Zompist Bboard Again

Likewise, Talskubilos's notion that the mainstream Indo-Europeanists think of PIE as a pristine language without either a prehistory or contact with neighbouring languages is a strawman. Not really. My point is what mainstream Indo-Europeanists call "PIE" is far from being one single lang...

Indeed, there are various theories about the origin of the nominative singular suffix *-s , but they do not really impact the mainstream opinion about s-mobile. Fact is, PIE had this suffix, for which reason ever, so it may have left its mark on following words, especially considering that an overt...

This is something I personally favor in proto-language discussions. Just because a language is reconstructed as we know it does not mean that it as a language spoken by real people in the past is any different from any other language. PIE-speakers were real human beings just like any of us, not jus...

It looks uncovincing to me. Processes like that exist. Look at the history of Englis adder , or older English nuncle as a by-form of uncle , where the final /n/ of the indefinite article and / or possessive pronouns mine, thine caused the deletion in one case and the accretion in another case of an...

Although I don't fully agree with Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, I think the mainstream theory doesn't explain the origin of s-mobile, which IMHO could be some kind of fossilized (i.e. no longer productive) prefix. The usual explanation is that it's a fully phonological process where a final -s on one wor...

In summary, Gamkrelidze & Ivanov posit a "compact fricative" sibilant *ŝ- in PIE which would account for Ø- in Sanskrit and š- in Hittite (e.g. šakuwa- ) and t- in Luwian (e.g. tawi- 'eyes'). And Fenwick, writing in 2016 and well aware of Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, points out that the ex...

*h₃ekʷ- , *h₃negʰ- and *h₂eḱru all begin with laryngeals, which last I checked are generally considered to be consonants. (I am aware of the arguments for vocalic allophones; it seems a little odd to me that a language would be comfortable with *m, *n, *s, *r and *l as syllable nuclei yet require a...

keenir wrote: ↑Thu May 30, 2024 3:10 amo-kay...and can you provide a title and-or a link so i can find said list?
thank you

I've uploaded a copy of the book here.

There're some cases of Hittite š- corresponding to PIE *H 3 - , namely šākuwa- 'eye' < PIE *H 3 ekʷ- 'to see' and šankuwāi- 'nail; a unit of linear measure' < PIE *H 3 n(o)gh- 'nail'. Yes, this is s-mobile; you can tell because the same roots are found elsewhere in Indo-European without an initial ...

keenir wrote: ↑Wed May 29, 2024 10:27 pmisn't distribution a part of how we determine which branches are which?
(such as satem itself - thats not found in all the IE languages from the Canaries to Sri Lanka either)

I'd suggest you read Mallory & Adams own list of "NW IE" words.

Not all sound changes are nice perfectly-regular neogrammarian ones; sometimes there's loans from related dialects ( vixen ) or folk etymology ( eggcorn ). Fenwick doesn't propose *meh₂l- > *h₂eml- > h₂ebl- as purely ad hoc changes; the association between "apple" and "sour" is ...

Cool, we're all happy with the reasoning so far and I agree with the criticism that a *b makes a PIE reconstruction suspicious in particular. Next step: Fenwick ( op. cit. ) provides an explanation of how "abVl-" can still ultimately be related to *meh₂l- , via two irregular sound changes...

bradrn wrote: ↑Wed May 29, 2024 4:16 pmNow we’re starting to get somewhere. Next question: why do you believe that *abVl- is not a native PIE word?

Mainly because:
1) it has a limited distribution, only found in a few branches.
2) it has a non-native phoneme *b.
3) it's seemingly related to Hittite šam(a)lu-.

I’m sorry, but I’m afraid this isn’t an ‘explanation’: it’s merely a vagueness. Even if I assume that many IE words are Wanderwörter , you’ve still given me no reason to believe that the specific word *meh₂l- is a Wanderwort itself. Given the strong evidence for its antiquity in Fenwick’s paper, wh...

My point is although these words are more or less distantly related, they can't be derived from a single PIE protoform. I'm affraid Fenwick and other scholars deceive themselves. :( And yet, you’re yet to give us any actual reasons why you think this… OK, I owe you an explanation. From my own resea...

Well, as it happens, the post you’ve replied to is one which summarises the strong evidence that it is in fact PIE-native. I strongly recommend reading Fenwick’s papers here and here — they’re quite thoroughly interesting, and very well-worked-out. Not exactly. On the first hand, the Hittite and In...

The discussion following the post you quoted includes links to a pair of papers by Rhona Fenwick which I think adequately address the entire topic without any need to posit a Wanderwort. The Anatolian terms are just the result of s-mobile; the irregular metathesis from *meh₂l- to *h₂eml- (> *h₂ebl-...

Dunno if this has been discussed already here, but PIE *Hebl- 'apple' may not be a loanword at all, and instead just be a metastethised form of *meHlom. Not exactly. These are differents renderings of a Wanderwort also found in Hittite sam(a)lu- 'apple (tree)' and which probably originated in the M...

Yesterday, an adventurous etymology idea occurred to me. The word in question is the Celtic word (which was also borrowed into Germanic) for 'iron', *îsarnon . I have seen attempts to derive it from PIE *h 1 esh 2 er/n- 'blood' (reconstructed from Anatolian and Tocharian data), perhaps due to the r...

One scholar (I forgot who) once wrote that we'd reconstruct PIE differently if the language of the old Indian religious hymns had been Hittite and that of the Boghazköy cuneiform tablets had been Vedic. Yet, all of the eight cases of Vedic appear to have cognates in other branches of non-Anatolian ...