me wrote:
> Neeraj Mathur wrote:
> > me wrote:
> >> Neeraj Mathur wrote:
> >
> >> > (Have you seen the Indo-European fable, "Hek'wos
> >> > owis kwe"?)
> >>
> >> No. I just tried looking it up and didn't find it.
> >
> > I misquoted the title. Here's a few versions of it:
> > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleicher's_fable>
and here's a page
> > with the last of the three, but with vowel lengths marked:
> > <http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/indoeuro.html#Schleicher>.
> >
> > It's often used to demonstrate the leaps and bounds made in IE
> > phonology and morphology over the last century and a bit, but how our
> > knowledge of syntax is still just about the same.
> >
> > The second and third versions differ mostly in choice of vocabulary.
>
> Schleicher's is so much more readable; I can understand many words
without
> even looking at the translation. By the time I get to the 3rd, it looks
> positively gross; eg., the equivalents of gharmam vastram and vavakant.
One of the major differences between Scheicher's and Hirt's versions is
the restitution of the vowels e and o. Up to the early twentieth
century, many phologists treated Sanskrit as being the language that
best preserved IE, especially IE vowels; the law of palatalisation
(that Indo-Aryan k > c before front vowels only) was the spark that
corrected the flaw.
The third version, although it looks odd to you, is the one that looks
the most like the IE that I ws taught at university. The first looks
far more like Sanskrit. In terms of vocabulary, Schleicher and hirt
prefer items which are more likely shared between Greek and Sanskrit,
while the third prefers items which are more likely shared between
Greek and Latin; if you knew more Latin and Greek than Sanskrit it is
the third that would probably be the most immediately understandable.
> I'm curious about kekluwos, though;
It is the reduplicated perfect participle from a verbal root *klew
'hear'; many of its forms with a more passive bent (IE didn't have a
passive itself, of course) tend to the meaning 'famous' (Latin
'in-clu-tus', Sanskrit 'vi-Sru-ta', both from the -to vebal adjective).
> Malayalam [ke:l.kU] (equivalent to Hindi
> suno or suniye) is definitively held to be Dravidian with no relation to
> Sanskrit; yet, the reconstructed PIE word for "hear" is similar.
Nostratic
> root, perhaps?
Well I'm one of those with a rather dim view of Nostratic myself, but
whatever floats your boat.
You also asked about *ke:r, the nominative for heart. The word has a
full-grade stem *kerd-, and a zero-grade stem *krd-. The idea is that
the nom sg of the word (which is neuter in gender) would have been
*kerd originally, and that this underwent a loss of the -d with
compensatory lengthening within IE itself, prior to the breakup. This
is common in the nom sg forms of many masculine words - father, for
instance, which has a full grade stem *pHter-, a zero grade *pHtr-, but
a nom sg *pHte:r, from an original form with the standard nom sg masc
final -s *pHters. This is very common in masculine words, but in
neuters was a bit controversial, since the form in Latin was derivable
from a remade zero-grade nominative *kord, meaning the only clear
attestation was in Greek. (I believe the clincher argument was a
discovery in Greek, but I don't remember the details.)
Neeraj Mathur
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