Loanwords in (P)IE

[Talskubilos]

Where did you say this? I've read many sets of proposed word groupings, but it seems like you left guessing the correspondences you assume as an exercise to the reader, which is both easy to fix and seems a lot less crankish¹ than just giving lists of words and lettign us guess.

That's right. I'll take the hint.

The other thing that strikes me as crankish is your very high confidence that your findings are certainly correct, rather than a possibility.

Honestly, I don't have the absolute truth, but in general, I think they could be better explanations than the std theories.

[Talskubilos]

There are some things that look like proper comparative method at first glance but aren't. One is the technique used by Nostraticists, both the "Moscow school" and Allan R. Bomhard. These people give sound correspondences and cognate sets for the families they compare, which look nice. But that's deceptive. What they do is to set up reasonable-looking correspondences between the phonemes of the various families and then trawl the families for words that happen to conform to them. With many of the families containing dozens of languages, and matches in one language each in just two of the compared families considered "good enough", it is hardly surprising that they find something. Languages are big, each having thousands of words, so it is no wonder if something matches by mere chance.

How such a procedure can go wrong can be showed by comparing Greek and Armenian that way. Both languages have the same three types of stops - voiceless, voiced¹ and aspirated - and using this technique, one would surely match each type in Greek with the same type in Armenian (the Nostraticists indeed prefer such trivial correspondences), and there are probably some words that seem to match that way (any post-shift Iranian loanword in Armenian which has a cognate in Greek, and whose PIE etymon doesn't involve voiced aspirated stops² would fit!) - but alas, we know that the stop types really do not match that way, as they have been permuted in Armenian by the Armenian sound shift. It tells a lot that both the Moscow school and Bomhard have found hundreds of "cognates" despite using different sound correspondences - they can't both be right, which probably means that both are wrong.

Real comparative work involves finding cognate candidates and then reconstructing the proper sound correspondences from what can be observed in the words resembling each other. This is much more difficult, and gives no results if the languages are unrelated or the relationship is too deep in the past - after about 10,000 years, the comparative method simply runs out of cognates, with correspondence sets so numerous (because of the large number of conditioned sound changes accumulating) and also so small (most of them containing only one single item) that they can no longer be distinguished from chance resemblances. (Also, words are simply lost.) Kind of like how the C14 dating method fails with samples older than 50,000 years because too little C14 is left in them. We can then only catch hints at relationships, such as similar pronouns, but can't prove the case any more by the comparative method because there are too few cognates left.

[1] There is reason to assume that the Old Armenian voiced stops were actually breathy-voiced, inherited intact from PIE. This has been reported for some Eastern Armenian dialects, and it would make sense of the Western Armenian shift where the voiced stops merged with the aspirated stops.

[2] In words with such stops, the PIE voiced aspirated stops appear as aspirated stops in Greek but as voiced stops in Iranian and thus Armenian, spoiling our neat correspondence.

The thing is these linguists tend to mistake Wanderwörter for true inherited lexicon, thus reconstructing a huge Frankenstein made of thin air. It's like amplying ten times the imperfections of the std PIE model.

[WeepingElf]

Honestly, I don't have the absolute truth, but in general, I think they could be better explanations than the std theories.

You think you are smarter than thousands of well-trained academic linguists (and a handful of gifted amateurs who, unlike you, taught themselves good methods, enabling them to make meaningful contributions, too) who have been working on this full time for 200 years? That's quite hubristic indeed.

[Talskubilos]

You think you are smarter than thousands of well-trained academic linguists (and a handful of gifted amateurs who, unlike you, taught themselves good methods, enabling them to make meaningful contributions, too) who have been working on this full time for 200 years? That's quite hubristic indeed.

I'm sorry you think like this, but I've learned what I know from these linguists and I'm trying hard at improving what they did.

[WeepingElf]

You think you are smarter than thousands of well-trained academic linguists (and a handful of gifted amateurs who, unlike you, taught themselves good methods, enabling them to make meaningful contributions, too) who have been working on this full time for 200 years? That's quite hubristic indeed.

I'm sorry you think like this, but I've learned what I know from these linguists and I'm trying hard at improving what they did.

I believe you that you are trying hard - but you are trying the wrong way. Real progress in science is achieved by building on what previous scholars have built, not by tearing down everything and starting anew in the rubble. Of course, academic scholars may err, but most of the time, such errors involve only details, and paradigm shifts are rare events - and do you really expect to achieve one? I know that I can only make limited contributions to historical linguistics, and that I may be misguided by misunderstandings and insufficient knowledge. Hence, I don't expect being able to usher in a new paradigm shift.

[Talskubilos]

You think you are smarter than thousands of well-trained academic linguists (and a handful of gifted amateurs who, unlike you, taught themselves good methods, enabling them to make meaningful contributions, too) who have been working on this full time for 200 years? That's quite hubristic indeed.

I'm sorry you think like this, but I've learned what I know from these linguists and I'm trying hard at improving what they did.

I believe you that you are trying hard - but you are trying the wrong way. Real progress in science is achieved by building on what previous scholars have built, not by tearing down everything and starting anew in the rubble. Of course, academic scholars may err, but most of the time, such errors involve only details, and paradigm shifts are rare events - and do you really expect to achieve one? I know that I can only make limited contributions to historical linguistics, and that I may be misguided by misunderstandings and insufficient knowledge. Hence, I don't expect being able to usher in a new paradigm shift.

There's the saying in catalan de mica en mica s'omple la pica, which freely translated into English would mean: big things are made from tiny steps.

[WeepingElf]

There's the saying in catalan de mica en mica s'omple la pica, which freely translated into English would mean: big things are made from tiny steps.

That's true. But your steps aren't tiny. You make bold moves all the time. Your ideas aren't minor improvements of the standard theories, they challenge them entirely.

[Talskubilos]

There's the saying in catalan de mica en mica s'omple la pica, which freely translated into English would mean: big things are made from tiny steps.

That's true. But your steps aren't tiny. You make bold moves all the time. Your ideas aren't minor improvements of the standard theories, they challenge them entirely.

I'll be a little more prudent from now on.

[WeepingElf]

There's the saying in catalan de mica en mica s'omple la pica, which freely translated into English would mean: big things are made from tiny steps.

That's true. But your steps aren't tiny. You make bold moves all the time. Your ideas aren't minor improvements of the standard theories, they challenge them entirely.

I'll be a little more prudent from now on.

I hope so. You are smart; you can learn, and not all your ideas are misguided. It just seems as if you still have some things to learn about the methodology of historical linguistics.

[Talskubilos]

That's true. But your steps aren't tiny. You make bold moves all the time. Your ideas aren't minor improvements of the standard theories, they challenge them entirely.

I'll be a little more prudent from now on.

I hope so. You are smart; you can learn, and not all your ideas are misguided. It just seems as if you still have some things to learn about the methodology of historical linguistics.

I also hope you don't equal historical linguistics to the std theory of PIE and little more.

[Travis B.]

I'll be a little more prudent from now on.

I hope so. You are smart; you can learn, and not all your ideas are misguided. It just seems as if you still have some things to learn about the methodology of historical linguistics.

I also hope you don't equal historical linguistics to the std theory of PIE and little more.

The thing is that you automatically assume that the standard reconstruction of PIE is incorrect, that something else must be true, without providing very good evidence to this effect. Many professional linguists (e.g. those who promulgated the glottalic theory) have doubted the standard reconstruction, on far more solid grounds than what you have presented, only to be shown to be most likely wrong and that the standard reconstruction is indeed probably correct in most regards.

[malloc]

The other thing that strikes me as crankish is your very high confidence that your findings are certainly correct, rather than a possibility.

Honestly, I don't have the absolute truth, but in general, I think they could be better explanations than the std theories.

Look, I know the feeling. Sometimes the expert consensus sounds counterintuitive and unsatisfying, like quantum mechanics which still sounds like occult philosophy dressed up as physics to me. Nonetheless you should not rush to dismiss the experts as dunces based on gut feelings.

[Talskubilos]

The thing is that you automatically assume that the standard reconstruction of PIE is incorrect, that something else must be true, without providing very good evidence to this effect. Many professional linguists (e.g. those who promulgated the glottalic theory) have doubted the standard reconstruction, on far more solid grounds than what you have presented, only to be shown to be most likely wrong and that the standard reconstruction is indeed probably correct in most regards.

PIE is a particularly complex entity with more than 2,000 lexical items, where I've detected a layered structure, with etymological doublets and even triplets. Also most IE-ists tend to concoct internal etymologies for evident loanwords, mainly because they reject external comparison.

I may regret asking this, but if all these things are not the ‘true native lexicon’, then what do you think is?

If we were able to identify and classify all those loanwords (by means of external comparison, internal analysis, etc.), the remainder must be the native lexicon, although there probably would be still a number of dubious items for lack of enough information. For example, some kindship words have a *-h₂tēr suffix attached to a lexeme which can be further compared (in the case of 'father' and 'mother' they're the nursery words pa/ma.)

IE *dhug-h₂tēr has a lexeme *dhug- (alhtough I'd expect *dugh- here) which can be readily compared to Thracian súkhis (glossed) and Etruscan seχ, sec, śec, śeχ 'daughter', with a correspondence d ~ s found elsewhere. Other languages have similar words referring to small mammals or rodents: Basque sagu 'mouse', Akkadian šikkû 'mongoose', Amharic ǝkokko (aškokko, ǝškokko) 'rock hyrax', Ge'ez sˁǝkˁwǝnkˁwǝn, sˁǝkˁwǝskˁwǝn 'field mouse; a kind of lizard', Central Chadic *Sakw- 'squirrel; dog', Omotic *sakw/*sikw 'chameleon; bat', Kartvelian *tsiqˀw- 'squirrel, mouse' (Georgian ciqˀwi 'squirrel'), Dravidian *tśikk- 'mouse', Old Turkish čekün 'young of marmot', Tungus čekše 'tarbagan (Marmota sibirica)', so I guess the meaning shifted to 'daughter' in some pastoralist societies.

[WeepingElf]

I'll be a little more prudent from now on.

I hope so. You are smart; you can learn, and not all your ideas are misguided. It just seems as if you still have some things to learn about the methodology of historical linguistics.

I also hope you don't equal historical linguistics to the std theory of PIE and little more.

Indeed I don't. If you read my posts to the Great PIE Thread, you'd know that I have ideas that go beyond that. While I think that the standard theory describes Late PIE (i.e., the common ancestor of the non-Anatolian IE languages) quite well, I don't think it was the last word on it, and I do think that Early PIE (i.e., the common ancestor of Late PIE and Anatolian) was different in some regards. Currently, I am researching a hypothetical lost branch of IE in Bronze Age Western Europe, which is entirely my own idea. Also, as you know, my ideas about the further relationships of IE go well beyond the orthodox "we don't know" - they are just different from yours, and nobody can say who is right

IE *dhug-h₂tēr has a lexeme *dhug- (alhtough I'd expect *dugh- here) which can be readily compared to Thracian súkhis (glossed) and Etruscan seχ, sec, śec, śeχ 'daughter', with a correspondence d ~ s found elsewhere. Other languages have similar words referring to small mammals or rodents: Basque sagu 'mouse', Akkadian šikkû 'mongoose', Amharic ǝkokko (aškokko, ǝškokko) 'rock hyrax', Ge'ez sˁǝkˁwǝnkˁwǝn, sˁǝkˁwǝskˁwǝn 'field mouse; a kind of lizard', Central Chadic *Sakw- 'squirrel; dog', Omotic *sakw/*sikw 'chameleon; bat', Kartvelian *tsiqˀw- 'squirrel, mouse' (Georgian ciqˀwi 'squirrel'), Dravidian *tśikk- 'mouse', Old Turkish čekün 'young of marmot', Tungus čekše 'tarbagan (Marmota sibirica)', so I guess the meaning shifted to 'daughter' in some pastoralist societies.

Are you serious about that?! This is a wild jumble of small animals, and why should such a word acquire the meaning 'daughter'? A (human) daughter is not a rodent. This doesn't even make the slightest bit of sense. As long as you post ridiculous etymologies like that, no-one will take you seriously. (And as for the PIE word for 'daughter', it is sometimes conjectured to be connected to a verb meaning 'to suck, to milk', with the connection being that either girls were in charge of milking cows, or the word once meant 'baby, suckling'.)

[zompist]

IE *dhug-h₂tēr has a lexeme *dhug- (alhtough I'd expect *dugh- here) which can be readily compared to Thracian súkhis (glossed) and Etruscan seχ, sec, śec, śeχ 'daughter', with a correspondence d ~ s found elsewhere. Other languages have similar words referring to small mammals or rodents: Basque sagu 'mouse', Akkadian šikkû 'mongoose', Amharic ǝkokko (aškokko, ǝškokko) 'rock hyrax', Ge'ez sˁǝkˁwǝnkˁwǝn, sˁǝkˁwǝskˁwǝn 'field mouse; a kind of lizard', Central Chadic *Sakw- 'squirrel; dog', Omotic *sakw/*sikw 'chameleon; bat', Kartvelian *tsiqˀw- 'squirrel, mouse' (Georgian ciqˀwi 'squirrel'), Dravidian *tśikk- 'mouse', Old Turkish čekün 'young of marmot', Tungus čekše 'tarbagan (Marmota sibirica)', so I guess the meaning shifted to 'daughter' in some pastoralist societies.

Are you serious about that?! This is a wild jumble of small animals, and why should such a word acquire the meaning 'daughter'? A (human) daughter is not a rodent. This doesn't even make the slightest bit of sense. As long as you post ridiculous etymologies like that, no-one will take you seriously.

Unfortunately this kind of agglomeration is typical of mass comparison... the problem is that it's extremely easy to accumulate random resemblances when neither phonetic or semantic closeness is important. The combination "some consonant toward the front of the mouth + some consonant in the back of the mouth" is easy to find, and when you accept "daughter" as a cognate to "chameleon", you're accepting anything at all. Why not add in "sugar"-- daughters are sweet! Or Spanish "chica"? Or Mandarin chǒngwù "pet"? With the leeway shown here, one can find these in any dictionary in two seconds, but it proves nothing.

Another problem is ignoring the structure of particular languages. Did Talskubilos get excited by the -u in Akkadian šikkû? It's just the nominative singular ending, it's found on every noun in Late Akkadian.

[Richard W]

IE *dhug-h₂tēr has a lexeme *dhug- (alhtough I'd expect *dugh- here) which can be readily compared to Thracian súkhis (glossed) and Etruscan seχ, sec, śec, śeχ 'daughter', with a correspondence d ~ s found elsewhere. Other languages have similar words referring to small mammals or rodents: Basque sagu 'mouse', Akkadian šikkû 'mongoose', Amharic ǝkokko (aškokko, ǝškokko) 'rock hyrax', Ge'ez sˁǝkˁwǝnkˁwǝn, sˁǝkˁwǝskˁwǝn 'field mouse; a kind of lizard', Central Chadic *Sakw- 'squirrel; dog', Omotic *sakw/*sikw 'chameleon; bat', Kartvelian *tsiqˀw- 'squirrel, mouse' (Georgian ciqˀwi 'squirrel'), Dravidian *tśikk- 'mouse', Old Turkish čekün 'young of marmot', Tungus čekše 'tarbagan (Marmota sibirica)', so I guess the meaning shifted to 'daughter' in some pastoralist societies.

Are you serious about that?! This is a wild jumble of small animals, and why should such a word acquire the meaning 'daughter'? A (human) daughter is not a rodent. This doesn't even make the slightest bit of sense. As long as you post ridiculous etymologies like that, no-one will take you seriously. (And as for the PIE word for 'daughter', it is sometimes conjectured to be connected to a verb meaning 'to suck, to milk', with the connection being that either girls were in charge of milking cows, or the word once meant 'baby, suckling'.)

It has precedent. Siamese หนู /nǔː/ 'mouse, rat' is commonly applied to children, and by extension to servants and is often used by country women to humbly refer to themselves. In our household, it was recently said of our young cat, who gets spoken of as the baby of the family, "หนูเป้นแมว", literally 'the mouse is a cat', causing me much mirth.

I'd not seen the proposed original meaning 'suckling'; that feels much better than 'milkmaid'.

[Talskubilos]

Unfortunately this kind of agglomeration is typical of mass comparison... the problem is that it's extremely easy to accumulate random resemblances when neither phonetic or semantic closeness is important. The combination "some consonant toward the front of the mouth + some consonant in the back of the mouth" is easy to find, and when you accept "daughter" as a cognate to "chameleon", you're accepting anything at all. Why not add in "sugar"-- daughters are sweet! Or Spanish "chica"? Or Mandarin chǒngwù "pet"? With the leeway shown here, one can find these in any dictionary in two seconds, but it proves nothing.

In fact, Dolgopolsky mentioned Spanish chico (which I think it derives from a substrate loanword 'kid') as an example of chance resemblance, and it appears that in some families (Kartvelian, Dravidian, Altaic) this etymology was conflated with a phonetically similar word 'small', probably for tabooistic reasons.

[Talskubilos]

I'd not seen the proposed original meaning 'suckling'; that feels much better than 'milkmaid'.

I think there's a tabooistic reason behind this: in the past, women thought rodents and other small animals (mustelids) could steal their maternal milk and thus they had to leave a dish with milk in the house to appease them. Today, many women still fear these animals for no aparent reason, but we know better, don't we?

On the other hand, Aragonese paniquesa and Gascon panquèra, panquèsa 'weasel' are diminutive forms (with a retroflex treatment of the Romance suffix -ella) of another word which designates this kind of animals (and incidentally also shifted its meaning to 'daughter' in Eskimo-Aleut *paniɣ), but it has undergone a folk etymology from pan-y-queso 'bread and cheese' (> Biscayan Basque ogigaztae) for tabooistic reasons.

[WeepingElf]

It has precedent. Siamese หนู /nǔː/ 'mouse, rat' is commonly applied to children, and by extension to servants and is often used by country women to humbly refer to themselves. In our household, it was recently said of our young cat, who gets spoken of as the baby of the family, "หนูเป้นแมว", literally 'the mouse is a cat', causing me much mirth.

I'd not seen the proposed original meaning 'suckling'; that feels much better than 'milkmaid'.

Sure, names of small animals, especially cute ones, are common hypocoristics for little children, but not all the small animals on Talksubilos's list of "cognates" are cute, and zompist's objection is still valid. 'Milkmaid' > 'girl' > 'daughter' is IMHO definitely possible; compare Breton which has 'cowherd' > 'boy': looking after cattle is a task that doesn't require much strength of the body, and therefore could be handled by adolescents.

[Talskubilos]

Sure, names of small animals, especially cute ones, are common hypocoristics for little children, but not all the small animals on Talksubilos's list of "cognates" are cute, and zompist's objection is still valid. but not all the small animals on Talksubilos's list of "cognates" are cute, and zompist's objection is still valid. 'Milkmaid' > 'girl' > 'daughter' is IMHO definitely possible; compare Breton which has 'cowherd' > 'boy': looking after cattle is a task that doesn't require much strength of the body, and therefore could be handled by adolescents.

An example would be Catalan rateta 'small rat' applied to a female relative or friend in an affective mood. But names of bigger animals can eventually shift to human beings, as in the case of Celtic *anderā, which means 'heifer' in Brittonic and was borrowed into Basque andere '(young) lady'.