----- Original Message -----From: proto-languageTo: List-Nostratic(2)Sent: Monday, July 09, 2001 12:28 PMSubject: BOMHARD'S Nostratic to IE Vowel TablesDear Nostraticists:Some discussion has recently taken place on the subject of how IE vowels correspond to Nostratic predecessors, and the table that Bomhard elaborated in his _Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis_.The table is Bomhard's book would be of more interest if Bomhard had ever seriously attempted to apply the correspondences in his dictionary, which he has *not*. Thus, the discussion is really moot.This can be illustrated quite simply by comparing three Nostratic roots in Bomhard's dictionary with the same consonantal structure but reconstructed with the three basic vowels of Nostratic.#520*man-/*m6n-, 'stay'; #533 *mun-/*mon-, 'protrude'; #519 *man-/*m6n-, 'divide'; the latter I would emend to *men- (Bomhard's form: *min-/*men-). I will not even insists on this correction of #519, since we can easily see the same facts in #525 *mir-/*mer-, 'stab'.In each of these, Bomhard gives IE equivalents of *CeR-/*CoR-/*CR- (exception: in #520, Bomhard does not list the expected *mN-): *men-/*mon-/*mN [*mer-.*mor-/*mR-].Thus, it is patently obvious that the choice of Nostratic vowel-pairs has no bearing whatsoever on the IE reconstruction; and that the table provided is meaningless because not employed.It is also obvious that only one unspecified vowel need be postulated for IE, corresponding to Bomhard's Nostratic *a/*6/*u/*e/*u/*o. This one unspecified vowel takes three forms in IE: *e/*o/*0, depending on the stress-accent, which varies according to the syntactic employment of the word.There is absolutely no need to reconstruct more than one unspecified vowel for earliest Nostratic; and this unspecified vowel corresponds to Lehmann's "syllabicity".I acknowledge that this is typologically unusual and inherently unstable but we do not need to believe that this stage lasted for any but a short time-period, during which Ablaut-variants and zero-grade forms developed.This is a great shame because Bomhard should be credited with discovering a valid relationship among Nostratic *e, *a, *o and Dravidian *i, *a, *u, which seems to be demonstrable whenever Dravidian cognates are available for comparison.PatPATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE@...
(501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA
WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/
and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html"Veit ec at ec hecc, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío,
geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit,
hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138)
PATRICK C. RYAN | PROTO-LANGUAGE@...
(501) 227-9947 * 9115 W. 34th St. Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 USA
WEBPAGES: PROTO-LANGUAGE: http://www.geocities.com/proto-language/
and PROTO-RELIGION:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/proto-religion/indexR.html"Veit ec at ec hecc, vindgá meiði a netr allar nío,
geiri vndaþr . . . a þeim meiþi, er mangi veit,
hvers hann af rótom renn." (Hávamál 138)