Re: Armenian, Sumerian, Burushaski, and Turkic languages

On May 28, 5:42 am, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <1180285900.719794.120...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,

Darkstar <darkstar...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On May 25, 8:20 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <1180073501.701765.282...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,

Trying to derive PIE from English and Spanish would be an epic
nightmare!

It's good to adjust for the margin of recent phonological deviations
by going to a family proto-state. But you're making it look as if
stand-alone isolates couldn't be compared at all.
If English and Spanish had no family realtives, would we never prove
they are related??

I didn't say it was impossible, only difficult. But the relationship
could not be proven solely by finding a list of superficially similar
words, because just statistically, we expect there to be quite a few
of those just by random chance.

First of all, I'll have to thank you (and Peter T. Daniels) for
indicating the importance of finding regular changes. My only
objection is that you seem to be setting the standards too high - no
regular correspondences have ever been found within some of the well-
established (?) families, like Afro-Asiatic, for instance. If I give
you (say) Dahalo, would you be able to indicate in what way it's
regularly related to Hebrew? Even in the main Omo-Cushitic group there
might be many inconsistencies. And the main IEL's are not entirely
unproblemetic, either.

But if you say that finding regular laws is absolutely crucial, I'll
probably have to agree. The only question is how regular these laws
are supposed to be? Can you provide a perfect example of "good laws"?
If you use the old IE laws for this matter, it just might turn out
that many generally-accepted families simply don't live up to this
standard, and by this reasoning will have to discard Afro-Asiatic,
Austro-Asiatic, Austronesian, let alone Altaic, or most Amerind
families.

What IS the standard that this kind of work is supposed to comply to?

Suppose, I give you some laws, and you or someone else points out a
few errors and debunks the whole idea just by saying "these
correspondences are not regular enough, period". So which ones are,
then?

That is, just on articulatory similarity alone, pure dumb luck causes
your method to have 11-33% *accidental* similarity between languages
that absolutely nothing at all to do with real genetic relationships.

It's a long story. You make it sound as if the Swadesh lists were
tottaly unsuitable for anything. But that greatly depends on *how* you
count the potential cognates. Swadesh can't be blamed if a
comparativist is not able to perform phonological analisys. So the 33%
you've mentioned one can only get if one is tottaly impartial or
indescriminate.

As you have been in choosing your "cognates".

1) In practice, there are more places of articulation than "just 3".
You're forgetting vowels, semivowels, glottals as well as differences
in vibrants, spirants, affricates, etc which all sound different to a
discriminate observer.

But you yourself don't make those discriminations, which is why I
ignored them in calculating the chance of accidental similarity:

Okay, now I see how you've been counting it. Although I do have a few
objections.

You claim erku, alto, and iki as cognates. You have a vowel
correspondence set of e~a~i. In other words, you don't care what the
vowel is, as long as it exists.

My counter-argumentation for this particular example will be as
follows:

(1) Vowels changes are quite rapid and unpredictable, but I do take
them into consideration in these few instances (at least partially).
(2) There seem to be no other languages in Eurasia which have
reconstructed VCCV-structure for "two", and those who do have are
located in Central Asia (the above mentioned).
(3) By performing a careful reconstruction (thanks for pointing out
the importance thereof) we have:

(3a) /ichkI/ or /ishkI/ (here, /I/ for a back vowel or shwa) in Turkic
on the basis of West Yughur /shigI/, Salar /ishkI/, Yakut /ikki/,
Chuvash /ikkE/, Uyghur /ikki/ and Tuvan /iyi/
Since there is a law of spirantization in modern Turkic, it could be
natural to suppose that it was acting already on the Proto-Tukic
level, so the final reconstruction as **/irkI/ < */ishkI/ seems
plausible.
(3b) /altV/ in Burushaski (the exact ending depends on class)
Therefore, we have "erku"-"altV"-*"ichkI/irkI", which may be quite
regular, except for the /t/ in Burushaski, which can possibly be
explained as something like *arku > *arthV > *altu conversion in Proto-
Burushaski.

Note, that I'm not using any rare or unimaginable sound changes in
this example. All changes are explained by reference to the languages
I compare, or natural phonological considerations.

Similarly, for "three":

"erek'"-"iski/iske"-*"Ur/Us". The highly raised /U-/ (<u> with the
dots) in Turkic indicate that the form in the early proto-Turkic could
be something like */uyr/ or */eys/.

But even then, you also have oj, tul, and jilan as cognates, showing
that an initial vowel in Armenian doesn't always correspond to an
initial vowel in Burushaski and Turkic.

I am not sure about this particular potential cognate. It can also be
reconstructed as <awdz> (Old Armenian) - "tul/tol" (Burushaski) - /SI
la-n/ (Turkic). The Turkic */S/ is known to be a weak palatalized
consonant roughly between /s'/, /ch/, /j/ (See for instance O.A.
Mudrak "The development of the Proto-Turkic phoneme system"). I don't
insist on this particular example, though. It might very well be
wrong.

Similarly, you have aun, ha, and ev, which shows that initial vowels
in Armenian and Turkic may not necessarily correspond to an initial
vowel in Burushaski.

[sigh] If I had been writing more carefully and you had been reading
more attentively, you'd know that there seems to be a prothetic /h-/
in Yasin Burushaski which often disappears in other dialects. For this
reason, I consider this example to be quite regular.

And you have astl, asii, and sulus as cognates, showing that initial
vowels in Armenian and Burushaski may not correspond to an initial
vowel in Turkic.

This one's debatable, I agree.
At a closer look, it turns into <astD> (/D/ for unknown coronal,
presumably /r/ or /l/) - /asii/ - */Suldur/. And, of course, PIE
*ster- (!). There are important similarities in this potential
cognate, but the fact that Arm., Greek and Proto-Burushaski tend to
have *astr (from "ste-" to "ast-") makes this case more or less
irregular.

There is no pattern to your arbitrary groupings. You just find a
handful of words that "look the same", without any apparent thought > to systematicity.

No one's analysis is as dumb as just taking
vowles, labials, coronals and dorsals in the first syllable.

Look at your correspondences for Armenian, Burushaski, and Turkic.

As stated above, you allow initial vowels of any type to correspond to
each other, though this is later contradicted by multiple examples of
initial vowels that do not correspond to initial vowels.

You have labials randomly corresponding to other labial: m~m~b, m~b~m,
v~b~m, b~b~b, p~b~u.

Ditto for dorsals: k~g~x, k~q~q, k~kh~q.

But bilabials-to-bilabials and dorsals-to-dorsals seem to be regular
to me for the purposes of a quick-and-dirty analysis! Especially
considering the fact that /q/-to-/k/-to-/x/ and /b/-to-/m/-to-/p/
transition is a natural event in Turkic, which are known to be highly
convergent in most other respects! Presumably, there were just 3 or 4
phonemes: */q/ for a weak dorsal, /k/ for a strong one, and */B/ for a
weak bilabial. Voiced/unvoiced opposition of these phonemes was
irrelevant in Proto-Turkic. (Except for /m/ which does seem to exist
in a few cases. As yet, I was unable to differentiate between /B/ and /
m/.)

Your coronals are, in theory, split into different groups, but in
practice, your groups overlap with each other (and of course, are not
consistent within themselves anyway): s~s~j, s~tS~s, j~ts~s, h~t~j,
d~O~s, Z~d~t, ts~d~t, l~j~t, l~tr~t, etc.

Coronals do split into different group. And I tried to indicate so in
my original post.

Plus, you throw in some random ad hoc correspondences that cross your
previous categories, such as h~G~u and j~r~O.

Not random. What you're omitting is that when I do allow for certain
inconsistencies, I watch for coincidences in other syllables. For
instance:

<hatik> (Armenian) - "GunoG/GonoG" (Burushaski dialects) - /uruG/ (Old
Turkic) coincide at three articulation points (!) at the same time
(the initial /h-/ is not possible in Turkic).

In addition, you allow for semantic variation (father/man/person,
blood/meat, sun/fire/burn, etc.), which exponentially increases the
chances of finding accidental similarity: with your lax criteria of
(a) unpatterned similarity within (being generous optimistic) 5
similarity categories and (b) semantic variation up to (being
generously conservative) 2 meanings deep, any given word has a chance
of having an apparent cognate of 1-(1-1/5)^2, or about 36%.

I allow for semantic variation only when it's semantically
appropriate. I do not compare "water" to "fire". Take any good
etymological dictionary of any language, there's lots of ALLOWABLE
semantic variation.

In reality, you have only about 3 similarity categories and allow
semantic variation up to three meanings deep. This results in a
chance of similarity of 1-(1-1/3)^3, or about 70%!

That's an exaggeration.

And this is just noise due to accidental similarity that has nothing
to do with true historical relationships. As long as you allow
yourself to use broadly arbitrary correspondences regardless of
conditioning environments or consistency within a language (any vowel
can correspond to any vowel, any dorsal can correspond to any dorsal,
etc.), you're going to have this problem, and you can't escape it
until you find *SYSTEMATIC* correspondences.

Agreed. Also, see the initial paragraph.

2) Moreover, I always adjust for lexical stability. Some lexemes are
particularly stable (I, not, this, that, thou, mother, water, foot,
fauna/flora, numerals),

What do you mean by "stable"?

Sematically stable (in this passage).

Surely not phonetically stable! Sound
change is regular, so it affects all words equally. On top of that,
the most frequent words of a language are more likely to look
irregular in the long run because they are more resistant to
morphologically regularizing forces like analogy.

while others can be slangy, compound and
semantically vague (fat, good, kill, cloud, rain).

If this means that you intended "stable" to mean "semantically
stable", then you're still wrong.

The demonstratives (this/that) easily rise and fall (e.g., in
Romance), and some languages don't distinguish between "this" and
"that" with single morphemes (e.g., French has ceci and cela, which
are transparently bimorphemic: ce=this/that, ci=here, and la=there).

You might be right about "this/that". Though, the problems you've
mentioned do not preclude the reconstruction of *to-/ta in PIE.
Nothing is absolutely stable. It's just that the grammatical items
exhibit more semantic stability.

Words for animals and plants are unstable. Look at the history and
cognates of English deer, hound, sow, worm, ***, daisy, bark, rose,
fruit, flower, bush, forest, etc., many of which do not have the same
meaning as some of their cognates in related languages and/or have
been borrowed.

Let me elaborate. Not ANY fauna/flora terms, but only those that are
not similar to others semantically. The name for a particularly
zoological or botanical species or genus would usually persist. This
principle allows consistent attempts at the PIE homeland
reconstruction. Again, nothing is absolutely stable. Just to some
considerable extent.

As for "water", you're wrong here too. There are at least two
distinct IE cognate sets for "water": PIE wed (English water, etc.)
and PIE akw (Latin aqua, etc.).

That is just one well-known exception for "water". Any others in any
other languages?

And you've already been shown to be wrong about numbers.

I have been not. Phogland and John Attkinson just gave me two counter-
examples. Let's just leave this matter aside. I promise to post some
materials (based on Rosenfelder's page) to try to show why I think
numerals are generally stable.

2) The phonological stability and the proto-phoneme stability must
also be taken into consideration. "Cinco-five" case is so distinct
because phonetic monsters like *qwinqwe are highly unstable. But "dos-
too" is similar because pure initial coronals rarely dissipate.

Coronals change just as much as any other sounds change. Spanish has
[dos], but German has [tsvai], and English has [tu], showing
differences in voicing and in affrication. German d- corresponds to
English T- (denken~think), but in some English dialects, this has
changed to f- (fink). Coronals are particularly vulnerable to
palatalization (t > tS/S as in nature/nation), and we even find pure
coronal to dorsal shifts, such as the Austronesian shift of t to k in
Hawaiian.

Different phonemes have different stability. "t/d" in the Anlaut are
much more stable than (say) vowels in Auslaut. Is that a news?

If
proto-language had many affricates, clusters and vowels, we couldn't
expect much correspondence. But if it had almost pure ptk-structure,

"Pure ptk-structure" is pretty rare in the world's language families.
Off hand, I can't even think of a major language family that doesn't
have at least one member language with doubly-articulated consonants.

There seems to be some kind of misunderstanding of my argumentation. I
only said that the a proto-language that has unstable phonemes will
yield more divergent offsprings, then a proto-language with a simple
and robust ptk-type of structure (consider Japanese as an example of
such).

it can survive much longer. For this reason, if you cannot reconstruct
ptk-type phonemes, but have some vague correspondence in vowels,
spirants, and glotal stops, there's your big red flag.

If you have any "vague" correspondence, you have a red flag. If you
can't construct regular, systematic sound changes, you have not
identified a genetic grouping.

Okay, I hear you. Or at least I'm trying to.

3) Prothetic phenomena and other types of inclusion are rare.

Hardly! I'd be rather surprised if there was any language in the
world that had no epenthesis at all in its history.

You're applying the same faulty logic that you accused me of. "Any
language with all of its phonemes in all of its history"! Yes, /h-/
may indeed be on and off sometimes in some languages (I've already
mentioned the Yasin dialect of Burushaski). But GENERALLY and
STATISTICALLY cases of pure random inclusion of some random phonemes
are rare. For this reason, explanations of some kind of epenthetic -k-
in "duos" with a simultaneous loss of such statistically stable
phoneme as the Anlaut /d-/ to explain the origins of "erku" may not
work.

4) There is supposed to be some typological similarity in grammar,

Which you haven't even looked at in this case!

There are some questions with the Burushaski four noun class system,
but as Peter T. Daniels always says typological (dis)similarites are
not crucial ;-). Establishing regular changes is more important - I
hope we finally agree on this point.

IMO, only very clear-cut typological dissimilarities should raise
objections. When a language is completely dissimilar in many aspects
and on many levels. For instance, when trying to compare Khoisan
languages to Finno-Ugric.

otherwise you won't be able to reconstruct grammatical morphemes. For
instance, the absence of classifiers in English indicates that it
would be difficult to relate English to Niger-Kongo.

Nonsense. As I understand it, Tibetan does not have classifiers, but
it is definitely related to the other Sino-Tibetan languages (which do
have classifiers).

Further, I seem to recall that Old Chinese did not have classifiers,
and I don't think we would have much trouble showing that Old Chinese
is related to Mandarin.

In many aspects and on many levels, as I've said...

Just think for a second about how overwhelming this can actually be:
we know of sound changes that can cause n to correspond to N, N to g,
g to k, k to ts, ts to s, s to z, z to r, r to l, l to w, w to b, b to
p, p to f, f to h, h to ?, ? to t, t to d, d to dZ, dZ to Z, Z to j...
essentially, any consonant in one language could in theory be related
to any other consonant in a different language, given the proper
sequence of sound changes. The classic example of how this can happen
in real languages is the pairs of real cognates English "horn" and
Hindi "singa", or English "five" and Spanish "cinco", which do not
look like cognates at all.

What you're forgetting is that for infinite changes, you will need
*infinite* amount of time.

I said nothing about infinity. You only need a few attested sound
changes to go all over the map of the consonant system.

Suppose your proto-sound is *t. Then one daughter language could have
the development t > k (like Hawaiian), while another could have t > ts
(like German).

From these, you could have further developments such as k > h (like
Germanic) and ts > s (like Pipil), resulting in a possible
correspondence set of t~k~h~ts~s after a maximum of two sound changes
per language.

Now, just add in a few more changes, and the diversity of possible
correspondents is staggering. Consider the sound changes h > O
(Romance), O > v or j (Slavic), O > ? (German), s > r (Latin), and r >
l (Samoan). This gives us the 11-member correspondence set
t~k~h~O~v~j~?~ts~s~r~l, all from no more than four sound changes in
any one language.

If this sort of reasoning were right, no proto-language reconstruction
would be possible. You seem to be overdoing it.

Four sound changes in one language's history is a miniscule number in
the time range needed to find a common ancestor for Armenian and
Turkish.

I use only NATURAL, ALLOWABLE or WELL-EXPLAINED phonological changes,
such /b/ being related to /m/ and /p/ already in Proto-Turkic.
Consider Old Turkic /biz/, Yakut /bihi-gi/, Khakas /pes/, Salar /
piser/ but West Yughur /mIs/ for "we". I do not use just ANY changes.

So for a phone to move ten steps away, it
will take ten temporal units,

False. Sound changes do not happen in regularly-spaced time
intervals. You can easily get sweeping changes in just a few
centuries (the Great Vowel Shift in English, the period of
disintegration in Slavic, etc.).

Aha. Then how many of these "catastrophic", sudden events do we have
in the world language history? The logical error here is that you
underestimate statistics (just as I do sometimes). In some cases
planes do fall down, but generally flying is safe.

Finding correspondences
is only part of the challenge; the next (and most important) step is
finding the systematic sound changes that create those correspondences.

Okay. I agree. I do have some laws, they're just not sufficiently
elaborated.

That's an understatement!

Thank you for your careful attention to my work. Without such critical
and sensible remarks no serious research into any linguistic problems
would be possible.

.