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

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

> On Tuesday 11 December 2012 01:55:12 Bhrihskwobhloukstroy wrote:

> It only appears like that as long one assumes that PIE was many
> times older than the classical IE languages. If you assume that
> PIE was only about 5,000 to 6,000 years old, the apparent rise of
> rate of change disappears. Your assumption that PIE was 40,000
> years old went into the input of your reason, so any attempt to
> use this as an argument for paleolithic continuity is circular.

I thought Bhr had just dropped that assumption. What is plausible is that European languages go back to a 40,000 year old common ancestor of which PIE would be a late descendant. An example of this is your idea of IE proper expanding over the territory of related languages, such as the languages of the Old European Hydronomy.

Tavi may be pushing a similar idea, with the superstrate language being imperfectly acquired, needing vocabulary to be supplemented from the substrate, rather as some believe has happened with Romanian. (I say 'may', because I am not entirely clear what he is suggesting.)

> Nopey-dopey. Your scenario requires that either

> (1) The IE languages, after established in the first peopling
> of Europe, all underwent the same sound changes

> (1) is certainly false because sound change is not predetermined
> and any language spoken across a continent-sized area *will*
> first develop dialects and later break up into several different
> languages as time passes because different areas undergo different
> changes.

Does this break-up require external shocks? Modern states seems to have been required to break up the Romance, Continental West Germanic and Slavic dialect continua.

> (2) The loanwords were adopted to the phonologies of the target
> languages according to the sound correspondences.

(2) is also false because when a word is borrowed from

> one language into a related one, the phonemes are *not* substituted
> according to the sound correspondences (which the speakers are not
> aware of!) but according to which phonemes of the target language
> are the most similar.

Do studies of word diffusion through dialect chains support this assertion? Borrowing of new senses for old words and transparent compounds would be borrowed in accordance with correspondences, as in the famous Proto-Central Algonquian *es^koteewaapoowi 'whiskey'.

> If the words for things as 'wheel', 'plough' or 'copper' were
> Wanderwörter, they'd show irregularities in their phonology.

They do show irregularities in their phonology!

> Armenian has borrowed massively from Iranian before the first
> written attestation. How do we know? Because the words show
> Iranian rather than Armenian phonological developments.

Wasn't the system broken by Armenian and Iranian going southwards on different sides of the Caspian?

> You need some very strong assumptions, namely that languages spoken
> before about 5,000 years ago changed in substantially different ways
> than languages spoken after that magical point in time, to construct
> your continuity theory. What kind of event effected that change?

How about development to a bizarre phonological system that then broke? The reconstructed PIE consonant system is unusual, not impossible, and quite plausibly unstable. The loss of vowels also seems to have been rather extreme.

Richard.