Re: Eating, Cattle and Elbow (was: Hermes/=Mercury)

Richard Wordingham wrote:

> 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?

The question is more complex. There are other factors which nobody takes
into account/

1. There were 2 African 'races' Negroid and Capoid (Carlton Coon's book
is a good one even if
it has flaws). See also McEvedy. North africa/Horn of Africa were
inhabited by Capoids. It was
invaded by Asians (e.g. Mideasterners/ Europoids) in historical times.
The Negroids (Bantus)
also pushed south and also mixed with the Capoids. The CApoids now in
Southern Africa
are short-statured due to environment. However, according to Coon, there
is evidence of
intrusion to North Africa circa 10,000 BC (or 10,000 years ago). These
likely came from
Sicily and hence via Italy. Then Hamitic (African branch of AA) could be
a mixture of this
European language mixed with whatever was there. Then there was
apparently migration of East
Africans to the Arabian peninsula, and some of them likely also mixed
with Capoids, so Semitic
is a mixture of these which then mixed with the languages that were
already there. (Later times
Egyptians/Semites? also moved thru via Anatolia to Europe etc [Herodotus].

2. Who was there? Let's see Lesghians (East Caucasians) are allegedly
descendants or relatives
of the Caucasian Albanians. These people had to be very pale or maybe
even albino in order to
produce whites via mixing with Africans. The Lazi (Northern Turkey) are
Georgian speakers.
The Greek Pelasgians must refer to the same. Hurrians were thought to be
also related to the
Caucasian languages.

3. I exchanged email years ago with an Africanist who said that words
like leukos (Greek) and
turuk really meant "white, pale". It would seem that very pale,
albino-like peoples with big noses
lived in that region or invaded it. Likely some of these people who also
mixed with incomers
moved into the steppes.

4. Amazons and the Arimaspi are likely stories of Europoids meeting up
with Mongoloids. They
could not believe that men who had no facial hair could be real men. Ibn
Battuta basically says the
same about the Central Asian Turks circa 1300 CE. Arimaspi in all
likelihood means "half-eyed"
e.g. epicenthal fold, but somehow the transition "half-eyed" >
"one-eyed" occurred.

5. Circa 2400 BC (Coon, if I recall correctly) representatives of
Mongoloids, Europoids and
the Munda/Australoids(?) are all in India as evidenced by their skulls.

So do any linguists take any of these into account?

What is Nostratic? Was it a single unified language or did two
(possibly related) languages
merge in various ways to create all of what we see. Was there a
prefixing language mixing with
a postfiixing language?

>
>
> 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 :-)

That is another problem. I see substratum. It occurs in India along with
Dravidian speakers.

>
>
>
> 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.

I read Buck (several times) and read Watkins (several times). I do my
reading round robin. e.g. Hittite,
Akkadian, Buck, Watkins, Turkic, etc. I see some preliminary patterns,
then when I go back again
using those I see more patterns, etc.

>
>
> 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 thrre roots *bheug. But there is a real word bUk in Turkic and
it means 'bend'. And there is
a real word el (hand), elig (hand), bilek (wrist, arm), and pilek
(five). Why can't *bheug simply be
from Hunnish. Weren't germans in contact with them? Werent' the Celts in
that region?

> 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.

In how many branches of IE does it show up?

What is wrong with Greek/Latin ul-, like English being related to
Akkadian QATUM,
Turkic kol (arm), all going back to *qathum? Much simpler. And this is the
NOSTRATIC LIST.

>
>
> 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>?

I am merely pointing out more patterns than Pokorny.

What is there was a period of chaotic mixing and it was after these
peoples in the ME split up
and far away that the words began to crystallize, and by being near each
other the IE languages
came to resemble each other more and more. That is basically what Dixon
says. Meanwhile here is
what I am doing and why. I will be going on a 3-week long trip of
conferences on genetics, etc and
will not be able to respond, so I am doing all this now.

I give you a set of integers: {1,2,2,3}. They came from one of them.
What do you do? Most linguistics
books are silent as if it is magic.

1. Average of some kind: e.g. pick *2
2. Mode: *2
3. Median: *2
4.Majority vote: *2
5. assume increase: *1, therefore *1>2, and *1>3 or *1>2>3
6. assume decrease: *3, therefore *3>2, etc.


So when I see something like :"language X has {p,p,f,f,f} so obviously
*p" I ask (and I used to
ask loudly, to linguists on mailing lists and sci.lang" "what is the
f*cking rule?"

No book ever has any rule, or any explicit algorithm. I think I read
every one.

Suppose now we have 2 language families {1,2,2,3}, and {2,3,3,4} (e.g.
IE and AA),. Suppose
we reconstruct PIE and PAA using any of rules 1-4, we get 2 and 3 and
then using one of them
have to choose 2.5 or 2, or 3 or something. But suppose we look at the
raw data e..g. {1,2,2,2,3,3,4}
Now it looks like we should select *2.

But what if we had some reason for selecting rule 5 or 6? What rules can
they be?

That is what I am working on and those are the parts that I am posting here.

>
>
> 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.

Look at pecor and pecud. * pecudh. From *dh I also derive both r and z.
Now you have actually
buttered my bread.

In any case, the point is that we have to go beyond IE since this is
Nostratic. And now I think
I explained why I do what I do.

>
> 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.

I said Doerfer did *pOkUrz not me.

How does one reconstruct sounds?

One way is to put both sounds in it e..g you want r and z, so you
assume rz. Another is to select
something like a centroid (e.g. average of some kind). I select *dh for
r, z, d etc. But there could be
some other directionality involved. These are complicated. I have
reasons for selecting what I
selected. I am not finished with the writing because I have so much to do.

What I think I will do over the next 3 weeks is try to put together the
Akkado-Turkic cognates
where Akkadian has lost consonants still retained in Turkic.

I have a question for everyone.

Where can I publish such a paper?

My guess is what will happen is what happens to my papers like this: for
the Sumer-Turkic paper,
Turkic journals say :"this is not Turkic, find Nostratic". I send to
Nostratic and it is "we are not good
in Turkic, try Turkic journal".

it is like an engineering paper where you get "this is math, not
engineering". you send to a math journal
and you get "this is engineering, not math."

The same thing happened with a paper I wrote; a mathematical model of
sexual orgasm., a fully
and seriously scientific paper. It was rejected by the SSSS by two
editors with the most asinine
excuses I have ever read in my life. I think they got scared that I was
about to pull a Sokol and Bricmont
trick on them. So I got it published in the Proceedings of an
Engineering conference on applications in
medicine. I fully expect to eventually get it published in the SSSS
journal, sooner or later :-) even if it
takes another 10 years and it might. I will try every new editor.

>
>
> 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.

Turkologists are mostly bad linguists. They have to rules. It was
formalized by Swadesh.
You can read about all this in Embleton's book. It is all clearly
written, including ideas by
Chretien, Ross, Swadesh etc. She also constructs trees and shows the
algorithms. Since the book
is about statistics and she is a statistician, you will like reading it.

I stand by Clauson. There is no Altaic. Mongolian is closely related to
Tungusic. that is all.


--
Mark Hubey
hubeyh@...
http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey