The oddities of Basque

[Talskubilos]

As with modern IE languages, PIE had a very productive derivational morphology, and its traces are all over its modern-day descendants.

So you're basically saying PIE behaves like a conlang, are you?

Really confused by what you mean by this, since derivation is a process in all natural languages as far as I know.

But PIE is a reconstructed language, so it behaves like a conlang.

[Talskubilos]

where do you think pigs came from? also, many pig breeds - extant and extinct - have been mottled

The thing is there're several word for 'pig' in IE languages, and this one appears to have been borrowed as a Wanderwort coined by pig breeders of SE Asia.

[Zju]

So you're basically saying PIE behaves like a conlang, are you?

Really confused by what you mean by this, since derivation is a process in all natural languages as far as I know.

But PIE is a reconstructed language, so it behaves like a conlang.

Non sequitur.

[Talskubilos]

But PIE is a reconstructed language, so it behaves like a conlang.

Non sequitur.

For practical purposes it is. In fact, the Spaniards Carlos Quiles & Fernando López-Merchero made a conlang based on PIE, nicknamed "dnghu": https://indo-european.info/a-grammar-of ... dition.pdf

[Ketsuban]

So, if I'm understanding this right, natural languages have derivational morphology for forming new words, but when a reconstructed language also appears to have derivational morphology for forming new words that can't be the case because naturalistic conlangs have derivational morphology for forming new words, so instead there's a shadowy cabal of language dictators trying to deny massive amounts of completely unattested loaning across Eurasia which led to the Indo-European languages acquiring a word for "pig" from Austronesian?

[Raholeun]

A simpler explanation is that the original Indo-European homeland was in South-East Asia, from where the swine-drawn chariots gallopped towards the steppes, wiping out all heteroorganic clusters in their paths.

[Zju]

But PIE is a reconstructed language, so it behaves like a conlang.

Non sequitur.

For practical purposes it is.

This statement is wrong. PIE is a reconstructed language, not a constructed language. Are we able to differentiate between construction and reconstruction? Do we know what reconstruction is?

[WeepingElf]

But PIE is a reconstructed language, so it behaves like a conlang.

Non sequitur.

For practical purposes it is. In fact, the Spaniards Carlos Quiles & Fernando López-Merchero made a conlang based on PIE, nicknamed "dnghu": https://indo-european.info/a-grammar-of ... dition.pdf

Which of course doesn't say anything about PIE itself. People can make conlangs based on whatever, which still doesn't mean that that whatever is itself a conlang. (Some people say that Ivrit was a conlang; be it or not, that doesn't mean that Ancient Hebrew was a conlang too, as it would be by your logic.)

A simpler explanation is that the original Indo-European homeland was in South-East Asia, from where the swine-drawn chariots gallopped towards the steppes, wiping out all heteroorganic clusters in their paths.

That's a good one

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I feel like there's a gay joke in there somewhere.

[hwhatting]

People seem to like postulating metathesis all over the place in PIE ... in the word for wolf, the word for wheel, one of the words for nudity (in pre-Greek), etc.... I dont believe in any of it myself, but if we can establish that metathesis really did happen in PIE, it would be at least fair enough to apply it to case like this since there are other arguments pointing towards a sound change of /ml/ > /bl/ in Greek and perhaps in other branches.

Metathesis rarely is a regular sound change (e/aRC/# > Re/a(:)C/# in Common Slavic is one of the few I can think off), so each example needs to be looked at on its own. It's good when it can be directly observed (like the variation between bird / brid in different varieties of English) or if it concerns a widely-attested etymon, without too many other exceptional developments thrown in. With the apple word, there are too many other things on top to make it likely.

I know Burushaski báalt "apple, apple tree" is sometimes connected to the IE forms, but this gets us even further away from Western-IE so its probably just a coincidence.

It could possibly belong to the group of words we discuss - words with a structure mVl-/bVl- in the wider vicinity of the area of original domestication of the apple (Central Asia).

I don't see the link between "warm" and "apple".

'warm (season)' > 'ripe (fruit)'.

Is actually a word meaning “apple” or “fruit” derived from the Nakh-Dagahestani lexeme attested in Eastern Caucasian?

Not necessarily so, but it would provide the "missing link" for IE *mah₂l-o-

A potential semantic development is not much of a missing link.

The Hittite form could belong if we assume the ša- is another prefix from a substrate.

Not exactly. The Uralic form points to a "laryngeal" *h₃ here, just like sākuwa- 'eye' < IE *h₃ekʷ- 'to see' and sankuwāi- 'nail; a unit of linear measure' < IE *h₃n(o)gh-

I see; this would add one more word to a small and problematic group (š is not a regular continuation of laryngeals; Kloekhorst assume an s-mobile here, which is also ad hoc and doesn't seem to be attested in other branches). As I don't know much about Proto-Uralic, how does the Uralic form show evidence for a laryngeal? And how does the Uralic r/n-stem relate to the -l- in other instances of this wanderwort?

I also don't see how the Basque belongs here - how do you get from something like mVl- to the Basque forms?

Apparently, m disappeared and was replaced by a (seemingly) prosthetic d, as in ahari 'ram' (with the dialectal variant adari) < *a-mari or adar 'horn' < *kam-ar-. On the other hand, udare, udari would be related to uda 'summer'.

That looks basically like "everything can come from everything". It would be better if you applied the rigour and skepticism you apply to other people's theories also to your own theories.

As I said before, there's no such verb 'to dig'.

I was referring only to the semantic development. I know too little about PIE to properly assess your claims about the existence of a verb ‘to dig’.

Talskubilos is on relatively good ground here. The main support for the root is indeed nouns meaning “furrow” etc. (the English word is one of these), while a basic verb is only attested in Lithuanian (LIV 475), with a meaning “to hurt (with a stinging pain)” – something which might go back to “dig”, but it would be good if one had more examples of that verb in other branches, with a meaning closer to “dig”. Still, there is also Lithuanian pra-paršas “ditch”, which doesn’t represent the zero-grade formation and needs to be explained if there wasn’t originally a verb *perk’- “dig”; likewise for Vedic párśāna- “depression, trough”.

@Talskubilos: On pigs - if you google “traditional pig breeds”, you’ll find a lot of multi-coloured and mottled sorts (I see now that this point has already been made by keenir). That’s more original than the uniformly pink pigs that have become ubiquitous nowadays. It’s also reasonable to assume that the further you go back, the more similar domesticated pigs were to wild boars.
AFAIK, pigs were domesticated in Anatolia about 13,000 years ago. That’s long before PIE is assumed to have been spoken, so there is no reason to believe that to the IEans, pigs were a novelty. But new words being derived especially for young animals and then becoming the word also for the grown animal is a well-documented process. So as long as we cannot document the chain of transmission between the origin of this supposed wanderwort and the instances in IE and Austrobesian, I find an internal derivation more convincing. That’s different to the “apple” word, because there is a range of similar words around the known origin of its domestication, the untypical structure of PIE *abVl-, and the fact that it has a /b/, which natively normally comes only from *-pH3- and is often a sign of loans.

The thing is the +2000 lexical items reconstructed for PIE haven't got the same Ablaut nor derivative patterns, IMHO because they belong to different linguistic strata.

On derivational morphology – the laws of IE derivation are well-known. There is actually a lot of regularity and semantic patterns can be reliably recognized. That said, if you look at derivational patterns in existing languages, you often find parallel formations using different patterns, and it’s also not always clear why this or that pattern was chosen.
Also, one shouldn’t be get too hung up on roots. What we have in the IE languages are words, from which roots can be abstracted; ablauting root languages work in that certain developments have lead to different ablaut patterns in different words derived from an original base, and the speakers abstract a core from this (the “root”) and apply the patterns to it. For example, spoken Arabic has abstracted a root t-l-f-n from the loan “telephone” and derives verbs from that by inserting the corresponding vowels. So, having various ablaut or derivative patterns to form words doesn’t make PIE a “conlang”, it just behaves according to its type.
(So, when you are making the point that certain words only or mostly are attested as derived zero-grade nouns and take that as an indicator that these are loans, you are basically using the absence of derivations with a wide range of derivative patterns as an indicator - but that is only a valid point if using a wide range of derivations is a characteristic of inherited lexicon, which I think is true.)

[keenir]

I feel like there's a gay joke in there somewhere.

well we're all having fun here, so that definition certainly is true.

[WeepingElf]

As I don't know much about Proto-Uralic, how does the Uralic form show evidence for a laryngeal?

Apparently, there is some variation. The most common reflex of PIE laryngeals in loanwords into Uralic is AFAIK zero, but there appear to be a few words where a laryngeal appears to be reflected by *k, *x or *š. See this chart for "Indo-Uralic" sound correspondences - which IMHO quite clearly shows that the bulk of the items are loanwords from IE into Uralic rather than inherited from Proto-Indo-Uralic or whatever.

[Talskubilos]

Is actually a word meaning “apple” or “fruit” derived from the Nakh-Dagahestani lexeme attested in Eastern Caucasian?

Not necessarily so, but it would provide the "missing link" for IE *mah₂l-o-

A potential semantic development is not much of a missing link

I was referring to phonology, not semantics, because the IE word isn't directly linked to the 'apple' Wanderwort.

The Hittite form could belong if we assume the ša- is another prefix from a substrate.

Not exactly. The Uralic form points to a "laryngeal" *h₃ here, just like sākuwa- 'eye' < IE *h₃ekʷ- 'to see' and sankuwāi- 'nail; a unit of linear measure' < IE *h₃n(o)gh-

I see; this would add one more word to a small and problematic group

"Problematic" means "it doesn't fit in the mainstream theory".

(š is not a regular continuation of laryngeals; Kloekhorst assume an s-mobile here, which is also ad hoc and doesn't seem to be attested in other branches).

As a matter of fact, he rejects any relationship between šam(a)lu- and *ab(ō)l-, which it's too bad.

As I don't know much about Proto-Uralic, how does the Uralic form show evidence for a laryngeal?

Just as in Greek, initial *o- in Uralic (and incidentally also u- in Basque) would point to something like *h₃

And how does the Uralic r/n-stem relate to the -l- in other instances of this wanderwort?

-l- > -r- is a rather trivial change.

Apparently, m disappeared and was replaced by a (seemingly) prosthetic d, as in ahari 'ram' (with the dialectal variant adari) < *a-mari or adar 'horn' < *kam-ar-. On the other hand, udare, udari would be related to uda 'summer'.

That looks basically like "everything can come from everything". It would be better if you applied the rigour and skepticism you apply to other people's theories also to your own theories.

Of course I do.

[bradrn]

[It would be better if you applied the rigour and skepticism you apply to other people's theories also to your own theories.

Of course I do.

Apropos of this, I’d be interested to know how often you consider a relationship between words but then discard it.

[Talskubilos]

The most common reflex of PIE laryngeals in loanwords into Uralic is AFAIK zero, but there appear to be a few words where a laryngeal appears to be reflected by *k, *x or *š.

This would be the case of *Hoḱte-h₃(u) '8' ~ Uralic *kakta ~ *kæktæ '2'.

[Talskubilos]

Apropos of this, I’d be interested to know how often you consider a relationship between words but then discard it.

I haven't got a statistics, but I'm sure I already did it several times.

[Talskubilos]

AFAIK, pigs were domesticated in Anatolia about 13,000 years ago. That’s long before PIE is assumed to have been spoken, so there is no reason to believe that to the IEans, pigs were a novelty. But new words being derived especially for young animals and then becoming the word also for the grown animal is a well-documented process. So as long as we cannot document the chain of transmission between the origin of this supposed wanderwort and the instances in IE and Austronesian, I find an internal derivation more convincing.

Of course I disagree. Having both 'ditch' (or similar) and 'piglet' derived from the same lexeme is quiet suspicious to be true. On the other hand, the connection between the IE and Sinitic words for 'dog' seems too evident to be a chance resemblance.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

If we're speaking of the form written 犬, I wouldn't be terribly disinclined to entertain the idea that it could be an Indo-European borrowing, when 蜜 almost certainly is, though the Proto-Indo-European and Old Chinese words are, I would also caution, composed of cross-linguistically common sounds, and it isn't that different from East Asian onomatopoeia (Mandarin wang, Japanese wan) for dogs barking, so in both cases, it could be onomatopoeic formations that happened to end up similar (the Mandarin onomatpopiea for a cat meowing sounds very similar to the English one, because cats sound much the same elsewhere).

[keenir]

AFAIK, pigs were domesticated in Anatolia about 13,000 years ago. That’s long before PIE is assumed to have been spoken, so there is no reason to believe that to the IEans, pigs were a novelty. But new words being derived especially for young animals and then becoming the word also for the grown animal is a well-documented process. So as long as we cannot document the chain of transmission between the origin of this supposed wanderwort and the instances in IE and Austronesian, I find an internal derivation more convincing.

Of course I disagree. Having both 'ditch' (or similar) and 'piglet' derived from the same lexeme is quiet suspicious to be true.

ah, and the quietly suspicious ones are the worst of all, i'd wager.

seriously, why suspicious? given that you appear to be finding long-lost relatives via wanderwords transcontinental-and-oceanic looking vaguely similar, surely your method produces more suspicious things

[keenir]

The Hittite form could belong if we assume the ša- is another prefix from a substrate.

Not exactly. The Uralic form points to a "laryngeal" *h₃ here, just like sākuwa- 'eye' < IE *h₃ekʷ- 'to see' and sankuwāi- 'nail; a unit of linear measure' < IE *h₃n(o)gh-

I see; this would add one more word to a small and problematic group

"Problematic" means "it doesn't fit in the mainstream theory".

if memory serves, there are presently five theories explaining how airplanes fly...and each of them has at least one problematic aspect

should we therefore return to using theories like Intelligent Falling? (a version of that was in use a century or three ago, IRL)

https://www.theonion.com/evangelical-sc ... 1819567984



ps: I asked you before - and its possible you missed seeing it earlier - if we could have a look at your writings and publications. I'm curious what "problematic" details afflict your own theories regarding linguistics and PIE-era things.