--- In nostratic@..., "Glen Gordon" <glengordon01@...> wrote:

> Torsten, who is innately modest, states:
>BTW, my innate modesty forbids me to direct your attention to the
>above posting, re: e-o-nothing.

Oh, did I miss your posting? Why didn't you say so before, man!

>Bomhard often has IE e/o/nothing cooresponding to AA a/schwa. But
>already Møller (or was it Cuny) proposed a/schwa for IE, as a more
>consistent system (the e/o/nothing ablaut is based on Greek alone).

See, here is what troubles me - the direct comparison of such things
as ablaut between IE
and AA, as if 15,000 years hadn't changed the two languages at all.

TP:
Nonsense. Bomhard is comparing the reconstructed Proto-forms of the
languages, thus PIE and PAA, not IE and AA as such. Forget about
15,000.

I'm sorry but 15,000
years is a very long time and two languages seperated by this amount
of time would have
very little in common at all. To be honest, I'm not caught up on my
Møller and so I can't
be sure if my views are in line at all with his proposals. However,
while I think *e/*o ablaut
comes from an earlier *&/*a ablaut (& = schwa) within IndoTyrrhenian,
I can't see how
the ablaut seen in IE and that of Semitic can possibly be related.
They have different functions
and operate differently.

I understand that it can be difficult to obtain a copy of Møller's
and Cuny's books out on the Canadian Steppe. But I don't know -
personally I prefer not to condemn stuff I haven't read.

> One thing that strikes me is the abundance of roots differing by
> d/l/r/n, as in [...]

The alternation of these phonemes is hardly bizarre and occurs
countless times in any language
(like in English, for example, where -d- is pronounced as a tap in
NAmerica, sounding
like an "r'). I suspect a similar *d > *r change in early Dravidian
and a change of *l > *n in Late Proto-Eurasiatic (including Dravidian
in the reconstruction).

TP:
I was commenting on the abundance of those roots in Bomhard, not in
the languages of the world. The bizarre part is your misreading of my
comment.


- gLeN



Torsten