Knut:
>In spite of the great difference [...] there is on area where AA
>and IE seem to be close to each other and opposed to the rest of Nostratic.
>
>The IE root structure is generally mono-sylabic with the wovel
>undergoing qualitative and quantitative ablaut variations.
This is something that continues to irk me in Nostratic studies.
There's a naive persistence at comparing "ablauts" of both IE
and AA, "in spite of the great difference" between the two
languages. Many unrelated languages show ablaut to some degree or
another. It's far too common. To claim that two languages seperated
by 15,000 years have managed to inheirit and preserve without
substantial alteration the same ablaut patterns is frustratingly
ridiculous.
IE and AA do not compare in their ablaut patterns in any shape,
form or function, unless one is willing to substantiate this with
some very hard reasoning. I feel personally certain that the ablaut
patterns in IE don't even go beyond the Steppe stage. I observe
that this ablaut (initially between *i and *u in the verb root)
partly arose due to vowel harmony with the differing transitive and
intransitive pronominal endings.
>In AA the roots consist of three consonantal radicals with wovels
>between, varying for flection and derivation. According to many
>scholars, the three-consonantal root is an extention of an earlier
>two-radical root. Thus AA in an erly stage had a root structure very
>simular to IE.
Yes. That crap has been shovelled before but nothing much comes
of it because Nostraticists fail to concern themselves with the
15,000 year gap **IN BETWEEN** IE and AA which seriously needs to
be reconstructed before any comparison between IE and AA can be
meaningful.
>I do not have any clear opinion about the reaon for this, several
>possibilities may exist:
As I said, I think ProtoSteppe (not Nostratic) had the beginnings of
ablaut (or rather "vowel harmony"), arising from vocalic agreement
between the verb root and its endings.
I personally reconstruct the transitive endings as *[-im, -it, -i]
and the intransitive endings as *[-ux, -un, ZERO] for Steppe. The
vowel harmony appears to have become useful in both AltaicGilyak
and IndoTyrrhenian. It's possible that, while the endings above
are fairly secure, the alternating vocalism of the verb root is not
reconstructable to ProtoSteppe but rather to a specifically southern
dialect area shared between IT and AltaicGilyak.
At any rate, the vowel harmony caused an alternation between *i and
*u in the verb root. However, IndoTyrrhenian, having moved west and
heavily affected by an early form of NorthWest Caucasian, adopted a
centralized vowel system. This caused a shift of *i > *@ (schwa)
and *u > *a. Thus, the alternation was now *@/*a. Another vowel
shift occured in IndoEuropean around 5000 BCE: *@ > *e and *a > *o.
Thus, a new *e/*o ablaut arose.
If you think I'm making this up, please note that IE *a appears to
be only an allophone of *e next to laryngeals. Therefore, only *e
and *o are true vowels, and yet with only these vowels, we have a
typologically unbalanced vowel system. We therefore must accept that
*e and *o derive from an earlier centralized vowel system of *@
and *a in order to resolve this issue.
Bomhard believes in a similar ablaut pattern but unfortunately
doesn't understand that this does not originate from Nostratic
nor does he fully explain what supposed function this would have
originally had, how it developed in Nostratic itself, why it
survived so long, yadayadayada. In other words, he doesn't have it
all worked out in a satisfying way because he forgot to reconstruct
intermediate stages like a good little comparative linguist.
- love gLeN
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at
http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp