Richard Wordingham wrote:

--- In Nostratica@yahoogroups.com, "H.M. Hubey" <hubeyh@...> wrote:
> The *PIE sounds and the changes in the daughter languages have
> not been agreed upon.

I think you'll find the basic correspondences are pretty well agreed
upon.  The arguments are about origins (i.e. in pre-IE), details and
phonetics.

Yes. What if there is a different set of sounds for *PIE ?

> There should be quantitative metics e.g. like R^2 for
> statistical fitting.  Among the factors
>
> 1. how many rules

How are you going to score the number of rules?  Latin to French is
reckoned to need 200 rules, so I suspect you'll be encountering cases
of too few rules rather than cases of too many.

It can be weighted, first into subfamilies then within families. Or different ones can be
used and compared. This too is an experimental science.

Possibly the rules should also be scored for complexity
and 'naturalness', though I think that will open many a can of worms.

> 2. how many words are explicable with these rules

What good does it do to have 13 rules to explain 13 words?

> 3. how many starred forms are needed

I don't understand this factor.  Please expand on what you have in
mind.

They posit PIE words from which attested ones are derived. Furthermore, like the
old elements table there are holes and they too have to be filled in with starred forms.
The more you have to create the worse your system.

I can probably create a protolanguage for any 3 languages e.g. Chinese, Latin
and Swahili (Swadesh 100 list) if I was allowed to create any number of protowords
and as many sound change rules I wanted. Clearly, there are better systems and worse
systems and we want to know which is which.

> 4. how good are the semantics
> etc
>
> Richard Wordingham wrote:

> > Another example is the pair
> > *pah2ur- and *h2ngni- of PIE words
> > for 'fire'.

Correction: *h1ngni-, not +h2ngni-.

I'm not sure that any of your hinted at principles will help with the
examples I gave.

First off, I think paHHur is really pa-aHHur f rom the root *athur or *anthur. The pa-
was likely a prefix. And the root *ya- shows up for fire/lighting etc in other langauges
and in fact, in Turkic yaruk and is cognate with Hittite laluki e.g. Turkic yaruk.

Now, to create *PIE all the languages that are presumably IE were selected and
then the protoforms constructed. To create Nostratic the same things have to
be done. That means Turkic yan (to catch fire), yak (to set on fire) cannot be
ignored especially when it is obvious that this yak> ag is possible, and that -ni
is likely a suffix from Georgian/Kartvelian or one of the CAucasian languages
e.g. the Abkhazians name for themselves is either Apswa or Apsni. The latter
may be the name for them given by Georgians. If there is a homeland for
fire-worship it is in the South Caucasus, where there were natural fires
because of surface oil and leaking gas. And these words show up in that
region.

This is just a simple example of problems to be encountered. There has to be
an objective and principled way to judge the various proposals.

Richard.



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