Re: Why do Pokorny's roots for water have an "a" in front?

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
wrote:

>
> The speakers of PIE probably weren't nomads. PIE has words for
> the house and its parts which are not particularly likely to
> originally refer to tents, for agriculture and for keeping pigs,
> which are unsuitable to pastoral nomadism.
>

Contrarily to you, I don't think the IE lexicon comes from a single
source, so words from the Dnubian farmers (e.g. 'plough') could coexists
with others from Steppe shepherds (e.g. 'horse').

> Of course, hardly
> any archaeologist now still believes that the kurgans were built
> by nomads.
>

Possibly "agro-pastoralists" would be a better term for describing
Kurgan people.

> > took over farmers of the Lower Danube area, leading to an
> > acculturation process ("Kurganization") by which they imposed their

own

> > language (Kurganic) over the autochthonous population. However, in

my

> > view the replacement of the existing languages was way of being
> > complete, so a kind of creolization happened by which large portions

of

> > them survived in the historical IE languages.
>
> I wouldn't call it a "creolization". Late PIE was a morphologically
> highly complex language about which one could say with only little
> overstatement that "all verbs were irregular". Compare that to a
> creole such as Bislama or Mauritian. It is a very different thing.
>

Possibly "hybridization" would be a better term, and defenders of the
Paleolithic Continuity Theory (PCT) use it throughly.

> One can definitely say that the spread of IE was the establishment
> of languages of a single origin onto a large area, by which means
> ever.
>

But this is only a *hypothesis*, not a proven fact. IMHO there's no way
the IE family could be the result of a single linguistic event, whatever
it might be.

> However, it is indeed the case that many words and probably
> also phonological and grammatical patterns from the languages
> previously spoken in the area found their ways into the individual
> IE languages.
>

I'd say "areas", in plural. This is precisely what I said Kurganic is a
superstrate in many IE languages.

> > Thus I think the identification of Kurganic as the real "PIE" by

most

> > IE-ists is wrong, and the refined version of an "Early PIE" from

which

> > Anatolian and "Late PIE" later split is only a palliative.
>
> Bullshit. The Anatolian languages differ from the rest of IE in
> some important ways (hence the proposition of an Early PIE and a
> Late PIE), but are clearly related to the rest of IE in basically
> the same way as the latter languages are related to each other,
> only a little more distantly.
>

Sure, some of the isoglosses running through the IE family are shared by
Anatolian, while others are not. I agree this points to a more distant
relationship, but IMHO the dichotomy Early/Late PIE is a crude
simplification, so to speak.