Re: Evidence for Nostratic? (was Re: Proto-Uralic?)

Quoting Rob Haden <magwich78@...>:

> On Thu, 3 Jul 2003 14:57:14 -0500, Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
> wrote:
>
> >No, that is actually precisely what they are *not*.  It is
> >in fact articulatorily impossible for a glottalized consonant
> >also to be phonetically aspirated. (Though it is possible for
> >a *phonemically* 'glottalized aspirate' to exist if it's a
> >combination of phonetic aspirate plus a phonetic glottal stop,
> >which pattern together as unit phonemes.  This is the case in some
> >C'ali dialects.)
>
> Ah, I misunderstood Jorg's post.  Somehow I thought he said "plain,
> glottalized, and ejective stops."  However, I can now clearly see
> that "ejective" and "glottalized" mean the same thing.
They don't mean *precisely* the same thing; the latter is a superset
of the former.  Glottalic consonants are those articulated with a
particular airstream mechanism, of which ejectives and implosives
are (the) two kinds. Ejectives are articulated by making closure
at some point of articulation and raising the secondarily closed
glottis, thus raising the air-pressure between the closure in the
oral tract and the glottis. This creates a click-like burst.
Implosives are simply the lowering of the closed glottis after
oral closure, and then release.

Speaking of which:  I can't recall many conlangs with implosive
series of obstruents -- other than Danny Wier's, which are (in)famous
for their consonant inventories.

> >Ablaut in modern Georgian is essentially a verbal phenomenon.
> >There are three types: null/e ablaut, null/a ablaut, and e/i
> >ablaut, which occur in a variety of inflectional and derivational
> >paradigms:
> >
> >  Present: v-gn-eb      "I find it"
> >  Aorist:  v-i-gen-i    "I found it"
> >           i-gen-i      "you found it"
> >           i-gn-o       "he found it"
> >
> >  Present: mo-v-k'l-av  "I kill it"
> >  Aorist:  mo-v-k'al-i  "I killed it"
> >           mo-k'al-i    "you killed it"
> >           mo-k'l-a     "he killed it"
> >
> >  Present: da-v-grex    "I twist it"
> >  Aorist:  da-v-grix-e  "I twisted it"
> >           da-grix-e    "you twisted it"
> >           da-grix-a    "he twisted it"
>
> The first two look like simple reductions of the root vowels.
Except that

(1) this is not a phonological process, since many, even most,
words satisfy the licensing condition but nevertheless do not
undergo the alternation.
(2) The quality of the ablaut vowels is predictable, as
is their location in the root:  they always surface
immediately before the last consonant of the root.

> The alternation in the third one also seems to involve the final vowel.
How so? I don't follow you here.

> >In Old Georgian, first and second person aorists had no following
> >vowel, and it is assumed that the presence of the vowel in the
> >third person is what triggered null ablaut there.
>
> So my earlier hypothesis was confirmed?
Exactly which hypothesis was this?

> Also, why are the final vowels in 1st/2nd different from the
> ones in 3rd?
Do you mean the first and second verbs listed above, or the
first and second persons?  If you mean why do -k'l- and -gn-
use -i- in the aorist, but -grex- uses -e-, that is because
each simply subcategorizes for one of the other. -k'l- and
-gn- belong to one (sub)conjugation, and -grex- to another.

> >I do not consider myself an expert by any means on PIE, but
> >how do you go from semantic agency, as with "kill", to being
> >transitive?  In plenty of languages, what we would think should
> >be transitive ("hit", for example) is intransitive.
>
> Don't transitive verbs always take direct objects, either expressed or
> implied?  How is "hit" interpreted as intransitive in other languages?
Well, I was thinking of Hebrew "hit", which I heard is intransitive,
but a better example would be English "dine".  Clearly something is
being dined upon, and yet it is absolutely impossible for it to take
an NP complement, unlike "eat" and "devour".

The lesson to take away from this is that there is no Platonic
"transitivity" floating out in linguistic space. A verb is transitive
if and only it can take a structural complement; that is all. The
semantics and syntax of words, though they interact with one another,
are entirely autonomous.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637