Zompist Bboard Again

Posted: **Tue Jul 20, 2021 7:38 am**

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Mon Jul 19, 2021 8:23 pmYeah…same as with those other languages. Your point?

See my previous post:

Talskubilos wrote: ↑Mon Jun 21, 2021 11:44 amGiven the fact Proto-Basque itself dates from the Visigothic period (roughly the 6th century dC), the number of Vulgar Latin/Early Romance loanwords is comparatively scarce, overhelmed by those from Church Latin/Mozarabic at the time of Christianization (roughly the 9th century dC). Compare for example gela 'cellar' with zeru 'heaven', with different developments from /ce/. On the other hand, a purported Latin loanword such as liburu 'book'*, is actually from Spanish libro (cfr. dialectal pel(l)iburu 'danger' from Spanish peligro).

The thing is, regardless of the source, the internal developments of some Basque words are rather puzzling. To quote an example, betagin 'canine tooth', a transparent compound of bet- (combinatory variant of begi) 'eye' and (h)agin 'molar tooth', has the dialectal variants matagin, letagin (the standard form), letain, litagin, litain, ithain, where l- is apparently prosthetic and replaces an otherwise lost initial stop.

IMHO, this and other oddities could be explained as the reflex of various adstrate/substrate influences. As a matter of fact, the available evidence suggest the W and SW of the historical Basque country were occupied at Roman times by IE-speaking (presumably Celtic) tribes, so some scholars think Basque entered these territories after the 6th century dC, thus replacing the pre-existing (already Latinized or not) languages.

* The standard Basque word for 'book', gut(h)un, found in northern dialects, is an adaptation from western kut(t)un 'pincushion; amulet; scapular', itself a loanword from Hispano-Arabic qutˁún ‘cotton’.

I'd add liburu probably dates back to the invention of the press (roughly 16th century), while kut(t)un/gut(h)un was from the Middle Ages.

Posted: **Tue Jul 20, 2021 7:39 am**

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Tue Jul 20, 2021 7:30 amTalskubilos, what I read out of your reactions amounts to "Please put out that lamp. I want to continue poking around in the dark!"

On the contrary, I'm here to shed new light over old data.

Posted: **Tue Jul 20, 2021 9:02 am**

Talskubilos wrote: ↑Tue Jul 20, 2021 7:39 am
WeepingElf wrote: ↑Tue Jul 20, 2021 7:30 amTalskubilos, what I read out of your reactions amounts to "Please put out that lamp. I want to continue poking around in the dark!"
On the contrary, I'm here to shed new light over old data.

Please do...but sometimes it feels like you're saying "hey, here's a word that was discovered oodles ago, and I'm going to throw it in this family because I think it would be fun to do so."

Maybe I just don't understand what you mean by "new light" in what are often one-sentence statements by you?

Posted: **Tue Jul 20, 2021 10:32 am**

Mr Talskubilos, have you ever heard of Occam's Razor? I feel like that would be a good check on some of the wilder claims.

Posted: **Tue Jul 20, 2021 10:33 am**

Maybe we are just talking past each other all the time, and see the same thing from different angles

It seems as if both T. and I feel as if there was a stratum of extinct IE languages, later clobbered by the expansion of Italic, Celtic and Germanic, in much of Western Europe, but we have different ideas about what those lost IE languages were like. T. apparently calls this stratum "Baltoid" (which perhaps is a designation he did not coin himself but picked up somewhere) and sees it as a language broadly similar to Baltic (i.e., a satem language with *D-Dh and *a-o mergers), while I call it "Southern IE" and suspect a relationship to the Anatolian languages such as Hittite, while not making any predicament about its phonological developments. (Obviously, these two hypotheses do not even contradict each other - why couldn't a branch of Southern IE - independently from Baltic, though - show such sound developments, which are commonplace enough in the IE family? In my opinion, the phonologies of Northern and Southern IE were probably mostly isomorphic - not necessarily the same, but each phoneme in one corresponding to one phoneme in the other - as the Late PIE phonology, which would be that of Northern IE, does a fairly good job accounting for Anatolian, the sole attested Southern IE branch, while the differences between Northern and Southern IE lay in morphology, syntax and maybe lexicon.) Such a stratum was already proposed in the middle of the 20th century (see Hans Krahe's "Old European Hydronymy" which, however, is not without flaws; some of the names on Krahe's list, such as Brigantia, are patently Celtic or from other known languages), and it seems to me as if the Bell Beaker culture was a good candidate for the speaker community of these languages.

Posted: **Tue Jul 20, 2021 12:45 pm**

To me one should not make assertions that cannot be reasonably backed up, and many cases of supposed long range or geographically implausible relationships or relations with supposed unwritten extinct languages based on a very small set of words are good examples of these. This is why I object to so many of T.'s assertions. This is not to say that things like very long-range Wanderwörter are implausible; take the Latin word for banana, musa - it clearly comes from a TNG language - the difference here is the chain of languages it passed through to reach Latin is well-documented and well-supported, unlike so many of T.'s assertions.

Posted: **Tue Jul 20, 2021 1:13 pm**

Talskubilos wrote: ↑Tue Jul 20, 2021 7:38 am
Linguoboy wrote: ↑Mon Jul 19, 2021 8:23 pmYeah…same as with those other languages. Your point?
See my previous post:

Again, I'm not really sure what you're saying here. Yes, there are multiple strata of loanwords from multiple forms of Romance, most of them later than the Proto-Basque period. (Standard German also has very few pre-Second Consonant Shift loans from Latin and Romance compared to the number which arrive afterwards.) So you have to be careful about identifying a particular word's provenance when reconstructing the changes and their chronology, but this doesn't mean that you can't use, say, 9th-century loanwords to reconstruct sound changes from the 9th century onwards and earlier loanwords to reconstruct sounds changes earlier than that, as Vascologists like Mitxelena and Trask have done. I just don't see this leading to the reconstruction of "some kind of Vasco-Romance language" unless you can find some solid ground for arguing that all Romance loanwords were treated differently from native vocabulary with respect to sound changes. That's not impossible, I guess, but I'm hard-pressed to think of any examples from the real world. (Maybe some of the "literary" pronunciations of Chinese characters in Min varieties would qualify?)

Posted: **Tue Jul 20, 2021 1:22 pm**

That's right, Travis. T. likes to make far-reaching assertions on flimsy evidence - which is what I called "poking around in the dark". Such assertions are very likely to be utterly wrong - not always, we have a saying here in Germany that "even a blind hen sometimes finds a grain", but most of the time. Chance resemblances between unrelated languages are far more common than most amateur linguists assume - languages are big, they have many thousand words, and so it is extremely unlikely that two different, unrelated languages show no resemblances at all (and of course, chance resemblances also occur within established families, as the famous example Latin deus vs. Greek theos shows).

Posted: **Tue Jul 20, 2021 1:54 pm**

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Tue Jul 20, 2021 1:22 pm(and of course, chance resemblances also occur within established families, as the famous example Latin deus vs. Greek theos shows).

My favorite example of this is Latin habeō vs. StG haben.

Posted: **Tue Jul 20, 2021 7:18 pm**

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Tue Jul 20, 2021 1:13 pm I just don't see this leading to the reconstruction of "some kind of Vasco-Romance language" unless you can find some solid ground for arguing that all Romance loanwords were treated differently from native vocabulary with respect to sound changes. That's not impossible, I guess, but I'm hard-pressed to think of any examples from the real world. (Maybe some of the "literary" pronunciations of Chinese characters in Min varieties would qualify?)

There are a few examples around. According to Jackson, hiatus developed differently in native Brythonic words and words borrowed from Latin - it was filled by [w] or some such in the loanwords, which Jackson admits seems bizarre. There may also be some odd interactions of Latin loans with the Brythonic chain shift st > s > h.

Varieties of 'Ancient Thai' and Khmer which didn't aspirate the old voiced consonants have an aspiration distinction between Indic plain voiced stops and voiced aspirated stops - there is no corresponding distinction in 'Ancient Thai'. (I suppose there might have been some old voiced stop + h clusters in Khmer.)

Within the 'Ancient Thai', it is notable that word-initial /r/ shows a two-fold development in Northern Thai and Lao. In words of Indic origin, it merges with /l/, whereas in native words it develops to [h], which differs from the reflex of /h/ in tone. The rule isn't perfect - a few Indic words have developed [h]. This distinction, however, looks like a consequence of education.

Posted: **Tue Jul 20, 2021 7:27 pm**

As you mention, though, how likely is it that these diachronic differences are due to learned borrowings or borrowings that occurred after or partway through native sound changes?

Posted: **Wed Jul 21, 2021 3:37 am**

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Tue Jul 20, 2021 1:22 pmThat's right, Travis. T. likes to make far-reaching assertions on flimsy evidence - which is what I called "poking around in the dark". Such assertions are very likely to be utterly wrong - not always, we have a saying here in Germany that "even a blind hen sometimes finds a grain", but most of the time. Chance resemblances between unrelated languages are far more common than most amateur linguists assume - languages are big, they have many thousand words, and so it is extremely unlikely that two different, unrelated languages show no resemblances at all (and of course, chance resemblances also occur within established families, as the famous example Latin deus vs. Greek theos shows).

Posted: **Wed Jul 21, 2021 4:02 am**

Upturned Microscope cartoons, while funny, do not go very far in advancing the discussion. Far better would be if you could explain exactly how WeepingElf has misrepresented your argument in such a way as to resolve the misunderstanding. If you could go further and explain your theories in more detail than you have so far, that would also be much appreciated.

(I hate to say this, but the very fact that you did not bother explaining your arguments, as well as your consistent dodging of our questions, is now making me somewhat suspicious as to whether you even have a coherent argument at all. I would be very happy to be proven wrong in this suspicion,)

Posted: **Wed Jul 21, 2021 4:19 am**

Talskubilos wrote: ↑Wed Jul 21, 2021 3:37 am{snip}

Its rather hard to accuse someone of using a strawman of your argument, when you haven't actually stated your argument. Mostly, you appear to basically be saying "oooh, look at this neat word I found!"

...and I will be the first to admit that I myself am plenty guilty of doing lots of "ooh look at this neat word I found" and "wow thats a cool theory"...but I try to (and freely confess to failing at times), but still try to follow up "wow thats a cool theory" with follow-ups to the tune of "what does it mean?" or "does it mean this-this-and-this or that-that-and-that ?"

So please, help end this by explaining at least ONE of your theories.

Posted: **Wed Jul 21, 2021 4:30 am**

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Tue Jul 20, 2021 1:13 pmAgain, I'm not really sure what you're saying here. Yes, there are multiple strata of loanwords from multiple forms of Romance, most of them later than the Proto-Basque period. (Standard German also has very few pre-Second Consonant Shift loans from Latin and Romance compared to the number which arrive afterwards.)

Not only that, but even native lexicon shows an astouding range of internal variations, as in the example I quoted of betagin, where some variants (e.g. letagin) have got a (seemingly prosthetic) l- in the place of an initial labial, an irregular but by no means infrequent phenomenon in Basque.

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Tue Jul 20, 2021 1:13 pmSo you have to be careful about identifying a particular word's provenance when reconstructing the changes and their chronology, but this doesn't mean that you can't use, say, 9th-century loanwords to reconstruct sound changes from the 9th century onwards and earlier loanwords to reconstruct sounds changes earlier than that, as Vascologists like Mitxelena and Trask have done.

Really? I'm afraid Trask didn't tell between genuine Latin/Early Romance and later loanwords, as e.g. liburu.

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Tue Jul 20, 2021 1:13 pmI just don't see this leading to the reconstruction of "some kind of Vasco-Romance language" unless you can find some solid ground for arguing that all Romance loanwords were treated differently from native vocabulary with respect to sound changes.

As a matter of fact, except possibly the merger of intervocalic liquids /l,ɾ/ into /ɾ/ and palatalization of nasal codas (incorrectly identified by Mitxelena-Trask, who associated it with a Romance yod), most changes aren't exclusive of Basque but are shared with other languages. My own impression is that the great bulk of loanwords was adapted into Basque with few or no changes at all, so this would imply it was thoroughly Romanized.

On the other hand, the Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula at the 8th century and the subsequent "Reconquista" (the expansion of northern Christian feuds into southern Al-Andalus) caused the extinction of most indigenous Romance varieties, collectively called "Mozarabic" (or more idiosyncratically "Romano-Andalusi" by the Spanish Arabist Federico Corriente), replaced by the northern ones (roughly Galego-Portuguese, Asturian, Aragonese, Catalan) and to a smaller extent, also by Basque itself.

Posted: **Wed Jul 21, 2021 4:33 am**

bradrn wrote: ↑Wed Jul 21, 2021 4:02 amUpturned Microscope cartoons, while funny, do not go very far in advancing the discussion. Far better would be if you could explain exactly how WeepingElf has misrepresented your argument in such a way as to resolve the misunderstanding.

This isn't the first time he recurrs to chance resemblance to criticise my theories. This is the strawman, and a disgusting one, because he's indirectly calling me a "crackpot".

Posted: **Wed Jul 21, 2021 4:38 am**

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Tue Jul 20, 2021 10:33 amMaybe we are just talking past each other all the time, and see the same thing from different angles It seems as if both T. and I feel as if there was a stratum of extinct IE languages, later clobbered by the expansion of Italic, Celtic and Germanic, in much of Western Europe, but we have different ideas about what those lost IE languages were like.

Not necessarily, because there're could be more than just one.

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Tue Jul 20, 2021 10:33 amT. apparently calls this stratum "Baltoid" (which perhaps is a designation he did not coin himself but picked up somewhere)

It looks like you didn't read my earlier posts where I mentioned Coromines' and Villar's works.

Posted: **Wed Jul 21, 2021 4:47 am**

keenir wrote: ↑Wed Jul 21, 2021 4:19 amSo please, help end this by explaining at least ONE of your theories.

OK. My view is that proto-languages and genealogical trees for modelling language relationships are a simplification, because they don't take into account (or do it poorly) lateral relationships (substrates and adstrates). In the case of the reconstructed PIE, one can find internal correspondences between the +2000 lexical items which would indicate they come from at least 2-3 different sources (Occam's Razor is at work here).

Posted: **Wed Jul 21, 2021 5:15 am**

Talskubilos wrote: ↑Wed Jul 21, 2021 4:30 ampalatalization of nasal codas (incorrectly identified by Mitxelena-Trask, who associated it with a Romance yod)

Some examples of that:
/ng/ > /ɲg/: angelu > aingeru
/nk/ > /ɲk/ (> /ɲg/ in most dialects): mancu > mainku, maingu
/-VnV/ > /-Vɲ/: *cofanu > k(h)obáñ, khogáñ, kofoin. Also the toponymic suffix -ain from Latin -anum.

Posted: **Wed Jul 21, 2021 5:46 am**

Talskubilos wrote: ↑Wed Jul 21, 2021 4:33 am
bradrn wrote: ↑Wed Jul 21, 2021 4:02 amUpturned Microscope cartoons, while funny, do not go very far in advancing the discussion. Far better would be if you could explain exactly how WeepingElf has misrepresented your argument in such a way as to resolve the misunderstanding.
This isn't the first time he recurrs to chance resemblance to criticise my theories. This is the strawman, and a disgusting one, because he's indirectly calling me a "crackpot".

Well, to be fair, most of your recent posts have been comparing only one or two word pairs at a time. This significantly increases the chance of chance resemblances; you will only gain wide acceptance if you give us systematic correspondences.

Or, putting it another way: the null hypothesis here is that any two words which look similar are, in fact, chance resemblances. It’s your job to give us enough data that we feel comfortable accepting that the resemblances are not due to chance.

Talskubilos wrote: ↑Wed Jul 21, 2021 4:47 am
keenir wrote: ↑Wed Jul 21, 2021 4:19 amSo please, help end this by explaining at least ONE of your theories.
OK. My view is that proto-languages and genealogical trees for modelling language relationships are a simplification, because they don't take into account (or do it poorly) lateral relationships (substrates and adstrates).

Thank you for finally explaining your theory clearly and concisely. Wrt the tree model, I don’t think anyone would disagree with you here: everyone agrees it’s a simplification. However, I’d argue that outside extreme contact situations, sub/ad/superstrates have too little effect to invalidate the tree model.

In the case of the reconstructed PIE, one can find internal correspondences between the +2000 lexical items which would indicate they come from at least 2-3 different sources (Occam's Razor is at work here).

This is where we disagree: as mentioned above, I don’t yet believe you have given us enough data that we can believe this.

Zompist Bboard Again

Paleo-European languages

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