Paleo-European languages

[Zju]

One can hardly talk about sound correspondence when there's a single pair of words present and no sounds match up (Caucasian *ttsˀăqˀV 'strength, power' ~ IE *seģh- 'to hold').

I'm sorry. The right correspondence would be IE *yēgʷ- 'power (of youth)' > Greek hḗbǟ (Doric hḗbā, Aeolic ā́bā) 'youthful prime, youth', Lithuanian jėgà 'power, strength', Lettish ję̃ga 'power, sense'. My thanks to Beekes!

So just comparing with the PIE word for power? There still isn't a single sound match, this isn't even a resemblance still. Without multiple examples of the same instance of sound correspondance, this is just a translation between PIE and the purported Proto-Caucasian form, or whatever Caucasian stands for in that context.

[Talskubilos]

So just comparing with the PIE word for power?

I'm not sure this is a "real" PIE word, because it's only attested in Hellenic and Baltic, but never mind.

There still isn't a single sound match, this isn't even a resemblance still. Without multiple examples of the same instance of sound correspondance, this is just a translation between PIE and the purported Proto-Caucasian form, or whatever Caucasian stands for in that context.

Fair. I've found several cases of dental or alveopalatal Proto-Caucasian affricates corresponding to IE y- at word-initial, as e.g. *yoini- 'reed' I quoted before. As regarding the uvular glottalic qˀ, one shoud expect ģh or possibly gʷ, but you've got reason that more examples are needed. Unfortunately, this isn't an easy task, among other things because Starostin's Proto-Caucasian reconstructions aren't always accurate and often contain errors.

[Talskubilos]

Now, Talskubilos is not the worst crackpot, not even the worst linguistic crackpot, I have eve heard of, but I think that it is more than just the glazing that is cracked here

Mmm. My female Art History teacher in high school said in front of the whole class that I was like a rough diamond.

[anteallach]

So just comparing with the PIE word for power?

I'm not sure this is a "real" PIE word, because it's only attested in Hellenic and Baltic, but never mind.

There still isn't a single sound match, this isn't even a resemblance still. Without multiple examples of the same instance of sound correspondance, this is just a translation between PIE and the purported Proto-Caucasian form, or whatever Caucasian stands for in that context.

Fair. I've found several cases of dental or alveopalatal Proto-Caucasian affricates corresponding to IE y- at word-initial, as e.g. *yoini- 'reed' I quoted before. As regarding the uvular glottalic qˀ, one shoud expect ģh or possibly gʷ, but you've got reason that more examples are needed. Unfortunately, this isn't an easy task, among other things because Starostin's Proto-Caucasian reconstructions aren't always accurate and often contain errors.

It isn't even at all clear that "Caucasian" (i.e. NEC plus NWC) is actually a clade, is it?

[Talskubilos]

It isn't even at all clear that "Caucasian" (i.e. NEC plus NWC) is actually a clade, is it?

Exactly. But Starostin's reconstructions are mostly based on (N)EC, with (N)WC playing a secondary part. To cut a long story short, West Caucasian is basically monosyllabic and has a rich consonant inventory with only two vowels.

[Zju]

So just comparing with the PIE word for power?

I'm not sure this is a "real" PIE word, because it's only attested in Hellenic and Baltic, but never mind.

*yēgʷ- is also attested in (South) Slavic *jakъ 'strong'.

[Richard W]

So just comparing with the PIE word for power?

I'm not sure this is a "real" PIE word, because it's only attested in Hellenic and Baltic, but never mind.

*yēgʷ- is also attested in (South) Slavic *jakъ 'strong'.

Of course, South Slavic seems not to be a clade either!

[Richard W]

It isn't even at all clear that "Caucasian" (i.e. NEC plus NWC) is actually a clade, is it?

Exactly. But Starostin's reconstructions are mostly based on (N)EC, with (N)WC playing a secondary part. To cut a long story short, West Caucasian is basically monosyllabic and has a rich consonant inventory with only two vowels.

Can you not present NEC and/or NWC reconstructions instead of NC reconstructions? It'd distance you from the disbelief that automatically greets 'proto-NC', and perhaps even get you some of the sympathy shown towards proto-Pontic.

[Travis B.]

I agree - what you (Talskubilos) say would be a whole lot more credible if you shied away from referencing supposed "proto-NC" protoforms and rather treated proto-NWC and proto-NEC as separate entities

[Skookum]

I just can't imagine a scenario where a language would borrow an alveolar ejective affricate as a palatal glide, or vice versa.

[Richard W]

I just can't imagine a scenario where a language would borrow an alveolar ejective affricate as a palatal glide, or vice versa.

I presume it's the ejectivity you're unhappy about. There are quite a few words where Thai has borrowed English /dʒ-/ as /j-/ (German, jam and jean(s) off the top of my head) and /j-/ > /dj-/ > /dʒ-/ is well known from Romance.

[Skookum]

I just can't imagine a scenario where a language would borrow an alveolar ejective affricate as a palatal glide, or vice versa.

I presume it's the ejectivity you're unhappy about. There are quite a few words where Thai has borrowed English /dʒ-/ as /j-/ (German, jam and jean(s) off the top of my head) and /j-/ > /dj-/ > /dʒ-/ is well known from Romance.

Borrowing /j/ as /dʒ/ makes perfect sense, and I think its attested in some dialects of Spanish as well? Very interesting that Thai does the opposite, which seems less expected to me. The ejectivity is the biggest problem to me, but I also think going directly from /j/ <-> /ts/ is unlikely without going through /dʒ/ > /tʃ/, and at least Proto-Northwest Caucasian seems to have had both these phonemes (I can't find anything about Proto-Northeast Caucasian, but the modern languages seem to have postalveolars...)

[Richard W]

Borrowing /j/ as /dʒ/ makes perfect sense, and I think its attested in some dialects of Spanish as well? Very interesting that Thai does the opposite, which seems less expected to me. The ejectivity is the biggest problem to me, but I also think going directly from /j/ <-> /ts/ is unlikely without going through /dʒ/ > /tʃ/, and at least Proto-Northwest Caucasian seems to have had both these phonemes (I can't find anything about Proto-Northeast Caucasian, but the modern languages seem to have postalveolars...)

To be totally fair, the usual Thai adaptation nowadays is /d͡ʒ-/ > /t͜ɕ-/; /d͡ʒ-/ >/j/ seems to be in an older layer, though I doubt that it was so old that the actual target was /ʔ͡j/. But for an IE analogue, we have the Latin development yielding Jupiter. I'm not sure about borrowing in Spanish, but initial "ll" can certainly be realised as /d͡ʒ-/. I would note that the Glottalic Theory has ejectives developing into voiced stops in most of IE, so having reconstructed ejectives where one might expect plain voiced stops might not be as weird as it seems.

[keenir]

The phonetics have a poor match, almost at the cakra v. wheel level, but at least there are sibilance and dorsality.

Celtic *longā 'boat, vessel' (but 'cinerary urn' in Cisalpine Gaulish lokan /longan/) is a loanword related to Caucasian *lĕqˀV̆ 'a kind of vessel'. Latin lanx 'dish' also comes from this etymology, presumably through Etruscan.

At this point, I only have two questions:

1. Caucasian is a language family, is it not? Thus any false friends become even more likely -- like looking for Japanese-like words among the Indo-European family...no & noh become even more likely.

2. Are you using modern Caucasian to compare with (Classical) Celtic and Latin?

[Nortaneous]

Borrowing /j/ as /dʒ/ makes perfect sense, and I think its attested in some dialects of Spanish as well? Very interesting that Thai does the opposite, which seems less expected to me.

also consider traditional american folk song "yon yonson"

[Skookum]

I would note that the Glottalic Theory has ejectives developing into voiced stops in most of IE, so having reconstructed ejectives where one might expect plain voiced stops might not be as weird as it seems.

Interestingly this is attested in the Northeast Caucasian family. But this still leaves the problem of why /j/ would be borrowed as /ts'/, when both PIE and Proto-Caucasian (assuming this is a real thing) would have had /j/...

Edit: For what its worth, the Nlaka'pamux language (Interior Salish) has shifted /*jˀ/ to /ts'/, so such a shift is not totally unattested. I just find it unlikely that this would happen in a borrowing situation where there are much closer phonetic targets.

[keenir]

Um, Hittite is an IE language, so how can you have a non-IE word which is cognate to a Hittite word?

The same way an IE word can be cognate to a non-IE word, although in the case of 'apple' we're likely dealing with an ancient Wanderwort: Uralic *omena/*omVrV 'apple', Basque udari, udare 'pear' < *u-malV, Caucasian *mhalV-/*mhanV- 'warm'.

I was going to guess that it happened by Hittite borrowing the word from Hurrian.

Basically, it seems, as if Villar (and apparently also Talskubilos) entertains the notion that the languages of Europe evolved in situ and frantically exchanged loanwords all the times, which created the illusion of the language family known to mainstream scholars as Indo-European.

Not exactly. Villar implictly recognizes there was an extensive language replacement in the Metal Ages, whose result is what we currently know as the IE family. But this doesn't preclude the existence of older strata (which he calls "Paleo-IE") in those languages. Here's a short quote from his last book

Are the "Metal Ages" a combination of the Bronze Age & the Iron Age, or is it something else?

[bradrn]

The phonetics have a poor match, almost at the cakra v. wheel level, but at least there are sibilance and dorsality.

Celtic *longā 'boat, vessel' (but 'cinerary urn' in Cisalpine Gaulish lokan /longan/) is a loanword related to Caucasian *lĕqˀV̆ 'a kind of vessel'. Latin lanx 'dish' also comes from this etymology, presumably through Etruscan.

At this point, I only have two questions:

1. Caucasian is a language family, is it not? Thus any false friends become even more likely -- like looking for Japanese-like words among the Indo-European family...no & noh become even more likely.

2. Are you using modern Caucasian to compare with (Classical) Celtic and Latin?

Outside controversial macro-family proposals, Caucasian is emphatically not a language family. What are families are NW Caucasian, NE Caucasian and South Caucasian. Talskubilos is referring here to ‘North Caucasian’ (well, Proto–North Caucasian), one of said controversial macro-families.

Edit: For what its worth, the Nlaka'pamux language (Interior Salish) has shifted /*jˀ/ to /ts'/, so such a shift is not totally unattested. I just find it unlikely that this would happen in a borrowing situation where there are much closer phonetic targets.

But that shift involves two glottalised sounds; /j/ to /tsʼ/ makes a bit less sense, though I couldn’t say that it’s implausible.

[keenir]

Celtic *longā 'boat, vessel' (but 'cinerary urn' in Cisalpine Gaulish lokan /longan/) is a loanword related to Caucasian *lĕqˀV̆ 'a kind of vessel'. Latin lanx 'dish' also comes from this etymology, presumably through Etruscan.

At this point, I only have two questions:

1. Caucasian is a language family, is it not? Thus any false friends become even more likely -- like looking for Japanese-like words among the Indo-European family...no & noh become even more likely.

Outside controversial macro-family proposals, Caucasian is emphatically not a language family. What are families are NW Caucasian, NE Caucasian and South Caucasian. Talskubilos is referring here to ‘North Caucasian’ (well, Proto–North Caucasian), one of said controversial macro-families.

thank you for clarifying that.

[Richard W]

At this point, I only have two questions:

1. Caucasian is a language family, is it not? Thus any false friends become even more likely -- like looking for Japanese-like words among the Indo-European family...no & noh become even more likely.

2. Are you using modern Caucasian to compare with (Classical) Celtic and Latin?

So far, the 'Caucasian' comparanda seem to be Starostin's reconstructions, converted to a more intelligible form.