Appendix talk:Proto-Indo-European roots

Sigh. The very stucture of this entire table is a problem. What I mean is, the whole notion of "basic form" and "early form" is nonsense. There's only one Indo-European, the one that includes the Anatolian branch. Hittite was discovered in the 30s and was understood to be Indo-European by 1960! This has been standard knowledge for decades and decades and decades. Seriously, I'm not exaggerating. At this point it's retarded to not have laryngeals in these forms by now. So, to even vaguely be up-to-date, there should only be Indo-European reconstructions with laryngeals automatically included and the "basic forms" should be thrown away into a large bonfire and people should dance around it. In fact, we now know that the loss of laryngeals was a slow process that was only complete long after Indo-European had fragmented into dialects. I can't stress enough how forms lacking laryngeals (ie: those reconstructions by Pokorny still celebrated by the naive) need to be trashed. If we don't, we'll continue to have public (mis)information which is outdated by, literally, FIFTY YEARS!!! So forgive me, but I'm gonna take initiative and do the table correctly by merging the two columns into an up-to-date single-column version. Here we go... --24.77.214.53 22:10, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Oh my god. This table is so full of problems it would take a lifetime to sort through all the crap. Obviously this table was maintained by people more interested in performing séances in pseudo-Indo-European to impress their clueless Wiccan friends than to go to a university and study the subject. I can list a bunch of total goof ups. For example, I find *h1d-ent- listed (at least it has *h1 like it's supposed to) but it's incorrectly cited in the weak case form (the strong case form used in the nominative is without a doubt *h1dont- because of Greek odous < *h1donts, not *****h1dents!). Ugh!!! I can't take it. Then there are completely bogus and/or outdated reconstructions with *b (a phoneme that is rare to non-existent in IE). Ninety-nine percent of the time, what appears to be *b is in fact traceable to *bH. Also anything with "long u" or "long i" is now known to be nothing but *iH and *uH (where H is any of the three laryngeals). There is no "long u" or "long i" in IE; only long e, long o and long a (although even long a may be unnecessary). I've also found double instances of the same thing (as with "to divide" which is properly *deh2-, not *dā(i)- but was found twice. Words like *akwā- (based on Latin aqua) simply don't exist. The Hittite word for "he drinks" (ekuzi) implies earlier *h2ēgHW-ti. --24.77.214.53 23:06, 13 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Eek! I made a booboo on that last sentence: I mean to say that Hittite ekuzi is from *h1ēgHW-ti with *H1, not *H2, because naturally H2 would show up as h in Hittite (eg: *H2osdo- 'branch' > Hittite hasd-wer-). Very sorry, I must kill myself now because I'm not worthy, haha. --24.77.214.53 00:13, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

I did it! I have no life but dagnammit, I got to the end of this monster list. Now I must say, it looks a heckuvalot better. But you know, Wiktionary should have a special system developed so that we can create SEARCHABLE dictionaries, not just lame lists like this. Why do I have to think of everything. Is everyone on acid? Speaking of which, after a job well done, I think it's time to have a nice toke, sit in the park and stare at a tree, hehe. Well tata now. --24.77.214.53 00:06, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

merge?
shouldn't this be merged with Appendix:List of Proto-Indo-European roots 130.60.142.151 07:59, 31 August 2007 (UTC)


 * The two pages are rather different and serve different purposes. —Stephen 22:34, 31 August 2007 (UTC)
 * What is the difference? --86.138.30.7 04:09, 1 November 2008 (UTC)