Hallo!

On Fri, 4 Dec 2009 20:01:34 -0200, Edgard Bikelis wrote:

> I think ablaut is older than _significant_ mobile stress.

Yes.  In my model, ablaut is caused by the old penultimate stress,
not by the mobile pitch accent of PIE proper.

>       If you have: 
> 
> pH2tér-s
> pH2tr-ós (or -és, anyway)
> 
> pék'-u-ø
> pk'-éu-s (avestan fšaōš, a very beautiful form BTW)
> 
> it seems like the accent goes as far right as it can. Now, if its position
> is bound just to where the last vowel is, like when the genitive desinence
> attracting the accent, this kind of stem should be impossible:
> 
> 'n-pH2tor- (here the accent is in the syllabic /n/)
> 
> tóm(H1)os
> tom(H1)ós
> 
> In the first form, because the accent is exactly where it should not be ; ),
> and the last two examples, because the vowel, even the radical vowel, acts
> like it is impermeable to elision, when it should just go away, as in the
> athematic inflexion.

I think that of all the accent-ablaut paradigms, the hysterokinetic one
is the most archaic: if the ending was monosyllabic, the stress fell on
the last syllable of the stem (i.e., the root in root nouns and root
verbs, otherwise the (last) suffix); if the ending was bisyllabic, the
stress fell on the first syllable of the ending.  Many of these forms
later lost the final syllable peak, but some (such as athematic
accusative singulars with a syllabic *-m) still have an unstressed final
syllable in PIE proper.

There was a tendency towards moving the accent to the first syllable,
which affected the "strong stems" (i.e., forms with originally
monosyllabic endings) first, resulting in the following sequence of
accent-ablaut paradigms:

hysterokinetic > amphikinetic > proterokinetic > acrostatic

> It may be just the opposite... the thematic system may be older. I think we
> will know just when we discover where the hell comes the thematic vowel.
> Some say the thematic vowel and the -i and -u suffixes that make the stress
> fixed are the same, but their behavior are fairly different...

I don't know.  Most Indo-Europeanists are of the opinion that the
thematic paradigms are younger, even if it is uncertain where the
thematic vowels came from.  I have read that among nominals, thematic
formations originally were adjectives of pertinence derived from
athematic nouns.  This could be related to what I call the "oblique
base", a form underlying the "weak" cases such as the genitive.  The
pre-ablaut genitive ending in my model was *-asa, the pre-ablaut
dative ending *-aja, etc., with a common element *-a following the
root.  (The nominative was *-sa, the accusative *-ma, both without
that *-a.)

The verbal thematic vowel may have been another matter entirely.
One idea I had, but am no longer sure about, is that the thematic
vowel once was a transitivity marker which evolved from a 3rd person
object suffix identical with the 3rd person perfect ending *-e.
I assume that Pre-PIE was an active/stative language in which one
set of endings (the later present/aorist endings) were used for
agents and another (the later perfect endings) for patients, with
transitive verbs taking a patient ending followed by an agent ending.
In PIE proper, the thematic vowel may have been some sort of aspect
marker, but PIE verb morphology is extraordinarily messy.

> > Perhaps the IE system of ablauting vowels developed from an alternation
> > between */a/ and */@/ (as still found today in Northwest Caucasian)
> > which resulted from the weakening of unaccented vowels - which is
> > rather to be expected from a *stress* accent.  There are good reasons
> > to reconstruct a pitch accent for Late PIE, but in an earlier stage,
> > the language may have had a stress accent.
> >
> 
> Yep, precisely : )

Also, most Caucasian languages, to my knowledge, have stress accents.
So do Uralic and Altaic languages.

>  > For a Nostraticist like me, it's a gramaticalised survival of an
> > > alternation between advanced and retracted tongue-root vowels, as in
> > > Tungusic and Chukotian.
> >
> > This kind of connection between PIE ablaut and eastern Siberian root-
> > retraction vowel harmony has been drawn by Greenberg (who also claimed
> > that IE had /e/~/i/ and /o/~/u/ vowel alternations, which actually do
> > not exist), but this is not very convincing.  Ablaut seems to be an
> > areal feature of languages spoken in the eastern vicinity of the Black
> > Sea, as similar alterantions are found in NWC and Kartvelian.
> >
> 
> Well, I don't remember any example of /o/~/u/, but what about:
> 
> kWís
> kWésyo
> 
> ís
> ésyo
> 
> ?

True, but do two pronouns make a productive alternation in a language?
Hardly.  The point remains that /i/~/e/ and /u/~/o/ ablauts are not a
general feature of PIE.  Vowels in such pronouns seem to be notoriously
unstable, not only in IE, but also for instance in Uralic.

> [...]
> 
> I the deeper we go, the less elegant. too many exceptions, to many rules,
> too many phonemes... the inventory for Nostratic seems a bit like Ubykh ; ).
> It's too easy to miss, I guess. I would like to see a book demonstrating
> everything, instead of having to chase down bit by bit. Even for PIE it
> would be amazing, a revised Brugmann's Grundriß**.

If your reconstructed phoneme inventory is much larger than anything
found in the putative daughter languages, there probably is something
wrong.  Also, using an excessive phoneme inventory and lost of ad-hoc
rules makes it easier to make the data seem fit.  What makes the matter
even less convincing is that there are two mutually incompatible
reconstructions with different correspondence sets are on the market
- at most one can be right, which probably means that both are wrong.
The problem with most current long-range comparison work is that it
relies almost exclusively on lexical data with virtually no heed taken
of morphology.  (The chapter on morphology in Bomhard's _Reconsstructing 
Proto-Nostratic_ is a huge disappointment: it lists some morphemes that
look similar, but does not attempt to reconstruct anything.)

Correspondences in morphological paradigms are what gives the best
evidence for language relationship.  Indo-European, for instance, was
established that way.  Words can be borrowed _en masse_, throwing
lexical comparison off the scent.  Inflectional morphemes are less
readily borrowed (though it sometimes occurs), and the borrowing of
entire morphological paradigms is virtually out of the question.
And that is where the Nostraticists have achieved the least; instead,
despite most "Nostratic" languages being rich in inflectional
morphology, they declare that Proto-Nostratic must have been an
analytic language, almost like Chinese, because the inflectional
paradigms fail to match!

If you ask me, the Nostraticists are not entirely wrong, though, but
I think the relationship goes only as far as Indo-European, Uralic
(and Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut), somewhat less
certainly Altaic, and perhaps Kartvelian, and that relationship
manifests mostly in similarities in morphological paradigms.  I see
no conclusive evidence for a relationship of these languages to
Afro-Asiatic or Dravidian.

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