Search found 1613 matches

by WeepingElf
Mon Jul 02, 2018 12:13 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448312

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Whether you call it a topic marker or an ergative case, it's the exact same development: genitive -> intermediary -> nominative, and I still don't buy it. I don't really buy it, either! It was just a "raw" idea of mine which I wanted to try out and bring to discussion. In fact, I doubt that there i...
by WeepingElf
Mon Jul 02, 2018 4:41 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448312

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Kath, either you are reading inattentively, or you just like whacking strawmen. I wrote nothing of the sigmatic nominative emerging from an earlier ergative suffix. I only speculated that a genitive may have become a topic marker , neither of which has anything to do with ergatives. Also, I now admi...
by WeepingElf
Sun Jul 01, 2018 2:20 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448312

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Today I shall talk about two ideas about the origin of the thematic declension and the sigmatic nominative. The thematic declension It has been observed for long that most of the oldest thematic nouns are adjectives. My idea is that these adjectives in turn descend from genitives of athematic nouns ...
by WeepingElf
Sat Jun 02, 2018 12:27 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448312

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

And why would a nomadic herder who does not raise crops know about such a thing as plowing? Because he has business dealings with farmers? Modern nomads eat a lot of flour. And the word does not imply knowledge about ploughing; rather it implies knowledge *of* ploughing (or hoeing). Moreover, the w...
by WeepingElf
Thu May 31, 2018 4:02 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448312

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Yes, pretty much. In my eyes, the evidence is pretty clear for the adoption of agriculture slightly post-dating the breakup of PIE, which would explain both the inconsistent semantics between Anatolian and the rest of IE, and the consistency in the European branches. Fine. The Pontic steppe lies on...
by WeepingElf
Thu May 31, 2018 7:41 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448312

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Congratulations, you've successfully named languages which are widely agreed to form a proper sub-group of PIE, and hence have only proven a meaning "to plough" for their common ancestor, which is not PIE itself. The only branches that are missing in Howl's list are Indo-Iranian and Anatolian. And ...
by WeepingElf
Wed May 30, 2018 2:37 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 193121

Re: European languages before Indo-European

Another take at the Bell Beaker people I am currently involved in an interesting discussion with Salmoneus about the genetics and origins of the Indo-Europeans, and in the flow of that debate and associated research, I got a new idea about the Bell Beaker culture. First, it appears as even if the B...
by WeepingElf
Wed May 30, 2018 10:08 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448312

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Sure, we have intersecting isoglosses, which point at an early IE dialect continuum. Hence, there is no reason to interpret the NW IE/Greco-Aryan isogloss as a primary bifurcation the same way 19th-century IEists interpreted the Centum/Satem isogloss, and the identification of this isogloss with Co...
by WeepingElf
Tue May 29, 2018 11:19 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448312

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Hmm, interesting. But there is another major branch of IE dominated by R1a: Balto-Slavic. Of course, Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian share a number of isoglosses, most prominently the satem shift and the ruki rule. Perhaps this "NW IE vs. Greco-Aryan" thing is vastly overrated as the "satem vs. centu...
by WeepingElf
Mon May 28, 2018 3:27 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448312

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

The early Neolithic farmers can't have brought PIE with them because they did not know wheeled vehicles and some other things which PIE has well-reconstructed words for (and hunter-gatherers are a fortiori out for the same reasons). The Yamnaya did know these things, and could have brought PIE to t...
by WeepingElf
Mon May 28, 2018 9:26 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448312

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Hmm, interesting. But there is another major branch of IE dominated by R1a: Balto-Slavic. Of course, Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian share a number of isoglosses, most prominently the satem shift and the ruki rule. Perhaps this "NW IE vs. Greco-Aryan" thing is vastly overrated as the "satem vs. centum...
by WeepingElf
Sun May 27, 2018 2:01 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448312

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

I don't believe that language always has to follow the genes. For example, there are numerous cases in history where an invading people eventually ended up speaking the language of the native people. And mechanisms like elite dominance and the need for a lingua franca make it possible that a popula...
by WeepingElf
Fri May 25, 2018 11:27 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448312

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

2. I have recently looked around at this site . Looks interesting, but doubtful. This is Carlos Quines, the Spanish guy who brought us "Modern Indo-European" (regularized PIE proposed as a European auxlang), who examines the origin of PIE in context of genetics and archaeology. Some of his ideas ar...
by WeepingElf
Thu May 24, 2018 9:46 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448312

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

I shall address three matters in this post. 1. Alwin Kloekhorst has an idea about how the Lydian dative singular ending emerged . As you may know, Lydian, one of the younger Anatolian languages, has a strange-looking dative singular ending, -λ (this is the conventional transcription of a Lydian lett...
by WeepingElf
Wed May 16, 2018 11:57 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448312

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

I take things Kloekhorst says with a pinch of salt and a very critical eye, since he's said several things which I think are utter bullshit. Yes, many things he has written are ones I do not agree with at all, such as his reconstruction of the Proto-Anatolian (and Early PIE) stop system, and his re...
by WeepingElf
Wed May 16, 2018 9:09 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448312

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Alwin Kloekhorst seems to think that *h2 and *h3 were uvular stops in PIE; his web site teases us of a manuscript in which he says that there is evidence of this in Anatolian; alas, the manuscript is not available, so nobody knows what his argumentation is.
by WeepingElf
Sat Apr 21, 2018 10:04 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 78955

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

without including at least Altaic as well. You speak as if Altaic is a proven family. While I personally do believe there is some kind of deeper connection between the Altaic languages (at least the Micro-Altaic ones), what I said doesn't necessitate that to be true. All the different Altaic langua...
by WeepingElf
Thu Apr 05, 2018 3:46 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448312

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Hyllested and Cohen propose a sound law of *h3w > *h2w and say it's somehow relevant, but naturally the page where they explain the derivation of the various forms for 'sheep' isn't in the Google Books preview. If this law holds up, the obvious thing to do is compare it to other IE delabialization ...
by WeepingElf
Wed Apr 04, 2018 10:37 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448312

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

I still do not understand Kath's scepticism against *o having been rounded in PIE3 I've already conceded that *o (probably) was rounded by late PIE, just not early/pre-PIE. Fine. So we agree that *o probably was rounded in post-Anatolian PIE (PIE3), though with pre-Anatolian PIE (PIE2) the matter i...
by WeepingElf
Wed Apr 04, 2018 7:38 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448312

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

And I know it's tempting to put the laryngeals into one system with the tectals, but there's no reason why it has to be that way, and in my view that approach creates more problems than it solves. This is also what I have arrived at by now. Interpreting the laryngeals as fricative members of the th...
by WeepingElf
Tue Apr 03, 2018 1:37 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 78955

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

There certainly are deeper linguistic relationships than those discovered so far What is, according to you, a "linguistic relationship"? Like I asked before, if a certain language is spoken by a population and that population splits in two; the descendents of those two peoples keep speaking the lan...
by WeepingElf
Tue Apr 03, 2018 1:04 pm
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: resources
Replies: 722
Views: 306581

Re: resources

Proto-Indo-European Database. Very useful though out of date to a large degree (the dictionary is more than half a century old, and for starters, it doesn't take heed of the laryngeal theory which already existed at the time but was still a matter of controversy), but a more up-to-date IE etymologi...
by WeepingElf
Tue Apr 03, 2018 12:59 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 78955

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

I'm very definitely not a lumper. My opinion on Indo-Uralic is that it's intriguing, worth investigating, but probably won't amount to anything provable. My opinion is similar, though I feel less pessimistic about the establishment of things like Indo-Uralic - we may live to see it established, but...
by WeepingElf
Tue Apr 03, 2018 12:46 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448312

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

It works if one assumes that uvulars and front vowels never occurred next to each other in PIE0 (the pre-GVC stage) - not a particularly unusual constraint as uvulars tend to back vowels. Perhaps the front vowels preceding or following uvulars were backed, explaining why there was no "front uvular" ...
by WeepingElf
Tue Apr 03, 2018 6:25 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448312

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

A interesting idea, Tropylium, and IIRC also proposed by Kortlandt.