ancient Europe, however
fascinating they may be.
> > I am pretty certain that some
> > people on this list can read Russian. (Though given the fact
> > that it consists mostly of a list of words, much can certainly
> > be found out with a dictionary alone. At least, I can read
> > Cyrillic script.)
>
> A very interesting thing I've gathered from Starostin is the
> correspondence between NEC sibilant affricates and IE palatalized
> velars, which are a feature of Kurganic alone. In Paleo-IE these
> consonants merged with dental stops, as you and Bomhard already know.
I know about Bomhard's correspondences, but I am not convinced
of them in all points. Bomhard's work, like so much work on
Nostratic, is centered on the IE-Afrasian axis, which may turn
out to be illusionary.
Also, Bomhard says *nothing* about your "Paleo-IE" because he
does not work with such a hypothesis. Likewise, he says nothing
about sound correspondences between NEC and IE, because he does
not consider NEC to be a member of Nostratic. Please do not
misrepresent other scholars this way!
> [...]
>
> > Certainly, PIE borrowed from other languages, and its daughter
> > languages also did so too, in substantial amounts, and sometimes
> > from sources related to those found in other IE languages.
>
> One thing is the "reconstructed PIE" and another one is the *real* PIE,
> which is only a subset of the former.
You are repeating this like a mantra ;) As I have said above,
I *am* aware of the difference between reconstructed PIE and
the real PIE. But it is the *reconstruction* that is a subset
of the real thing, because it misses many details that are hard
to recover.
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