Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Tropylium »

Richard W wrote:Of the 20 most conservative Uralic words, as measured by retention within Uralic, 10 have apparently related, well-established Indo-European correspondents.
Do they?

The best-retained Uralic words, with unambiguous reflexes in every branch, are the following 25:
– pronouns: *ku- 'who', *me- '1PP', *mi- 'what', *to 'that'
– basic verbs: *kalə- 'to die', *kad₂a- 'to disappear', *ńalə- 'to lick', *ńälə- 'to swallow', *puna- 'to plait', *ujə- 'to swim'
– body parts: *mëksa 'liver', *sënə 'vein', *sülə 'bosom', *śilmä 'eye', *śɜd₁äm(ə) 'heart'
– other nouns: *ëla 'low', *nimə 'name', *ńëlə 'arrow', *ńërə 'moist/wet', *pälä 'half', *pesä 'nest', #wäśkä 'metal'
– etc: *kuma- 'overturned', #kɜk/ttA '2', #wittə '5'
The bolded ones have well-established IE counterparts (in English: who, me, that, spin, sinew, name). But I can only get together six, half of them pronouns (even considering that the 1st person pronouns *mi(n(ä)), *ti(n(ä)) do not even make the cut). One could think up some sort of comparisons for some of the others too —I mentioned 'heart' above — but they're not similarly obvious.

If we allow words that fail to cover one branch, and/or have uncertain reflexes (I have a collection of these, down to 6 out of 9, assembled here: http://www.frathwiki.com/Proto-Uralic/distribution), the track record doesn't look much better, plus we actually also rake in two clear Indo-Iranian loanwords (*śëta '100', *śarwə 'horn').

Don't get me wrong, this is decently good evidence still, but it's not case-obviously-settled-everyone-go-home good.

Also, let's assemble a similar list on the IE side. How many of those will find good Uralic counterparts? Mallory & Adams give 15 words found in "all major IE groups" (— counting Baltic separately from Slavic and Iranian separately from Indic, but that doesn't seem to affect the big picture). Their list scores only three clear hits. Four if we count the suppletive oblique stem of 'I', but I don't know if that's included in the count here:
*wódr̥ 'water', *gʷōws 'cow', *pōds 'foot', *dʰwōr 'door', *tréyes '3', *pénkʷe '5', *septḿ̥ '7', *h₁néwh₁m̥ '9', *swep- 'to sleep', *h₁nómn̥ 'name', *h₁eǵ- '1PS', *wey '1PP', *tuH '2PS', *yuHs '2PP', *so 'that'

They also have a distribution-ranked Swadesh list. Interestingly, in case there's only one branch missing, the branch scoring the most misses is not Anatolian (the supposed earliest branch)… it's Albanian. (Maybe this and Armenian should be not counted as full-fledged "major groups".)
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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by KathTheDragon »

Tropylium wrote:*h₁nómn̥ 'name'
It gets worse when we consider the lack of agreement on the form of 'name', specifically whether the initial laryngeal was *h₁ or *h₃ (I think there isn't enough evidence for *h₁) and whether it was *o or *eh₃ in the middle (could go either way)

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Soap »

What do the # marks mean? At first I assumed it was a typo but I wouldnt think you'd make the same typo three times, and on the wiki too.

If the word for fish was *kola or *kula or maybe küla I'd feel comfortable pairing it with PIE *kʷalos "whale, large fish", but it's not. Perhaps "whale" is cognate to "wheel", even, since they're both things that spin around.
KathTheDragon wrote:
Tropylium wrote:*h₁nómn̥ 'name'
It gets worse when we consider the lack of agreement on the form of 'name', specifically whether the initial laryngeal was *h₁ or *h₃ (I think there isn't enough evidence for *h₁) and whether it was *o or *eh₃ in the middle (could go either way)
And that the -mṅ is likely to be a standard PIE noun-forming suffix cognate to "-ment" in Latin. (However, it could still be salvaged by proposing that the root ended in -m, and that PIE had a rule simplying any geminate nasals.)
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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Tropylium »

Soap wrote:What do the # marks mean?
"Approximate reconstruction, details not clear, does not necessarily go back to single common Proto-X at all".
Soap wrote:If the word for fish was *kola or *kula or maybe küla I'd feel comfortable pairing it with PIE *kʷalos "whale, large fish", but it's not.
*a could well have been [ɒ] rather than [ɑ].
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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by WeepingElf »

Soap wrote:
KathTheDragon wrote:
Tropylium wrote:*h₁nómn̥ 'name'
It gets worse when we consider the lack of agreement on the form of 'name', specifically whether the initial laryngeal was *h₁ or *h₃ (I think there isn't enough evidence for *h₁) and whether it was *o or *eh₃ in the middle (could go either way)
And that the -mṅ is likely to be a standard PIE noun-forming suffix cognate to "-ment" in Latin. (However, it could still be salvaged by proposing that the root ended in -m, and that PIE had a rule simplying any geminate nasals.)
PIE *h₃neh₃mn̥ 'name' indeed looks like a derivative of a root *h₃neh₃-, perhaps 'to call', with the familiar suffix *-mn̥ 'way, means', so the Uralic word, if not just a chance resemblance, may be borrowed from an IE language where this word had a front vowel; the only known branch of IE where this is the case is AFAIK Tocharian, but there may have been other languages (perhaps related to Tocharian) where this was also the case.
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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by KathTheDragon »

WeepingElf wrote:
Soap wrote:
KathTheDragon wrote:
Tropylium wrote:*h₁nómn̥ 'name'
It gets worse when we consider the lack of agreement on the form of 'name', specifically whether the initial laryngeal was *h₁ or *h₃ (I think there isn't enough evidence for *h₁) and whether it was *o or *eh₃ in the middle (could go either way)
And that the -mṅ is likely to be a standard PIE noun-forming suffix cognate to "-ment" in Latin. (However, it could still be salvaged by proposing that the root ended in -m, and that PIE had a rule simplying any geminate nasals.)
PIE *h₃neh₃mn̥ 'name' indeed looks like a derivative of a root *h₃neh₃-, perhaps 'to call', with the familiar suffix *-mn̥ 'way, means'
Indeed this is Kloekhorst's position. But Soap is correct, we can still suppose a root *h₃nem- "call by name", with "name" being *h₃nom-mn̩ > *h₃nomn̩ (for indeed PIE simplified all geminates save *tt), and retain the link with the Hittite verb ḫannai "sue, judge" as *h₃eh₃n̩mey or some such, with the same levelling as e.g. mallai < *molh₂ey. However, this leaves Greek ὀνομαι "blame, scorn" hard to explain.

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Richard W »

Tropylium wrote:
Richard W wrote:Of the 20 most conservative Uralic words, as measured by retention within Uralic, 10 have apparently related, well-established Indo-European correspondents.
Do they?

The best-retained Uralic words, with unambiguous reflexes in every branch, are the following 25:
– pronouns: *ku- 'who', *me- '1PP', *mi- 'what', *to 'that'
– basic verbs: *kalə- 'to die', *kad₂a- 'to disappear', *ńalə- 'to lick', *ńälə- 'to swallow', *puna- 'to plait', *ujə- 'to swim'
– body parts: *mëksa 'liver', *sënə 'vein', *sülə 'bosom', *śilmä 'eye', *śɜd₁äm(ə) 'heart'
– other nouns: *ëla 'low', *nimə 'name', *ńëlə 'arrow', *ńërə 'moist/wet', *pälä 'half', *pesä 'nest', #wäśkä 'metal'
– etc: *kuma- 'overturned', #kɜk/ttA '2', #wittə '5'
The bolded ones have well-established IE counterparts (in English: who, me, that, spin, sinew, name). But I can only get together six, half of them pronouns (even considering that the 1st person pronouns *mi(n(ä)), *ti(n(ä)) do not even make the cut). One could think up some sort of comparisons for some of the others too —I mentioned 'heart' above — but they're not similarly obvious.
Eugene Helimski, in "Early Indo-Uralic lingusitic relationships: real kinship and imagined contacts" claims 9 out of 18 preserved in all branches and out of 23 preserved in all but one, 6 numerals (not matching) and 6 with corresponding IE routes.

The extras words in the 18 he gives, in their Finnish forms, are:
*ala- 'under' (PIE *Hel- 'deep' - but looks like an uncertain interpretation of words like Latin altus 'high, deep)
*mi(kä) ‘which’ (coɡnate with PIE *mo- - what's this?)
*minä ('I' - so do we have one or two words here?)

The 6 extras are:

kuolla ‘to die’(PIE gʷe(H)l 'to stick, pain, death‘
kyynär ‘elbow’ (Enɡlish knee)
käsi ‘hand’ (IE *ĝʰes- 'hand')
mennä ‘to go’ (IE *men- ‘to step upon’)
pelätä ‘to fear’ (IE *pelH- ?)
tämä ‘this’ (IE *te-).

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Zju »

What are the best papers/websites to get acquainted myself with the latest developments and understandings of Proto-Yukaghir and and Proto-Uralic reconstructions and of their last common predecesor?

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

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Richard W wrote:*mi(kä) ‘which’ (coɡnate with PIE *mo- - what's this?)
OK, tracked it down. Hittite masi 'how much?' and Tocharian mänt 'how?' and, possibly, Breton ma, may ‘that‘.

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

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Richard W wrote:Eugene Helimski, in "Early Indo-Uralic lingusitic relationships: real kinship and imagined contacts" claims 9 out of 18 preserved in all branches and out of 23 preserved in all but one, 6 numerals (not matching) and 6 with corresponding IE routes.
Ah right, this paper. He's basing this on stats from Kaisa Häkkinen, whose work comes from before the rekindling of Uralic etymological research from about 2000 on. Hence she gets together 41 items, while I have 72. (She also somewhat arbitrarily treats Komi and Udmurt separately for counting purposes, even though no-one doubts that they're a part of the one and same Permic branch of Uralic, though this only has minor effects.) The research goes on, too: some of mine are based on still unpublished papers currently in press, such as the Hungarian cognates for 'nail' and 'tail'. (On a re-look-over just now, I noticed also one more in the 8-out-of-9 category I've missed: Samic descendants have recently been pointed out for *wetə 'water' — just in the meaning 'snow'.)
Richard W wrote:The extras words in the 18 he gives, in their Finnish forms, are:
*ala- 'under' (PIE *Hel- 'deep' - but looks like an uncertain interpretation of words like Latin altus 'high, deep)
*mi(kä) ‘which’ (coɡnate with PIE *mo- - what's this?)
*minä ('I' - so do we have one or two words here?)
I disqualify *minä from the list of roots with "unambiguous reflexes everywhere", since no-one has ever been able to exlain how this is supposed to give Hungarian én, without piling on at last 2-3 ad hoc assumptions. They also involve the material of the actual "root" *mi- being mostly lost. If é- is suspected to be from a prefix, and -n is also suspected to be from a general singular pronoun suffix, a fifth option would be to assemble the Hungarian word from just these pieces…
Richard W wrote:The 6 extras are:

kuolla ‘to die’ (PIE gʷe(H)l 'to stick, pain, death‘
kyynär ‘elbow’ (Enɡlish knee)
käsi ‘hand’ (IE *ĝʰes- 'hand')
mennä ‘to go’ (IE *men- ‘to step upon’)
pelätä ‘to fear’ (IE *pelH- ?)
tämä ‘this’ (IE *te-).
Sure, I would count all of these except 'elbow' ~ 'knee' as well-established counterparts. Also obvious is PU *kerə ~ IE *(s)ker- 'bark'. That seems to be it, though: new research does not seem to have added anything that would improve the relative similarity of Uralic and Indo-European.

By the way, one conspicuous pattern in this is that there seem to be almost no IE-U potential cognates for natural terminology. Words such as 'egg', 'feather', 'nest', 'tree', 'pine', 'goose', 'ant', 'fire', 'summer', 'winter' are well-reconstructible on both sides & nothing alike to each other…
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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

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Finnish päivä "day" could be cognate to proto-Indo-European *péh₂ur if we assume that the -r was not part of the stem. I admit that's quite a leap of faith, though, and I was originally planning to connect the PIE word to Finnish tuli, claiming /tw/ > /p/ and /l/~/r/, until I realized that the /r/ might not be original. A semantic shift like this isn't impossible; modern Greek didn't preserve its original word for fire either, using φωτιά, originally "lights", instead.
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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Zju »

Soap wrote:Finnish päivä "day" could be cognate to proto-Indo-European *péh₂ur if we assume that the -r was not part of the stem. I admit that's quite a leap of faith, though, and I was originally planning to connect the PIE word to Finnish tuli, claiming /tw/ > /p/ and /l/~/r/, until I realized that the /r/ might not be original. A semantic shift like this isn't impossible; modern Greek didn't preserve its original word for fire either, using φωτιά, originally "lights", instead.
I doubt it. *péh₂ur comes from *péh₂- 'to protect, to guard' + -*wer/wór, which is a nominalising suffix. ur is just its zero grade. Once you take the verb's original meaning into account and the fact that u is a part of the suffix the connection is even less likely.

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Richard W »

Tropylium wrote:Also, let's assemble a similar list on the IE side. How many of those will find good Uralic counterparts? Mallory & Adams give 15 words found in "all major IE groups" (— counting Baltic separately from Slavic and Iranian separately from Indic, but that doesn't seem to affect the big picture). Their list scores only three clear hits. Four if we count the suppletive oblique stem of 'I', but I don't know if that's included in the count here:
*wódr̥ 'water', *gʷōws 'cow', *pōds 'foot', *dʰwōr 'door', *tréyes '3', *pénkʷe '5', *septḿ̥ '7', *h₁néwh₁m̥ '9', *swep- 'to sleep', *h₁nómn̥ 'name', *h₁eǵ- '1PS', *wey '1PP', *tuH '2PS', *yuHs '2PP', *so 'that'
*h1eɡ́- is very dubious as PIE (Anatolian disaɡrees). *so is also suppletive - the stem is *to. [Strikinɡ out the numerals as beinɡ too late a cultural shift, that leaves 5 out of 11.

I look at the best retained defined statistically by Dyen and Black. Striking out the numbers (as argued for above) and collapsing the interrogatives, as the well-retained ones are all variants on *kʷ-, that ɡives me, with the oriɡinal rankinɡsː

3) *me (simple oblique, but with *n turning up in later in stem in places) 'I'
6) Forms based on *me - especially as the verb suffix 'we'
7) kʷi- 'who'. 'How', 'what', 'where', 'when' not considered separately.
9) *h₁nómn̥ 'name'
13) tu 'thou'
14) *dn̥ɡ̂ʰū 'tongue'
15) *newos 'new'
16) *ne 'not'
18) *sah₂wel 'sun'
19) *nekʷt 'night'
20) *doh₃ 'to give'
21) *okʷ- 'eye'
22) *en 'in' (Is it fair to include this?)
23) *howyom 'egg'
24) *sal 'salt' (unless Fi. suola etc. are loans)
25) ? 'to die'. *mer seems to have oriɡinally been 'to vanish'.
26) k̂erd 'heart'
27) *mah₂ter- 'mother'
28) *poh₃ 'to drink'
29) *ɡʷei- 'to live'

That gives us 8 out of 20. I'm not sure how fair it is to consider 'in' and 'mother'. That brings in no. 30, *nas 'nose', which seems to have by-forms based on *nar, which immediately leads to comparison with PU *närə 'nose' .
Tropylium wrote:They also have a distribution-ranked Swadesh list. Interestingly, in case there's only one branch missing, the branch scoring the most misses is not Anatolian (the supposed earliest branch)… it's Albanian. (Maybe this and Armenian should be not counted as full-fledged "major groups".)
The time depths are not comparable.

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

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Richard W wrote:Of course, this of itself doesn't exclude the possibility that PIE originated as a pidgin para-Uralic or similar.
Pretty unlikely.
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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by KathTheDragon »

Richard W wrote:*h1eɡ́- is very dubious as PIE (Anatolian disaɡrees).
Kloekhorst argues that Hittite ūk can be regarded as the regular reflex of *h₁eǵ-, with the vowel replaced by ū from the accusative ammūk, which itself got it from the 2nd person.

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by KathTheDragon »

While we're on the topic of cross-family word comparison, consider these PIE-Ancient Egyptian pairs:
PIE *h₂ent- "face, forehead" (later "in front of" from the locative) ~ Egyptian ḫnt "face"
PIE *h₃er- "rise" ~ Egyptian (j)ʿr "ascend, approach"

(This is not intended as a serious cognacy proposal, but rather as a warning against this sort of comparison. Such similarities, especially in such a limited array of words, are not very suggestive)

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Richard W »

KathTheDragon wrote:(This is not intended as a serious cognacy proposal, but rather as a warning against this sort of comparison. Such similarities, especially in such a limited array of words, are not very suggestive)
Which is why decent word list comparisons attempt to limit the number of random matches. Straight Swadesh list comparisons seem to have too high a rate of false negatives. In signal processing terms, the processing loss has to be kept low, which is where binary comparisons usually fail.

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Tropylium »

Zju wrote:
Soap wrote:Finnish päivä "day" could be cognate to proto-Indo-European *péh₂ur if we assume that the -r was not part of the stem. I admit that's quite a leap of faith, though, and I was originally planning to connect the PIE word to Finnish tuli, claiming /tw/ > /p/ and /l/~/r/, until I realized that the /r/ might not be original. A semantic shift like this isn't impossible; modern Greek didn't preserve its original word for fire either, using φωτιά, originally "lights", instead.
I doubt it. *péh₂ur comes from *péh₂- 'to protect, to guard' + -*wer/wór, which is a nominalising suffix. ur is just its zero grade. Once you take the verb's original meaning into account and the fact that u is a part of the suffix the connection is even less likely.
That's not necessarily a problem: there's a recent proposal that *päjwä, though reconstructible already for PU, might be segmentable as *päj-wä, from a shorter root meaning 'shining, light' (possible other derivatives include stuff like 'fire', 'white', 'lightning'). OTOH *j versus *h₂ doesn't look too good even then.

Insofar this is the "Nostratic etc." thread though, EDAL has a root #paja- 'to shine' (Tungusic *paja-, Japonic *pàjá-) that looks very relevant.
Richard W wrote:24) *sal 'salt' (unless Fi. suola etc. are loans)
These are normally indeed considered loans. You could try splitting it, with the clearly phonologically non-native words in outlying branches as loans (in this case, Samic, Finnic, Ob-Ugric) versus a native word in the central branches (Mordvin, Mari, Permic), but that approach seems awfully dubious.
Richard W wrote:16) *ne 'not'
The negative particle in Permic / Ugric seems to have too big of a risk of also being a loan.
Richard W wrote:30, *nas 'nose', which seems to have by-forms based on *nar, which immediately leads to comparison with PU *närə 'nose'
By-forms other than Latin nāris by regular rhotacism?
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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Šọ̈́gala »

Zju wrote:What are the best papers/websites to get acquainted myself with the latest developments and understandings of Proto-Yukaghir and and Proto-Uralic reconstructions and of their last common predecesor?
Are you on academia.edu? Their in-site search function isn't that great, so I recommend doing searches like yukaghir site:academia.edu &c &c on google. You'll find some relevant papers. Then, you can follow the authors of those papers as well as any relevant categories. For instance, there's a category for https://www.academia.edu/Documents/in/Yukaghir . That way, new papers that are relevant to your interests will populate in your feed. Meanwhile, you can go through the list of papers by the authors you're interested in and find additional relevant papers there.

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Richard W »

Tropylium wrote:
Richard W wrote:16) *ne 'not'
The negative particle in Permic / Ugric seems to have too big of a risk of also being a loan.
I don't claim that all these apparent cognates are indeed cognates - the truth in individual cases may be impossible to establish. I thought Thai วาฬ /wa:n/ 'whale, dolphin' (the /n/ is spelt with the letter for the retroflex lateral) was just an outrageous coincidence, but there seems to be good evidence that it was borrowed from Dutch!
Tropylium wrote:
Richard W wrote:30, *nas 'nose', which seems to have by-forms based on *nar, which immediately leads to comparison with PU *närə 'nose'
By-forms other than Latin nāris by regular rhotacism?
Alas, I can't remember the details. It was indeed associated with a suggestion that the Latin /r/ there might not be due to rhotacism. I suppose it's possible that the suggestion was based on the Uralic form, and is thus invalid evidence. Of course, the correspondence could be due to the same erratic change that gives us French chaise 'chair' where we could expect *chaire.

I'm definitely not basing my statement on English nark.

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Soap »

If the rhotacism is natural, it seems to me it's nāsus that needs an explanation, not nāris. Classical Latin /s/ can result from clusters containing primordial /s/, I think.
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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Sumelic »

Soap wrote:If the rhotacism is natural, it seems to me it's nāsus that needs an explanation, not nāris. Classical Latin /s/ can result from clusters containing primordial /s/, I think.
Yes; a cluster seems to have been one explantion commonly offered for /s/ in this word; I've also found reference to a proposed "Conway's Law" (that seems a bit over-fitted) whereby
Medial s between words after an unaccented syllable became r, but after an accented syllable it was retained except when followed by i or u and preceded by i or u or a long vowel or diphthong; while medial s before nasals after an unaccented syllable was lost without compensation; after an accented syllable if arising before the period of rhotacism it was lost with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel (e. g. aenus, primus); if arising during the period of rhotacism it became r (e. g. carmen, verna).
Harry Thurston Peck. Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. New York. Harper and Brothers. 1898. Accessed via Tufts' Perseus Digital Library

There are a number of other apparent exceptions to rhotacism like "miser" that are hard to explain.

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KathTheDragon
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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by KathTheDragon »

The explanation for words like miser is that rhotiacism was blocked before a following r

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Zju »

Šọ̈́gala wrote:
Zju wrote:What are the best papers/websites to get acquainted myself with the latest developments and understandings of Proto-Yukaghir and and Proto-Uralic reconstructions and of their last common predecesor?
Are you on academia.edu? Their in-site search function isn't that great, so I recommend doing searches like yukaghir site:academia.edu &c &c on google. You'll find some relevant papers. Then, you can follow the authors of those papers as well as any relevant categories. For instance, there's a category for https://www.academia.edu/Documents/in/Yukaghir . That way, new papers that are relevant to your interests will populate in your feed. Meanwhile, you can go through the list of papers by the authors you're interested in and find additional relevant papers there.
Yes, but I was more asking of a general introduction to the commonly accepted diachronics - most (all?) papers or academia edu are on specific topics and it's halfway difficuld halfway in vain to follow when you don't have background knowledge. Actually, maybe I was asking for this in addition to that and forgot to mention it.
Tropylium wrote:
Zju wrote:
Soap wrote:Finnish päivä "day" could be cognate to proto-Indo-European *péh₂ur if we assume that the -r was not part of the stem. I admit that's quite a leap of faith, though, and I was originally planning to connect the PIE word to Finnish tuli, claiming /tw/ > /p/ and /l/~/r/, until I realized that the /r/ might not be original. A semantic shift like this isn't impossible; modern Greek didn't preserve its original word for fire either, using φωτιά, originally "lights", instead.
I doubt it. *péh₂ur comes from *péh₂- 'to protect, to guard' + -*wer/wór, which is a nominalising suffix. ur is just its zero grade. Once you take the verb's original meaning into account and the fact that u is a part of the suffix the connection is even less likely.
That's not necessarily a problem: there's a recent proposal that *päjwä, though reconstructible already for PU, might be segmentable as *päj-wä, from a shorter root meaning 'shining, light' (possible other derivatives include stuff like 'fire', 'white', 'lightning'). OTOH *j versus *h₂ doesn't look too good even then.

Insofar this is the "Nostratic etc." thread though, EDAL has a root #paja- 'to shine' (Tungusic *paja-, Japonic *pàjá-) that looks very relevant.
Still the difference in meaning between 'shining, light' and 'to protect, to guard' is quite big - how would such a semantic shift come about? Althemore that in this scenario the meaning 'sun' of both words is secondary and by chance. All in all seems like a chance resemblance.

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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Post by Sumelic »

KathTheDragon wrote:The explanation for words like miser is that rhotiacism was blocked before a following r
Oh, I've also heard of that explanation, but there are apparently counterexamples like "soror" and "aurora".

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