--- In Nostratica@yahoogroups.com, "Gerry <waluk@...>" <waluk@...>
wrote:

> Hi Richard,
>
> > I don't think there are any such stems. To me, the most obvious
> > candidates are the 'Proto-World' vocabulary, and of those words,

I

> > think *mama 'mother' is probably the best candidate. One then

has

> to
> > decide which if any of amma 'mother', umm 'mother',

mater 'mother'

> > and mamma 'nipple' count as instances. It does run the risk of
> being
> > rightly disqualified as a nursery word.
>
> Originally I came up with three stems: mother, father, and god.
> Someone recently mentioned that there was no 'father' in Hebrew.

No, I said that the root 'father' does not occur in Biblical Hebrew.
Hebrew does indeed have a word for father, '?a:v', cognate with
Arabic 'abu' and Aramaic 'abba:', whence the English word 'abbot'.
(American public schools don't teach religion, either, do they?
Otherwise, you might have recalled the story of Abraham's name being
changed from Abram.) The point is that these words do not derive
from the 'father' root, for so far as I am aware, no-one is claiming
that PIE *p corresponds to Proto-Semitic *b. Independent baby talk
may be the origin, though 'father' has been analysed as
meaning 'protector'.

> That leaves us with 'mother' and god. When we examine the
> derivitives that can be included, are we using "definition"
> or "morphology" or "syntax" or all?

I thing 'morphology' and compounding should be allowed, though I may
regret this when the root erodes almost completely, leaving only the
affixes. If we go back to the issue of mutual comprehensibilty,
broad meaning ought to be included, though I was allowing for it not
to be included. For example, Welsh for father is 'tad', which is
totally unrelated to the English 'father'. However, I did not put
Welsh forward as a counter-example, because I suspected it may have
some derivatives of Latin pater 'father' analogous to
English 'paternal'. (I don't have a Welsh dictionary at my disposal.)

From your suggested words' including 'god', I can only assume you
meant meanings rather than roots. The word for 'god' shows a good
deal of variation in European languages; one scholar once named the
European IE families by their word for 'god'! However, I doubt that
it's a universal concept. It doesn't appear on the Swadesh 100- or
200-word lists.

Richard.