Zompist Bboard Again

@Talskubilos: Thanks! My main issue here is that in order to confirm that hypothesis, we would need some idea on when these loans would have happened. Are PIE and PNWC / PNEC assumed to be comtemporaneous? If not, what would be the respective stages of the language families and the concrete forms t...

On the other hand, the NWC connection for "two" is pretty unconvincing, since I doubt *qˀʷ would be borrowed as *w. Maybe I'm splitting hairs, but from those forms, I would've expected the Proto-Indo-European ones to be something like *tkwe- (I believe we see dual initial clusters in PIE,...

hwhatting wrote: ↑Wed Sep 01, 2021 10:13 amWell, he didn't quote any forms there, that's what I'm interested in.

PNWC (Abkhaz-Adyge) *tˀqˀ^wə '2' -> PIE *dwe-h₃(u) '2' (*-h₃(u) is a dual marker suffix).
PNEC (Nakh-Daghestanian) *fimkˀwV 'fist' -> PIE *penk^we '5'.

Richard W wrote: ↑Tue Aug 31, 2021 6:17 pm

Talskubilos wrote: ↑Tue Aug 31, 2021 7:55 am It might exist, but its lexicon would only be only a subset of the +2000 items commonly reconstructed for PIE.

Who reconstruct 2000+ items? That's the count for Pokorny, and many of his entries are rejected as lacking adequate evidence.

Mallory & Adams is a more recent source.

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue Aug 31, 2021 10:47 amFor the first time I can remember, Talskubilos is actually explaining his ideas clearly. I mean, I still don’t agree with them, but at least I finally understand what he’s saying now, and it’s not actually too unreasonable.

/me wants to smack his forehead against his desk so badly after reading this (well, before I started skimming rather than reading)... I've just rewritten the text to make it more understandable. :-) On the other hand, other IE numerals, namely '10, '20', ... '100', have got the fossilized lexeme *ḱ...

OK, this makes sense. I’d personally call all the layers together ‘PIE’, and give the basic lexicon a name like ‘PIE proper’ or ‘native PIE’ or something. I'd temptatively call this layer "Kurganic" after Gimbutas-Mallory's theory of IE origins in the Pontic Steppes. According to Piotr Gą...

Possibly, but this helps me not one bit in understanding what you’re talking about. I still have no clue whatsoever what you (or Georgiev) means by ‘multilayered’. According to Georgiev, Lycian was made up from two different components: one would be Lycian proper, the descendant of West Luwian, and...

What does that even mean? I’m not familiar with use of the term ‘multilayered’ from mainstream historical linguistics, so you’ll have to define it for us. AFAIK, this term was first introduced by the Bulgarian linguist Vladimir Georgiev to describe Lycian, an Anatolian language. You must be joking ...

Sure, but we both agree at least that the language existed , even if we disagree on how well it’s been reconstructed. You do accept that PIE existed; you just think that haven’t yet reconstructed it correctly, and that most currently-accepted ‘words from PIE’ in fact were loaned from other language...

But I’m starting to believe that the disagreement between us is mostly one of terminology. When I refer to ‘PIE’, I simply mean the common ancestor of all the IE languages. This language may well be entirely different to that reconstructed by various researchers; I accept that this may be the case,...

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue Aug 31, 2021 7:26 amBut do you accept at least that that sort of basic vocabulary must be inherited from the common ancestor of all IE languages?

Something of the kind, although not exactly so. In fact, some of these words were borrowed from other languages.

Hold on… I’m not sure how you can accept that all the various reconstructed protoforms of IE are real, but the protolanguage is not. I mean, let’s go through this step-by-step. You accept that the IE language family is real; that is, that the various IE languages are all related. You accept that th...

Again, I’d be really curious to know how you came to this conclusion that protoforms aren’t real. I said proto languages , not protoforms. 8-) In mainstream historical linguistics, ‘the protoform *x can be reconstructed from y and z ’ is usually taken to be synonymous with ‘people used to say the w...

@Nort, Richard - that's the kind of internal reconstruction which needs further support - either by finding an up to now unknown IE language which confirms these theories (à la Anatolian with the laryngeals), or by external comparison in a wider group, like Boreal / Nostratic / Indo-Uralic, etc. Un...

Getting back to the thread's topic, Basque native lexicon has a good number of nouns with final -i , namely begi 'eye', behi 'cow', ogi 'bread', (t)egi 'place', etc. which in some cases can be linked to the IE masculine -o- and probably would be parallel to -ā > -e for the feminine, as I explained b...

I don’t see why not — you just work recursively. First, reconstruct the semantic changes in the lowest-level groups. That gives you a set of recent protoforms, which you can use to reconstruct the semantic changes in higher-level subgroups. Be persistent enough and you’ll eventually figure out the ...

I’ll admit that this is true when considering languages with thousands of years’ worth of separation — I am reminded here of how wheel and chakra are cognate. This happens to be another instance of a Wanderwort in IE. :) Luckily for us, semantic changes tend to occur in small steps, which means you...

The range of semantic correspondences is also restricted — a Greenbergian comparison of ‘udder’ to ‘suck’ to ‘throat’ (say) would never be acceptable. Unfortunately, semantic changes happen all of the time, so this approach is likely to discard true correspondences and include Wanderwörter . Loanwo...

Understandable. But surely you accept there is a difference between sound changes which have only very weak evidence and tenuous etymologies, as purported for Basque–??? links, and sound changes which each are attested from hundreds of cognates across multiple languages with clear and obvious seman...