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| '''Europic and Afrasian''' | | Now that administrative measures against the abusive "Talskubilos" have been taken, I'm opening this discussion page again. The minutes of the sordid debate can be found [[Talk:Europic/Talskubilos|here]], for those interested. |
| | --[[User:WeepingElf|WeepingElf]] 10:35, 29 July 2012 (PDT) |
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| If the speakers of Europic were Neolithic farmers who came to Europe from the Near East, we should expect a close relationship between Europic and Afrasian (aka Afro-Asiatic), as implictly suggested by Vennemann, who proposed an "Atlantidic" (aka "Semitidic") substrate to explain some Germanic words of non-IE origin.
| | Hi Jörg, I updated my [[User:Talskubilos|user page]] to summarize my ideas and where I also mention you. [[User:Talskubilos|Talskubilos]] 07:20, 11 September 2012 (PDT) |
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| There's also the fact most Afrasian languages have a 3-vowel system like the one proposed for Europic, as the result of a collapse like the one proposed by Orel and Stolbova (1995), in which vowels '''e, o''' developed into '''i, u''' or the corresponding glides '''j, w'''. Then I assume the GVC was like this and not the way described by Jörg.
| | Fair. I have read it. Of course, my opinion differs, but that won't be news to you ;) |
| | --[[User:WeepingElf|WeepingElf]] 13:28, 11 September 2012 (PDT) |
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| I agree with Jörg in the development from Europic to PIE, except in that Europic '''*a''' didn't developed into IE Ablaut vowel '''*e ~ *o''' in OEH and Indo-Iranian. So there's actually no need for a second vowel collapse. Also the reason why '''i, u''' didn't appear before resonants (in that case, the resonant shifted to the syllable onset) is that they were actually ''semivowels'', so there's also no need for the RCL. [[User:Talskubilos|Talskubilos]] 05:48, 17 July 2012 (PDT) | | I also hope you won't refer to me anymore as a crackpot elsewhere (e.g. in ZBB) :-) [[User:Talskubilos|Talskubilos]] ([[User talk:Talskubilos|talk]]) 13:47, 20 September 2016 (PDT) |
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| | == Europic is obsolete! == |
| :There are also (rare) cases of alternation of type '''*e ~ *i''' and '''*o ~ *u'''. I would imagine the Pre-PIE system of a type:
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| :{| class=wikitable
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| ! High | |
| | i || ə ~ 0 || u
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| ! Low
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| | e || a || o
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| |}
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| :With a height opposition and a schwa being allophone of the zero grade. Then they merge: [e] with [ə] to '''*e''' and [a] with [o] to '''*o'''. How much probable would that be? [[User:MilyAMD|MilyAMD]] 13:03, 16 July 2012 (PDT)
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| | As I have laid out on [[Europic#Abandonment|the page itself]], '''I have dropped this hypothesis!''' It is obsolete, so ''please'' do not claim that I consider PIE and the LBK language to be related. '''I no longer do so.''' Rather, the LBK language may have been related to Kartvelian (the Georgians seem to be the closest modern genetic relatives of the LBK people), but even that is sheer speculation. --[[User:WeepingElf|WeepingElf]] ([[User talk:WeepingElf|talk]]) 10:07, 4 April 2017 (PDT) |
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| @Talskubilos:
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| I cannot say you are wrong, but I don't consider Afroasiatic a likely candidate for the next closest kin of Europic. | |
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| @MilyAMD:
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| No. You'd get */i/ ~ */e/ and */u/ ~ */o/ "ablaut" alternations that '''aren't observed in PIE''', at least not in the same function as the familiar */e/ ~ */o/ ablaut. These alternations are a myth spread by the late Joseph Greenberg, nothing else. He tried to connect IE ablaut to vowel harmony systems found in languages of eastern Siberia, but this is impossible, especially considering that IE ablaut is not a vowel harmony system of ''any'' kind (you'd expect ''all'' morphemes to be in the same grade if it was, which is not the case).
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| --[[User:WeepingElf|WeepingElf]] 13:22, 16 July 2012 (PDT)
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| @WeepingElf:
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| I think you've got some pre-conceived ideas about the subject. Perhaps if you knew more about Afrasian, you'd change your opinion. [[User:Talskubilos|Talskubilos]] 15:16, 16 July 2012 (PDT)
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| @Talskubilos:
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| That's your opinion. --[[User:WeepingElf|WeepingElf]] 06:10, 17 July 2012 (PDT)
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| Which is based on actual ''data''. You also might notice I changed somewhat my views since yesterday. [[User:Talskubilos|Talskubilos]] 08:02, 17 July 2012 (PDT)
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| So is mine. The difference is that yours is based exclusively on ''lexicon'', which admits the hazard of being misled by loanword layers, while mine is based on ''morphology'', especially matches between entire morphological paradigms, where loaning is unlikely. But it is just opinion vs. opinion, I have to admit.
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| --[[User:WeepingElf|WeepingElf]] 08:45, 17 July 2012 (PDT)
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| Ah! but these "loanwords layers" must be studied anyway, something which very few comparative linguists have done.
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| Also the problem with morpohology is that it isn't very stable over long periods of time (i.e. millenia), so it's of little value in long-range comparisons. [[User:Talskubilos|Talskubilos]] 12:41, 17 July 2012 (PDT)
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| Sure, morphology can change a lot over long periods of time - but so does lexicon. I wouldn't say that morphology was "of little value" in long-range comparisons, to the contrary: it often provides the best evidence. Many language families were first established by morphological comparison; Indo-European is an example.
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| [[User:WeepingElf|WeepingElf]] 13:04, 17 July 2012 (PDT)
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| Ah, but the example you quoted isn't precisely long range. We're talking about language families seprated by millenia. [[User:Talskubilos|Talskubilos]] 13:54, 17 July 2012 (PDT)
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| I don't see why a greater time depth requires a different methodology, though of course things bceome more difficult the deeper one is trying to look.
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| --[[User:WeepingElf|WeepingElf]] 02:21, 19 July 2012 (PDT)
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| This is precisely why morphology is quite useless on time depths of 10,000 years or more.
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| Also regarding the GVC, I almost forgot about NWC (Abkhaz-ADyghe), which has a 2 vowel system '''a, @''' together with an exteremly rich consonant inventory. At an early stage, front vowels caused the preceding consonant to be palatalized ('''Ce/Ci > Cj@''') while back vowels labialized it ('''Co/Cu > Cw@''').
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| It's conceivable some similar processes took place in Kurganic (the language of Kurgan people), which after all was in contact with NWC (leaving loanwords such as the numeral '2'), leading to the formation of so-called "labiovelars" and "palato-velars", although the latter could also arise (by contrast to Europic) from palatal consonants. Also possibly the IE Ablaut vowel '''e ~ o''' evolved from '''@'''. [[User:Talskubilos|Talskubilos]] 03:40, 19 July 2012 (PDT)
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| Two points, one in which I disagree with Talskubilos, one in which I basically agree.
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| On the alleged unsuitability of morphology to long-range comparison:
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| Morphology is ''not'' quite useless on time depths of 10,000 years. It was ''morphology'' by which Afroasiatic was established; the lexical evidence actually doesn't really look that good (there are ''two'' mutually incompatible reconstructions - one by Ehret and one by Orel and Stolbova - which cannot both be right and may both be wrong, and indeed have similar problems as the two major reconstructions of Nostratic, or, for that matter, the ''Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages'' by Starostin, Dybo and Mudrak). Lexical resemblances can easily arise by chance, and allow people like Arnaud Fournet to "prove" that Basque and Hurrian are Indo-European languages! In both cases, it is the ''morphology'' which shows the wrongheadedness of these attempts by utterly refusing to match.
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| On the GVC and the NWC developments:
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| Yes, this kind of thing apparently happened in pre-Proto-Europic. A velar next to a front vowel became a front velar ("palatovelar"), a velar next to a rounded vowel became a labialized velar. This is indeed the most likely origin of the three velar series (which Uralic and other Mitian languages lack; all three IE velar series appear to correspond to Uralic velars), and preserves information on the pre-Proto-Europic vowels.
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| Here is an example: Proto-Mitian '''*kulV-''' 'to turn' (with apparent cognates in Uralic and Altaic) > '''*kolV-''' (RCL) > '''*kʷolV-''' (velar affection) > '''*kʷala-''' (GVC) > PIE '''*kʷel-''' (ablaut).
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| An areal or ad/sub/superstratal connection with the developments in NWC is not at all unlikely. These languages ''were'' neighbours.
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| --[[User:WeepingElf|WeepingElf]] 09:45, 19 July 2012 (PDT)
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| Surely, I was exaggeraring a little, but in such time depths (40,000 years or so won't be unusual among Eurasian languages) the weight of ''lexical'' correspondences becomes more and more preponderant. Of course, I'm referring to ''genuine'' ones, not the ones "discovered" by crackpots (for that matter, Arnaud also "proved" that Yeniseian was an IE language, LOL).
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| The case of the IE family is interesting, because not only lexicon, but also morphology point to it being the result of the "blend" of several Eurasiatic languages (i.e. paleo-dialects in Villar's model), were "Kurganic" (i.e. the Steppe paleo-dialect) is chronologically the most recent layer.
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| It's also worth noticing that the "3 velar series" didn't appear simultaneously, because in IE languages we only find 2, either palatals/velars (satem) or velars/labiovelars (centum). I've also simplified a little bit the pre-NWC vowel collapse from Chirikba's description (''Common West Caucasian. The Reconstruction of its Phonological System and Parts of its Lexicon and Morphology'', 1996). [[User:Talskubilos|Talskubilos]] 05:05, 20 July 2012 (PDT)
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| I don't think that Mitian/Eurasiatic is anywhere near 40,000 years deep. Rather, I'd estimate the time depth at 12,000 to 15,000 years. Also, I think that lexical resemblances fade ''faster'' than morphological ones (through loanwords, semantic shifts, replacements of various kinds), though it is of course true that there is a much larger amount of data in the lexicon than in the morphology to start with. I also don't see why Indo-European should be a "blend" of several Eurasiatic languages. Surely, PIE had dialects; but it can be considered a ''single'' language from which all IE languages descend, and that language must have been spoken in the Late Neolithic (about 4000 BC), probably somewhere north of the Black Sea. Of course, all IE languages have borrowed from non-IE languages, but that doesn't invalidate the standard model.
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| Oh dear, we have been through these issues over and over again, and I am tired of all this. I don't see any chance that any of us two will persuade the other to be right. So why don't we just ''agree to disagree'' and end this pointless debate?
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| --[[User:WeepingElf|WeepingElf]] 12:55, 20 July 2012 (PDT)
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| Well, I'll say that the traditional monolythic PIE model is no longer valid and that also std chronologies are too low as compared to the ones supplied by genetics and archaeology. [[User:Talskubilos|Talskubilos]] 15:47, 20 July 2012 (PDT)
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| That's your opinion. I do not see how it is supported by linguistic evidence. The standard model accounts for the known facts very well, as one would expect from a framework that is the result of 200 years of scholarly endeavour.
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| --[[User:WeepingElf|WeepingElf]] 08:57, 21 July 2012 (PDT) | |
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| As you say, the traditional PIE model coined by 19th century neogrammarians has worked quite well for almost 2 centuries, but nowadays it has become ''outdated'' because our knowledge of other language families, as well as science in general (i.e. not only historical linguistics), has improved enormously. This is why I'd encourage you to read the relevant literature, especially the works of Rodríguez Adrados and Villar (in Spanish), as this will surely help you to dispel some of your pre-conceived ideas (i.e. dogmas). [[User:Talskubilos|Talskubilos]] 03:01, 22 July 2012 (PDT)
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| We are getting '''nowhere''' with accusations of dogmatism and pre-conceived ideas. I ''have'' read both Rodríguez Adrados and Villar (not everything they have ever written, but one book each) and found that they are ''not at all'' supportive of your ideas. Basically, their ideas are not very different from mine: PIE was more or less as it is assumed in the standard model, but related languages were spoken in Neolithic Central Europe. I may have missed some points, though (my Spanish is rather poor).
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| --[[User:WeepingElf|WeepingElf]] 03:31, 22 July 2012 (PDT)
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| I've reached to the conclusion that the "PIE" reconstructed by IE-ists doesn't actually represent the ''last common ancestor of all IE languages'', but it's rather a cross-section through the more recent (i.e. post-Neolithic) stages of the IE family, part of which (but by no means all) can be attributed to the language of the Steppe people, which I call '''Kurganic'''. As Villar points out in his last book (2011), there's an enormous chronological gap (in the order of 10k-20k years) between the protolanguage (i.e. the real PIE) and the emergence of the historically attested IE languages. This would also give plenty of room for the evolution from an originally agglutinative to a highly inflecting morphology, as proposed by Rodríguez Adrados (of whom Villar was a former disciple). The main difference in our respective methodologies is that Villar studied ancient European and SW Asiatic toponymy and hydronymy, while I study IE lexicon.
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| On the other hand, I think the reconstruction of '''Kurganic''' itself, which includes many lexical and morphological items traditionally assigned to PIE, would be an interesting task on its own. [[User:Talskubilos|Talskubilos]] 04:25, 22 July 2012 (PDT)
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