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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: original Indo-European words
In-Reply-To: kthier@festival.ed.ac.uk's message of Thu, 16 Mar 1995 18:46:24 GMT
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In article <D5JqtC.36E@festival.ed.ac.uk> kthier@festival.ed.ac.uk (K Thier)
writes:

>ab113 (fgao@interaccess.com) wrote:

>:If I recall correctly, linguists have possibly identified where proto-IE was
>:spoken by the appearance of several geographically words in most Indo-
>:European languages.  Without getting into too much detail, I think one of
>:these is a words for salmon, which we carry down into English as "lox".
>:Another is a word for "birch".  From these clues, linguists can make a
>:reasonable guess as to where proto-IE was spoken.

>:My question is, what are some of the other words that fall into this list?

>father, mother, brother, sister, day, certain words for water,etc.

Well, *these* words are hardly conducive to the so-called "homeland question."

More to the point are words for several other species of tree, the word for
"turtle" or "terrapin", and so on.  There is an article from _Scientific
American_ (1958, I forget the month) by Paul Thieme which discusses some of
this data.

However, Paul Friedrich has shown, in his monograph _Proto-Indo-European
Trees_, that the ranges of many of the trees for which we can reconstruct etyma
differed greatly in the timeframe of the dialect dispersion.  There have been
other papers in the salmon gloss.  (BTW, "lox" in English is a borrowing from
Yiddish, and not a retention.)  Thus, it's *still* up in the air, and probably
always will be.

>Unfortunately, this does not lead to definite conclusions about where the
>indo-European languages come from. By many scholars, Proto IE is now
>considered a scholarly system to describe relationships rather than an actual
>spoken language.  

I've already given my reading of what this means in another post.

>If you have some German, read Pokorny's "Vergleichendes Woerterbuch der
>Indogermanischen Sprachen". Lots of Roots, but traditional ie intellegible for
>non-professionals.

Odd you should say that.  I sometimes find Pokorny, or the later Walde-Pokorny,
hard to follow--but that may be my laryngealist background:  I learned the
laryngeal version of the PIE vowel system before I learned the Neogrammarian
traditional version.
-- 
Rich Alderson		[Tolkien quote temporarily removed in favour of
alderson@netcom.com	 proselytizing comment below --rma]

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