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Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Wed Aug 30, 2017 3:41 pm
by mèþru
Well, dissimulation tends to be an irregular sound change. Also, miser > mirer would mean miseror > mireror. Freaking mireror. That's a solid reason for leaving the poor, greedy misers alone!

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Wed Aug 30, 2017 4:17 pm
by Soap
I dont think it was dissimilation though. If it were it'd have to have been miser > mirer > miser again, and we would likely have turned up evidence of the boomerange shift in an inscription somewhere.

Rhotacization of [z] (/s/) was blocked in syllable-final position, not just when preceding /r/. This seems to have extended to some words where we now see a vowel but where there was once a syncopating stem in various inflected forms. (e.g.*misris). In some cases it seems to have become [ð] and then followed the path of the other [ð] in the language, which was from earlier /d/, which led it to become later /b/. (e.g. the -brum* in "cerebrum" is c. Greek -tron).

In other cases the [z] just disappeared, hence nīdus "nest" for earlier *nisdus.

As for why "miser" survived and not "miber", perhaps the syncope was abolished after the rhotacization was done with but not the later change to /b/.



Wikipedia actually claims cereburm is from *keras-rom, which would indicate /s/ > /z/ > /ð/ > /b/, but Im not sure I believe that. The -ber of the months is supposed to be from (-me)nsris.

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Wed Aug 30, 2017 8:21 pm
by KathTheDragon
Sumelic wrote:
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".
These are no counterexamples, because both r's in each word are from *s

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Wed Aug 30, 2017 8:58 pm
by mèþru
Soap wrote:would likely have turned up evidence of the boomerange shift in an inscription somewhere
Just because there is no evidence doesn't mean it didn't happen, and that's about as much evidence as you also gave. This whole thing is kind of futile.

(I apologise if this sounds angry, it isn't)

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Wed Aug 30, 2017 10:09 pm
by Sumelic
KathTheDragon wrote:
Sumelic wrote:
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".
These are no counterexamples, because both r's in each word are from *s
That doesn't seem to be true for "soror"; there are cognates like Welsh chwaer and Sanskrit svásṛ.

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Wed Aug 30, 2017 11:26 pm
by KathTheDragon
Oh, my bad. De Vaan doesn't have an explanation for it, so I don't know how it should be explained.

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Thu Aug 31, 2017 10:36 am
by WeepingElf
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.
Thank you for posting this. Ante Aikio's paper is especially interesting. He comes to conclusions that I also arrived at in a much shallower investigation than his - the Uralic-Yukaghir hypothesis is unfounded, the lexical resemblances it is mainly based on are probably just a layer of loanwords (probably from a lost eastern Samoyedic or Para-Samoyedic Uralic language that was later eclipsed by Evenki, if you ask me), and Collinder's claim that the Samoyedic and Yukaghir nominal declensions were almost "identical" is a vast overstatement.

If parts of the lexicon match better than the morphology, one is almost certainly dealing with a layer of loanwords. The morphologies of Uralic and Yukaghir are not much alike at all beyond those "Mitian" pronouns found all over the place in northern Eurasia; and the Uralic-looking words in Yukaghir show eastern, in part even outright Samoyedic traits. Nope, Uralic and Yukaghir are not particularly close within the "Mitian" cluster.

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Sun Sep 17, 2017 1:34 pm
by WeepingElf
There are similar reasons to doubt an Indo-Uralic relationship, though the morphological resemblances are more favourable. But if you look at these sound correspondences, it is quite clear that we are dealing with a loanword layer here, as they look exactly like the sound substitutions one would expect in IE loanwords in Uralic. Even the vowels are faithfully reflected, with ablaut grades, laryngeal colouring and all that. This just can't be due to a common ancestor spoken several thousand years earlier!

Yet, these is the possibility that real cognates hide out of view elsewhere, with real sound correspondences that are more complex and thus harder to detect. And as I said, the morphological resemblances look promising.

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Sun Sep 17, 2017 2:31 pm
by Richard W
WeepingElf wrote:But if you look at these sound correspondences, it is quite clear that we are dealing with a loanword layer here, as they look exactly like the sound substitutions one would expect in IE loanwords in Uralic.
There is at least one loanword layer. PU *k for laryngeals seems to be found in the oldest set of correspondences, the ones that may be cognate rather than merely borrowed.

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Mon Sep 18, 2017 2:37 pm
by WeepingElf
Certainly, the fact that most IE look-alike words in Uralic show sound correspondences that clearly indicate that they are loanwords does not mean that there are no true cognates. Our state of knowledge of Indo-Uralic may be like what we knew about the IE membership of Armenian before Hübschmann - lots of words that look like Iranian words which would turn out to be loanwords, and a smaller, less easily spotted set of actual cognates, including derivational and inflectional affixes, with more complex sound correspondences which would allow Hübschmann to drive the nail home. (Alas, I don't expect to be the next Hübschmann who manages to prove the Indo-Uralic relationship!)

In fact, the morphologies of IE and Uralic resemble each other about as much as those of the various Afrasian families (e.g., Semitic and Cushitic), on the ground of which Afrasian is widely accepted even though lexical cognates are scarce. It is just that Africanists tend to be more admittive of long-range relationship hypotheses based on morphology than Indo-Europeanists and Uralicists. I seriously think that there is too much resemblance here to dismiss it as chance, and borrowings of entire inflectional paradigms are far less likely than descent from a common ancestor. (And it is of course not just IE and Uralic, but somewhat less clearly also Eskimo-Aleut, Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic and perhaps also Yukaghir and Chuktoko-Kamchatkan, though the latter two have not much in common with IE and Uralic other than the pronoun roots.)

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2017 6:17 am
by Howl
WeepingElf wrote:There are similar reasons to doubt an Indo-Uralic relationship, though the morphological resemblances are more favourable. But if you look at these sound correspondences, it is quite clear that we are dealing with a loanword layer here, as they look exactly like the sound substitutions one would expect in IE loanwords in Uralic. Even the vowels are faithfully reflected, with ablaut grades, laryngeal colouring and all that. This just can't be due to a common ancestor spoken several thousand years earlier!

Yet, these is the possibility that real cognates hide out of view elsewhere, with real sound correspondences that are more complex and thus harder to detect. And as I said, the morphological resemblances look promising.
But we must be mindful that we have expectations about how earlier PIE looked based on internal reconstruction. Much of the assumptions that we make about earlier PIE are quite speculative. Now we are seeing possible cognates that do not confirm those expectations. It may indeed be that some of this is due to a loanword layer. But I also think that a lot is because the internal reconstruction of earlier PIE got off the track.

I have been looking into the evolution of a proto-Indo-Uralic (or proto-Indo-Mitian) vowel system into the one PIE has. My conclusion is that the original vowel system must have been very much like the one proto-Uralic has. That vowel system has 4 possible open vowels in the first syllable (e,o,a,ä). Do we really expect that system to evolve into a PIE system of just one open vowel /e/ without leaving any traces of the original vowels? Imagine English with all non-close vowels turned into 'e'. How would that work?
Even the vowels are faithfully reflected, with ablaut grades, laryngeal colouring and all that.
In my model of the evolution of the vowel system from a (mostly) proto-Uralic one to a PIE one, this is what I would expect to happen a lot.

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2017 5:30 pm
by Hydroeccentricity
Here's the problem I have with arguments for things like Mitian: the number of languages can never, no matter how large, be used to make coincidence less plausible.

Let's say I have 100 languages, all with MT. 100 is a lot. But they acquired these pronouns from their local regional proto-language, so really I only have 10. But even if those 10 proto-languages are related, they didn't just pop into existence simultaneously, unless they're the product of 10 sisters who all left home on the same day. Some of these families easily clump together, so now we're down to 5 data points. And some of those five must be more closely related to each other than to the others. The two way splits, whether we can prove them or not, will eventually go back to the initial two way split.

In other words, if a group of languages are in fact related, the number of data points for testing coincidences will always be 2. Not 3. Not 4. Exactly 2.

So if Indo-European and Uralic and Mongolic and Tungusic and Turkic and Kamchatkan and Inuit are all related, are we to believe they sprang into existence simultaneously? Or did they split into something like Eastern and Western, and later Indo-European, Uralo-Altaic, and East-Siberian? I think it would be odd if someone argued for the existence of Mitian but against groupings like Altaic. No matter how you slice it, your data points will continue to shrink the better your reconstruction becomes, until you're left with just two, at which point almost any coincident sounds pretty plausible if you're only dealing with a couple of words.

The only way around this is to construct regular sound changes that work across a whole or nearly whole corpus. If Indo-European and Inuit are related, and they have been shown to adhere to the pattern of regular sound change, how can their vocabularies not be explained through regular sound change?

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Mon Nov 13, 2017 5:10 pm
by Howl
I do not wish to repeat the argument for Indo-Uralic or the Mitian hypothesis.

What I am looking at is the vowel systems of Indo-European, Uralic, Turkic and Mongolian. The vowel systems of the last three are remarkably similar. They have 8~10 vowels in the first (root) syllable. But they also have a collapsed vowel system with 2~3 vowel phonemes starting from syllable 2, where the actual phonetic realization depends on the previous syllable through vowel harmony. I do not care for the different types of vowel harmony, as it is also clear that these types switched over times within the groups themselves.

The biggest difference between the PIE vowel system and the Uralic/Turkic/Mongolian ones, is that PIE has a collapsed vowel system starting at syllable 1.

Also notable is that modern PIE does show an alternation of vowels e and o. This alternation is purely grammatical. The strongest example of this is the verb, which has e-grade in present singular and o-grade in stative singular.

The obvious suggestion here is that pre-PIE had grammatical prefixes with fixed vowels. These grammatical prefixes colored the root vowels through vowel harmony. A stative 'o' prefix would put the rest of the verb in o-grade through vowel harmony. And a present 'i' prefix or an aorist 'e' prefix would put the rest of the verb in e-grade. This is the Great Vowel Collapse in my model. Later sound changes then created the modern PIE ablaut system we know.

One important later sound change in my model is that sequences of o-o were transformed into e-o sequences. This sound change is one of the reasons that the o-grade in modern PIE looks so much like a secondary development. You see this in the declension of the noun genos (latin genus, generis): gonos, gonosos -> genos, genesos

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Tue Nov 14, 2017 6:17 am
by WeepingElf
As I have said earlier, IE looks somewhat like the "odd man out" in Mitian (though Chukotko-Kamchatkan looks weird too), and it is thus likely that it innovated while Uralic, the three Altaic families (I consider it likely that they form a valid node within Mitian, but that's not certain) and Eskimo-Aleut look more "typically Mitian". Cases like Insular Celtic show that languages may break out of the typology typical of their family within rather short periods of time by a modest number of pervasive changes. The phoneme inventory that Fortescue reconstructed for "Uralo-Siberian" in his 1998 book Language Relations across Bering Strait may give a good idea of Proto-Mitian phonology, if such a thing ever existed. That PIE went through a stage with just one non-high vowel is something many if not most Indo-Europeanists agree upon; the evidence looks quite compelling. And the high frequency of this vowel seems to indicate that a number of different vowels have collapsed into it; this in turn gives a plausible explanation of the three velar series where Uralic has only one.

Alas, as for now these are just educated guesses, and the thing may turn out to be a phantom. As Tropylium has laid out here, this is a large project that could support several linguists' entire careers, and we should be accordingly humble in our expectations of what we could find out by ourselves. I at least do not seriously expect to be the next Ventris - and definitely do not want to be yet another Octaviano!

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Tue Nov 14, 2017 1:49 pm
by Howl
WeepingElf wrote: That PIE went through a stage with just one non-high vowel is something many if not most Indo-Europeanists agree upon; the evidence looks quite compelling. And the high frequency of this vowel seems to indicate that a number of different vowels have collapsed into it; this in turn gives a plausible explanation of the three velar series where Uralic has only one.

Alas, as for now these are just educated guesses, and the thing may turn out to be a phantom. As Tropylium has laid out here, this is a large project that could support several linguists' entire careers, and we should be accordingly humble in our expectations of what we could find out by ourselves. I at least do not seriously expect to be the next Ventris - and definitely do not want to be yet another Octaviano!
I understand what you are saying. My ideas are unorthodox and very speculative. I won't deny that. I should probably research and work out my ideas a little better than the rough form they are in now, before presenting them. Maybe write a big paper and put it out on academia.edu, if I can make the time for it. But Historical Linguistics is a hobby for me. I work in a totally different field.

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Tue Nov 14, 2017 3:37 pm
by WeepingElf
It's a hobby to me, too - a minor hobby that emerged from my conlanging interest. I don't think my ideas in this field are particularly good. My homebrew internal reconstruction of pre-ablaut PIE is probably full of problems. While I have been planning to set up a historical linguistics section on my personal web site, I have set aside that plan because I feel that I would probably achieve little else than make a fool of myself that way. I'll keep the files, but they are probably of no other use than as a framework of ideas for my conlangs.

This is not meant to discourage anyone, it is a fascinating field of study, but you should be aware how little one could hope to achieve and how great the danger of being marked off as a crackpot actually is.

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Tue Nov 14, 2017 5:13 pm
by jal
If you put in enough disclaimers, you won't be marked as a crackpot. A token characteristic of a crackpot is their conviction they alone are right, everybody else is wrong, and their theory trumps everything. Combined with being blind to all inconsistencies and obvious faults in what they present. We've had Octaviano, we've had Finnish guy, but that's about it I think. All other amateurs on the board here are very specific in admitting their lack of knowledge. I think it must be possible to just kinda dabble on the side, without being called a crackpot.


JAL

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Tue Nov 14, 2017 5:25 pm
by mèþru
I think, to a variable degree, all of us conlangers are cracked. Probably a lot of the non-conlangers on this board as well.

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Wed Nov 15, 2017 12:12 am
by Šọ̈́gala
Howl wrote:One important later sound change in my model is that sequences of o-o were transformed into e-o sequences. This sound change is one of the reasons that the o-grade in modern PIE looks so much like a secondary development. You see this in the declension of the noun genos (latin genus, generis): gonos, gonosos -> genos, genesos
So, then, we'd expect to see the e/o grade contrast only in final syllables, otherwise all e grade?

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Wed Nov 15, 2017 7:50 am
by WeepingElf
jal wrote:If you put in enough disclaimers, you won't be marked as a crackpot. A token characteristic of a crackpot is their conviction they alone are right, everybody else is wrong, and their theory trumps everything. Combined with being blind to all inconsistencies and obvious faults in what they present. We've had Octaviano, we've had Finnish guy, but that's about it I think. All other amateurs on the board here are very specific in admitting their lack of knowledge. I think it must be possible to just kinda dabble on the side, without being called a crackpot.
Yep. Such ideas must be presented as what they are - mere ideas that may be wrong. As I have presented them here. I won't say, "Pre-ablaut PIE was such", but "Pre-ablaut PIE may have been something like this", etc. Also, my plans for the historical linguistic web site include a link list, including links to web sites which present different opinions, with colour-coded bullets which indicate how much speculation there is in the sites.

Also, due respect towards handbook knowledge is in order. The handbooks are the result of 200 years of high-standard research, so they should be taken as not infallible (handbook knowledge has changed over time, and old handbooks contain obsolete opinions) but reasonably accurate. Note that people like Octaviano claim handbook knowledge wrong!

The project is not cancelled yet, just put aside as I am currently concerned with other things such as writing and practicing songs for my band, and researching and writing a book about progressive rock. And, of course, my conlangs!

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Wed Nov 15, 2017 1:55 pm
by Vijay
mèþru wrote:I think, to a variable degree, all of us conlangers are cracked. Probably a lot of the non-conlangers on this board as well.
Not sure whether I count as a conlanger or not, but I'm definitely cracked. :P

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Wed Nov 15, 2017 2:28 pm
by Howl
Šọ̈́gala wrote:
Howl wrote:One important later sound change in my model is that sequences of o-o were transformed into e-o sequences. This sound change is one of the reasons that the o-grade in modern PIE looks so much like a secondary development. You see this in the declension of the noun genos (latin genus, generis): gonos, gonosos -> genos, genesos
So, then, we'd expect to see the e/o grade contrast only in final syllables, otherwise all e grade?
It is a rough rule that still needs work.
For example, the stative singular shows o-e (or e-o-e with reduplication).

In my model, the whole word would be in either e-grade or o-grade after the Great Vowel Collapse. But in the athematic verbs/nouns of late PIE, there is never more than one o-grade syllable. The rest of the syllables are either in e-grade or zero-grade. So I have to assume that some sound law converted all syllables in an o-grade word into e-grade but one.

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Thu Nov 16, 2017 11:24 pm
by Šọ̈́gala
And then the 0-grade has a separate cause?

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Sun Nov 19, 2017 8:34 am
by Howl
The short answer is the accent. A major weakness of the earlier version
of my model is that I wanted to derive accent secondarily. But this
caused everything to be too complex and I could not get the rules to
work cleanly.

I am now looking more into how PU corresponds with PIE. And it is like
exploring a pristine land. I just look at the data, let my mind work,
take notes and be totally amazed at what I find.

Here is an overview of the current model.
And also something I wrote this week in my notes about the PIU numerals.

Disclaimer: I am not a professional linguist. What I write reflects ideas
of mine. These ideas are very speculative.

----------------
My Vowel Harmony to Ablaut Model

1. Pre-PIE0 vowel system

PIU **ä merges with Pre-PIE0 **e and sometimes even **i
PIU **ë shifts from unrounded back to rounded front **ö
Pre-PIE0 ï (-> PIE eu) develops secondarily through vowel harmony

Close vowels: i~ü (ï)-u
Open vowels: e~ö~a~o

The vowel harmony becomes a system that looks a lot like the Turkic vowel cube.
Close vowels have rounding harmony.
Open vowels have both front/back and rounding harmony.

2. Verbal prefixes

PIE had the following ways to prefix a verb:
1. Reduplication: DvCvC
Remnants of this have been preserved in many branches
2. Single vowel prefix: vCvC
Remnants of this have been preserved in the Greek/Indo-Iranian augment

The Pre-PIE1 verb always had a prefix. These prefixes + vowel harmony cause
verbs to be in either o-grade or e-grade depending on conjugation.

3. Vowel collapse

For verbs, vowel harmony caused the following vowel system in the root

E-grade
Close vowels: i ï
Open vowels: e (öh1, ah2, oh3)

O-grade
Close vowels: ü u
Open vowels: o (oH)

For nouns, ö and a were also removed, but could be kept with a laryngeal.

4. Accentuation

The old root/initial syllable accent shifted mostly to the modern PIE accent

5. E/O shift

O-grade words get reworked.
All o-grade syllables but one are converted to e-grade.

When stress is on the initial syllable (acrostatic nouns) the remaining o-grade syllable
will go to the end of the word.

When stress is on any other syllable (root/ending in stative verbs) the remaining o-grade
syllable will be in the root.

6. Syncope

Accented close vowels split
'i -> éi
'ü -> ói
'ï -> éu
'u -> óu

Unaccented close vowels merge
i/ü -> i
ï/u -> u

Open vowels get reduced to zero grade in unaccented positions except for:
- O-grade words with initial or root stress.
- The vowel in a reduplication prefix

Examples:
O-Acrostatic *genh1os - tribe
nom/acc sg. 'gonhos -> genhos
gen sg. 'gonhosos -> genhesos

O-Amphikinetic *leymon - lake
nom sg. 'lümons -> 'limons
gen sg. lümon'os -> lümen'es -> limn'es

Stative *memone - to think, to be mindful to remember
3rd person sg. (m)o'monü -> (m)e'moni (later me'mone)
3rd person pl. (m)omon'or -> (m)emon'er -> memn'er

----------------

PIU Numerals

It has often been speculated that the IE words for 4 (*kʷetwores) and 8 (*Hoḱtṓw)
are related. If that is true, they should come from an earlier form like **kʷoktw.
In the word for 4 the 't' was elided, and a suffix was added.
In the word for 8 the inital kʷ was lenited to a laryngeal.

Several etymologies have been proposed for this. The usual etymology for 8 relates
it to an old Avestan word ašti- 'breadth of four fingers'. *Hoḱtṓw would then be
a dual of that. And the word for 4 would have been the original singular.

But when we then look at the Uralic side, another cognate emerges.
Their word for the number 2 is reconstructed as käktä/kakta. This looks a lot
like our **kʷoktw. But now the meaning of '4 fingers' does not hold up.
And we get down to an original meaning of 'pairing', which has also
been proposed.

But even that meaning may be too much. For if we look at the reconstructed
Uralic numbers, we find more forms that look eerily alike:

PU: *(w)ük(t)i one (w reflected in Mordvinic)
PU: *käktä two
PU: *witte five
PU: *kutte six

Now, the Uralic word *ük(t)i can be tied to the IE word for one. The Indo-Iranian
languages have a form 'eka' that derives from *Hoykos. The rest of the IE languages
use the form *HoyH-nos

And on the IE side, I should also add the word (s)wéḱs 'six' to this paradigm.
This can be derived from earlier **kukte via ukte -> ueks.
Alternatively, it can also be derived from PU *witte, earlier **wikte -> weks
with a change in meaning.
The 's' in the word (s)weks was later added by analogy with the Semitic word for six.

This gives me the following numbers on the IE side:

PIE: *Hóynos / *HóyHnos
PIE: *kʷetwores
PIE: *(s)wéḱs
PIE: *Hoḱtṓw

(And it is even possible that the IE word for 5 *pénkʷe fits into this paradigm.
Italo-Celtic had an alternative form *kʷenkʷe/*kʷinkʷe. But there are problems
with this. Most of IE reflects forms with a p-, not kʷ-. And the 'n' in the middle
would need explanation.

Also, the IE word for 2 *dwóh1 could be derived with a sequence
like kaktwo -> agdwo -> dwo. But the complete absence of any sign of the
original first syllable makes me very reluctant here.)

Could these all numbers really come from one single root? It seems unlikely.

But what if?

1. What would such a root mean?

Well, at least the meaning of 'pairing' will not hold up with odd numbers like 1 and 5.
My first thought would be something like 'number' or 'count'.

2. Is it possible to find a possibly cognate word with such a meaning (number/count)
in either IE or Uralic?

First the IE side: In English we have the word 'quota'. This is a borrowing
from Latin and has meanings such as 'maximum number' in English. The Latin word
ultimately derives from a Latin interrogative 'quot', which means 'how much/
what number'. The reconstructed PIE form for this word is:

PIE *kʷoti how much?

Then the Uralic side. There we have this root:

PU *kokɜ - size

So it is plausible that these words trace back to an earlier form like **kʷokti.

If this is all correct, then a very primitive paradigm emerges. In the earliest
stage, one word was used to indicate a number. That word meant as much as 'this much'.
One can imagine that a speaker would hold up his/her hands with the appropriate
number of fingers when using this word. At a later stage, they started to dissimilate
this word. For every number another variant was used. Also, they replaced some
numbers with alternative words outside of this paradigm.

But I'm not done, yet. That is because there is a rough sound law hidden in this data.
One thing that I note is that the only thing that consistently changes between the
number words in PU is the vowel. And the k/w alternation at the start of the word
is an almost regular sound change.

Let me summarize this:

Form PIU form PU form PU reflex of **kʷ- PU vowel
Interrogative: **kʷokt- *koke k o
Number 1: **kʷykt- *(w)ük(t)e w->none ü
Number 2: **kʷakt- *kakta k ä/a
Number 5: **kʷikt- *witte w i
Number 6: **kʷukt- *kutte k u

But before I phrase the sound change, I must look at an alternative reflex of PIU **kʷ
that is found in the interrogative pronouns:

PU *ke /*ku- ~ *ko- PIE *kʷo- who
PU *mi PIE *kʷi- what

Here we see 'm-' as a reflex of PIU **kʷ before i.

So I can now formulate a rough sound law.
- PIU **kʷ regularly changes to PU *w or *m before i/ü,
(and this also happens incidentally before e/ä)
otherwise it changes to PU k

And this is also valid for other PIE labiovelars than *kʷ
For example:

PU: *mińä daughter-in-law, young woman
PIE: *gʷen- woman

PU: *weδɜ- to kill
PIE: *gʷʰen- to strike, slay, kill

PU: *wäke- 'come; go, run'
PIE: *gʷeh2- (perfective) to go

PU: *lewe- 'throw, shoot (tr)'
PIE: *gʷelH- 'to throw, reach, pierce; to hit by throwing'

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Posted: Sun Nov 19, 2017 6:37 pm
by Nortaneous
*kʷetwor- probably isn't related to *oḱto-; it's probably related to the root of Russian četá 'pair' and čëtnyj 'even' and Digor Ossetian cædæ 'pair of oxen'