Re: Question About Lingustic Notation

On Mar 11, 9:53 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Slashes are used to enclose phonemes (basic contrastive sounds of a
language) and phonemic representations of words. For example, in
English, /p/ is a phoneme and /paes/ is the phonemic representation of
the word 'pass'.

Brackets are used to enclose allophones (the particular pronunciation
a phoneme has in a certain environment), as well as phonetic
representations of words. For example, in English the phoneme /p/ has
an aspirated allophone [ph], a glottalized allophone [?p], and a plain
allophone [p]. These allophones can be found in the words [phaes]
'pass', [sae?p] 'sap', and [spaez] 'spaz'.

The asterisk has two main uses in linguistics. One is to indicate a
hypothesized historical form, one that we conjecture must have
existed, but for which we have no direct evidence. For example,
various pieces of evidence lead us to believe that the modern words
for 'five' in French (cinq), English (five), Greek (pente), etc. come
from a word like *penkwe. We don't know for sure, because we have no
recordings from that time, but the conjecture is well-grounded.

The other use of * is to mark forms that are not well-formed in the
language under discussion. For example, */bnaek/ is not a possible
word of English, so it's marked with *. We could also use it to mark
sounds that are not phonemes of the language. For example, */x/ is
not a phoneme of English.

As for *penkwe 'five': I have a different explanation
for the origin of that word, namely my model case
of an Aurigniacian word group:

PAD --- activity of feet; to pad along, pad pad pad pad
.... (onomatopoetic), ancient Greek pous podoi Latin pes
pedes Italian piede piedi French pied pieds German Fuss
Fuesse English foot feet

DA PAD --- away from (da) acitivity of feet (pad),
delivered from the paw of the lion, delivered from
the paw of the (cave) bear, delivered from the hand
of the armed man, Goliath ..., possible origin of the
male given name David (DVD can't be the same as
Ugaritic dd 'beloved' or Phoenician Dido 'loved one')

DAP --- acitivity of hand; tap, to tap, French tapper,
Taape in my dialect means hand

PAS (comparative of pad) --- everywhere in a plain:
here, south and north of me, east and west of me,
all in all five places; ancient Greek pas pan for all,
every, penta for five, Sanskrit pathi for path, German
Pass originally meant a narrow passage in a gorge,
also English to find comes from this old word, also
Greek pataer Latin pater Italian padre French père
German Vater English father come from pas and
originally meant: he who goes ahead, paves and
leads the way, overcomes every obstacle, always
finds a passage ...

PAS TON --- he who gets everywhere (pas) and
makes himself heard (ton), hypothetical origin of
Poseidon, once the god of rivers, also the creator
of the horse and shaker of the Earth

SAP (comparative of dap) --- everywhere in space:
here, south and north of me, east and west of me,
under and above me, all in all seven places; origin
of the number seven in many languages, Latin
sapientia for knowledge of the world

I could write my hypothetical very ancient words
with an asterisk each, *PAD *DAP *PAS *SAP,
yet I prefer the simple notations PAD DAP PAS
SAP. The reconstruction *penkwe for five is own
to the comparatistic method, which allows to go
back only by about 5,000 years. My approach
begins on the level of 40 000 or 30 000 BP, and
I give PAS (comparative of pad) as origin of five.
Consider Greek pas pan penta above. Old words
branched out in many ways. PAD pad foot find
father ..., PAS path passage pas pan penta five ...

These explanations are very new and much decried
(my message will immediately get killrated in the
Google version of sci.lang), but if you are young and
seriously interested in linguistics you may consider
that the classical reconstructions of early words such
as *penkwe 'five' are not the last word about early
language.

Regards Franz Gnaedinger www.seshat.ch




.

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