Richard:
What do you mean by 'introduced'? If you mean came in as loan words, then
Hittite hapalzil and parSur can't be Nostratic. Or are you talking about a
more restricted swathe of land?
Mark:
maybe some people moved into the Mideast-anatolia region with liquids.
Richard:
That's yet another aspect to the issue. A similar case is retroflexes in
the Indic (i.e. indo-Aryan) languages. Some retroflex stops were developed
internally, and then some other allophones and phonemes were interpreted as
also being retroflex. Additional words with retroflexes were borrowed. The
change might have been facilitated by interaction with speakers who already
had them. Scanning the literature, one could be tempted to suspect there's
something in the water that causes retroflexes :-)
Richard:
What is the status of 'ash'? Turkish? Turkic? I presume below that it's
Turkish.
Mark:
I think it is Turkic. Others may disagree.
Richard:
What makes you think English 'parch' can be an inherited word?
(1) If you had a dictionary with any pretensions to give etymologies, you'd
find its origin is unknown. You are thus 'reaching down' with a vengeance.
(2) If you had a good dictionary, you'd find that the best, but rejected
guessses, made it a compound with the Latin prefix per-.
(3) If you could accept that comparative linguists have *some* idea of what
they're talking about, you'd know that inherited English p- ought to imply
PIE *b-, but that any instance of PIE *b- is highly suspect.
Mark:
So then it must be borrowed. Is that what you are saying?
Richard:
Either borrowed or 'invented'. English 'parch' first appears in the 14th
century, and cannot be traced back to anything earlier.
Mark:
I think lots of words in English cannot be traced back. Did you seriously
read Watkins' book?
See how funny some of those etymologies are.
Richard:
My etymological bed-time reading was Onions' Oxford Etmological Dictionary.
Mark:
See my post on Aturan on the derivation of "elbow", or try Watkins'
derivation of "estuary'" and dozens of others.
Richard:
The reference to Aturan is to 'aturan-languages', and it's message 2160, not
2444. The latter discusses a possible cognate of English 'knee', PIE
g^enu-, though connections to PIE are not on that group's manifest agenda.
Onions gives a less complex variant of the same story - one word, PIE
*olena: seems to account for the Germanic *alina: (typo for *alino:,
surely?) as well as Latin ulna:, and for all I know, the Celtic forms, e.g.
OIr u(i)len and Welsh elin. (It seems that umlaut has eliminated any
differences between *alina: and *elina:, so extant Germanic forms don't show
which form Proto-Germanic had.) Greek's got three froms for elbow -
o:léne:, o:lé:r and ôllon. I _think_ it is complicated because PIE started
out with a heteroclitic stem *olen- (*oler in the nominative singular) and
then it got regularised independently in the duaghter languages. The
meaning's a but vague - for example Scott & Liddell says of the Greek form,
'the elbow, or rather the arn from the elobw to the wrist, the lower arm,
Latn ulna: generally, an arm'. In English, the basic word is represented
by 'ell'.
English 'elbow' and its Germanic cognates are compounds of 'ell' and 'bow'.
Old English elnboga (which occurs as well as 'elgoba', the only form you
quote from Watkins), Old High German elinbogo and Old Norse o,lnbogi
illustrate the compounding summed up in Proto-Germanic *alinobogon.
The word for 'bow', the weapon, is 'boga' in Old English; the change of
unsoftened, intervocalic g > w is a regular change from Old English to
Middle English. It's a weak noun in Old English, i.e. the oblique cases
have -n-, and in German its uninflected 'Bogen'. (The OHG nominative
singular was 'bogo'.) West Germanic languages were very fond of forming
weak nouns (and of course, we have the weak form of the adjective with the
same suffix), whence what you refer to as "parasitic 'n'".
The issue of non-Germanic cognates of 'bow' and 'bow' (both the homonyms) is
complicated. The Germanic forms point to PIE *bHeugH-, but the other
languages (Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, at least - I haven't checked Pokorny
for other languages) point to PIE *bHeug. There are several other cases
where there is inconsistency in the phonation of a final velar in the root.
Many just shrug their shoulders and say 'different stem extension', but a
similar problem has been noticed in Austronesian. Maybe you'd like to check
out the explanation that's been offered there - voicing differences are less
obvious the further back in the mouth that closure is made, so the
opportunity for children mislearning words is higher.
The etymology is complex, but:
(a) Words for parts of the limbs seen to change their reference easily.
(b) Ablaut seems to have left PIE full of surface irregularities, which have
been resolved differently in the daughter languages. A modern parallel is
Polish.
In short, I see no significant problem with the normal etymology.
Are you just being mischievous in quoting German essen 'eat'? It is a
perfectly regular derivative of PIE *h1ed 'eat'.
Mark:
No. Why? Persian has "ash"
Richard:
German essen 'eat' is merely part of the evidence for PIE *h1ed 'eat'.
German 'essen' does not add to the plausibility of PIe *h1ed and Turkish(?)
ash being cogante (other than be evidencing what sort of sound changes are
possible).
Mark:
I am not sure about the laryngeals. Secondly, It is not necessary for it to
be from -d- e.g. what if
it was more like -dh- or from an earlier -th-. The point is that some
patterns have been collected, but
there are also other patterns.
Richard:
For Indo-European, I am not aware of any problems with applying the set of
correspondences associated with PIE *d to PIE *h1ed. If you want to say
that PIE *d was not [d], you are in good company; that is a different issue.
But please don't change the PIE citation form for that reason, treat it as a
spelling with odd conventions if you dislike it. This avoids confusion. If
the 'spelling' offends you, why not cite it as a spelling - PIE *<d>?
Mark:
For example, it is said that Altaic had an initial-p that changed to a
bilabial fricative and disappeared
but apparently along the way it also became h in some places. One of the
classics is Doerfer's *pOkUrz (ox)
from which he gets OkUz, OkUr, hOkur, hOkUz etc. Now it so happens that this
word looks too much
like pecus (IE cattle) to be an accident. So why cannot the same thing
happen to *parsh? *pash? And
what if it had an even earlier form which could have given rise to eat.
Richard:
The biggest problem I can see in relating Doerfer's *pOkUrz and PIE *pek^u-
is that the <s> of Latin pecus is not part of the root. Germanic and
Indo-Iranian show only a stem in peku-. Latin has (citing just the forms in
my pocket dictionary):
1. pecu: 'flock of sheep', stem pecu-, neuter.
2. pecus 'cattle, herd, flock; animal', stem pecor-, neuter.
3. pecus 'sheep, head of cattle, beast', stem pecud-, feminine.
Only no. 2 has the right stem. Note that the final consonant has developed
from /s/, with the nominative and accusative singular retaining /s/ becuase
it was not followed by a vowel.
Incidentally, a loan of a pre-PIE animate nominative singular *pakuz to
Altaic might appeal to some people, but I don't think the timing is right.
What proto-language are you suggesting *pa(r)sh for? The Old English form
derived from PIE *peku- root is feoh 'cattle, property'. If you're looking
for a route via Latin, you seem to be suggesting something like Latin
*pard-, *perd-, or *pord-. English 'parch' is a non-starter.
In any case, were you looking for loans or cognates? If we are talking of
cognates, we can't have forms with and without p- just because Turkic has
lost it. The only reson for such pairs would be a prefix, which are pretty
rare in PIE. Prefixes appear with a vengeance in the daughter languages,
but what PIE shows is a whole set of root extensions which are probably
suffixes of obscure to zero meaning. (A lot of Latin prefixes, especially
con-, also lost any significant meaning.)
Mark:
PS. There is no Altaic. Clauson showed this circa 1950.
Richard:
Obviously not convincing enough. Do you want to expand on this statement,
or is it an irrelevant aside? What's your working hypothesis? The only way
I can see to demonstrate 'not true', as opposed to 'not proven', is to show
that is not a natural grouping, e.g. by showing that Turkic is more closely
related to Indo-European or Finno-Ugrian that to Mongolian.
Richard:
By Persian 'ash', do you mean Farsi a:sh /AS/ 'stew'? What's its history?
How do we know it isn't a loan from Turkish? Farsi has been subject to some
pretty heavy Turkish influence, and the meaning 'stew' doesn't seem to keep
its words very well.
Mark:
There are those who claim it is Persian, but then they always claim those
things.
Richard:
How far do they trace it back, and to what?
Mark:
In fact, I think
Khaladj has hash (instead of ash) adding further evidence that the
bilabial-F/B (which still exists in Japanese) changed to h in Turkic
(already theorized by
Turkologists) and still retained in Khaladj. It is also pretty clear that
kap (cup) etc is originally Turkic or Prototurkic ...
Richard:
What distinction are you making here?
Mark:
Please see above. I gave other examples before e.g. pelik/pilek > elig > el
Richard:
I take it *hel rather than *el is the Proto-Turkic form meaning 'hand'. I
use the asterisk because we don't have evidence of Proto-Turkic. Again, you
seem to be distinguishing Turkic and Proto-Turkic - what is the difference
you are making. Do you include Chuvash as Turkic; from your examples it has
not undergone the change of initial p > h.
An asterisk means that the form is not directly attested; reconstruction as
being identical to some or all descendant forms does not premit you to
remove the asterisks.
PS. This word el also shows up in Watkins' derivation of elbow. If you find
my post on
Aturan languages you will enjoy it. There are lots of quotes there from
Watkins.
As I see it, you are offering several possible Turkic cognates for the
elbow/foream word - Altaic *pel (evidenced by Turkic *hel - what's the
Khalaj form?), Turkic *kol compared to PIE *el or *ol (though I must say I'm
only persuaded for PIE *olen), and one for PIE *bHeugH or Germanic *beug,
Turkic bük. There used to be a lot of doubt about the phonetic realisation
of this Altaic *p-, so the relationship may be plausible.
I apologise for not beang able to trim this post much.